Before Twilio, if you wanted your app to send a text message, you had to negotiate a contract with a telecom carrier. That took 5 months. With Twilio, it takes 5 minutes and 7 lines of code.
Ask a developer. That was our internal mantra. We did not build what executives wanted. We built what developers wanted. And developers wanted an API that just worked.
Software people have become the most important people in every company. Every company is becoming a software company. And every software company needs communications built in. That is our market — literally everyone.
We laid off over 2,500 people. That was the hardest thing I have ever done. I hired too many people too fast during the boom. That is my responsibility and I own it completely.
Our stock went from $30 to $400 to $50. That is a hell of a ride. But the business processes 150 billion API calls a year and the revenue is $4 billion. The stock price is a story. The business is real.
At our launch event, I let the audience build an app that made phone calls during the demo. A real phone rang in the room. A developer in the audience answered it. That was the moment people understood what Twilio was.