The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
Lawson: Sony Music was Twilio's first inbound customer post-launch
“I remember the day we launched Sony. Reached out. And you'd say, Sony? What did Sony need? And you'd sort of think about some big enterprise use case. Well, it was actually Sony Music, and there was a music promoter who worked at the record label who was like,…”
Uber grew to account for a quarter of Twilio's total revenue
“So they were growing to be like a quarter of our revenue. I'm like, that's actually a problem. That's not something to celebrate. That's actually something to worry about.”
Twilio failed to raise any venture capital in summer 2008
“And so we spent that whole summer and did not have a dollar to show for it from investors. We raised no money.”
Twilio generated $200K in year one and $2M in year two
“Our first year, we made 200,000 dollars. Our second year, we made two million dollars.”
Lawson: $700 of late-night Taco Bell was Twilio's best marketing ROI
“So I remember I showed up at one of these hackathons at two AM with about 700 dollars worth of Taco Bell. That was probably the best marketing dollars ROI we ever got.”
Lawson: Uber was an early Twilio customer for ride arrival texts
“You know, like one of our early customers was Uber, and they came to us and said, well, actually, we want to let you know when your ride's arriving. Can we do that with Twilio? We said, of course you could. And they, like a day later, rolled out the first vers…”
Uber had roughly five employees when Twilio won their business
“Uber, when we won them as a customer, I think the whole company was about five people.”