Cordoba: Jeff Schox handled Twilio's IP and was its first investor
Taylor Cordoba · Leveraging AI for Ecosystem Matching with Taylor Cordoba of Havilo · Aug 20, 2026 · at 9:07
Taylor Cordoba, founder of Havilo, recounts how she sought out technical talent through patent attorney and investor Jeff Schox's class at UC Berkeley.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Jeff Shocks is his name, and he did all the IP and patent work for Twilio. So he was the first investor in Twilio, talks about when he was there, when the whole team could be fed by a pizza, and he's a very prominent investor and IP attorney in the Bay Area.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Taylor Cordoba
Cordoba: Every startup founder pivots their initial idea
“Because at the end of the day, we're going to end up pivoting. Find me one startup founder who hasn't pivoted. It just isn't real.”
Cordoba: Most startup failures stem from founder breakups
“Well, and most, because I worked after I graduated, I worked for Berkeley Skydeck, and most of the, like, startups that fail, fail due to, like, founder breakups.”
Cordoba: Universities, not accelerators, are the primary centers for startup collisions
“I found that those four things tend to live in or around a university, or they live in or around some sort of central community that touches all of them. So accelerators serve this purpose on a micro scale, but really university is the biggest portion of this.”
Cordoba: AI lacks novelty; breakthrough ideas require human creative collisions
“They're not known for novelty. It is human creativity that does that, and you have to collide with the right people in order for those awesome ideas to emerge.”
Cordoba: Harvard-MIT lagged Silicon Valley due to concentrated, non-diverse networks
“Even if you look at part of my research in undergrad, so I looked at, okay, even on the East Coast, there's plenty of innovation, but the Harvard-MIT geographical region hasn't yielded the same outcomes as, say, the Stanford-Berkeley, Silicon Valley region, ri…”
Cordoba: Future innovation will come from non-coastal, blue-collar industries
“I think that the future of innovation is going to come from the
Less flashy industries than what we've seen historically.
I believe it's going to come from the regions and areas that, as I, listen, I born and raised California, love the West Coast.
I do believ…”