by ceohockey60 on 1/8/24, 2:37 PM with 270 comments
by shakes on 1/8/24, 3:40 PM
He created an environment where (at our best) we could have fun doing work that had a real impact, and we could it with people we enjoyed doing the work with. He pushed us to be creative to authentically empower and inspire developers. Wanna build a video game that teaches developers how to code and use Twilio? Let's try it! Wanna build an AI application with Tony Hawk and have Tony Hawk debug the code live on stage? Sure!
And Jeff would always be spending time with developer tools and Twilio's products himself, to the point that he could live code at the drop of a hat to show off what we'd been working on. This meant his own understanding of developers and their problems never ceased to amaze me.
But more than all of that, he was a rare CEO that led with empathy, humility and care.
Thank you, jeffiel. We can't wait to see what you build next.
by gkoberger on 1/8/24, 3:17 PM
Jeff (and team) deserve a ton of credit for two massive things:
First, changing how people think about devtools. I know Stripe gets a lot of credit, but Twilio was 3 years earlier and really defined how we look at building, marketing and monetizing tools meant for devs. They were early (if not first) to the devrel space, and Jeff's live coding (paired with a phone literally vibrating) was something I had never seen before.
Second, I know a lot of people have lots of opinions about San Francisco, but I have a lot of respect to Jeff for always standing up and fighting for the city that enabled him to build his company. He seems to be a really good person, and is one of the few CEOs I find myself eager to emulate.
Good luck to Jeff, Twilio, and everyone else involved. Jeff built something really special in the early years. And jeffiel, now that you have a bit more time on your hands, hopefully we can finally cross paths!
by movingmove on 1/8/24, 4:28 PM
Twilio tried to expand into Europe and failed miserably. Customers (especially German ones) wanted exact locations of data, exact routes of packet transportation, wanted features Twilio promised on Slides but never delivered.
I was part of at least 4 customer meetings (the biggest in Europe) where the clients just called Senior levels in and told them off.
Twilio was great when it just handled voice and text messaging. It never grew substantially, it never delivered features customers were asking for years. Messy code base, hired product owners with no clue what they should actually build.
Jeff was famous for over-promising and under-delivering. 1 year into my Twilio career, it was clear that the company would fail hard. Colleagues and I had bets on when Jeff will be fired or the company sold. Well, the last few months have been telling.
A sad story, since they had a great core product, really smart people, great people working there. But especially through the pandemic, they grew an insane amount without actually building anything of substance.
by jmacd on 1/8/24, 4:19 PM
Most of Twilio's business has been built on reselling network access purchased via SMS consolidators. These are companies who, decades ago, got their hardware installed inside the networks of the major phone carriers. This allows them direct access to send/receive SMSs. Twilio never really tried to own the network layer and these companies continued to demand higher and higher tolls for access. Short codes are a very good example of this. Twilio spent a lot of time and money trying to sew up access to those short codes.
On top of all that, high volume customers would move directly to these consolidators. Sometimes Twilio would keep some portion of the business if the sender used a round robin model to distribute sends, but often they didn't. OpenMarket and a handful of others were the goto providers at scale.
Add on to this the overall decline of the utility of SMS. Even as SMS volumes increased, they have not increased at the same rate as messaging overall. ie: other channels like iMessage and WhatsApp continue to pull volumes.
Cue Twilio's attempt to go up market. Flex and the purchase of Sendgrid were the best examples of this. Could CPaaS work for Twilio as a business model? I think we've seen so many fits and starts with the Flex product line and the integration of Sendgrid that it seemed like perhaps buying their way in to that market wasn't panning out.
Finally, as seen in the last year, the culture just seems to have gone off the rails at some point. [1] I don't know Jeff, but my respect for him is sky high. I've read all his writing over the years and he's been hugely influential for an entire generation of founders.
Unfortunately this seems like a bit of a hasty departure. I hope it isn't, but the choice of replacement CEO screams caretaker-CEO rather than shrewd strategic move.
Another commenter mentioned Stripe [2] and how they get a lot of credit for advancing DevTools. I agree that Twilio did it first and I think paved the way. Jeff Lawson and Twilio deserve more credit. "Ask your developer" was not a small thing at all.
I also think Stripe very likely is in a very similar position, but they are earlier in their cycle and they've avoided the scrutiny of being a public company. Credit card processors are gatekeepers and fully dominate in their markets. Stripe serves a purpose for them and dramatically improves access to their networks via great tooling and abstractions, but there is still a fixed cost toll to pay and what that toll is cannot be static for interminable time. Is Stripe in the "Commerce" market like Twilio is in the "Communications" market, or are they in the "payments" market, like Twilio is in the "SMS" market? (or somesuch)
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36382361 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913134
by gregorymichael on 1/8/24, 3:35 PM
Six weeks into the job I watched Jeff live-code a Twilio app in front of 10,000 people at IBM Connect. It was as if he was saying to all of us, "Yeah, live-coding is hard. And if I can do this in front of 10,000 people, you can do it at your local Ruby meetup."
It was the first of many, many times over my nine years that Jeff led by example, set the bar, and pushed us all to reach levels we didn't know we were capable of. Working under Jeff's leadership was the privilege of a career.
I can't wait to see what he builds next.
by makaimc on 1/8/24, 4:05 PM
One of my favorite moments was running into Jeff in the hallway at our Beale Street office just before he had to do a quarterly earnings call after we went public. I said "good luck on the earnings call" and Jeff said thanks then asked what happened to a link to a specific Stack Overflow question/answer from one of our docs pages that got removed. He had just been building an application and felt like that answer was particularly helpful for context in a certain programming language, and was surprised it was removed.
Jeff's always been software developer at heart even though he had a ton of non-dev responsibilities. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages in that mindset! But he created a tremendous company along the way and I wouldn't change working there for anywhere else during those years.
by caseysoftware on 1/8/24, 4:33 PM
My first day, we got briefings on what it was, what it will do, and then had to finish docs and re-arrange the office for our top customers. (At that stage, most people knew them by name. Shout out patio11!)
Since I knew nothing and the docs were.. weak, I decided to take out the garbage. I grabbed the bags and asked where the dumpster was. Jeff Lawson stopped me and asked if I had an office key card to get back in. Oops, nope. So he grabbed a bag and we took it out together.
So yes, Jeff opened doors for me. ;)
Despite the last year or so of chaos, he founded and built a company that redefined telecomm specifically and tech gtm as a whole. Not a bad track record.
by maerF0x0 on 1/8/24, 3:24 PM
Keep in mind his voting structure changed in May meaning he lost some shareholder power.
> Its use of supervoting shares, which gives CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson a voting stake of 21.8% even though he owns only 3.7% of the stock, [1]
No derogatory remarks intended to Jeff, Jeff certainly has had great moments, but Kho is also a fantastic leader and capital allocator, who's made some truly uncanny calls (like raising in the market near the top,and share buy back near the bottom). I think Kho is the right person for the job in the times that Twilio finds themselves. It's something I've hoped for for years, as a shareholder. Jeff deserves praise for the humility to step down and promote from within a well groomed and talented successor.
[1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twilio-set-to-lose-s...
by 7ewis on 1/8/24, 3:14 PM
"Twilio Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Lawson is stepping down from leading the software company he co-founded amid slowing sales growth and pressure from activist investors."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-08/twilio-ce...
by pkiv on 1/8/24, 4:22 PM
by _fat_santa on 1/8/24, 3:41 PM
by winter-day on 1/8/24, 7:55 PM
by jijji on 1/8/24, 3:56 PM
by coloneltcb on 1/8/24, 4:20 PM
And while you hear a lot about ruthless but effective asshole CEOs, Jeff happens to be a brilliant executive and a great human all at the same time.
True visionary and 1 of 1.
by shadowtree on 1/8/24, 5:50 PM
Amazon could snatch, also Oracle the evergreen. SFDC is the dark horse, don't see MSFT touching it due to massive AWS setup.
Godspeed.
by kelnos on 1/8/24, 8:45 PM
I was disappointed in Twilio for the last several years I was there. What had started off as an engineering (and product) focused company devolved into being driven by sales. We put out some products that were half-baked from an engineering perspective, and it showed: missing or buggy features, downtime, and unfulfilled promises to customers that sales/product made with barely perfunctory consultation with engineering. IMO it really hurt the company's reputation. I remembered a time when mentions of Twilio in tech circles would come with praise and even awe; more recently complaints seem to have overtaken the good vibes.
The "Ask Your Developer" billboard on US-101 as you entered SF was iconic. I loved that billboard; it perfectly encapsulated what the company stood for and illustrated why I was so happy there. For a while it was changed to something about reducing customer acquisition costs, a big red flag. More recently, it says some meaningless nonsense about "digital greatness" and "customer AI". That kind of shift tells me everything I need to know about where things have headed.
Ok, time to stop being so negative... having said all that, I wouldn't trade my time there for anything. I learned more than I thought possible, worked with a ton of people who I respect heavily, made many lifelong friends... it was a life-changing experience. Jeff was a big part of that, and I'll always be thankful to him, Evan, and John for creating a place where I could thrive and grow.
by zubspace on 1/8/24, 8:21 PM
Usually company values are just written down as a checklist somewhere, which you once read and then forget about. But twilio's values are fun to read, think about and easy to follow.
by anovikov on 1/8/24, 4:18 PM
Twilio did include telephony and was originally built as telephony-only provider, so it really stood out and was a lot more sustainable as a business than anybody else.
But, importance of telephony is falling. When was the last time you dialed-in to a Zoom conference? Without that, what's left of telephony? Just the 2FA SMSes.
I believe long term, providers like Twilio will become very thin layers of indirection to aggregate together underlying phone operator services, and will be mostly owner by those phone operators themselves, like Vonage now owns Nexmo, Twilio's direct competitor. Nexmo's API makes a lot more sense than Twilio's by the way, and is a true pleasure to use.
by Aeolun on 1/8/24, 3:35 PM
by knodi on 1/8/24, 5:28 PM
by totalhack on 1/8/24, 4:56 PM
by nonstopdev on 1/8/24, 4:35 PM
by sbeckeriv on 1/8/24, 4:55 PM
I am just waiting for my minimum required balance to be eating up by fees i dont understand. I have moved on to a chat service. I wish them luck moving forward.
by AndrewKemendo on 1/8/24, 6:02 PM
I think this is especially sad as Twilio really was a reflection of the purity of product and engineering coming together to make more than the parts.
I can’t think of a better leader at the intersection of people and technology than Jeff Lawson.
I think Twilio has a unique opportunity to lead in AI if they kept their Hacker spirit. Unfortunately the fatal blunder here was that they signed up for this outcome via IPO. Not much better being private under PE, however it was doomed to this fate the moment they went public.
All that said, congrats Jeff (jeffiel) for doing such an amazing job and holding on this long.
by debacle on 1/8/24, 3:39 PM
They probably need to go vertical and capture some of the value their users are generating to have the kind of revenue investors want.
by swozey on 1/9/24, 12:05 AM
This article [1] says "Anson and Legion [[2 investors]] have pushed Twilio to sell the Data and Applications unit, if not the whole company. Anson and Legion have both amassed individual stakes of around $50 million"
Twilios marketcap is 13.33bn. Why do 2 investment groups that own a collective of $100m twilio have so much power that they can push for layoffs or SELLING the WHOLE company?
They want twilio to sell a group that is 20% of their revenue. 20% of their revenue based on a 2023 $4bn would be around $800m or so. Twilio is an 8k employee company.. Is $50m in stock so high on the food chain that you get critical voting rights? That's nothing to an 8k large company.
Could anyone explain?
1 = https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/04/twilio-layoffs-company-to-cu...
Edit: Ok I'm learning about "Activist Investing" now and I'm pretty sure as opposed to that really nice seeming name it's corporate vultures who try to take over the board and push a company to do whatever they're doing with Bed Bath and Beyond and all those.
It was ONE Portfolio Manager who went from Legion to Anson and brought Twilio into their portfolio at both companies, at $50m each.
He launched campaigns at Kohls, BB&B, Twilio, Nutanix and SurveyMonkey at least according to this article.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2N3B82SO/
And for anyone curious about Activist Investing - Moral of the story once you own 5% you get a form that notifies the board you own 5% and they send in a form to the SEC with all their wants/complaints: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywashburn/2023/02/03/whats-...
by tomashertus on 1/8/24, 6:31 PM
Anyway, I wish the best of luck to Jeff. I consider his book Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century to be one of the must-read books for founders.
by ultrasaurus on 1/8/24, 5:43 PM
by ezxs on 1/8/24, 4:50 PM
by tschellenbach on 1/8/24, 5:53 PM
by say_it_as_it_is on 1/8/24, 7:39 PM
by alwaysrunning on 1/8/24, 3:12 PM
by davidshepherd7 on 1/8/24, 7:16 PM
by EMCymatics on 1/8/24, 5:32 PM
by Obscurity4340 on 1/8/24, 7:21 PM
by cranberryturkey on 1/8/24, 5:28 PM
by DennisAleynikov on 1/8/24, 3:11 PM
by paxys on 1/8/24, 3:36 PM
> Shipchandler has over 25 years of experience growing businesses and driving financial performance across global, public organizations. Prior to Twilio, Khozema spent over two decades at GE where he drove operating excellence in GE’s high tech aviation division, plus accelerated growth in the Middle East region.
I wouldn't be too enthused about him running a software-focused company. His experience yells "generic businessman brought in by investors to squeeze more profit".
by annthurium on 1/8/24, 4:07 PM
by whalesalad on 1/8/24, 3:59 PM
by m4tthumphrey on 1/8/24, 3:17 PM
by Waterluvian on 1/8/24, 3:14 PM
That’s an unfortunate name to have. I’ve always wondered how people handle when this happens. If it’s as big a deal as I feel it would be if it were me.