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Comment by thiago_fm | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising, given the -$500m net income result on last quarter amid slowing growth, Twilio has been burning money since a long time, despite being a public company.

Sometimes I wonder what those CEOs are doing to let a situation roll like this for so long. How boards accept this kind of thing?

Twilio has terrible numbers, you don't even need to be a VC or professional analyst to see that. They need a big cut not only in personel, but in expenses.

Perhaps also a new CEO and leadership...

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Checking their leadership team, there is a "Chief People Officer", "Chief Diversity Officer", "Chief Social Impact Officer", "Chief Digital Officer" and a bunch of pompous and inflated C-level titles. In fact their C-suite has 12 people!

Maybe the shareholders should be asking if their C-suite is going to be downsized appropriately.

Too many chiefs.

From their website:

Chief Diversity Officer - ... responsible for guiding and scaling inclusion strategy and diversity initiatives across Twilio's global workforce

Chief People Officer - .. responsible for driving the talent development and acquisition strategy, and building infrastructure to support a thriving culture of belonging, diversity and inclusion across the company

I'm seeing some optimization opportunities here.

https://investors.twilio.com/governance/person-details/defau...

https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NYSE/TWLO/insider-trades/ I do not see any insider trades from her.

I don’t know their compensation packages but I doubt firing a few executives will fill a minimum $500M hole. They must have additional systemic issues with their business model

Following Amdahl’s Law it would only make sense that we should start with the biggest salaries to get the biggest savings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

There was a period of time after the last lay off and before the current one, I had noticed a huge number of exec level folks jumping ship, moving companies etc. I wonder if that was just in anticipation of all this? The execs do seem to be taking care of each other regardless of companies while employees argue about which companies are supreme!

Stock market. A lot of these companies are not only kept afloat but celebrated because of some future pie in the sky possibility. Everyone makes money in this game from brokers, engineers, managers, media. A perfect merry go round.

Nope, nobody can make money consistently out of a company that has the same CEO since 2008 and is still burning money(!!!).

Maybe their business model isn't even viable, and/or needs a big revamp.

Unlike other companies that fired people with 100bi in cash(looking at you, Google), Twilio is literally paying for people to use their services for over a decade.

Are boards and VCs so rich that they can keep such thing going on for so long, without ever the expectation of making a profit?

Pension funds and many other xyz funds have these companies in their portfolio. Crypto markets with their scammy tokens are a good simulation of US stock market of today. Unprofitable companies posting 1 less cent loss as compared to forecast and seeing their stock jump 20%.

>>Maybe their business model isn't even viable

Twilio needs to figure out that that even is...

They seems to be pulling in 100 directions from Automated Communications, to Authentication, Serverless Cloud, To Transactional Email, to Video Services to what ever else.

This is the correct take, but it is funny, because everyone is always lamenting the "quarterly focus" of the stock market but the reality is bloated companies are given huge runways in public markets.

> what those CEOs are doing to let a situation roll like this for so long. How boards accept this kind of thing?

It's approved by the board. They signed off as part of some strategy. No way a ceo outside of Zuck is permitted to lose money like this otherwise. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/net-in...

I'm guessing the boards don't need to be the top shareholders? Maybe that could be the driver for this mess.

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