Goodbye, Twilio
blog.miguelgrinberg.com
blog.miguelgrinberg.com
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.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffiel/
"CEO and cofounder of Twilio"
> and what thread did he jump into?
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.
Not everything is zero sum. There is a reason that when you purchase something both sides say thank you.
unless you can legally appropriate property with no money or any other type of compensation then where is this magical free pie?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Is it a problem, say, if we all achieved nirvana but some achieved better nirvana? Must we rebel against them too?
> 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?).
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.
Suicide is quickly becoming the leading cause of death
I’m not sure we’re any better off now holistically
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.
But if we're considering utility-- how useful stuff is to me-- it is far from zero sum.
If I produce lots of wheat, being able to trade some of it for my neighbor's beef makes both of us richer.
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
This is the society we live in, created by capitalism that demands unsustainable growth.
Scarcity is the problem, not capitalism.
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.
I’d say the capitalists do a better job.
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.
Who are you blaming? If you're so virtuous, why don't you give away half of your money to a homeless person?
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.
But that is a very uncharitable framing of their philanthropy.
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.
And you think they don’t?
So no. And especially so for the corporations they own.
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.
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.
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?
I don't think HN is for you.
There's always Reddit.
Says one with the hubris to decide what is right for me.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
Rephrase your question so it make sense.
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.
They are (almost identical) to a dividend, which yes, enriches shareholders but
a) that's kind of the point of a business
b) especially in startups employees are often shareholders as well, and meaningfully so
c) even if they weren't, how do they hurt employees?
But it's not an entirely invalid viewpoint. There really is a lot of room for reasonable minds to disagree.
(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.
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?
or pensions, fully paid HC, the list goes on.
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.
Plenty of privately owned businesses IPO and become subject to the same forces. Less than 50% of publicly listed companies are VC backed.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
Happy Father's Day (in the US) HN!
[1] https://www.twilio.com/docs/verify/preventing-toll-fraud/sms...
Yes, fighting the good fight - doing god’s own work.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Twilio authored/published the package GP is referring to.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
Wrote about it more here: https://memos.hawkhill.ventures/p/selling-features-then-solu...)
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:
https://www.twilio.com/blog/build-adhd-lifehack-tools-python...
Will you just remove all of those ?
Because they are impossible.
There are no hobbyist uses of Twilio after July.
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.
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.
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...
If I understand the page for Fraud Guard correctly, this appears to cost money.
Seems like Twilio should be filtering spam (a) by default / auto-enabled for all and (b) at no cost to the user.
Much like how spam is included & auto enabled for all (and free) from Gmail/Outlook/etc.
Well done!
I offer a virtual mobile number that does voice, txt and mms in Australia which could be globalised, interested in chatting?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can build a fairly successful startup with little to no engineering.
Sure, engineers are usually pretty important (they're great at automating tasks to improve efficeincy)... but so are many other roles.
It's more difficult to assess and measure soft skills that you would find in sales positions.
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.
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.
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 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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not just the GOP blocking her.
(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.)
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.
> It's not just the GOP blocking her.
Is this supposed to be a real opinion? Manchin and Sinema are your cornerstones? LOL
I can't help but fear for what congress will do to neuter generative AI.
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.
- emails get sent
- some percentage of people do not open within 24 hours
- provider suspends the campaign
- receiver clicks a link like you suggested
- the campaign remains suspended and I can no longer email those contacts unless I delete, and re-add them
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...
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sns-settings-regis...
Also its technically not required for actually inbound only, but it sounds like this application also sends ack replies.
Maybe the answer isn't SMS but someone working on constrained satellite internet?
Not a great solution, I guess, but ... zip-tie/hot-melt the hardware into a box with a fan and I guess it'd be mostly as reliable as a Raspberry Pi?
Is there a cheap Android phone with an external antenna socket still?
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.
Corporations simply are built to amass profits, and outcompete others. They do not care nor are they built to care about you.
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.
This was encouraged by helpful “hacker” blog posts and official howtos detailing integrations with alert systems and home automation, etc.
Twilio sold itself as useful infrastructure.
All of this falls apart next month when A2P (or whatever it is) begins.
Twilio polluted its own environment so completely that nobody can exist there anymore.
(Unless you’re spamming, which is what customer engagement is)
https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-...
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 sure hope I won’t have to deal with that (in the Netherlands) just because the US has tons of spam.
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 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).
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.
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
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.
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!
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...
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
Twilio is now another Xerox.
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.
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...
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.
In biology, tissue that keeps growing indefinitely is lethal to the organism.
What's wrong with glyphosate?
That's because the principal "danger" of glyphosate formulations comes from surfactants.
Pure glyphosate by itself is pretty benign.
* No more than slightly toxic and no significant adverse health effects are expected to develop if a small amount (less than a mouthful) is swallowed.
* May be slightly irritating to the skin.
Here's an MSDS for dishwashing liquid: https://hesco.ca/pdf/msds/J429%20MSDS_E-5%20%20DISH%20MACHIN... When working with it, you're supposed to:
* Wear appropriate protective equipment.
* Wear protective clothing as necessary to prevent skin contact.
* Chemical goggles. Wear a face shield if splashing hazards exists.
* Repeat or prolonged exposure may cause damage to lungs.
* Harmful if swallowed. Causes burns to mouth, throat and stomach.
* Corrosive to skin. Causes severe burns.
* Corrosive to eyes. Causes severe burns.
https://labelsds.com/images/user_uploads/Roundup%20Pro%20Con...
"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"
No residential user cares about any of this.
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.
Here's an overview from NIH: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5515989/
What's next? The earth is a flat disk?
I see you have never worked in chemistry. The total BS of MSDS is very well known.
Here's a piece from Derek Lowe: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-msds
> What's next? The earth is a flat disk?
If you believe in MSDS, then you probably think that the Earth lies on the back of a turtle.
I HOPE this a sarcasm filled question.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781493
(Disclaimer: I was the author of the blog)
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.
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.
The author is upset for XYZ "other" reasons, I would have recommended they slept on it and not post that publicly.
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.
Hacker News discussion:
They do way more than just DNS
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
Once it becomes a viable business, growth and departments that support it become equally important. Devs are one of the important departments.
Smart devs grow up and seize the opportunity to grow with the company. For most devs it is a rude awakening and accept the reality quickly.
This thread coming to the surface means there are a lot of such devs in the YC community surprised or curious about this phenomenon.
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.
> What is digital greatness?
Has no-one in Twilio ever seen Parks and Rec? This is definitely a Ron Swanson thing.
How is this in any way "news" worthy.
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?
Again, I'm not saying I like it.
Companies don't generally have the same long term goal to stop earning revenue and ride out their savings until they die.
Twilio doesn't make billions in profits. Twilio has been losing money for years. I'm not sure if Twilio was ever profitable?
Good luck
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.
do I though?
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.