In the early days of Twilio, carriers laughed at what we were doing. It didn't help that most of the people at Twilio pre-2014 didn't speak much "telecom." But to your point, it was tough to rely on these carriers who thought Twilio would be gone in a few years so they didn't put much stock in ensuring the infrastructure was redundant and robust.

I was on several calls with providers begging them to put us on a more robust network. Especially in years when there was an election. In those early years, we had one customer doing more minutes than our entire customer base. In fact, at an early Twiliocon (pre-Signal) John and Jeff had to help build out an entirely separate environment for them because it was dragging everyone else down.

My point is that the early days were definitely the "Draw the Owl" days. We were figuring out things on the fly. Carriers were dubious and it was tough to get things working consistently. However, by 2015 those same carriers were developing APIs of their own.

Twilio changed the game for the telecommunications industry. Two years before joining Twilio I was putting in large-scale Avaya systems. The fact that I wrote four lines of code to make a phone ring blew my mind. Twilio and Jeff created something special. It's sad to see his run come to an end, but every company needs to adapt to the changing times. This is just Twilio's time to adapt.