Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio, discusses how agile development replaced legacy multi-year enterprise development cycles.
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Jeff Lawson: Future company offices will be showrooms, offsites, and coffee shops
“I personally believe that the future of a company like ours, I think that the company's offices are going to consist of three different types of locations. I think you'll have number one, like a showroom, the place where you bring customers or like recruits or…”
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Lawson: Twilio was among the only companies marketing directly to developers
“And at that time, no one else was trying to reach them. We were like one of the only ones.”
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Telecom carriers shut down competing developer API platforms within a year
“Almost every carrier in the world that I can think of in that era, in those early days, like, Built an API on top of their services and launched with great fanfare, their developer platform. And every one of those carriers within 12 months had shut it down.”
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Lawson: Enterprise software providers must know budget owners when spend scales
“There's a budget owner somewhere who's spending now millions and going on tens of millions of dollars on our services, we at the very least have to know that person really well. And that was the transition that we had not really made, because we were taken a l…”
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Lawson: Prolonged low interest rates conditioned a generation to ignore profits
“The last business cycle, the boom time, the low interest rate environment went on for a pretty historically long time. So there's a lot of people. In the workforce, for example. Who have never seen a high interest rate environment in their career. And that cre…”
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Jeff Lawson: Twilio's SF offices see low single-digit utilization
“At the beginning of the pandemic, we had, I think, three buildings in San Francisco. And today, you look at those offices, they're about, you know, low single digit percent utilization.”