It's not that they can't be profitable. It's more along the lines that they are re-investing all of their profits to grow the business. The market Twilio is in has plenty of room to grow and Twilio has to aggressively capture it or else someone else will. If they wanted to become profitable, they can. They're just spending a lot to continue to double every year.

You're looking at it wrong. Twilio _could_ be profitable with 28M users, easily, but they'd rather not be profitable and spend more money on expansion.

All nonprofitability means is they expect ROI on dollars spent today. In other words a dollar spent today will, in their model, increase their future (discounted) free cash flow. In even more words, profit is when a company runs out of investible ideas (within the assumptions of their hopefully convincing model). The size of the company has nothing to do with it (canonical example is Amazon where you can change the 28M users to at least 280M and rev in the billions).

it says "In thousands, except share, per share and customer data" - so it may be 28 thousand accounts. May have misread this though

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447669/000104746916...

They can but choose not to, seems to be what the parent is saying.

You can look at it like they are borrowing 35 million a year on top of their profits in order to fuel their expansion