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.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
Jeff Lawson: Iterative work unlocks value while multi-year projects fail
“The nature of agility has really entered not just the software development world, but like the business parlance, which is you're no longer embarking on multi-year projects because those always tended to fail. Instead, you kind of work more iteratively and tha…”
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.”
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.”
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: 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…”
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.”
Versity raised an $11M venture round while its founders were undergrads
“Again, we're still basically full-time students, and we raised, I think, eleven million dollars.”
Jeff Lawson says Versity generated only $26,000 in lifetime revenue
“And in the course of that, we made a total of about 26,000 dollars of revenue in the lifetime of the company.”
Versity acquired users for $1 compared to CollegeClub's $50 CAC
“And I think they were paying like when they took their whole marketing spend and they divided it by the users, they were paying something like 50 dollars to acquire a customer. And so, that's a lot of money. And when you took the entire cost of operating our b…”
CollegeClub burned roughly $50M monthly before its canceled 2000 IPO
“They're like, yeah, we've been burning, you know, fifty million dollars a month or some ungodly number. And now that we're not going public, we don't, we're not, we don't have the money. And so we've got to reduce our burn, like, immediately.”
Jeff Lawson explored building a GPS item tracker in 2000
“We said, well, if you're always losing your keys or your car or your whatever, couldn't we put a GPS chip and a, like a pager radio
Into a small package and let you just keep track of where things are. And this was in 2000. Called the thing locator. And so we…”
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…”
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.”
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 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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Versity raised a $1M friends and family round during college
“Well, we raised first a C like friends and family rounds. We raised money from people we knew and Kevin participated and a few other folks like that. And that was while we were still full-time students, we raised about, if I remember, a million dollars.”