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Comment by runT1ME | Hacker News Reader

Telco is a commodity. You want to raise as much money as possible and you want to drive your margins down as it makes competition impossible.

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Twilio runs on cloud providers (Amazon and Rackspace, at least when I interviewed with them). Anyone can build what Twilio does, whether thats a group of devs in a co-working startup space, or a large telcom (NTT, AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom).

On the web, there are no longer barriers to entry.

Strong competition is a barrier to entry.

If I'm an enterprise, I'll go with Twilio over some 2 week old startup because of its proven track record and the likelihood of being around in a year.

You don't start at the top. Barriers really are incredibly low but that's not to say its realistic to expect to land enterprise clients on day 1. The key is o build a sustainable business and work your way up while creating that track record. I think we've gotten way too used to these overnight success stories about startups (which aren't really true a lot of the time).

I hate to use this example because its a bit cliche but Google entered late into a field of established players and won. Microsoft beat IBM (this one applies only to the PC, I know IBM is still a force to be reckoned with). Stripe, Balanced, and Square are able to compete with PayPal for accepting payments. I know these arent all enterprise-specific but I didn't take the parent's comment to be about enterprise only.

It depends on the industry. There is no risk if I try out a new search engine as a consumer. But, if I'm building a phone application, there's a huge risk if I build it on a weak platform.

Really? Because AT&T went with Tropo over Twilio, and Tropo isn't nearly as big as Twilio.

What you'd do as an enterprise and what real enterprises would do are two different things.

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