Finding Twilio

Today is my 7th anniversary at Twilio and tomorrow will be my last day. It’s a bag of emotions, I will dearly miss all the friends I now call family.

Today I’m closing one door, to open another. Cliché enough? But before I open that door, I want to tell you the story of how I discovered the magical kingdom of Twilio. For that, I need to tell you another story.

Hop into my time machine to the late 2000's.

I started working at a green media company for all things recycling, Earth911. In 2007, it was made of an amazing team of designers, engineers, and editors. Earth911’s mission was to educate and help inform its consumers with the best waste management practices from oil to your old mobile phone.

Earth911 was made up of three properties.

1. A media website with original content.
2. A recycling location search engine. Including web-based search, a crowd-sourcing application for collecting listings & an API product.
3. A recycling hotline. 1800-Cleanup, stamped on the bottom of every bottle of motor oil.

The new owners of Earth911 had purchased the company out of a bankruptcy and hired us to convert it from a non-profit into a for-profit company.

Properties #1 and #2 were complete with a brand spanking new blog and recycling search engine.

Property #3, 1800-Cleanup was not. It was built on a hardware platform from the early 1990’s and had a visual programming language no one could figure out. To add to that the data was no longer relevant and callers didn’t get a great experience. It was too costly to replace considering how much it would take to buy new telecom hardware and the time it took to extend Asterisk. In short, the executive team said “Don’t touch it”.

On November 20th, 2008, we were listening to Arcade Fire in a dark four-person office near Scottsdale Road in Arizona. The iPhone just sold over 10 million devices that year with the iPhone 3G. Three20 became the first & most popular iPhone SDK for the platform written by Joe Hewitt. And toll-free hotlines were still powered by on-premise hardware from the 1990’s. Yes, the grunge 90’s and skaters wearing jnco jeans.

If you tell an engineer they can’t touch something, you can guarantee it will be in pieces by lunch time. That is what inspired me to write an iPhone app instead of trying to petition for a budget on new hardware to replace the telephone system.

During a search on an undocumented API in the iPhone SDK, I discovered Twilio. I saw a post by Jeff Lawson on a forum, clicked, signed up and built a phone system without a credit card or hardware whatsoever. I think my jaw needed wiring shut after that.

After fifteen minutes I had a small prototype hooked up to our existing search api. I added a new template renderer to our template engine to output TwiML instead of HTML.

That was my first magical moment using Twilio. I knew Jeff, John, and Evan were going to sail in the high seas of telecom. Seamless programmable communication services in minutes. I felt like I saw a glimpse of the future through that magical moment.

I shared the prototype with the leadership. They were shocked to say the least. It created more moments for us. We became a team with a mission to make 1800-cleanup cool again! We even designed user experiences to reduce menu-selection time.

When we hit our first feature gap in Twilio, spanish text-to-speech support, John Wolthuis launched four languages for our team within the week. We were thrilled, they over-delivered as we only needed two not four!

Shortly after launch, Danielle Morrill interviewed me about building the application from a Seattle Cafe. I was baffled, who interviews developers!? I’m not the CTO, CIO, or VP of Nonsense. Danielle’s marketing strategy was highlighting the stories around developers, the builders, not the high-flying titled folks. This wasn’t about writing a white-paper, it was about spreading the message that developers are the heroes. A humbling experience to say the least.

From that experience I knew three things about Twilio.

1. Twilio creates experiences. With an emphasis on the developer, all I needed was a little creativity to get started. No credit-card, no shenanigans.
2. Twilio thinks at scale. By focusing early on one quality voice API product, they could support Earth911’s scale.
3. Twilio celebrated DOers. I never understood the impact I was making until I chatted with Danielle.

When Jeff decided to make that phone call about working at Twilio, I already knew the value Twilio provided to its customers. I didn’t care how much they made, how big the team was, what their run-rate is, or if they served lunch everyday. It was a no-brainer for me.

After that I went on to learn how to build a company from a veteran entrepreneur, a talented architect, and an array of future industry leaders.

In retrospect, it boils down to one moment in the past for me where I refused to accept complacency with the way things were and wanted to change them.

Thats how I found the magical kingdom of Twilio.

Do you have a similar story? Share with me on Twitter @minddog