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Comment by aeromusek | Hacker News Reader

Genius move for Twilio, honestly. Segment can supply the central hub to tie in all channel spokes Twilio already powers (especially after the SendGrid acquisition from a couple years ago).

I can't help thinking Segment had much more room to run though...everyone I know who uses them loves them, and they were still only just scratching the surface of the addressable market.

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Agreed really good fit. I bet a large % of Segment's customers were using Twilio endpoints. Really nice combination of a data hub / last mile across multiple channels...fully expect they will continue moving up the stack towards a CRM / Marketing automation solution.

Who’s a likely candidate for CRM acquisition? Seems like the space is a bit crowded and Salesforce is the big dog and lots of second tier but who’s a good fit for Twilio?

Intercom

+1 fits perfectly with the contact center features in Twilio (in addition to messaging etc.).

Intercom needs SMS integration badly.

Intercom already mentioned may be a bit big.

There’s also Vero and Iterable that I’ve used. Iterable was pretty terrible and we ended up replacing it with in house tooling, Vero has been really great and we’re investing more in our Vero setup.

While Intercom offers a great messaging feature set, it's far from being a complete CRM. Many other potential targets with more complete offerings.

Pipedrive?

Airtable

Not really. It's not one of the top 10 most popular destination by either event volume or counts.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting as somewhat of a "bottoms up" approach vs the Salesforce approach.

I swear there's some law for these sorts of things where they inevitably end up as a marketing automation platform.

Segment published a report on tool usage. "SMS and Push" was @ 12% and was not in the top-10. Even in the "SMS and Push", there was Braze/Iterable etc but no Twillio.

https://segment.com/blog/customer-data-platform/

This is not surprising. The personalized SMS/push notification use cases (for which you need Segment data) are commonly implemented via marketing platforms (like Braze etc) as opposed to directly via Twillio.

I think this was the other way around. Twillio is powering a lot of these new age marketing automation tools. Instead of just being at the infrastructure layer, it wants to go up the stack and own the marketing applications. Sendgrid and now Segment acqusitions are part of the same strategy.

They did the same thing for the contact center (call center) software space. Lot of the cloud contact center companies were using Twillio and now they launched their own contact center product. That has been one of the key drivers in their 3x increase in valuation in the last 1 yr.

https://www.twilio.com/use-cases/contact-center

Segment's partners like Braze etc should be worried.

It's a bit like Amazon with it's branded meatspace products or AWS properties which can be directly sourced/inspired by by their own down-stream / customer data. They don't even need to look into traffic, just look at your best/top paying customers, and copy them

Sigh!

At least Twilio buys Segment, not just copies it I guess..

With how frothy the public market is for SaaS companies with growth looks like their growth may have stalled out.

Usually board will look to make changes, replace founder CEO and if that doesn’t work then push for a sale.

Very smart acquisition for Twilio though.

> With how frothy the public market is for SaaS companies with growth looks like their growth may have stalled out.

Can you explain what this means. Why does the first part of the sentence imply the second?

If they could show strong growth continuing they'd have made more money with an IPO than an acquisition. At least that's what the comment is suggesting.

The other case is they didn’t want to deal with going through an IPO, got a great offer for their business and a major liquidity event for their employees.

Going public, despite profits made, really sucks the soul out of a company.

Twilio and Segment’s visions align pretty well so I think that played a role as well. Outside of golden handcuffs, a large portion of their employees are liquid immediately as opposed to an IPO with a 6-12 month lockup for employees plus the rise/fall of a stock price during that time.

All in all, I think they made the right choice to sell instead of going for an IPO.

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