Goodbye, Twilio

Goodbye, Twilio(blog.miguelgrinberg.com)

545 points by joaopaulomcc 3 years ago | 336 comments

There’s nothing surprising here.

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.

jmacd 3 years ago | |

Venture capital has been long gone from Twilio at this point. It's a public company and no matter what the history of how the company raised the capital to build its business initially, it is simply acting as a public company now. Had they chosen to stay private and continue to use venture capital, they may not have had to reposition the way they have. See: Stripe.

Plenty of privately owned businesses IPO and become subject to the same forces. Less than 50% of publicly listed companies are VC backed.

dheera 3 years ago | | |

I think they were saying that a investor-backed company only has a pathway to either (a) acquisition, likely by a public company, or (b) going public. Investors need (a) or (b) to get a payout, that's their business model, that's the reason they invest in your company.

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.

el_nahual 3 years ago | |

How do stock buybacks enrich investors at the cost of employees?

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?

reaperman 3 years ago | | |

Stock buybacks represent excess profits which otherwise could be used for employee bonuses or salary raises. There's a lot of room for argument here, because it's not clear if in the absence of stock buybacks, that excess profits wouldn't go more directly into the pockets of the owners via direct capital withdrawal.

But it's not an entirely invalid viewpoint. There really is a lot of room for reasonable minds to disagree.

satvikpendem 3 years ago | |

But...Twilio is a public company, VC shareholders have already sold their stock, so most of what you say isn't applicable, unless you mean to imply that a public company also acts similarly to a VC backed one.

AndrewKemendo 3 years ago | | |

It likely wouldn’t be publicly traded without VC

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.

activitypea 3 years ago | | |

What's the difference? You still have to find a way to maximize profit at the cost of pretty much everything else. The only difference is that VCs are more willing to play the long game, whereas the stock market wants better results year over year.

vikramkr 3 years ago | |

I notice there's always this impulse to blame VCs for how startup businesses evolve but like, founders want to make money too, and plenty of founders dream of building a huge company with a massive exit or ipo etc etc and push for that as a company without vcs needing to force it

louwrentius 3 years ago | |

It’s funny to me that I’m reading this while listening to “Abolish Silicon Valley” by Wendy Liu.

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.

sethammons 3 years ago | | |

> making other people more rich at the cost of others

Not everything is zero sum. There is a reason that when you purchase something both sides say thank you.

rajanaccros 3 years ago | | |

> I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”.

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.

JDEW 3 years ago | |

Following of the “Uber for x” trend of the 10s, we really need an “X but without VC pressure” trend for the 20s…

djvdq 3 years ago | | |

There already are such companies, but they aren't that visible, because they don't have VC money to burn in order to grow, so they have to do it organically, which usually means slower.

kelnos 3 years ago | |

> stock buybacks, or other things that directly enrich investors at the cost of employees

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.

refulgentis 3 years ago | |

Who is Jeff Lawson and what thread did he jump into?

nordsieck 3 years ago | | |

> Who is Jeff Lawson

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffiel/

"CEO and cofounder of Twilio"

> and what thread did he jump into?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383229

FrenchTouch42 3 years ago | |

What about Expensify?

jeffiel 3 years ago |

Thank you Miguel for all of your contributions to Twilio over the past four years, and I hope your next gig is just as rewarding!

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...

paxys 3 years ago |

"The company was great when it was just engineers, but then they hired account managers and sales reps and business people and marketers who ruined everything."

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.

buro9 3 years ago |

There is a certain point at which the engineering is no longer what makes a company successful, it fuels an initial growth and can sustain it longer, but then the deciding thing on whether the company survives and thrives becomes the more operational aspects, the traditional sales & marketing.

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.

kypro 3 years ago |

I'll try to add some perspective to help people understand Twilio's side here.

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.

joshstrange 3 years ago | |

> 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.

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.

Animats 3 years ago |

Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway.

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.

firebirdn99 3 years ago |

Working for any company is a "job", and not a "family" as many have found out in the last few years (but happens at every downturn). It's hard to draw a line, between personal and professional identities, but it's something I feel everyone should do.

Corporations simply are built to amass profits, and outcompete others. They do not care nor are they built to care about you.

joeythedolphin 3 years ago | |

Friends are friends and business is business. If you get it confused, you will stay confused while the world moves on. I noticed most people are confused. You serve for your paycheck and then you are forgotten. They don't ask you what you spent the money on. Your reward is the package they gave you. Best to make friends in areas of life where that is the goal.

drdaeman 3 years ago | |

The concept of family varied quite a lot over times and cultures, there probably are some that fit. Medieval families are quite different social constructs from modern first-world nuclear families. Heck, and if anything - family abuse is, sadly, a very real thing, too.

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.

shakes 3 years ago |

I had the privilege of working with Miguel at Twilio. His work had a meaningful impact on our goal of empowering developers around the world and I’m unsurprised to see such a thoughtful take from him has he departs. A huge loss for Twilio but I can’t wait to see what he does next.

miguelgrinberg 3 years ago | |

Thank you, Ricky! The privilege was also mine. :)

rsync 3 years ago |

I built an entire personal telco for myself using twilio apis and twiml bins, etc.

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)

smallerfish 3 years ago |

I've been playing with Twilio recently, and it's certainly not the lean platform that it once apparently was. In the Java client SDK for example, I count 7 separate Message classes. There are multiple APIs with overlapping functionality; you can send SMS and whatsapps several different ways each. The documentation is likewise byzantine and bloated.

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).

rabiddmeese 3 years ago | |

> If you launch a new API that's intended to replace older ones, then stop exposing the legacy APIs in the default SDK.

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.

mightybyte 3 years ago |

Anyone else share my thought that Twilio (and any other companies like them that I'm not aware of) is likely the primary driver of the massive epidemic of spam text messages and phone calls? Phone and text have been rendered almost completely useless to me. I often get close to double digit spam texts and calls per day. Obviously the drivers of this stuff are many and complicated, but it seems like the automation layer is the main thing that enabled it all.

singpolyma3 3 years ago | |

To send SMS with Twilio (or any other similar service) you need to jump through a bunch of hoops to register your traffic with major carriers and get their sign off.

coderintherye 3 years ago |

The really sad thing is the executive team / board / investors not being able to comprehend that they could vastly increase their revenue (and profit) by just providing expanded technical services to me (an existing customer). There are a ton of things I would pay Twilio for beyond SMS and WhatsApp Messaging. You don't need a MBA to figure that out, you just need someone talking to your customers and an engineering and product team that can turn that into real products.

cj 3 years ago | |

Anecdotally, I think one result of the layoffs of the past couple years has been companies

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

nine_zeros 3 years ago | | |

I have seen number 2 at my company. They've given up on midsized and startup companies. They are only chasing the large ones and government contracts.

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.

erhaetherth 3 years ago |

FWIW I never thought Twilio was good as a developer. At least not coming hot off of Stripe. Which is glorious. The dev mode is fantabulous, and so are the docs. Twilio... I.. it's just atrocious in so many ways. Firstly, it needs a proper dev API key and then all the SMS's should just be collected into a dashboard on their site instead of going to phones. And their Connect option is very half baked. Customers should be able to re-use their existing Twilio numbers, not re-buy under a connected app, and they should be able to manage their numbers on twilio.com, not force me to rebuild the entire Twilio UI.

predictabl3 3 years ago |

The writing was on the wall when they got acquired, forced two-factor auth with SMS only and forcibly locked me out of my account by turning it on when I didn't have a phone setup. If you want to use SMS as spam prevention, then just do that. Breaking your product and forcing bad security to harvest numbers is, well, just shitty.

arnvald 3 years ago | |

When who got acquired? Twillio? They're a public company, aren't they?

tnzk 3 years ago | | |

I assume parent is talking about when SendGrid got acquired by Twillio. I had the similar experience with it at that time.

wilg 3 years ago |

1. I could not tell you what that billboard means, despite also looking through the related blog post. Perhaps it is something only marketing teams understand, which would be an interesting failure mode.

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!

karussell 3 years ago | |

Re 2: had the exact same experience. And the big problem was that in order to contact support I needed an activated account :). But at some point I found a support Email and with that I got an activated account.

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...

ds0 3 years ago |

Tangentially, I'd like to shout out both Miguel's work both in explaining the Flask web development framework for Python as well as his work developing Flask-SocketIO, both of which I've used extensively.

fastball 3 years ago | |

I've had to move away from Python-SocketIO due to countless regressions and subtle failures of the library.

miguelgrinberg 3 years ago | | |

Have you reported these? The library has a fairly complete testing suite, and if you are saying there are regressions I'd like to know what those are so that I can make sure the testing is adjusted to cover those cases going forward. Thanks.

miguelgrinberg 3 years ago | |

Thank you so much. Glad to hear you've found my work useful.

kelnos 3 years ago |

I was at Twilio for 10.5 years, and left at the beginning of 2022. It's interesting to read things like this, from someone who joined in 2019, as the change OP is talking about in the company started well before his arrival. We all saw it, with increasing emphasis on enterprise sales (we hired someone from Salesforce as COO specifically for this). Courting individual developers and small startups stopped being a priority, even though those sorts of folks are the ones who formed the backbone of Twilio's mind share.

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.

29athrowaway 3 years ago |

It seems the MBAs are at it again.

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.

SamuelAdams 3 years ago | |

Alright fine. Twilio has largely saturated the communications space. You can now send an API request for a phone call, SMS message, and WhatsApp notification in a lot of countries.

If you were calling the shots, what would your next growth move be? What should Twilio expand into?

klabb3 3 years ago | | |

> If you were calling the shots, what would your next growth move be?

In biology, tissue that keeps growing indefinitely is lethal to the organism.

29athrowaway 3 years ago | | |

Not spam-calling elderly people and causing them to fall and die could be a good start.

cyberax 3 years ago | |

> selling glyphosate for residential use

What's wrong with glyphosate?

richbell 3 years ago | | |

There's a lot that can go wrong when unqualified and untrained people are given a powerful pesticide for residential use.

29athrowaway 3 years ago | | |

Read the safety data sheet, see what precautions are needed and then ask an average residential roundup user if they care at all about following those instructions.

namtab00 3 years ago | | |

Italian here.

I HOPE this a sarcasm filled question.

Solvency 3 years ago | |

Preach.

INTPenis 3 years ago |

As a Swede I naturally gravitated towards the 46elks.se service instead of Twilio. Been using it for years now, no issues. They even called me once to find out what their clients were doing, like a survey.

taf2 3 years ago |

This is unfortunate that he got disillusioned but the shift is for really one simple reason - segment. The original twilio that went on to acquire sendgrid, was increasingly in a low margin commodity market. Segment is hugely profitable in contrast and is not dependent on increasingly competitive upstream providers (carriers) providing lower cost similar apis as twilio voice/messaging. It still stands that Twilio’s apis are better than the competitors but that will only last so long. Segment will keep twilio relevant for a much longer time.

balozi 3 years ago |

For my teams, we used Twilio services on projects very early in the company's lifecycle. Its always been a running joke about how the company's trajectory will play out. So far the cynics seem to have won out. In hindsight it wasn't very difficult to predict but the trajectory Twilio is on appears to repeat itself on more than a few of the tech companies we invested in or utilized. ugh! Moral of the story, is to get off someone else's platform as soon as reasonably possible.

__d 3 years ago | |

I think this is a massively undervalued point of view, and I agree completely.

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.

rdiddly 3 years ago |

That was refreshing as heck. No damn them to hell, no woe is me, just a lot of here's what happened, and that's why I'm leaving, bye and thanks. Simple, clear, balanced, no histrionics. The word "sadly," I believe was used, that's about it. And yeah, if part of your reason for leaving has to do with the vision becoming cloudy and diffuse, then your writing had better be as concise, neutral and simple as this was, bravo.

catgirlinspace 3 years ago |

Kinda disappointing to see how Twilio has changed. used to have a pretty positive opinion of them even though i hadn’t used their services, and then i went to signup for twilio sendgrid for sending emails for a little website and i immediately got suspended before i even activated my account? support was completely useless too

soumyadeb 3 years ago |

Twilio has to go for high margin business than their usual SMS business. Old HN discussion on why Twilio acquired Segment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781493

(Disclaimer: I was the author of the blog)

galkk 3 years ago |

We all know true reasons why a lot engineers leave at about 4 year mark, it doesn’t need long post with justification.

mkl95 3 years ago |

Twilio are still doing better than their competition. To name an example, MessageBird laid off 30% of their workforce in late 2022 vs Twilio's 17% in early 2023, and they are known to be an absolute clusterfuck, which is not something you hear about Twilio (yet).

willmeyers 3 years ago |

Sad, unfortunate, but inevitable. Twilio still has the best startup tech demo to date in my book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuXIgp9S7o

cvalka 3 years ago |

What's a good twilio alternative? Voximplant, plivio, bandwith are not very good.

cjcampbell 3 years ago | |

Would you be willing to share more about your experience with these companies? I have a client evaluating Twilio alternatives due to skyrocketing costs, and some of these companies are on the list.

sparrish 3 years ago | | |

We've used Twilio, Nexmo (now Vonage), and Plivo for years.

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.

cvalka 3 years ago | | |

The companies I mentioned are substantially inferior in terms of engineering compared to twilio. Plus twilio is more transparent and trustworthy f.e. with porting out numbers. Voxbone is a Russian cheaper twilio clone. Plivo is an Indian cheaper twilio clone. Bandwith is a disaster. You just need to get a single look at their control panel which they won't show to you unless you're a paying customer.

jagtstronaut 3 years ago | | |

I work at bandwidth and would also love to know what you don’t like with messaging at least.

kleff 3 years ago | |

Sinch? LinkMobility?

personperson 3 years ago |

I feel like this isn’t the “betrayal” that it’s made out to be.

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.

rospaya 3 years ago | |

> is there a modern engineer on earth who hasn’t used Twilio’s API at least once?

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.

thomasfromcdnjs 3 years ago | |

Agreed.

The author is upset for XYZ "other" reasons, I would have recommended they slept on it and not post that publicly.

redroyal 3 years ago |

I’ll never take Twilio seriously after their fire the white people first layoffs. I think they’re racist and won’t do business with them ever again.

swyx 3 years ago | |

uh what? source?

austhrow743 3 years ago | | |

https://www.twilio.com/blog/a-message-from-twilio-ceo-jeff-l...

>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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837345

xwdv 3 years ago |

I’m hoping Cloudflare will eventually offer the SMS stuff that Twilio used to, along with other real time communications.

sethammons 3 years ago | |

How does that fit in with Cloudflare? DNS is different than SMS, email, etc. Industry regulations, integration with providers, spam fighting, etc. Both benefit from network peering. I would think it would be easier to add DNS to Twilio than to add SMS to Cloudflare.

aprilnya 3 years ago | | |

If you think Cloudflare only does DNS, you don’t know what Cloudflare is

They do way more than just DNS

chopete3 3 years ago |

>> Sadly, us developers are not at the center of everything anymore at Twilio.

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.

Waterluvian 3 years ago | |

Every tech company’s goal is to grow into the thing that you, as a dev, don’t want it to become.

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.

oytis 3 years ago | | |

I'm not sure why I as an engineer would not want more focus on security, testing, documentation and reliability. It's by far not the worst that a company can become

istillwritecode 3 years ago |

I was a twilio customer developer until they instituted a change that demanded to know my personal phone number in order to login to their account. They claimed this was for security, but TOTP doesn't require a phone number. After a meeting with their engineering staff, I realized that they completely screwed up their TOTP implementation and they needed the phone number as the seed. Since I wasn't going to give them my phone number, that brought our customer relationship to an end. They clearly had no idea how to spell the word privacy.

rsynnott 3 years ago |

From the linked AI product page:

> What is digital greatness?

Has no-one in Twilio ever seen Parks and Rec? This is definitely a Ron Swanson thing.

berkle4455 3 years ago |

Twilio went from cool developer tooling to facilitating global robocalls and being a net negative for the world.

kec 3 years ago | |

Twilio was always that way, the zeitgeist has just moved on from the unbridled optimism of the 2010's which masked it.

grogenaut 3 years ago | |

Seems they have multiple income streams from negative actors ... https://billychasen.medium.com/twilios-toll-fraud-problem-28...

blobbers 3 years ago |

I'm curious why this got upvoted on hackernews. Isn't this some rando- employee (no offense Miguel Grinberg) that joined an established medium sized software company and then is moving on after spending a fairly short time there. Did this particular engineer move the needle on their product somehow?

How is this in any way "news" worthy.

blobbers 3 years ago | |

(thanks for the downvotes but I stand by what I said)

Solvency 3 years ago |

This guy is crazy if he thinks "The Cloud Communications Platform" makes more sense to the average driver passing by the billboard than "Customer Engagement Platform". At least the average person knows who customers are and what engaging means.

liftsh 3 years ago |

Hmm...is this really surprising to anyone? Yes, I'd like the purpose of a tech company to be to "make developers heroes," but in a capitalist society, companies exist to make money. I'm not saying I like it, but that's just the way it is.

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.

obiefernandez 3 years ago |

Another one bites the dust. Goddammit

toni_bk 3 years ago |

Why can’t a company just be happy making several billion dollars a year in profits? Always about growth, growth, growth!

macspoofing 3 years ago | |

>Why can’t a company just be happy making several billion dollars a year in profits?

Twilio doesn't make billions in profits. Twilio has been losing money for years. I'm not sure if Twilio was ever profitable?

fassssst 3 years ago | |

You could ask the same of yourself, presumably you have a retirement account invested in things that grow…

Johnny555 3 years ago | | |

A retirement account is based on the premise that its owner is going to stop working and adding money to it so they can draw money out of it for the rest of their life.

Companies don't generally have the same long term goal to stop earning revenue and ride out their savings until they die.

zht 3 years ago |

What a time to leave lol.

Good luck

rajanaccros 3 years ago |

The trend we are seeing across the tech industry and business in general is to know/consolidate/extract/exploit. Even users who pay now are still "the product". Who are the buyers? Intelligence agencies, both governmental and private who have different aims, but with the same intermediate goal is to know everything about you.

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.

wayeq 3 years ago |

> I'm sure you want to know what the future has in store for me.

do I though?

JoeyPardella 3 years ago |

It's impressive, in such a short article you managed to execute the most low brow self promotion (that you're looking for a new job) and also trash your previous employer who you were quite comfortable profiting off of for years. Twilio's long term vision did not change overnight - in fact it's been very consistent since 2019.

joeythedolphin 3 years ago |

The developer only exists to serve the product and customer. I do not know why the developer should be the center of any company, none the less why they should be on a billboard. Buyers don't care, they want a great product. Great products are built by companies that love their developers. They don't need to tell that on billboards, they need to tell that privately to each engineer they employ. It is not appropriate for a developer to be the center of a company. Why not quietly say thank you for the employment opportunity (a rare treat across all time and history)? Accept the fortune they gave you, if they were good share it with the world, and if not, move on to your next opportunity? HN may downvote me but I do not understand these "goodbye" posts. I don't think anybody cares and it just makes you think twice about the person who is leaving if they showed up at your door for a job.

freedomben 3 years ago | |

> The developer only exists to serve the product and customer. I do not know why the developer should be the center of any company, none the less why they should be on a billboard. Buyers don't care, they want a great product.

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.

joeythedolphin 3 years ago | | |

This is helpful! Thanks. Sometimes I come off intense, it's just an authentic invitation to spar.