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 39 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
Lemkin: ElevenLabs Is Already Generating $500M in Revenue
“What do 11 Labs use, which is already doing five hundred million in like a year and a half? They're using Twilio, ok?”
Lemkin: Low-margin software and fintech businesses will remain out of favor
“It's gonna be a long time until folks are comfortable with lower quality revenue again, and what I mean is fintechs with 20% margins companies, you know, folks with huge, with, even, even folks like Twilio, one of the best companies in the history of, Cloud an…”
Deeter: Cloud leaders are superseding FAANG as tech growth drivers
“Our thesis internally is that those horizons and the growth rates of those markets are starting to pull back, and that you see a changing of the guard. And it's really the cloud basket, and we pulled out six names in particular with Microsoft, Twilio, Shopify,…”
Lawson: Tech strategy shifted from 'build versus buy' to 'build versus die'
“It used to be in the old world of IT, you had these classic build versus buy decisions. Are we going to build something? Are we going to buy it? Right? And now it's become build versus die. Because if you aren't building software that answers your customers ne…”
Lawson: Billboards provide enterprise air cover for developer-led adoption
“You know, I think what it does is it provides air cover. So that let's say, you know, a developer builds a thing and they're in some meeting where they're saying, oh, how did you build this? Yeah. And they say Twilio, if you have name recognition, even though …”
Lemkin: Twilio's growth rebounded to over 20% due to AI agent APIs
“And to me, Twilio is another example. It almost died. It's growing four percent. Now it's growing over 20% because the API worked with agents.”
Lemkin: Hiring Junior PMs from Big Tech Brands Is a Founder Mistake
“And 98% of you, 96% of you, I think, make the same mistake. You hire a junior person. Ok, I'm gonna go hire a product manager that worked on one pixel at Twilio, or worked on one little thing at some great company. They don't know how to ship products into pro…”
Allen: Startups should anchor their pitch against established competitors
“The next important piece is when you're describing your company, don't be afraid to describe your company relative to competitors.”
Lawson: Distributed teams should stay within three time zones for workday overlap
“My recommendation, keep them within three time zones of each other. So you've got a maximum amount of overlap in the workday so that they can collaborate effectively.”
Deeter: Stripe and Adyen will be multi-billion dollar successors
“Companies like Stripe and Adyen will certainly be multi-billion dollar successors.”
Lawson: Twilio has never killed or deprecated an API it built
“We've killed the teams, but maintain the products. So we find another home internally for the product to live. We have never killed an API that we've ever built.”
Lawson: Developers are a market entry strategy, not the end market
“I don't think of developers as the market, per se. I think of developers as the strategy to get into the market for whatever you're doing.”
Lawson: Usage-based SaaS needs recurring packages to justify enterprise sales reps
“If you're not willing to sign up for this monthly recurring package, then you're probably not a very qualified opportunity, right? Because with our usage-based model, the prices at Twilio start at a penny. Yeah. And you can sign up on our website and get going…”
Twilio maintains five nines API availability despite 18,000 annual production deployments
“Now we can ship 18,000 times a year, and we have a five nines available API, and a seven nines success rate of the request that we're serving.”
Lawson: Developer-led adoption replaces competitive RFP bidding with pre-built prototypes
“It's not a hero sale. You're not like, hey, let's just do an RFP with, You know, five of our competitors. It's a, Hey, the thing's already built. The executives may have even touched it and said, Oh, this is awesome. Let's get it shipped. Right. And now we're …”
Lawson: 'Find a niche' and single-product focus is bad startup advice
“And I know there's this advice that entrepreneurs often get about, you know, find a niche, get rich you know, focus, focus, focus. You know, there's a lot of ways to phrase this bad advice.”
Shen: Top SaaS companies scale from $1M to $10M in two years
“If you are a good company, you got from one to ten million in AR in just four years. That means you did a little better than a double, double, double, double, and you're on the same growth trajectories as companies like Cornerstone and Mindbody. If you're in t…”
Lemkin: Twilio's Growth Accelerated to 20% Over 18 Months Due to AI
“They're using Twilio's APIs, and boom, growth goes from four percent, or six, to 20% in 18 months. That's an epic turnaround for a public company at this scale.”
Dietrich: Atlassian and Twilio enterprise sales teams are farmers, not hunters
“Atlassian has an upsell, cross-sell enterprise sales organization that's not hunters. It's all farmers, and Sarah was talking about that. The Twilio sales group is farmers.”
Varney: Enterprise sales playbooks can erode developer trust in PLG companies
“If you started like Twilio as a product-led growth function and company, and then you're graduating to sales, you want to make sure that you're, again, not running like an enterprise playbook on you know, developer base like that, because that could erode the …”
Lawson: Twilio requires engineers to work support shifts two days a year
“There have been times at Twilio where we have all of our engineers take turns doing support, you know, like two days a year.”
Lawson: Customer interfaces are digital, making software development a core differentiator, not outsourceable
“The interface that most businesses have with their customers has become a digital interface... And so in that world, IT is no longer something to be outsourced. It is the source of competitive differentiation in the eyes of your customers.”
Lawson: Twilio employees will shuffle teams based on remote work preferences post-pandemic
“Within Twilio, I suspect when we can go back to offices, there will be a bit of a team shuffling going on, because certain teams will say, we want to be back in an office, and other teams will say, we're really happy virtual, and people will find the teams tha…”
Gunderson: Mapbox is the default location platform like Stripe for payments
“When a developer goes out and is gonna build something, they're gonna go get a cloud provider, like, Amazon, or if you're going to use Payments, you might use Stripe, or if you're going to use Notifications, Twilio. But if you're going to use Locations, you're…”
Lawson: A small five-person team is the unit of progress in software
“Right, so you don't need a hundred engineers to build a product. Like, you need five engineers who work really well together, and who know the problem domain, know the customer, can prioritize well, and can ship and operate code. Right, that's the unit of prog…”
Lawson: Twilio enterprise sales exist to shepherd developer prototypes past procurement
“Developers are the ones who bring you in first, build that prototype, you know, and then it starts to snowball within the company, right? The momentum, because people see this thing and they say, oh, we want to ship that. Hey, what's preventing us from shippin…”
Lawson: Early Sales Hires Face More Cultural Friction Than Engineers
“I thought that the cultural shift that happened was not so much a struggle for, like, the developers, it was actually a really interesting struggle for the salespeople, especially the early ones that we brought into the organization, because they were the ones…”
Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson rejected opaque enterprise pricing for 'no shenanigans'
“And we've had talks, like, hey, are we leaving money on the table? Like, you know, And he's like, nope, no shenanigans. Boom. That makes it a very short conversation.”
Browder: DoNotPay expanded from one product to over 200 via API integrations
“I just built, started building SaaS integrations with, like, Twilio Lob API UiPath, Bot Builders, and things like that, and that allowed me to go from one product, parking tickets, to over 200 today.”
Varney: Twilio operated for 11 years without a formal sales organization
“So our joke at Twilio is that we're a fourteen-year-old company with a three-year-old sales organization and up until very recently, we were almost a hundred percent of self-service and product-led growth motion.”
Varney: Twilio hosts enterprise hackathons to bridge developers and business executives
“We have what we call enterprise hackathons now, and so we will bring developers along with the line of business owners at an account together. We'll have them hack on real problems that they're having in their company, and at the end of the day, they'll do, li…”
D'Onofrio: Twilio averaged over 60% annual revenue growth since IPO
“And instead, Twilio has grown an average of over 60% since IPO with more growth runway to come.”
Deeter: Bessemer invested in Twilio, Shopify, and Pinterest during 2008 crisis
“Three in the Bessemer portfolio alone, we had Twilio, Shopify, and Pinterest were all, you know, seed and series A investments coming out of that O eight crisis.”
Deeter: Bessemer started its Twilio investment with a $125,000 seed check
“We started with a 125,000 dollar seed check and over many ground built.”
Ferrara: Twilio achieved an 8.1 GRIT score driven by 160% net retention
“They had a 160% annual net retention. They were growing at around 300% per year when they were at this scale. And so with 200, ah, two years of cash in the bank and a 1.5 X efficiency score, their grit score was 8.1, which was, ah, which was very strong.”
Shen: Twilio reached 300% growth and 160% net retention at Series A
“Twilio is a great example when they were a series A company of a retention driven score. And so they had a 300% growth, 160% net retention, two years of cash burn left, and a 1.5 X efficiency. So when you sum that all together, they had a phenomenal grit score…”
Lawson: Twilio's early top 50 accounts were personally closed by the CEO
“What I did is I looked back at, like, every major customer that, that, you know, I could look at, like, our top, like, 50 list or whatever, and I go through the list, and I, like, a substantial number of them I looked at, and I'm like, wow, when we were really…”
Lawson: Twilio monetizes enterprise security features as a separate recurring plan
“So for Twilio, for example, we have got our enterprise plan. It adds things like single sign-on and client certificate validation, And a bunch of other like security and compliance related things that, you know, clearly enterprises with a lot of check boxes be…”
Jeff Lawson commits to at least three face-to-face customer meetings weekly
“And so I set the internal going and meet with at least three customers a week. And, you know, face-to-face meetings with customers, and I asked the sales team's help. Hey, I want you to bring me in. I want to meet customers. When I get on a plane, it's going t…”