This is a typical cycle for a venture backed technology business. There’s just nothing else to say here other than this is 100% expected outcome if you decide to build a product on venture capital money, which requires an exit and an increasingly large exit to the point where you IPO.
Unless you avoid this structural pathway, you will be 100% guaranteed to do this.
I am unaware of a venture capital funded technology company that has maintained the core of what they do, and the value proposition, but didn’t push most of their money into paying for sales marketing executive compensation and eventually finally, stock buybacks, or other things that directly enrich investors at the cost of employees.
Having had a couple points with Jeff Lawson I believe he’s a good person who wants to do the right thing for the most amount of people and do it ethically, which is why he jumped into this thread. However, he faces the same pressures as everybody else, and so it’s honorable that he is attempting to find ways to mitigate the downside harms of this new direction but at the end of the day the arrow of history is clear.
Venture capital has been long gone from Twilio at this point. It's a public company and no matter what the history of how the company raised the capital to build its business initially, it is simply acting as a public company now. Had they chosen to stay private and continue to use venture capital, they may not have had to reposition the way they have. See: Stripe.
Plenty of privately owned businesses IPO and become subject to the same forces. Less than 50% of publicly listed companies are VC backed.
I think they were saying that a investor-backed company only has a pathway to either (a) acquisition, likely by a public company, or (b) going public. Investors need (a) or (b) to get a payout, that's their business model, that's the reason they invest in your company.
If you avoid the venture investor route, you can avoid both outcomes (a) and (b), keep the company privately owned, just stay awesome and customer-friendly forever, and avoid being forced to eventually prioritize shareholders over customers.
All the perfectly-successful, privately-owned companies seem to have a price at which they eventually sell out to a soulless conglomerate, q.v. StackOverflow and GitHub.
(a) Some dude is making $500K/year at Google or $250K/year elsewhere or whatever
(b) They start a privately-owned company and hit $1M/year personal income and are pretty happy, at least happy enough to not want to go back to working for someone else
(c) But then soulless conglomerate offers them $20M+ in one go for an acquisition
I don't blame them for taking the $20M. It can be a life-changing amount of money.
Yes, every business needs to be recapitalized at some point. There is an entire industry that focuses on finding the non-public companies that OP mentions. It's called Private Equity and they buy these companies when they have come to the end of their natural cash flowing life.
The owners have either (at great pain) developed a sufficient capital base and succession plan to provide continuity (which would require significant ongoing investment in R&D out of cash flow in order to develop competitive products), or they must find a plan for the business. Going public solves this problem for them, so does selling privately. Neither option really eliminates the requirement to remain competitive.
Story after story involving a business getting bought by private ends with the PE 1) buying an ENORMOUS amount of debt based on the goodwill of the history of the company, 2) giving themselves ENORMOUS bonuses, and then 3) filing bankruptcy and liquidating. This is an entire AREA of business that should just not exist. It would seem that "investors" selling debt to these PE parasites would learn their lessons, but I expect that the even-bigger lesson is that they're all in on the grift together, and they're ALL making money somehow.
Stock buybacks represent excess profits which otherwise could be used for employee bonuses or salary raises. There's a lot of room for argument here, because it's not clear if in the absence of stock buybacks, that excess profits wouldn't go more directly into the pockets of the owners via direct capital withdrawal.
But it's not an entirely invalid viewpoint. There really is a lot of room for reasonable minds to disagree.
There is no such thing as "excess profits" -- people start businesses and invest in businesses in order to get rich. Anything less than "excess profit" isn't enough profit.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that’s anti-capitalistic in an original sense.
One purpose of the free market is to deliver the best value to consumers at the lowest expense possible. If a company is making excessively vast profit, then there isn’t enough competition making a cheaper product of the same value to the consumer.
‘Excess profit’ can be argued as the free market not working. Profit has no value to humanity if the system doesn’t deliver on other promises.
Which they do. Twilio's equity comp was fairly generous, at least for a time, and I believe all employees had equity as some percentage of their compensation. In addition, Twilio offered an ESPP that all employees could take advantage of.
(Full disclosure: former Twilio employee and current Twilio stockholder.)
I didn't know, and apparently yes, Twillio employees get RSU at entry as a standard perk. Now, those are still just RSU.
I couldn't get an exact number but if they are in line with most other companies, the stock raising while hypothetically the employee compensation goes down the drain would still a net negative for employees.
No, just no. Capital extraction, be it dividend payout or stock buybacks, benefit existing stockholders, by definition. Stock buybacks, however, as opposed to dividend payout, in a free-ish market increase stock price, which prevents those with less free capital from being stockholders in the first place, which, under capitalist system, are the workers.
Stock buybacks benefit those with previously free capital while at the same time hurting those without free capital currently. In a capitalist system this does hurt workers quite a bit.
Are you saying the price of an individual stock is what's pricing people out?
Having trouble reconciling that with the fact that only a few stocks are above $1000 (which doesn't seem to hard to reach if you want any substantial savings), and then stock splits and fractional shares happen often.
Or are you just saying that they will own a smaller percent of the total stock, so they have less say as stockholders?
If capital wants to take on the risks of being suddenly fired and losing access to healthcare, injured on the job, sued for non-compete, being forced to relocate to keep benefits, lack the freedom of vacations, sick leave, parental and bereavement leave, being forced to commute to and work in an office with other people during a deadly global pandemic, deal with stress and potentially harassment and discrimination, sometimes be forced to surrender their work life balance to handle completely predictable emergencies, be forced to work on days off because of shortages and scheduling screw ups, be forced to travel to keep their job, they can roll up their sleeves and Get A Job.
It's ridiculous to pretend this isn't a valid negotiation.
If you own a lawnmower (capital), and you want to hire someone to mow your yard (labor), it's clearly and obviously a negotiation for appropriate wages. Why would it be ANY different if you're paying them to mow your neighbor's yard, and you pocket the profit???
Oh I forgot, you went to the HOA and pulled a regulatory capture coup d'etat and convinced them that only Certified lawn companies should be able to charge to mow in the subdivision, and there's a prohibitive fee and delays and inspections, making it practically impossible for the guy to save up and buy his own lawn mower to compete with you and "take on the risks" of business ownership you worried about.
I know, as if the people who actually create the value should receive it!
Software development is a really interesting capital class, because the means of production are humans. So it’s not the same as owning a big loom machine and expecting a return on your capital investment, in software the loom is people, you don’t own them and they are directly linked to your value creation. This needs more thought than simple: worker vs owner dichotomy
> does not materially benefit labor in the long run.
If you ignore the wages (direct and indirect) paid, then sure. Otherwise, I'm not sure how you can argue that in good faith when the largest expense almost any corporation has is labour.
>> In the US at least, the fact of employment isn’t some gift to the laborer, which a lot of employers claim.
> If you ignore the wages (direct and indirect) paid, then sure. Otherwise, I'm not sure how you can argue that in good faith when the largest expense almost any corporation has is labour.
Unless you consider employment itself being a benefit to the laborer, your statement is only reflective of expense grouping in financial statements.
But...Twilio is a public company, VC shareholders have already sold their stock, so most of what you say isn't applicable, unless you mean to imply that a public company also acts similarly to a VC backed one.
The public market is the idealized landing spot for VC and in fact is usually the default and desired pathway for all institutionally funded companies
To the extent that startup boards choose or heavily push a specific category of CFOs in order to drive company structure that would lead to an IPO.
Go look at the employee history of a lot of startups and you’ll see they either changed CFOs or got one for the first time, after a massive B but certainly not long after a C round.
What's the difference? You still have to find a way to maximize profit at the cost of pretty much everything else. The only difference is that VCs are more willing to play the long game, whereas the stock market wants better results year over year.
I notice there's always this impulse to blame VCs for how startup businesses evolve but like, founders want to make money too, and plenty of founders dream of building a huge company with a massive exit or ipo etc etc and push for that as a company without vcs needing to force it
It’s funny to me that I’m reading this while listening to “Abolish Silicon Valley” by Wendy Liu.
I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”. Or in plain language: making other people more rich at the cost of others.
I’m just happy the guy got out when the company didn’t align with his values anymore and he has the means to afford himself a conscience.
Attention and logistics. The cost of getting things where they need to go, the administration of an empire, frequently dwarves by orders of magnitude the cost of the materials being transported to and fro. The problem is not solved by localisation given the increased exposure to volatility that brings.
Caritative actions are part of capitalism. I donate voluntarily to charities, this is part of capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t prevent people from having a soul.
Capitalism is the framework that makes all those people work together: The nun, the family guy, the corporate shark, the idealist who can buy land and create an inefficient community based on non-monetary exchange.
Capitalism also makes us globally quite rich (by virtue of allowing us to simply take the revenue we generate in our startups), which affords us the luxury of giving 63% to the state. Supposedly in exchange for the state taking care of poor people. It’s the capitalism that allows me that money.
So I get it, you pin everything bad on capitalism. It’s just that you allow CEOs to pactise with the state to remove freedoms from you. Meanwhile you forget that this unprecedented lifestyle improvement since the industrial revolution, it’s also due to capitalism.
> Some have more money than they can spend in a lifetime while others are homeless.
> This is the society we live in, created by capitalism that demands unsustainable growth.
Who are you blaming? If you're so virtuous, why don't you give away half of your money to a homeless person?
Because to make a significant difference to that person's life you'd have to give them an astounding amount of money (and probably other forms of support), and personally speaking I'm still desperately saving just for a chance at having a place of my own myself. Nobody claimed to be 'virtuous', but caring is a good first step. I donate some of my time and a small amount per month to a local multicultural group. Small things help. Caring helps. Why is this suddenly about whether you're happy to give away half your savings to a person you don't know? Society as a whole could make things better by sharing wealth just a little more equitably. But some people seem to think that billionaires are just fine and not at all a symptom of a sick society.
Sorry but I get really frustrated by this lazy kind of 'well why don't you do it?' response. It just feels like you're trying to convince yourself that you're right not to care (to be clear, I have no idea whether you do or not), and implying that anyone who does, and hopes for something better, is just a hypocrite.
This "why don't you do it?" type of argument is probably the most common straw-man response to this topic.
The whole point, is to point out that some people have enough money to uplift hundreds of thousands out of poverty. Some have greater personal wealth than the GDP of an entire country, and that those people should either:
Give up some part of their wealth for the greater good.
Never be allowed to accumulate that much personal wealth in the first place.
The common person, like myself, doesn't have that kind of money. I cannot even afford a house for myself.
You have a fixed amount of already acquired property
You do specified labor on that
You exchange your labor + property for someone else’s labor + property
That’s commerce and has nothing to do with the question I’m talking about, which is: How you acquired the property in the first place is the ethical question.
What’s unethical is if your a neighbor was struggling to survive and instead of caring for him out of your property and labor, you convinced him to trade your excess money for a portion of his property in perpetuity.
So no, there is no more uncaptured “pie.” It should have never been caputured in the first place - it’s equally everyone’s right
Every “win-win” most certainly produces side effects, usually unmeasured, which leads to naive statements like “it’s not zero sum”.
We may no longer be peasants (hard to prove), but a large number of extinct species and ecological disasters would like to argue the “not zero sum” point.
If the world were zero sum, that means no new value has been created for humanity, ever. The world population has grown ~22x since 1400s. Are we now splitting our meager peasant loaves of bread 22 ways?
Nobody cares about your stupid degrowth ideology that advocates for death and people to be poorer. Just state what you actually are, which is anti-human.
> If the world were zero sum, that means no new value has been created for humanity, ever.
This statement is straight up false. Obviously you gain and lose value, and are interested in whether it's a net gain or loss. It's worth noting that a gain or a loss here is only anecdotal to our own human experience so far and without accounting for potential debts (externalities) still owed... like global warming, monoculture, antibiotic resistance, nukes, etc. You're attempting to make a rule in an extremely non-scientific manner, and making a ton of assumptions to boot.
> Nobody cares about your stupid degrowth ideology that advocates for death and people to be poorer. Just state what you actually are, which is anti-human.
I've never even heard of this Degrowth ideology... My ideology, if you can call it that, is simply taking responsibility for our actions instead of making up a bunch of buzzword horseshit. I'm not advocating for anything but the basic admission that it stinks when we fart. This "not zero sum" statement is as much a fantasy as religion is. I'm not asking you to stop farting or to save a whale. Just stop polluting our eyes and ears with corporate doublespeak.
What he said that "its hard to prove if we are still peasants" is wrong. But you cannot argue that we human have benefitted at the cost of nature? Also,
>Nobody cares about your stupid degrowth ideology that advocates for death and people to be poorer.
Is also not true. Having a 1km lawn is excess. Flying solo on a private plane to visit an office halfway across the world for 1-2 days every other week is excess. No sane person arguing for this position is claiming that people who can barely find food every day is living in excess and must suffer degrowth. It is the privileged that needs to degrowth and redistribute their excess wealth. Do you really think that the Earth can sustain had every single person on Earth lives like the ultra wealthy? Or even as the middle-class American with single unit home in the suburb? We would probably annihilate almost all of "interesting" flora/fauna and be left with chickens and cows if that at all. Maybe that's a perfectly reasonable trade? AFAIK humanity must take priority over every other being AFAIC.
> What he said that "its hard to prove if we are still peasants" is wrong.
I think this depends on how you classify peasant. If we can agree that it's about income inequality, and not quality of life, then there was a study done comparing income inequality in the late eighteenth century to current day, which concluded that "Incomes were much more equally distributed in
colonial America than in America today, or in other countries in the late eighteenth century". https://www.nber.org/papers/w18396
Ultimately it depends on the specifics and the dates we are comparing. I don't think people fully realize how significant income inequality really is today.
Why does income inequality matter? Why does it matter that some people are way, way richer than the other. This correlates with poorer quality of life, sure, but income inequality itself is not really that important. Calling the modern middle-class human a peasant is quite misguided imo. It is important to acknowledge that we have fared much better than our ancestors.
Is it a problem, say, if we all achieved nirvana but some achieved better nirvana? Must we rebel against them too?
It matters a lot since wealth translates to power and influence.
> Calling the modern middle-class human a peasant is quite misguided imo.
The modern middle class is shrinking fast. About 17%. Most people are either low income or poor.
> It is important to acknowledge that we have fared much better than our ancestors.
Look, we generally live much longer these days, so I think that's a decent measurement that we're far better off in aggregate compared to the middle ages. However life expectancy has actually been decreasing recently in many places, and we have some really big global problems to solve if we don't want that trend to continue. If that trend does continue though, then it becomes very hard to say we're better off than our ancestors.
> Is it a problem, say, if we all achieved nirvana but some achieved better nirvana? Must we rebel against them too?
Probably yes. Most people aren't zen. It's in our nature to measure our status among our peers, and probably responsible for most people's wealth and their drive to do better. Better is always relative. Before arguing the morality of this, you'll need to also defend the morality of billionaires (what's the point really?).
So... If you are complaining about destruction of habits for animals, and global warming, then yeah. If you are complaining about us extracting minerals... Rocks don't have feelings, they don't get a vote. If we could mine them without polluting and destroying ecosystems, not only we probably should, but we should start thinking on how to also mine asteroids and stuff.
> decimated humanity
How did we do that? There are more people now than in any previous point in history. There are a lot of people suffering, but quality of life by numbers is probably a lot better now than it has ever been.
> globally hopeless (look at birth rates)
So is population growth a good thing cause it shows people are happy, or a bad thing cause it means we won't have enough resources? I prefer us to have a stable population for the long run, at least until we can get to space.
> individual alienation has never been wider spread
How informed do you think illiterate peasants used to be?
What is happening, is that the American empire is in a state of decay right now. But the world is bigger than just the Western cultural world. Yeah, it might suck to not get getting all the fruits of imperialism that the US and European countries used to get. It makes the imperialist countries poorer not to have that. But for the formerly colonized people, their life gets better.
Without (yet) having an opinion here, that's not necessarily true: resource consumption is adding value to the system at a level that might offset population growth?
Who cares about population growth? We know human population will stabilize pretty soon. Malthusian arguments are meaningless when the very premise of unlimited population growth is false.
> I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”.
I am really glad I am starting to see a lot more posts here on HN with regard to this fact. Capitalism is literally destroying everything and has proven itself not to be a viable system for long term sustainability and a healthy society and ecosystem.
Some of the smartest people on the internet aggregate on HN and some have still not figured this out. Either because 1) They haven't taken the time to look into the n-order knock on effects that are produced by capitalism in it's current form, or 2) they are too interested in self-enrichment to make any changes to behavior for their own comfort and convenience.
We should get of publicly traded corporations and Wall Street should disappear in my opinion. It is that publicly traded shareholder value that drives all the crimes against society/environment in this late stage. However, we are up against a severely selfish and entrenched minority with a ton of power who won't let that happen ... at the cost of everything.
How is it the driving force behind everything comfortable? If another system was in place are you saying that we would not have had progress towards human comfort? And it seems you are assuming that I wouldn't give up a comfortable life for a more fair and just system with less market externalities? If your measure for success is comfort, then you are the exact person I am trying to convince that we need something else.
Because capitalism is the only system which incentives continual innovation through market competition, removes non-competitive organisations which fail to meet consumer demand from the market, and empowers consumers to make choices which are in their self-determined best interest.
This is what largely I am arguing against. I think the benefits of capitalism have been proven, but the negatives are largely brushed aside. I think this form of capitalism is dangerous (and I should have been more explicit about that in my original comment). My original comment was to get rid of publicly traded companies and remove wall street altogether. Private companies can continue to exist and compete but the profit motive to solely deliver growth and profit to public shareholders has distorted the whole system into pro-forma income sheets at the best and to outright devastation and exploitation at the worst. Private companies would be largely in check because they wouldn't grow unchecked by raising capital they don't have by going public. In so doing, they wouldn't be "in debt" (overloaded non-technical sense of debt) to shareholders. This would lead to more sustainability and less growth over everything mindset. The knock on effects I mentioned would contribute to a more just and fair system.
That said, I am not an economist, but I would like to see this world exist for future generations. And this economic system isn't it.
> Because capitalism is the only system which incentives continual innovation through market competition
Why would a for profit company invest into basic research without a clear goal to monetizing that research while their competitor is spending that money on marketing?
Implication is that the claim: "Because capitalism is the only system which incentives continual innovation" has no basis in reality. By the lack of answer to the posed question I'm guessing you are starting to agree?
Of course I don't agree, your question is worthless.
"Why would a for profit company invest into basic research without a clear goal to monetizing that research while their competitor is spending that money on marketing?"
The only form of R&D spend that cannot be monetised is that which fails to better meet consumer demand, which is a purposeless waste of money.
As much as I disagree with the OP, this is just as naive. What we enjoy about our modern lives in Western societies is a productive mixed-market economy. The "pure capitalism" argument is just as naive as to pretend it's failed with no redeeming features (which itself, is fallacious because the critics propose no alternative they care to describe - but pointing out a problem with the current system doesn't mean anything if you can't raise a reasonable alternative).
There are plenty of critics proposing alternatives
I get a monthly magazine called Jacobin that is filled with bough criticisms and alternatives
Trying to find people who aren’t either fundamentally greedy or barely hanging on is nearly impossible so it’s just mostly people exploiting each other.
I am personally trying to build a cooperative that is mutually owned by employees, and it’s structurally really hard because the legal system doesn’t know anything about how to do that. The entire system is built on the assumption of profit maximization. You don’t go into a banking situation, without telling them the type of business, and the type of profit that you expect. so in every single aspect of attempting to do commerce in the United States, or worldwide today, the default functional system, which everybody uses, because there is no alternative system to use, makes it effectively impossible to do something else without totally building it yourself from scratch.
> You don’t go into a banking situation, without telling them the type of business, and the type of profit that you expect.
But that's because you're not just banking with someone, you're asking them for a loan. That money has a cost associated with it so the bank quite reasonably wants an indication you're able and likely to repay it.
Waste is waste under any economic model: if the input costs in whatever form they take exceed outputs the endeavor isn't viable.
Meanwhile, just last year people living a couple of blocks from me were removing sludge a metre high from the floors of their homes due to river flooding levels we've never seen before. Very comfortable indeed.
You’re blaming capitalism for flooding? If that’s the direction we are going, then I could find dozens of famines, dozens more environmental disasters that can be blamed squarely on socialism and communism.
Capitalism is definitely not the driving force behind most of the great art I enjoy in my modern life. Capitalism destroys art, and it's hard to imagine just how much great art we've missed out on because the artists had to stay busy with work so they can live.
If an artist has limited time (as all humans do), they can either work a regular job and have a guaranteed income, or they can create art and possibly starve, even if their art is great. You understand that, right?
You can't go up to people and say "hey, I have this incredible idea for an art project, please give me enough money for 5 years go work on this". A few artists can, but most a) won't convince other people that their specific idea is as good as it might be, and b) can't create enough publicity to actually get enough people's eyes on their ideas.
Your "it's not great if people don't want to pay for it" might work in a system where every human can talk to every artist and compare everything. But that is not our world. There will always be people who are undiscovered, there will always be people who could create great things, but don't have enough money.
But I don't think a capitalist can actually understand this.
You can't give credit all the credit to capitalism. Communism destroyed what was the fourth-largest lake in the world, which was so big that it was called a "sea"[0].
> Some of the smartest people on the internet aggregate on HN and some have still not figured this out. Either because 1) They haven't taken the time to look into the n-order knock on effects that are produced by capitalism in it's current form, or 2) they are too interested in self-enrichment to make any changes to behavior for their own comfort and convenience.
The age-old adage that anyone opposed to your viewpoint is either stupid or evil.
> You can't give credit all the credit to capitalism. Communism destroyed what was the fourth-largest lake in the world, which was so big that it was called a "sea"[0].
The age-old adage that if it is not capitalism, it must be communism.
> The age-old adage that anyone opposed to your viewpoint is either stupid or evil.
Which one are you? Sure my take was reductionist, but you are using my critique to distract is disingenuous. You are trying to defend capitalism by saying that you are not stupid or evil. If I have missed an adjective to describe people who have not discovered this ruthless system of destruction what would it be? Ignorant? Willfully Ignorant?
Somewhere else, maybe. To think one's opponents are evil or stupid only reveals a lack of self-awareness, arrogance, and over-confidence. Just as the spoon cannot taste the soup, someone displaying those qualities will learn nothing here, and no one will learn anything from them except a bad example, hence why I think HN is not for someone like that.
There already are such companies, but they aren't that visible, because they don't have VC money to burn in order to grow, so they have to do it organically, which usually means slower.
> stock buybacks, or other things that directly enrich investors at the cost of employees
As a former Twilio employee (and current stockholder), I have to disagree with this. Stock buybacks generally raise the stock price (or at least keep it from falling). Up until 2020 or so, Twilio was fairly generous with equity comp (at least for some of us; obviously I can't speak for all employees), so employees do indeed benefit from stock buybacks.
I suppose you could make the argument that, as a company spends cash to buy back stock, base salary raises get worse, since the company has less cash on hand to fund those raises. But I think you'd need evidence to back that up.
Thank you Miguel for all of your contributions to Twilio over the past four years, and I hope your next gig is just as rewarding!
For all those interested in why we acquired Segment, and are focused on the integration of data and communications -- several years ago, we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective.
As a developer, I know that's really hard to pull all the threads together to make realtime personalization of every communication hard -- and Segment is so good at it.
So that's what we're focused on!
As an aside, the fraud and scam vectors of email, sms, and voice have grown a lot since we started the company 15 years ago. We are always fighting that cat and mouse game with the bad folks of the world. Are we perfect, no. But are we here to make money off those bad actors? Hell no. That's why we just launched fraud guard [1] for free to all Verify customers, and soon to all SMS customers as well. More to come like this.
And to others reading: Miguel didn't say anything bad about Twilio really, just that the alignments for them aren't there - and that's ok. Maybe it back fires and Twilio adjusts back to its dev-focused strategy. Businesses just evolve as they need to. If Twilio ends up being "bad" it just means there's now a spot for someone else to form "The Good Twilio" :) See: the many Google competitors, the many smartphone competitors, the many VPN competitors, etc...
Question: What does Twilio do with the profit it does make off those bad actors once it discovers they are bad actors?
Probably my top issue with companies like Google which make a ton of money off of crime is... they keep the money from the crime! That's a perverse incentive to at least do a poor job preventing it.
I remember visiting the Twilio offices when it was still tiny during a Google Glass related thing. I still have the T-shirt.
It’s a good question because it goes to the incentives of a company to truly fight the problem vs saying the right things but looking the other way when convenient.
For us, we typically work with customers who are victims of fraud and the first time, we give them advice on how to better protect themselves and then refund them ~ the amount of profit we would have made. Ie we recoup costs but that’s it. For the financially aware, this is bad for our gross margin and profit but we do it to help customers the first time. After that though we expect them do implement some defenses otherwise our incentives aren’t aligned. Now however, we have Fraud Guard rolling out which should prevent much of the fraud in the first place.
There are other forms of bad actors but that’s the most prevalent these days.
You have the CEO of a public company come out to play and address a public post, which is pretty cool! Your attacking style of questioning just makes people like Jeff less likely to engage with the community. You could frame the same question in a more constructive style.
Curious, what in GP's question rubbed you the wrong way? To me it seemed like a legitimate question. I'd actually like to know the answer myself because in the end it always comes down to incentives. But maybe I missed some nuance? (not a native english speaker, obviously)
Anyway, hoping for the answer to the question, and that it is taken in a positive way.
I actually don't have a strong issue with Twilio, and I think it's a good question that concerns me about other larger companies which also have problems with bad actors on their platform. It is potentially something that CEO could use as a huge differentiator if they want to as well. It definitely wasn't meant to be attacking in style, and I also wasn't aware this was the CEO. =)
That being said, I'm not a scary individual, I assume I am softballing compared to what a CEO faces day to day.
Jeff is the CEO of a public company, and hence works for shareholders.
It's in Jeff's interest to engage with the community, and we are glad he's here. We certainly don't need to tiptoe around delicate sensibilities though...
Only tangentially related—and I know the odds are low that you worked on this personally—but I want to give sincere thanks for the stuff you guys have shared via Twilio Labs. The netlify-okta-auth package in particular was exactly what I needed to complete a recent project, and the documentation it came with was nearly perfect.
if you feel inclined, would really love your comment on OP's observation:
> Sadly, us developers are not at the center of everything anymore at Twilio.
it does seem the recent messaging has de emphasized that in favor of "Customer Engagement Platform". as the originator of "Ask Your Developer" (I read your book!) that has to sting a little bit. would love to hear your thinking on how Twilio continues to also engage developers in its next phase.
At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers. Only talking to developers isn’t savvy or smart. AWS etc do the same thing.
We can have good APIs and make a compelling case to the business why they should pay for it.
I agree that sometimes our engagement messaging isn’t quite right for developers. As a developer, I prefer more technical and matter of fact marketing of products. But interestingly, as a CEO, sometimes I need companies to simplify the message especially in a domain I’m not an expert in and don’t want to become an expert in!
For the entrepreneurs in the HN community, it’s talking features vs benefits. Developers love what a product does in a literal sense because they’re close to the implementation. Business folks tend to look for the benefit statements more as they’re not as close to the implementation. It’s a like to walk when you’re talking to both!
"At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers."
How can I send my wife a grocery list, with a twiml bin, and not register a business use-case and provide a US EIN for A2P 10DLC (along with example messages and opt-out mechanisms) ?
Haha - just kidding.
I know I can't do that.
... and as long as we have you here, what, pray tell, will Twilio do with the pages and pages of use-cases and howtos for home automation, personal alerts, person to person messaging, self-reminders, email forwards - like this, for instance:
Yes, but the Twilio implementation of this has been very frustrating. The process is (needlessly?) complex and has changed several times since it's inception. The last time I had to adjust our 10DLC configuration I was forced to use the Twilio API instead of the web console.
An API is great if you have to do something hundreds of times or automate a process, but I had >10 sub-accounts to update and doing it through the API made it much more difficult. I feel like Twilio really dropped the ball here and could have done much more to make the 10DLC process more manageable.
I’ve always described this as “selling features vs selling solutions”. As a startup grows, the buying persona changes. Startups that sell to developers do best when they’re selling features, whereas a product manager/CEO is shopping for a solution (like increasing customer engagement). A neat thing I’ve noticed is that at one point, almost every B2B company will add a “Solutions” page to their website to highlight that.
> At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers. Only talking to developers isn’t savvy or smart. AWS etc do the same thing.
AWS does it well for both, may be learn from them. Twilio outbound communication has turned completely undecipherable (too much marketspeak) for both business and developers. The billboards in Miguel's blog post sums up the stark contrast very well. There need to be a balance.
Just an anecdotal data point, recently a company was interested in integrating internet voice calling systems, having used Twilio about 8 years ago, I suggested them to check out Twilio. The company mentioned they couldn't figure what Twilio does and doesn't and in the end went with the solution being pushed by local Telco.
I'd be interested to know how you think the business folks should judge the benefit statements without the detail that they could run by experienced developers? Surely they get a lot of vapourware pitches all the time.
definitely. my most quoted dev marketing tweet is about me constantly having to relearn “"Talk benefits, not features" doesn't work!” in the early stage devtool startup playpen i operate in, but at your stage you have multiple equally impt constituencies.
whenever i’m caught between a thesis and an antithesis i try to look for a synthesis to break through the apparent conflict. perhaps TWLO can find messaging that does the same. it feels like Msft is doing this well by essentially having a different group of brands that are keenly developer oriented, with Azure on the backend filling in all the enterprise messaging.
What better example of Twilio becoming a completely sales driven organisation than this opportunistic and self serving response, with a paragraph directly lifted from you sales 101 deck no doubt.
Good to see that y'all are still pushing in the right direction! I left between the layoffs to pursue some innovation in the semiconductor space, but I look back fondly on my time at Twilio (Sendgrid)!
Building APIs into businesses is no easy task, but I'm glad that there are those still fighting the good fight, even if the field changes. Best of luck to the Twilio of the future!
Hey there, this is tangential but you just launched limited MMS support in Australia, but no voice and not 2-way and from what I can gather only on the Optus network.
I offer a virtual mobile number that does voice, txt and mms in Australia which could be globalised, interested in chatting?
It's no cost to the user! Defaults are rolled out to everybody, but the users opts-into aggressive protection because of the risk of false positives. Note, this is Verify today. All Programmable SMS customers will get it soon as well.
"The company was great when it was just engineers, but then they hired account managers and sales reps and business people and marketers who ruined everything."
Common refrain from developers at SaaS companies who don't realize that the party they were enjoying all these years was directly funded by VC dollars, and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and are necessary for converting all their work into a viable business.
I think you read a different article. Miguel is aggrieved by the fact that it is no longer a developer focused company, which was the reason for its success.
Sure, you need sales, marketing and the rest of it; it does not mean that you need to forget what made you great in the first place.
The article is all over the place. Miguel spends most of it bemoaning the change of his favorite billboard, as if that can be universally unpacked and extrapolated by others as why Twilio is no longer "for developers".
The remainder of his post says only that their shift from focusing on one specialization (communications) to another (customer data and engagement) doesn't align with HIS values.
Now, that's ok. He doesn't have to be down for it. But it also doesn't prove how they're no longer for developers. They could still have the best API, documentation, and developer support in the game. They could pay developers well, respect their input, and their process.
And yet he doesn't speak to any of this. I want to know how Twilio is no longer for developers. What actually changed! That was his root proposition, and he doesn't address it or substantiate it ever.
" The article is all over the place. Miguel spends most of it bemoaning the change of his favorite billboard, as if that can be universally unpacked and extrapolated by others as why Twilio is no longer "for developers"."
I think his point is hella clear with the two screenshots. Originally they provide "Voice, SMS, and Video APIs"and then they switch to "Customer Engagement Platform"
Both messages are likely nonsense for the vast majority of people that drive by them. The "ask your developer" one specifically targets software devs and mentions why. The "How can I reduce acquisition costs by 65%?" targets business owners ... but it's a little vague because the first thing I'd think when I hear "acquisition costs" is buying another business lol. What the hell is a "customer engagement platform"? Well, a developer isn't gonna give a shit then.
So the first billboard goes with a "hey boss I found out about this cool twillo stuff we can use!" to "Hi it's the CEO, we're now going to use twillo and if you don't like it, eat shit"
I think I can play both sides, GIMP vs Photoshop, Photoshop Vs GIMP.
Both have great engineers but sales and marketing is subject to opinion based on how you see them.
Money doesn't magically show up at your doorstep even if your product is focused on developers. How do you think SaaS companies are able to hire developers? Do those $350k bay area salaries magically come from nothing? Yes, they often initially fueled by VC dollars, but eventually customer revenues pay for them.
The "anti sales" drivel from engineers on HN who are largely some of the highest paid positions in the world always puzzles me.
It's OKAY to be okay with Sales & Marketing in companies. It isn't some evil function, and discounting it means future entrepreneurs are doomed to fail.
Neither the original article nor the person you are replying to said that sales wasn't needed. Indeed, the person you're replying to explicitly said the opposite.
The actual complaint is that they shifted their target audience from engineers to something much broader and fuzzier. The complaint is not that they have salespeople, which they needed in either case. It's that the lack of clarity in who they're selling to and why is making it worse for everybody.
> (...) and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and (...)
Just because someone is hired for a position of a sales rep/account manager/business people, that does not mean they walk over water. Those positions attract plenty of types whose primary skill is to leverage their soft skills talent to latch themselves to a organization while delivering no added value at all.
A startup lives and dies by the engineers. Without them there is no product. This very case documents how engineers created value only to get new arrivals whose net contribution is non-positive, to the point they effectively drive out the talent that made everything possible.
No, a startup lives and dies by revenue or fundraising. Engineers are a means of achieving revenue for many startups, but that does not mean they live and die by their engineers. There are plenty of large companies that got there without engineering excellence.
And conversely there are plenty of startups (the majority even) that had excellent engineering but failed due to a myriad of other reasons. "Engineering = success" is a very naive view of the industry and the world.
> And conversely there are plenty of startups (the majority even) that had excellent engineering but failed due to a myriad of other reasons. "Engineering = success" is a very naive view of the industry and the world.
You're putting up lame strawmen. No one claimed "Engineering = success".
The claim is that it is absolutely impossible to have a tech startup without engineers, and no idea, no matter how cunning it might be, can have success if engineering can't turn it to into reality.
A tech startup without engineering is snake oil. Simple as that. Let's not pretend that a salesperson parachuting into a startup with a product in the market can possibly have a comparable impact to those who actually deliver the actual product.
Is that really a representative example though? Roberts basically invented a gaming subgenre despite himself until he had so much money there was no one left who could say "stop, that's enough". His ambition appears to keep engineers busy with an ever growing product scope.
That’s… an over simplification. But it’s an example of what happens when sales people are trying to sell jpegs and mpegs before anyone has done any development. It drives development to the point that virtually nothing is “done” and everything is half-done.
How wrong can someone be? Unless the startups core proposition is some advanced algorithm (like openai), something very hard to replicate, it absolutely does not matter how great their engineers are. They merely need to be barely competent. Of course, better engineers means more efficiency and a different structure but that never fails a startup. Bad growth does. But growth numbers expected of VC backed startups can fail it. Thus the factors that fail or succeed most startups is not the engineeers.
I was an engineer for 15 years and have been a tech presales for 4 years now. You couldn't be more wrong.
Best engineers making the best product ever will not make a dollar without good sales people and marketing and product managers and VC and ... You need ALL of these to make a succesful company.
This has been my experience as well. Some word of mouth counterexamples exist yet are not the norm.
I think it's especially hard to appreciate sales+marketing since they seem so ephemeral while tech is concrete. Sadly there also also too many examples of marketing getting too far ahead of the product, over promising, or devaluing engineering.
Best is definitely a balance, where all sides respect others' work and can see both the effort and its benefits.
Perhaps, but I would argue that the door in order to be able to get access to these positions is more heavily barred when the interview process can include clinically quantifiable demonstrable competency in the form of architectural whiteboarding, algorithm design etc.
It's more difficult to assess and measure soft skills that you would find in sales positions.
I’ve been on sales calls as the primary tech contact with 10 other people on the line. After 4 months on that account, only one other person actually did anything in my opinion. Perhaps the other bodies gave the perception that a lot of people “cared” about the customer?
Unfortunately, this is a common outcome. Sales/marketing will quantify revenue/profit goals, these goals often implicitly assume that it is only because of sales that those numbers were hit. Sales then grows headcount and gains influence in the organization. Eventually, you get some insane ratio of dev:sales and things get strange. The terminal state of such firms is the sales team driving acquisitions of products - so that they can sell the new product. By the time you’ve reached this point “technical” innovation is impossible.
On the flip side, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with driving a business from the sales side. There is lots of room for business process innovation. However, as an engineer - I’d much rather work at an engineering driven firm.
A developer run and developer focused business could absolutely be a viable business. But it wouldn’t be the 10x hockey stick growth company venture capitalists demand and ultimately they hold the power here. So we get the inevitable.
Where does the money come from? Customers don't magically appear. Any, and I mean _any_ example you can dream of, will require something more than just the product.
Price, promotion, product, and distribution. You need all four.
You realise that businesses are successfully formed without venture capital, right?
I’m not saying “create a business and ignore the entire concept of marketing”. I’m saying that you can create a small business with a tight focus and it can be a success, a great success even, without the necessity of scaling to the level VC investments usually require you to.
You can sort of get it in the post-unicorns: see AWS, Microsoft. Smaller examples, Digital Ocean, Hashicorp. They are certainly dev focused, and probably dev run to a high enough level (but not the top). They wont always do things you like/agree with as a dev, but that is different to not being dev focused.
the interests of account-managers/sales-reps and developers are often in conflict over resource allocation. Its natural for those interests to compete and I feel like brushing off one side of this coin as juvenile whining is a partisan position to take.
Its a common problem in tech and finding the balance between the two is arguably a big part of long-term success for an org in this industry.
There is a certain point at which the engineering is no longer what makes a company successful, it fuels an initial growth and can sustain it longer, but then the deciding thing on whether the company survives and thrives becomes the more operational aspects, the traditional sales & marketing.
With the product-market fit nailed, a solid offering out there, Twilio now occupies that later stage, and the buildboard reflects it. Everything changes at this point, because it's also not the top priority of the company to keep their own engineering happy at this point.
To me there's just an argument for effective marketing. That new billboard can't be more effective at generating industry and brand awareness, can it? It's so forgettable. It's _mediocre_, and reads just like every other uninteresting stat point most B2B enterprise SaaS companies put out there. That's the part that I don't get, even if they are moving up market and away from a pure developer play, that kind of messaging still should raise Twilio's stature, no?
I think the “Ask your developer” resonates with only a small segment of the market (a fairly passionate segment).
The “Lower your aquisition costs by 66%” resonates with the CFO, who will drive past the board every day until he remembers to tell someone in passing to “investigate this twilio thing”. From there the cogs of the org start turning and 6 months later out rolls a several million dollar order for Twilio.
To everyone’s surprise the bill is 20% higher a year after release, but by that point everyone responsible for it has already been promoted.
The issue is that everyone is saying some version of that tagline. It's forgettable and the kind of thing you tune out over time. I guess we'll see how they perform moving forward though.
Early Twilio engineer here. There was never really all that much unique ground breaking technology work being done, we used open source tools running on AWS to build the core products. Our differentiators were reliability and user experience. Both of those came from how the organization was built and run. There was an obsession with uptime and DevOps, with a carefully guarded culture of collaboration and blameless postmortems when things went wrong. Empowering individual engineers and product designers to call out when things sucked really went a long way, and is really hard to scale. Initially managers and directors had very little power over the actual makers and maintainers, which lead to a lot of quality. A few years post-IPO we hit a scale where a lot of that culture began to fall apart. That’s when I made my exit/was pushed out.
> It reflects the defensible moat in our industry (SaaS offerings in general) is no longer technology.
I feel like it was never technology, especially in SaaS.
Sure you need some initial technical chops to get a service up and running, but after MVP —> PMF, it’s all marketing, momentum, consumer trust, your brand, etc.
For every successful SaaS (take Notion for example) it’s easy to say things like they never had a real competitor, but the truth is they had a lot of competition but they were able to overcome it and build a moat initially propped up by really good usability, but now their usability could easily go to shit and they’d still do well with a traditional sales/marketing moat.
I'll try to add some perspective to help people understand Twilio's side here.
Twilio is has always been a very unprofitable company. Unlike their SaaS counterparts Twilio's PaaS model has significant costs in the form of fees which they pay to network providers. They're also loved by bad actors who can leverage their service for fraud (search "toll fraud" if you're interested) and the ongoing effort and investment needed to counter this growing fraud problem is significant. What's more there's very little moat in a communications API so Twilio has little pricing power which only compounds the cost issues they face since they cannot easily increase prices to offset growing costs of an already unprofitable business model.
Basically the business model sucks. I'd argue it's one that can only exist in a world where investors are not interested in profits. Now interest rates are rising it's becoming harder for companies like Twilio to attract investors by posting revenue growth alone.
I don't think Twilio wanted to shift their focus, they simply had to. They had to find something that had more of a moat, and therefore better margins. Segment is the answer, but ultimately it's a different product which understandably requires a different focus. If you sell a communications API then developers are the people whom you must evangelise, but Segment is a product used by business folks to grow their business.
I don't envy the position Jeff and Twilio's management team are in. They've had to make some really tough decisions, but if you like Twilio then I'd see this simply as them doing what they need to do to survive and continue providing the awesome developer focused products they provide.
I'll also note that unlike Facebook's mass layoffs Twilio's layoffs weren't simply done to increase profitability, but needed to right side a business that's currently burning over $1 billion a year.
> They're also loved by bad actors who can leverage their service for fraud (search "toll fraud" if you're interested) and the ongoing effort and investment needed to counter this growing fraud problem is significant.
And Twilio is wholly incompetent when it comes to battling this. Not only are they unable to keep bad actors off, they punish good actors. They require "approval" of what text messages you are going to send (never mind if part of it needs to be dynamic) and limit your sending ability to arbitrarily low levels. The company I work for just switched off them after high rejection rates and them randomly blocking us or limiting our send volume. They also bungled the whole number verification thing that recently went into effect, or at least dropped the ball on the communications side. Very glad to be off them and kind of sad, I remember when Twilio first hit the scene and it was truly amazing and so cool to work with.
Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway.
I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention.
Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an additional monthly "campaign" charge for the service. Their business model no longer comprehends a pure request-reply service. They now assume their customers want to spam.
The campaign stuff is related to legal requirements. Ultimately the texting emailing and calling via APIs wild west is being shut down across the world by a hundred different government and regulatory organizations. Twilio surely has huge headaches in this area.
Good. The fact that the FCC refuses to act (and GOP in Congress blockades things like chair nominations (read up on what happened to Gigi Sohn) to ensure inaction) against telcos just allowing spammers to ruin our national communications infrastructure because the pennies they get from them are worth more than all their consumers is an embarrassment to our country.
Some of these requirements aren’t even from Twilio but from upstream, Tier 1 telcos.
T-Mobile for example has made many changes over the past few years intentionally designed to make it harder to onboard large numbers of texts, and they’re happy to tell intermediaries like Twilio to get fucked if they don’t play ball.
Which in absence of any stronger measures is great, but those stronger measures could at least serve to create a baseline that’s the same and reliable across the industry. If you want to launch a 10DLC-based campaign it can be a real headache.
>
She’s shown unapologetic animus to conservative views, calling Fox News “dangerous to our democracy,” accusing Republicans of suppressing the vote, and describing Justice Brett Kavanaugh as an “angry white man.” She’s also supported progressive attacks on law enforcement, which prompted the Fraternal Order of Police to oppose her nomination.
> During her Dec. 2021 confirmation hearing, she committed to acting with transparency and integrity. But then she stonewalled the Senate’s request for a copy of a legal settlement she signed with broadcasters and the defunct app Locast, whose board she sat on. Locast was sued for capturing and retransmitting broadcasters’ signals over the internet without their permission.
> We were told that Ms. Sohn’s political statements made Democratic Senators Catherine Cortez Masto, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly uneasy.
(Article courtesy of WSJ owned by
Rupert Murdoch who has a very large interest in keeping regulators out of the medias money printing machinery, out of ISPs rent-seeking grift, out of conglomerates which own both media companies and ISPs collusion against consumers)
Be doubly sure to read up on how the media AKA vested interest was weaponized against her nomination too.
Edit: here’s an article to get started https://www.theverge.com/23437518/biden-fcc-gigi-sohn-fox-ne... Note that it explicitly mentions Fox News (also Murdoch) so again I don’t have much faith that WSJ is unbiased about this issue. The Verge has some other in-depth articles about Gigi Sohn as well. Pretty ironic that the first response defending the GOP actions is from a source overseen by someone directly responsible for the media campaign against her. It obviously worked.
Moderates on both sides are adverse to appointing people to executive positions if they are nakedly partisan. These people are supposed to implement the policies written by Congress to their best ability. If the appointee is acting like a politician and not a civil servant, they should consider running for some political position.
The sometime political media convention that an action can't be described as a GOP responsibility if the 50 Republican senators are joined in it by 3 Democrats is purely obfuscatory if one is trying to actually understand what sides are involved in a political debate and what's entailed by empowering one party or another. Let's not adopt it here.
(Also, while maybe there's something to the Locast stuff-no idea-I'm not sure what a Democratic nominee is supposed to think about Fox News or Kavanaugh's temperament.)
>> We were told that Ms. Sohn’s political statements made Democratic Senators Catherine Cortez Masto, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly uneasy.
> It's not just the GOP blocking her.
Is this supposed to be a real opinion? Manchin and Sinema are your cornerstones? LOL
This is extremely frustrating for me. We used to use Send In Blue. If you send a campaign, and some larger percentage (10% or so) do not open within 24 hours, they automatically suspend your campaign.
On the surface you might think this is a good idea, but we used this service for sending investor updates. Most of our investors don’t open non-urgent emails within 24 hours. SIB claimed it was some legal requirement.
We switched to Gmass, which sort of hacks your Gmail account to send campaigns. We haven’t had any issue with Gmass blocking our campaigns, so I have doubts SIB was being genuine about the legal requirements.
Based on what you're describing they probably were being genuine. The legal requirements are tricky and often enforced by private parties and only when actually enforceable. Gmail is supposed to be a private user rather than an application sender so you're probably skirting the requirements.
I continue to receive an overwhelming amount of scam text messages and calls. These messages do not seem to originate from Twilio (probably because its high cost deterring scammers and spammers).
So all these the legal requirements intended to curb spam and scams, are clearly ineffective.
Even my Twilio phone number wasn't immune to incoming spam, and Twilio itself couldn't block it. I had to create a studio workflow to combat the issue. Indeed, it's a puzzling world...
These requirements (not legal, they are by the telcos) are "soft" now and become "hard" this summer. There is a huge push for all campaigns and businesses using A2P SMS to be registered by July.
Pretty sure it's contractual obligations by the major carriers. Traffic registration is with the carriers, not with any regulatory body. So, it's out of Twilio's control but not "legal requirements".
Also its technically not required for actually inbound only, but it sounds like this application also sends ack replies.
Not defending Twilio, but this isn’t their doing. Every SMS gateway service now requires this due to new anti-spam regulations by US authorities. (FCC or FTC or maybe both.)
My open question becomes, who is servicing the request-reply service in its void? It still has a place as a subsystem within IoT that itself isn't anything necessarily hype worthy, but quiet background productive infrastructure in an easy to consume API format.
Maybe the answer isn't SMS but someone working on constrained satellite internet?
After following this thread and following up on some mentioned competitors, looks like I'm looking for Plivo. Cheaper and still covers the SMS backhaul use case without the fluff I don't need while still focusing on the developer. I'm sure I will have to move again in a few years, more its something for now.
they still support pure request reply, but that has become commoditized. there’s a bunch of sms gateways to choose from today. so twilio is finding the most valuable forms of sms and productizing them. this is classic growth steps for a 15 year old business. aws has been doing this since before twilio was founded
SMS was highly commoditized before Twilio. In my mind, what made Twilio rise was programatic Voice with a better API and developer centric marketting (including examples, showing up at conferences, demos etc), maybe a bigger US focus than most aggregators helped too. Self-service signup is pretty handy.
Disclosure: I was at WhatsApp from 2011 to 2019, and worked on SMS and Voice verification. We started using twilio as an alternative voice provider, and only later added them for SMS.
I'm not much of a focused writer, so other than comments on HN, and private communications. Not really.
If it's on topic, I'm happy to answer questions. And my email is in my profile.
On this topic, I guess the big learning if you use phone numbers for verification is to use multiple providers, and build a system that automatically chooses providers in real time based on success. They all have incidents, and they all have destinations that work better and worse. I don't usually mention suppliers by name unless it was clearly public, they put us in their SEC forms by name, so I think it's fair.
My "favorite" incidents are when one provider has a major incident, and several others have minor incidents that correspond exactly. This is because most of the aggregators are interconnected, and sometimes it makes more sense for them to send through another aggregator than directly (they don't tend to have direct routes for all carriers, regardless of what they claim).
If you use voice codes, I also recommend working to make the voice spacing sound good. Remembering 6 digits from a call isn't super easy; it's better if you make it sounds like two groups of three or maybe three groups of two. It's not totally obvious how to do that either; smashing audio files together doesn't sound great. You've got to adjust the silence between voice samples.
Overkill I suppose, in the past for similar stuff I've used a microcontroller with a GPRS modem, but since the 2g switch off I'm not sure it can be done that simply.
Working for any company is a "job", and not a "family" as many have found out in the last few years (but happens at every downturn). It's hard to draw a line, between personal and professional identities, but it's something I feel everyone should do.
Corporations simply are built to amass profits, and outcompete others. They do not care nor are they built to care about you.
Friends are friends and business is business. If you get it confused, you will stay confused while the world moves on. I noticed most people are confused. You serve for your paycheck and then you are forgotten. They don't ask you what you spent the money on. Your reward is the package they gave you. Best to make friends in areas of life where that is the goal.
The concept of family varied quite a lot over times and cultures, there probably are some that fit. Medieval families are quite different social constructs from modern first-world nuclear families. Heck, and if anything - family abuse is, sadly, a very real thing, too.
Same for the companies - they vary, a lot. Working at a two-person startup can resemble a family to some extent (or, well, there are genuine family startups, where partners in life start business together, and some succeed), but large corporations are entirely different experience.
I had the privilege of working with Miguel at Twilio. His work had a meaningful impact on our goal of empowering developers around the world and I’m unsurprised to see such a thoughtful take from him has he departs. A huge loss for Twilio but I can’t wait to see what he does next.
"Why is A2P bad and why does it make your personal telco fall apart?"
A2P 10DLC requires all senders to provide company/corporate information and register their "campaigns".
Which is to say, when I send a grocery list to my wife, that must be under the auspices of a business case that I have registered with twilio and the carriers and within the confines of a campaign that I have defined with example messages and an opt-out and unsubscribe mechanism.
There is a sole proprietor option which is hazily defined and it is unclear if twilio even understands the implementation of.
All of this to say:
Because of the horrible behavior of both twilio and their customers there is no longer any such thing as programmable, personal messaging.
Personal messaging is something you do with your thumbs, on your physical device and programmable messaging is spam. There is no third classification.
Twilio could have been a boring and useful telco infrastructure company providing plumbing for interesting use-cases - but there's no route to billions there so they had to somehow become a unicorn. That's where the "customer engagement" comes in.
I'm experiencing the same massive pain point from Twilio. Our business sends survey links to about 300 people a day who have all opted in. We've been doing this for 7 years. Our undelivered rate had been under 5% for years. It's now at 33% and is threatening our business.
Twilio's support has been absolutely dismal. They say things like "Your number is not attached to your campaign" and show a screen shot from their admin screen, but when I point out it is all connected in the console: they respond with the generic Twilio links about A2P implementation.
Has anyone figured out a solution? ... I'm happy to switch to another company at this point.
I assume they are talking about a2p 10dlc registration. Twilio has badly mishandled the rollout, it's been extremely painful. OP seems to blame them for making things too easy for spammers which caused the changes to be needed, which may be true.
I've been playing with Twilio recently, and it's certainly not the lean platform that it once apparently was. In the Java client SDK for example, I count 7 separate Message classes. There are multiple APIs with overlapping functionality; you can send SMS and whatsapps several different ways each. The documentation is likewise byzantine and bloated.
I get that scaling tech organizations is hard (Stripe is another company with abysmal bloat in their APIs) but jfc, get a competent chief architect who is opinionated, please, and aim towards coherency. If you launch a new API that's intended to replace older ones, then stop exposing the legacy APIs in the default SDK.
(That said, better than MessageBird, who don't even have SDK support for the APIs they're promoting as the correct way; on the other hand, their documentation is markedly better than Twilio's).
> If you launch a new API that's intended to replace older ones, then stop exposing the legacy APIs in the default SDK.
They might want to alienate and break things for many of their existing clients who use the older APIs. Plenty of companies contract out dev work until they have a working product and keep it as is. They don't have devs on hand to update them if they deprecate older APIs leading to a completely broken app despite all the old functionalities being perfectly adequate for the task.
Anyone else share my thought that Twilio (and any other companies like them that I'm not aware of) is likely the primary driver of the massive epidemic of spam text messages and phone calls? Phone and text have been rendered almost completely useless to me. I often get close to double digit spam texts and calls per day. Obviously the drivers of this stuff are many and complicated, but it seems like the automation layer is the main thing that enabled it all.
To send SMS with Twilio (or any other similar service) you need to jump through a bunch of hoops to register your traffic with major carriers and get their sign off.
The really sad thing is the executive team / board / investors not being able to comprehend that they could vastly increase their revenue (and profit) by just providing expanded technical services to me (an existing customer). There are a ton of things I would pay Twilio for beyond SMS and WhatsApp Messaging. You don't need a MBA to figure that out, you just need someone talking to your customers and an engineering and product team that can turn that into real products.
Anecdotally, I think one result of the layoffs of the past couple years has been companies
1) really focusing and doubling down on existing product lines, less experiments outside core competencies
2) double down on focus on top 20% paying customers, pull back hands on support for smaller clients, focus on keeping (and upselling) existing large clients with less focus on the bottom 50th percentile
I have seen number 2 at my company. They've given up on midsized and startup companies. They are only chasing the large ones and government contracts.
Which makes sense from a shareholder perspective as they look to leech as much return as possible. But, it also ensures that the company is not going to innovate anytime soon.
FWIW I never thought Twilio was good as a developer. At least not coming hot off of Stripe. Which is glorious. The dev mode is fantabulous, and so are the docs.
Twilio... I.. it's just atrocious in so many ways. Firstly, it needs a proper dev API key and then all the SMS's should just be collected into a dashboard on their site instead of going to phones. And their Connect option is very half baked. Customers should be able to re-use their existing Twilio numbers, not re-buy under a connected app, and they should be able to manage their numbers on twilio.com, not force me to rebuild the entire Twilio UI.
The writing was on the wall when they got acquired, forced two-factor auth with SMS only and forcibly locked me out of my account by turning it on when I didn't have a phone setup. If you want to use SMS as spam prevention, then just do that. Breaking your product and forcing bad security to harvest numbers is, well, just shitty.
You know, I think this is correct. I was using them to do some Email workflow stuff with Pipedream, and ended up replacing it with my own Gmail SMTP since I'm just emailing myself and it's low volume. Apologies for getting that mixed up.
1. I could not tell you what that billboard means, despite also looking through the related blog post. Perhaps it is something only marketing teams understand, which would be an interesting failure mode.
2. I tried to sign up for Twilio Sendgrid the other day to send some emails from a Heroku app but I couldn't complete the sign up because I never received the activation email. Classic!
Re 2: had the exact same experience. And the big problem was that in order to contact support I needed an activated account :). But at some point I found a support Email and with that I got an activated account.
Still all this was too slow and left a bad taste. And I already finished integrating a different and IMO simpler (and probably less powerful) solution. And as the pricing was ok it was just the Twilio brand that I missed...
Tangentially, I'd like to shout out both Miguel's work both in explaining the Flask web development framework for Python as well as his work developing Flask-SocketIO, both of which I've used extensively.
Have you reported these? The library has a fairly complete testing suite, and if you are saying there are regressions I'd like to know what those are so that I can make sure the testing is adjusted to cover those cases going forward. Thanks.
I was at Twilio for 10.5 years, and left at the beginning of 2022. It's interesting to read things like this, from someone who joined in 2019, as the change OP is talking about in the company started well before his arrival. We all saw it, with increasing emphasis on enterprise sales (we hired someone from Salesforce as COO specifically for this). Courting individual developers and small startups stopped being a priority, even though those sorts of folks are the ones who formed the backbone of Twilio's mind share.
I'm not saying this was bad thing for the business; Twilio's growth would have slowed well below what would have been acceptable for a VC-backed (and the newly-public) company without this move. I'd be lying if I didn't say I was happy with where the value of my equity went. On top of that, Twilio was life-changing socially: I have many dear friends who have remained dear friends well after we all left the company, something that's never really been that case for me at other companies. As for the work itself, there were many fun and challenging problems to solve over time as the company grew, despite our frustration with the growing pains.
In the end, I left for very similar reasons as OP: the company seemed more focused on helping brands increase engagement than on doing anything novel with communications. Sure, a lot of the older, interesting use cases (the ones that got me stoked about Twilio in the first place) were still running on the platform, but those kinds of things felt like a minuscule percentage of the business.
The change of the billboard to the "How can I reduce my acquisition cost" branding makes me feel sad any time I drive by it. "Ask your developer" was brilliant, but Twilio isn't that company anymore, and hasn't been for a while.
MBA programs should be illegal. You can thank MBAs for spreading PFAS everywhere, single use plastic, profiteering from insulin, making every American a diabetic by adding sugar into everything, selling glyphosate for residential use, killing all the pollinators, moving all manufacturing to countries with no environmental laws, and other consumer and planet-fucking initiatives.
The number of extinct species, diabetic patients, number of employees on minimum wage with no health insurance, policitian revenue from lobbying activities, dead bees, cut trees, lost topsoil, former Roundup users with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, revenue from weapons, atmospheric temperature increase, ocean acidity, plastic waste, pollution, every form of ecocide and every other measure of things going wrong is directly proportional to the number of MBAs.
Why? because if shareholder value is everything, then the employee, the environment and society at large becomes irrelevant.
Alright fine. Twilio has largely saturated the communications space. You can now send an API request for a phone call, SMS message, and WhatsApp notification in a lot of countries.
If you were calling the shots, what would your next growth move be? What should Twilio expand into?
> Catastrophizing – Giving greater weight to the worst possible outcome, however unlikely, or experiencing a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just uncomfortable.
---
Hopefully it goes without saying that talking about elderly people falling and dying due to a supposed spam text originating from Twilio is...a bit farfetched...
My grandpa had a pulse-dialing phone (aka rotary dialing) and he was strongly against learning how to use a different type of phone. I tried to have him use a cordless phone but he strongly refused.
So each time the phone rang the guy had to stand up, then slowly walk to the phone and answer. He did fall a few times as he got older.
That was not his cause of death but I can imagine that if you call enough people for long enough as those robocallers do it is not hard to imagine it happening kind of often. A lot of older people have no idea how to use a smartphone and new technology is particularly hostile to them (small fonts by default, complex menus, tech jargon, etc.)
As robocalls became more frequent he was really pissed off at the situation.
Just call your grandparents and ask them what they think of robocalls.
Read the safety data sheet, see what precautions are needed and then ask an average residential roundup user if they care at all about following those instructions.
"Remove soiled clothing immediately and clean
thoroughly before using again. Wash thoroughly and put on clean
clothing. Keep working clothes separately. Garments that cannot be
cleaned must be destroyed (burnt)."
"Chemical-resistant gloves (barrier laminate, butyl rubber, nitrile
rubber or Viton)
Wash gloves when contaminated. Dispose of when contaminated
inside, when perforated or when contamination on the outside cannot
be removed. Wash hands frequently and always before eating,
drinking, smoking or using the toilet."
"Use tightly sealed goggles and face protection."
"Wear long-sleeved shirt and long pants and shoes plus socks"
Glyphosate is a true victim of post-truth society. It has not been shown to cause any harm in multiple well-controlled experiments, yet a jury in San Francisco (no brains allowed there) found Monsanto liable for a cancer that they attributed to glyphosate use. Because Monsanto is bad and does GM food which is bad for you because glyphosate causes cancer.
And now "everybody knows" that glyphosate is somehow bad.
The toxicology section of the MSDS with actual information is great, though:
SECTION 11: TOXICOLOGICAL INFORMATION
Eye Causes moderate eye irritation.
Skin May cause slight irritation.
Ingestion Not expected to produce significant adverse effects when
recommended use instructions are followed.
Inhalation Not expected to produce significant adverse effects when
recommended use instructions are followed.
Information on toxicological effects
Acute oral toxicity LD50 (Rat) > 5,000 mg/kg
Acute dermal toxicity LD50 (Rat) > 5,000 mg/kg No deaths
Skin corrosion/irritation Slight irritant effect - does not require labelling.
Basically, they have not managed to cause dermal toxicity even after slathering rats in glyphosate. Yet you must burn clothes if glyphosate gets on them.
It's not even about food. The thread here is about glyphosate for household applications. I guess you might be growing food at home, but that's probably pretty rare.
As a Swede I naturally gravitated towards the 46elks.se service instead of Twilio. Been using it for years now, no issues. They even called me once to find out what their clients were doing, like a survey.
This is unfortunate that he got disillusioned but the shift is for really one simple reason - segment. The original twilio that went on to acquire sendgrid, was increasingly in a low margin commodity market. Segment is hugely profitable in contrast and is not dependent on increasingly competitive upstream providers (carriers) providing lower cost similar apis as twilio voice/messaging. It still stands that Twilio’s apis are better than the competitors but that will only last so long. Segment will keep twilio relevant for a much longer time.
For my teams, we used Twilio services on projects very early in the company's lifecycle. Its always been a running joke about how the company's trajectory will play out. So far the cynics seem to have won out. In hindsight it wasn't very difficult to predict but the trajectory Twilio is on appears to repeat itself on more than a few of the tech companies we invested in or utilized. ugh! Moral of the story, is to get off someone else's platform as soon as reasonably possible.
I think this is a massively undervalued point of view, and I agree completely.
Especially if the company is using developer engagement to build. The day will come when they're too big for that, and all the stuff you liked will steadily fall away.
That was refreshing as heck. No damn them to hell, no woe is me, just a lot of here's what happened, and that's why I'm leaving, bye and thanks. Simple, clear, balanced, no histrionics. The word "sadly," I believe was used, that's about it. And yeah, if part of your reason for leaving has to do with the vision becoming cloudy and diffuse, then your writing had better be as concise, neutral and simple as this was, bravo.
Kinda disappointing to see how Twilio has changed. used to have a pretty positive opinion of them even though i hadn’t used their services, and then i went to signup for twilio sendgrid for sending emails for a little website and i immediately got suspended before i even activated my account? support was completely useless too
Twilio are still doing better than their competition. To name an example, MessageBird laid off 30% of their workforce in late 2022 vs Twilio's 17% in early 2023, and they are known to be an absolute clusterfuck, which is not something you hear about Twilio (yet).
Would you be willing to share more about your experience with these companies? I have a client evaluating Twilio alternatives due to skyrocketing costs, and some of these companies are on the list.
We've used Twilio, Nexmo (now Vonage), and Plivo for years.
Twilio is still our go-to for US SMS.
Nexmo has great international deliverability but is more expensive than Plivo.
Plivo works fine when it works. When it doesn't, their support is horrible. Most times I don't even bother opening a ticket anymore. I just switch the customer to Nexmo.
I tried A2P 10DLC registration on Twilio when it first came out and our deliverability went to less than 50%. I quickly switched if off.
They're all going to start requiring A2P 10DLC registration for US SMS within a few months. It's going to be painful to get timely SMS delivered.
The companies I mentioned are substantially inferior in terms of engineering compared to twilio. Plus twilio is more transparent and trustworthy f.e. with porting out numbers.
Voxbone is a Russian cheaper twilio clone.
Plivo is an Indian cheaper twilio clone.
Bandwith is a disaster. You just need to get a single look at their control panel which they won't show to you unless you're a paying customer.
I feel like this isn’t the “betrayal” that it’s made out to be.
Twilio won at their niche. People often talk about “if we just get 1% of the market…” — is there a modern engineer on earth who hasn’t used Twilio’s API at least once?
They’re moving towards doing the same thing with other parts of tech companies, in this case it’s marketing. It’s not like their APIs change because of it, these are additional products they’re introducing. Engineers generally find anything marketing related icky, but they’re very happy to collect the checks which are funded through these icky distribution methodologies.
> is there a modern engineer on earth who hasn’t used Twilio’s API at least once?
Reading this thread makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Twilio is huge and is the leader, but they hold less than 40% market share in CPaaS and makes something like 60-70% of their revenue in the US. There are a lot of competitors and a lot of reasons to never use Twilio.
>As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.
How does that fit in with Cloudflare? DNS is different than SMS, email, etc. Industry regulations, integration with providers, spam fighting, etc. Both benefit from network peering. I would think it would be easier to add DNS to Twilio than to add SMS to Cloudflare.
For any of the following Cloudflare products, are any as complex as SMS or Email? None of these are adversarial and covered by legal constraints to my knowledge (except ddos which is a resource game). I'm unfamiliar with their "china network" - probably some legalities there.
Cloudflare Services:
Advanced Certificate Manager
Advanced DDoS
Always Online™
Analytics
Anycast Network
API
Apps Marketplace
Audit Logs
Argo Smart Routing
Argo for Spectrum
At Cost Registrar
Bot Management
Browser Insights & Origin Monitoring
Browser Isolation (Advanced)
Bring Your Own IPs (BYOIP)
CDN
Certificate Transparency Monitoring
China Network
Cloudflare Access
Cloudflare Gateway™
Cloudflare Gateway™ (DNS Only)
Cloudflare Images
Cloudflare Logs
Cloudflare Network Interconnect
Cloudflare Pages®
Cloudflare Registrar
Cloudflare’s Security Operations Center (SOC) as a Service
Cloudflare Spectrum
Cloudflare Stream
Cloudflare WAF
Custom SSL
Data Localization Suite
Dedicated SSL
DNS Firewall
Enterprise DNS Only
Enterprise - Primary DNS
Error Pages
Healthcheck
Image Resizing
Intel
Keyless SSL
Load Balancing
Magic Firewall®
Magic Transit®
Magic WAN®
Page Rules
Page Shield
Premium Success
Rate Limiting
Secondary DNS
Secure Registrar
SSL for SaaS
SSL for SaaS Advanced
Standard Success Offering
Static IPs
Teams for Enterprise
Waiting Room
Workers Bundled
Workers KV
Workers Unbound
I don’t think you understand Cloudflare’s capability to build new services. Especially that now Twilio has left this vacuum in the market. If my app needs robust SMS delivery, who can provide it now?
Every tech company’s goal is to grow into the thing that you, as a dev, don’t want it to become.
There will be a growing focus on security, process, reporting, testing, documentation, reliability, etc. And a shrinking focus on new feature development, prototyping, experimentation.
For many that might be something to embrace. Maybe you’re 35 now and have kids and wouldn’t mind a more boringly reliable employment. Otherwise you might want to find a new job.
But, yeah, nobody’s being wronged here. It’s just what happens. Like my kids growing up and needing me less and less.
I'm not sure why I as an engineer would not want more focus on security, testing, documentation and reliability. It's by far not the worst that a company can become
I was a twilio customer developer until they instituted a change that demanded to know my personal phone number in order to login to their account. They claimed this was for security, but TOTP doesn't require a phone number. After a meeting with their engineering staff, I realized that they completely screwed up their TOTP implementation and they needed the phone number as the seed. Since I wasn't going to give them my phone number, that brought our customer relationship to an end. They clearly had no idea how to spell the word privacy.
I'm curious why this got upvoted on hackernews. Isn't this some rando- employee (no offense Miguel Grinberg) that joined an established medium sized software company and then is moving on after spending a fairly short time there. Did this particular engineer move the needle on their product somehow?
This guy is crazy if he thinks "The Cloud Communications Platform" makes more sense to the average driver passing by the billboard than "Customer Engagement Platform". At least the average person knows who customers are and what engaging means.
Hmm...is this really surprising to anyone? Yes, I'd like the purpose of a tech company to be to "make developers heroes," but in a capitalist society, companies exist to make money. I'm not saying I like it, but that's just the way it is.
I think developers have been treated extremely well--justifiably, I might add, given the profit some of these tech companies are making--but at the same time developers expect things from their companies that no one else would. Could you imagine your local barista complaining that Starbucks isn't giving them a free gym, free meals, transportation expense reimbursements, and making them heroes?
A retirement account is based on the premise that its owner is going to stop working and adding money to it so they can draw money out of it for the rest of their life.
Companies don't generally have the same long term goal to stop earning revenue and ride out their savings until they die.
The trend we are seeing across the tech industry and business in general is to know/consolidate/extract/exploit. Even users who pay now are still "the product". Who are the buyers? Intelligence agencies, both governmental and private who have different aims, but with the same intermediate goal is to know everything about you.
The only (ONLY) motive is profit. Growth, growth, growth above all costs at the expense of people and the environment. Jeff jumped into this thread to try to color it with verbiage such as:
> we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective.
This is another way to habituate and legitimate the exploitation of users for those few who profit. An example, is the A2P 10DLC registration that is being forced on users of the product that will charge a registration fee, a vetting fee, and a recurring monthly cost. From what I can tell, there is no legal basis forcing this. The Telco cartel got together and came up with a way to make more money off of you. Sure they will talk about it in terms of "improving your experience" and "stopping spam texts". While there may be a kernel of truth in there, that is not the main reason. Go back to rule number 1: profit, profit, profit.
It is a shame that the Telcos are strong arming the CSP middlemen to make them abide by these rules or not deliver their messages. And of course that rolls down to the end users.
But I think the bigger issue here is that they need to know exactly who you are in terms of registration. Blocking VOIP numbers for OTP verification, etc etc. Why do you think this is? Because they will take all of the data you provide, the metadata you produce and sell it to third parties for profit at your expense and without your consent (or otherwise wrapped up in a "privacy policy" that is too long that no one reads).
None of what I am saying is new, it is the same old playbook that most people are ignorant of. I suggest reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff for a deeper study of this topic.
If you would like to refute any of this @jeffiel I would welcome it. I find the forced registration of A2P 10DLC absolutely horrifying. The trend for everybody is to put them into a "pre-crime" bucket. In doing so, we lose all privacy on the web, and with it the web itself.
Edit: I don't know Jeff and I am not making my comment about a personal attack or a character (mis)representation. My point is to look at trends in general, at the decline of privacy for the growth of profit, and how language is used to characterize it as something else selling it as you are getting a better experience through personalization, relevancy, effective, etc. Zuboff touches on this in her book and it is recently in my mind so my comments are coming through the lens of this recent discovery. However, the larger anti-privacy trend and centralization across the web is not new, and I stand that we are all losers if we allow this trend to continue.
It's impressive, in such a short article you managed to execute the most low brow self promotion (that you're looking for a new job) and also trash your previous employer who you were quite comfortable profiting off of for years. Twilio's long term vision did not change overnight - in fact it's been very consistent since 2019.
The developer only exists to serve the product and customer. I do not know why the developer should be the center of any company, none the less why they should be on a billboard. Buyers don't care, they want a great product. Great products are built by companies that love their developers. They don't need to tell that on billboards, they need to tell that privately to each engineer they employ. It is not appropriate for a developer to be the center of a company. Why not quietly say thank you for the employment opportunity (a rare treat across all time and history)? Accept the fortune they gave you, if they were good share it with the world, and if not, move on to your next opportunity? HN may downvote me but I do not understand these "goodbye" posts. I don't think anybody cares and it just makes you think twice about the person who is leaving if they showed up at your door for a job.
> The developer only exists to serve the product and customer. I do not know why the developer should be the center of any company, none the less why they should be on a billboard. Buyers don't care, they want a great product.
I think the point is that developers are (or were) the customers. Twilio got adopted because they targeted and excited developers. Now they don't care about targeting the developers, they're targeting executives and marketing professionals.
I did not down vote you, and I don't think you deserve the down votes.
This is a typical cycle for a venture backed technology business. There’s just nothing else to say here other than this is 100% expected outcome if you decide to build a product on venture capital money, which requires an exit and an increasingly large exit to the point where you IPO.
Unless you avoid this structural pathway, you will be 100% guaranteed to do this.
I am unaware of a venture capital funded technology company that has maintained the core of what they do, and the value proposition, but didn’t push most of their money into paying for sales marketing executive compensation and eventually finally, stock buybacks, or other things that directly enrich investors at the cost of employees.
Having had a couple points with Jeff Lawson I believe he’s a good person who wants to do the right thing for the most amount of people and do it ethically, which is why he jumped into this thread. However, he faces the same pressures as everybody else, and so it’s honorable that he is attempting to find ways to mitigate the downside harms of this new direction but at the end of the day the arrow of history is clear.