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Comment by throwaway_108 | Hacker News Reader

It's also why George Hu left Twilio.

Because Jeff wanted to be a celebrity CEO, and it was to the detriment of the company.

All of Twilio's growth (as a public company) happened on George's watch.

I don't think it's a coincidence that well after George left, on Jeff's watch - they had to do 3 different layoff for a total of ~24% of their entire public company being let go.

Note: former senior level Twilio employee, posted anonymous for obvious reasons.

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This is a genuine question... isn't that his job?

For a public company, the CEO has to be a public CEO. Everyone takes on a different persona (some sell themselves as business geniuses, others as creative geniuses, and others as someone you wanna grab a beer with). Some really like it, and some do it begrudgingly. But at the end of the day, you can't be the same CEO of a public company as you were when you were private.

I've never known Jeff to hobnob with celebrities, travel in luxury or abandon his company. I'm not sure he's a "celebrity CEO" as much as he just became a public one, although I don't know him personally.

(FWIW, this is the reason I'd never want to go public. I personally don't like the system, but that doesn't mean it's not how the system works.)

> For a public company, the CEO has to be a celebrity CEO.

No. Look at S&P 500 CEOs.

I've seen celebrity CEOs in non-public companies a lot more than in public companies. There is a difference between being the public face of the company and being a celebrity CEO.

Only if you pretend that the CEOs job is purely for raising money.

Nominally, CEOs are supposed to run the company and help brew the culture that makes that company productive.

We've grown a bunch of celebrity CEOs because people stopped caring about how companies worked over the last 10 years of low interest rates. But now that it's harder to raise money, it's time to see these guys run the companies they built.

Everything you said here is true, but I don't think it applies to Twilio or Jeff.

I don't think you can accuse Jeff of not caring about company culture. He built one of the defining dev cultures out there. Yes, this have changed as they've grown, but I've always found the people and offices of Twilio to be warm, productive and smart.

And Twilio was forged in the hardest time to raise money ever... 2008. If anyone knows how hard it is to build in a climate without easy money, it would be Jeff.

Memories are short, but Twilio was built when doing what seemed obvious - add an API to telecom services - was really hard. It's what Stripe is (doing, not done) to banking & payment, what countless companies have failed to do with Healthcare... I met Jeff in the early days and the fact that he (a) managed to stay the CEO through this growth & timeline, and (b) gave few enough sh!ts to maintain a hacker dev mentality makes him a notable standout. I'm not surprised that lots of people with legitimate viewpoints and perspectives DO/DID NOT like him or his approach. To me, that's a feature; we need less CEOs and senior executives who try to be all things to all people.

Working in healthcare, I’m genuinely interested why healthcare startups have failed?

It depends on the company and what it needs.

At google Eric had very little to do with product and engineering. He was still a very effective CEO.

Having been in Eric reviews, let me tell you he was very involved in what I was working on... And I learned a ton.

I was tasked with taking over some of jeffiel’s code bases around the time period we are discussing here. He perfectly skirted the line of telling me what he was thinking while writing stuff and simultaneously staying out of it and letting the people he hired take the reins. He spent most of his time interacting with Cxx and Director level people to set the tone and direction of the company, while still taking the time to know what ICs were doing so that he could usefully answer questions and use our products.

IMO, you and the GP are onto something with the term "celebrity CEO". In Jeff's case, he seems like a celebrity CEO for his employees/developers, who we identify with, though not for his customers, who we are largely not.

His customers probably expected better products, whereas his developers expected another round of amazing perks and fun work.

I don't know the right answer here, but there are thousands of public companies. If every CEO has to be a celebrity, meaning that everybody knows them and which company they are the CEO of, it's going to end up like for actors: tier one world superstars, tier two stars, then people you don't hear much about, then people you read their names sometimes in the closing credits, otherwise they are only random faces on screen.

If that's the case, the top layers of the system have space for so many CEOs. Some won't even care to be there, they'll just do their job and take the salary plus bonuses.

Sure. I'd say 99% of people in tech couldn't name the Twilio CEO. I don't think he's really a celebrity CEO, at least not in the way that's being implied about him (as in, I think "public" and "celebrity" are being conflated here).

Jobs certainly was a celebrity CEO, and despite all the criticism of him, I've never once heard anyone imply he was bad for Apple (or its shareholders). Musk is a celebrity CEO, much to the detriment (and potentially benefit? who knows) of his companies.

>For a public company, the CEO has to be a celebrity CEO.

Is it?

From the DJIA: can you even name the CEO of 3M? Cisco? Amex? Visa?

I don't think celebrity is a pre-req for being a CEO. And as OP suggests, it could even be a detriment.

It's also a double edged sword where greater visibility leads to greater scrutiny. Galen Weston Jr stepped into the public eye much more during the pandemic as the face of Loblaws (Canadian grocery chain), and although it originally was welcome, he ended up outing himself as just another entitled, out of touch zillionaire, and at least in my social circles becoming kind of as punchline.

Why he thought to cast himself in commercials is beyond me.

Why's that? He has been doing the commercials for around a couple of decades, staring long before he was the one doing the casting. Even after taking that role in 2016, the previous commenter points out that the commercials continued to be well received until well into the 2020s. It was a successful formula for a long time.

Indeed, positive audience sentiment has an expiration date. He rode the wave too long, perhaps, but it is hard to know when to stop. All ongoing media productions (e.g. TV shows) suffer from the same problem and question of when to keep going and when to move on.

I didn't actually know that he'd been doing it for a while, but I've not ever been a regular TV viewer. The change from my perspective was the commercials showing up in my Facebook feed and my family group chat joking around about the latest dispatches from old Gal Pal and how we could pick up a shrimp ring for 20% off.

So even if it was a longstanding thing, pushing the content toward a more millenial/gen-z audience is still a new direction and risk.

In the end, the biggest factor was the dissonance between his warm, cozy "all in this together" messaging combined with grocery price hikes and news like this coming on the other side of it all: https://www.blogto.com/city/2022/11/loblaw-report-profit-foo...

Funny thing is that restaurant patronage has declined considerably in Canada in the past year or so. Even with many restaurants now operating at a loss (i.e. paying you to eat) to try and win back customers, they are failing to capture hearts and minds.

If people aren't eating at restaurants, it is almost certain they are getting their food at the grocery store instead. For all the mockery of Galen, it seems the marketing strategy has been unbelievably successful.

That's probably why he continued to cast himself even as the audience focus shifted to millennials and gen-z. Letting someone laughing at you for a few minutes is no big deal. Watching them love you when they show up at your store over and over makes it all worthwhile, I'm sure.

>> just another entitled, out of touch zillionaire,

You can level a lot of criticism at Jeff but I don't think this one applies.

I can't. But could most people name Jeff, even in tech? I bet people in finance certainly know (and closely watch) the CEOs of these companies.

I did reword my comment though, because I don't agree Jeff is a "celebrity" as much as a "public" CEO.

I work in tech and had never heard of Jeff or George. I could name every CEO of Twitter or Google, or the founding CEOs of companies like Stripe, AirBnB, Uber, Coinbase, etc. Companies like Twilio and Unity don't really register.

Twilio is more of a "how the sausage gets made" type of company, I do t really think its the type that benefits from a celebrity CEO

everyone knows the Stripe founders tho...

I've worked on some of the foss tech (infra and ptsn) that twilio has used for almost a decade. Know all about what the company does. Have applied there (to which they never replied). Known plenty that work there.

Ironically my previous partner works there and she didn't know anything about the company prior to taking the job so me not even getting a reply to my application was a jab. I've always seen twilio in a positive light they do some really interesting work.

I live in the city of their HQ. I have no clue who the people mentioned in this thread are either but it makes sense that they'd see the CEOs in a positive light with how much positive I hear(d) about the place.

Being able to keep track of the craziness that is the leadership history at X/Twitter is kind of impressive.

There actually haven't been that many, and double-checking against Wikipedia I forgot Parag Agrawal but Wikipedia forgot Linda Yaccarino. I divide them up into eras and power struggles:

1. Jack Dorsey. Founding era, founding engineer, forced out when Twitter was ~30 employees because he had no management experience.

2. Evan Williams. Growth era. Another founder, but one who had past experience dealing with hypergrowth, getting companies acquired, and working inside a big company.

3. Dick Costolo. Maturation era. Adult supervision, he's the professional CEO hired to manage Twitter because both of its previous CEOs were really startup people.

4. Jack Dorsey (2). Came back after gaining some political savvy and learning how to launch a boardroom coup. Founded Square in the meantime and got a bunch of experience being CEO of another company. Also famously the guy who shut down the Jan 6th insurrection by blocking the sitting U.S. president from Twitter.

5. Parag Agrawal. Caretaker; Twitter was in trouble by then and Jack Dorsey was either forced out or decided it was better to die a hero than be remembered as a villain.

6. Elon Musk. Bought Twitter in a fit of insanity.

7. Linda Yaccarino. Glass cliff. Installed as CEO so that X's eventual demise is not Elon Musk's problem.

There's celebrity CEOs and there's celebrity CEOs.

Without googling, can you tell me the name of the CEO of Target? Sony? Texas Instruments? BMW? FedEx? Mitsubishi? Exxon? Home Depot? Siemens? Procter & Gamble? 3M? Nestle? Broadcom?

I certainly can't.

But I bet you can tell me who the CEOs of Tesla and Amazon are.

Just because whoever-is-in-charge-of-siemens hasn't run a vanity PR campaign to raise their personal profile, doesn't mean it would help the company if they did.

There's big company and there's BIG company.

# Market caps:

Target 64.99B

Sony ~116B (I think)

TI 152B

BMW ~70B

Fedex 62B

Mitsubishi ~70B

Exxon 396B

Home Depot 343B

Siemens 141B

P&G 349B

3M 60B

Nestle ~290B

Broadcom 501B

...

Amazon 1520B

Tesla 750B

The sum of the market cap of the first group of companies is ~2.068T USD, while the sum of the second group is ~2.270T.

And of course the CEO of Tesla is(?) allegedly the richest man in the world, which is one of the reasons why people know him. And I honestly don't remember the name of the CEO of Amazon since Jeff Bezos stepped down.

> There's big company and there's BIG company.

Which is Twilio?

Not this big, but very large with a market cap of 13B.

In tech circles, a very well known story though.

lmao Teslas market cap is such a joke. 750bn, 10x higher than BMW while I see tens of millions more BMWs on the road and the BMW brand has astronomically more staying power as brand recognition. Wild. Nobody would be surprised if Tesla flopped but we know BMW, a company over 100 years old won't flop.

I can't imagine being offered a choice between owning (the company) Tesla or BMW and picking Tesla.

edit: Tesla did 4.2% of total market in 2023, outpacing VW, Subaru and BMW. They did 25% more sales in 2023 than 2022. They sell 500-700k/yr right now with 2023 being 660k. BMW delivered 550k cars worldwide.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-2023-u-s-market-share-volksw...

Shhh you must not rain on techbro's fanatical obsession with fantasy market caps. It's the only aspiration validating their particular niche of career.

So you are shorting TSLA right? Or do you just believe in capital markets?

> isn’t that his job?

The CEO’s job is to create value. The answer to your question is “it depends”.

If buyers of their services are impressed with his ability to live code and that moves the needle on results, then yes. If the same can be accomplished by having a non-CEO developer evangelist, then probably no.

This is not specifically about Jeff in any way, but no, it's not a CEO's job to be a celebrity. It's their job to allocate capital in a superior way (relative to the investors desires ie how much beta, and to marginal opportunities elsewhere in the market). If they cannot produce a better Risk Adjusted Return then they simply should be returning the capital, not being a rockstar and growing.

George Hu cut his teeth under Benioff during the most meteoric rise of both Salesforce and Benioff's celebrity. I would be very surprised if Jeff's desire to be a public facing CEO would even cause George to notice, let alone bristle at.

It's more likely that someone as smart as George might have just looked at the fundamentals of the business and decided it could not keep this up over the long term.

or... it might have just been epic timing too. Probably.

I don't have any direct knowledge, but the gossip flying around internally at the time was that a big part of George leaving Twilio was because he wanted the CEO role, but knew Jeff wasn't going to leave and give it to him.

That was gossip, of course; sure, George may have decided back then that -- even with all the growth he drove -- Twilio wasn't going anywhere long-term.

The fact that George has not taken on a CEO role since tells me that it probably wasn't a driving factor for him. That's conjecture though. I think that role would be available to him at a lot of strong companies if that was his goal.

Being a celebrity CEO makes sense when interest rates are low and your main job is to keep convincing investors to pump in money. Of course when interest rates are high, and your main job is business and company fundamentals that's a lot less useful. I'm seeing a lot of startups (and public companies) with CEOs like that floundering right now.

I don't know the specifics of these two CEOs, but those were two very different eras financially in the tech sector. To nail all of it on just a CEO's door feels reductive, at best.

Did any of those layoffs coincide with the global layoffs?

September of 2022, Feb 2023, and December 2023. So no, kinda, and no.

Sep 2022 and Feb 2023 was the peak layoff season in the industry. Mostly guided by interest rate hikes.

Why would that be why George Hu left Twilio?

A CEO has to be the face of the company and needs a good reputation. It seems like he was a good leader.

From an outsider it looks wrong.

...George left right as ZIRP ended. Maybe coincidence but that played a big part in TWLO's growth and subsequent stalling as well

Please. George joined the company when it was damn near a decade old, and already a publicly-traded company. It's embarrassing to ascribe anywhere near the agency to someone like that than to a founder.

is that you, George Hu?

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