So they can further concentrate their revenues? I'm sorry, no, that's exactly the worst thing they can do. I'll refer you to this piece:
https://www.inc.com/magazine/201206/jason-fried/huge-account...
As mentioned in the TechCrunch article, this is precisely Twilio's problem.
Revenue concentration is incredibly dangerous for long-term prospects of any operating business. Twilio needs to broaden their revenue base to stabilize it, not find a few more whales that will dictate their future.
We're just one company but there are many tens of thousands of companies with the exact same LeadGen problems that we have to solve that just don't have dedicated engineering teams attached to them yet like we do.
There are many other things that we could do on Twilio that would increase our spend once that foundation is laid too that we can't do now and we would like to.
We need zero touch from Twilio salespeople to make this happen -- it really only costs them in infrastructure.
I would be willing to bet that Twilio spends huge amount of money wine & dine-ing Uber and WhatsApp. Our (big internet advertising company, you fill in the blanks) rep sure does take good care of us.
Yep, your job is then to ensure they don't leave. "All your eggs in one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET" and all that
The revenue concentration problem is well documented and I don't think we add much to that discussion.
The revenue volatility problem is inherent to how short-lived their actual product is - SMS and phone calls are ephemeral, measured in seconds to minutes. As the result, without contracts, the only thing that is stopping the outbound traffic from flip flopping providers are some business rules baked into the implementation. (Inbound traffic has phone number lock-in, which is why we don't change cell providers on a weekly basis.)
For Uber, that business logic is pretty straightforward on their largest volume SMS, making multi-vendor flip flop based on rates fairly easy.
Long term contracts with guaranteed minimums will absolutely protect Twilio from this volatility. It's not lock-in or concentration, but rather way to have more predictable revenues and manage working capital.
In parallel to trying to get long term contracts/guaranteed mins, Twilio should be (and is) diversifying their customer base.
I do think this is just temporary. They'll bounce back. It'd be a good time to double down on the stock.
Communication companies like these are inherently highly competitive. Each one only cover some part of the world (for instance, SMS to USA and canada).
When you have a big company operating in multiple continents, like Uber, you MUST have multiple service providers to cover all your customers (and it will also come with costs savings so you really have maximum incentive to diversify).
Once you have diversified to 3+ providers, you mastered the abstraction good enough to plug them in and out. The next logical step is to take advantage of that to put providers in a same zone in competition with each other.
And the interchangeable nature of their business is pretty much the definition of a commodity.
Until then they are the first choice for a large portion of the developer population.
After that, it's just a numbers game: will it cost more to redevelop the functionality they provide (either on your own or with another vendor) than you will save over a reasonable timeframe? If the answer is yes, you keep paying twilio, otherwise out migrate.
I have no first hand experience on what size makes sense for twilio, but this article gives us an upper bound (a huge one, to be sure).