Quick into to Twilio (for my friends)
Over the past few months I have spoken to a number friends and colleagues about Twilio. I am often greeted with a blank look, or may be a “yeah I have heard of them”.
To help these discussions, I thought I would pull together a non-technical summary of what Twilio is all about, feel free to correct or jump in if I have not got it right.
Twilio is to telecoms what Uber is to car manufacturers.
Summary
Twilio was founded in 2008 by John Wolthuis, Jeff Lawson & Evan Cooke. It raised raised $233.7m (in 8 rounds). Albert Wenger from early backers Union Square Ventures back in 2010 wrote a post laying out their thoughts about the then start-up:
Twilio hides all the complexity of telephony behind an API that is so simple that many applications can literally be created in minutes.
They listed on 23 June 2016 NYSE:TWLO at $15 per share, rose to a peak of $151 and are currently trading at $127 at the time of writing, valuing Twilio at $17.52B.
They posted their first full year profits in 2018 and also bought SendGrid for $2bn.
The short story
Charismatic founder Jeff Lawson has explained the business as “AWS for Telecoms” and “a Telecoms API” and also “a software network”.
“the phone network as a series of programmable building blocks”
“like an Amazon Web Services but for telecom”
Early interview
Simply put, Twilio was targeted from the outset at software developers to make integrating telephony easier. Software developers can use code to programatically provide everything from (interactive) SMS to scaleable IVR systems and conferencing capabilities. Hundreds of thousands of businesses use Twilio to provide features such as; 2 factor SMS authentication, in application call recording and virtual IVRs.
You can rent a number (monthly) in almost any country in the world and start building service, which you pay for when you generate traffic. This very low cost of entry made the service extremely attractive to legions of developers, and Twilio even provides free credits to get started. Accounts are pre-paid and when the credit runs out the service stops working.
Software & Cloud Keynote 2012 (long)
The continued explosive growth of application-to-person (A2P) messaging has helped Twilio’s customers (eg: Uber and WhatsApp) build engaging user experiences on their platform. MobileSquared estimated A2P messaging was worth $12.88 billion in 2015 rising to $58.75 billion in 2020.
The above is just a brief overview of the business and there are a number of aspects of the story that I find intriguing including; the target audience, the total “re-framing” of telecoms as an industry, the way that customers nurtured, the focus on engineering and understanding of their product
From the journey and the understanding of how Twilio has evolved, what can you take out of it? What could it do with Twilio in your business? How could you find software solutions to physical problems?
Technology
- Astrix
- FreeSWITCH
- AWS
Competition
https://www.bandwidth.com/products/application-platform/
https://www.sinch.com/
https://www.nexmo.com/
https://www.plivo.com/
CUSTOMERS:
READING:
https://www.twilio.com/engineering/
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-twilio-will-kill-att-2012-1?IR=T
https://www.ft.com/content/c4e95ffc-38b6-11e6-9a05-82a9b15a8ee7
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/twilio#/entity
http://readwrite.com/2012/01/06/how_twilio_the_web_will_disrupt_the_mobile_operato/
