<a href="https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/number-of-employees" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/number...</a> (dates for 2021 to 2015 as of Dec 31 on that yer)<p><pre><code> 2022 8,992 ( from https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/13/twilio-layoffs-1500-employees-17percent-of-workforce.html )
2021 7,867
2020 4,629
2019 2,905
2018 1,440
2017 996
2016 730
2015 567
</code></pre>
In the past 3 years, they've tripled in size. <a href="https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit</a> shows the comparison of the revenue and net income over that time.<p><a href="https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit+and+number+of+employees" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit...</a> isn't quite as readable for financial data, but shows the context with employees (as this is about a layoff).
This is on top of 11% they laid off in September 2022, 5 months ago.<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/twilio-lays-off-11-of-its-staff-as-it-aims-for-profitability-in-2023/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/twilio-lays-off-11-of-its-...</a>
Not surprising, given the -$500m net income result on last quarter amid slowing growth, Twilio has been burning money since a long time, despite being a public company.<p>Sometimes I wonder what those CEOs are doing to let a situation roll like this for so long. How boards accept this kind of thing?<p>Twilio has terrible numbers, you don't even need to be a VC or professional analyst to see that. They need a big cut not only in personel, but in expenses.<p>Perhaps also a new CEO and leadership...
My free PR advice to companies announcing layoffs is to cut short on the cute company employee nicknames, keep the 'Twilions', 'stripes' and 'Zoomies' to the good times.
I’ve seen the threads, but asking again, anyone tried finding a dev job right now? How hard is it? There must be 50k software engineers looking for work. Gotta wonder how long it will take for the job market to recover
From the article
"I'm sure you're wondering why we're making additional cuts to the team after the September layoffs. At that time, we sought to streamline the company as it was then structured."<p>Translates as "We did a terrible job with the first round of layoffs and didn't really explore all of our options and because we messed up then we have to lay off more of you now."<p>Wasn't this the company that announced they were laying people off based on race in the last round of layoffs? Looks like that turned out great for them, shocked they are laying more people off now. No mention of race in this announcement though.<p>Note [before I get torched here]: I am saying hiring and firing based on race is insane and should be based on talent and what skills you need for the job. I am in no way saying any race is better than any other race at anything.
I wonder why people just can't be completely honest and say something along the lines of: "look, rising interest rates makes leaving money in the bank way more attractive than spending it by having x% more employees doing things that we were not sure if contributed directly to our financial KPIs. It was cool while it lasted but right now we're just keeping the cash cows and what they need. Thanks"
In my humble opinion, having used Twilio extensively for over a year, it is an awful service.<p>They will happily take your money and report that SMS are being delivered when they're not. They implement the most bureaucratic nightmarish processes for vetting brands which are impossible to do via the UI, and must only be done through broken/bizarre API calls that were clearly cobbled together without any design considerations. Maybe you get it all to work, but then after deliverability customer complaints a month later, you hear from Twilio that something broke on their end and you need to re-submit the vetting.<p>Having a major production issue? Well, you too can get a response in 3 hours by forking over 4% of your spend or $250 minimum, whichever is greater (how does that even make sense? Why should I pay more than a minimum?). And the response right at the end of the 3 hour window will consist of "We have received your issue and are passing it to the relevant team" which resets the 3 hour window. Whoops it looks like you're outside of business hours now, we'll get to it tomorrow. Unless you want to upgrade to the 8% monthly spend or $5000 minimum plan?<p>All that said, Twilio can burn. Burn or get their act together. I hope they get eaten by a better service though, truly.
The truth is that many of these companies can be run with fewer and fewer people as abstractions in technology become higher-level. Software takes a lot of effort to write, and much less to maintain.<p>We just went through an era of effectively no software, to one with a large saturation of software that fills many niches. In the 2010's there was no competition for the majority of these businesses as VC capital tended to move towards new ideas, rather than directly competing with existing ventures.<p>All of that is changing. The world will continue to need new and improving software, but the value provided by a single engineer continues to trend higher, and fewer and fewer developers will be needed to create these systems.<p>Some SaaS has high costs of switching and a defensible moat, but many do not and are easily replicated. Existing players may even be at a disadvantage to competitors due to existing architectures using old patterns that require more manual labor/cost to maintain. e.g. Something like DocuSign is a good example of a low moat SaaS. Database systems are a good example of large moat (high cost of switching, even if better tech comes out)
I was part of the RIF and I am actively looking for Data Scientist roles. Any leads are much appreciated. You can find me<p>- [here](<a href="https://linkedin.com/in/dheeraj-ravindranath" rel="nofollow">https://linkedin.com/in/dheeraj-ravindranath</a>)
- <a href="https://github.com/dheerajrav">https://github.com/dheerajrav</a>
My favorite part of these posts are learning all the dumb names people call employees.<p>For anyone who has been at a place with an employee pet name that stuck, did you buy into it? Did you have to use it with a straight face or was it more of an outwards facing, recruiting tool?<p>EDIT: Twizzlers is a much better name.
This guy Jeff Lawson was virtue signalling big time about how much he loves paying San Francisco's taxes. I wonder if he's taking a pay cut while he leaves 17% of his workforce without jobs.
Over the last few years Twilio’s CEO wrote a navel gazing book and hosted some conferences about social justice, but didn’t improve the core product. I bet this made him popular with employees, though I suspect it would have made him less popular if they saw these layoffs coming.
I chose not to use sendgrid (twilio) because they force their own 2nd factor auth app, instead of allowing to use literally any of the ones already out there.<p>Anecdotal, but still
You cannot just say that these businesses hire too many people, there is a reason why they’re laying people off right now.<p>These businesses know what’s coming. Get ready for a higher than expected inflation rate tomorrow.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774930" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774930</a>
This is the impact of moving from the "growth company" to "profitable company" investment model.<p>Twilio and other "high growth" saas companies for the last few years have competed solely on how much they could grow the top line every quarter. Now they have to rebuild themselves.
I have a mild question:<p>Ukraine war outlook in 3 months China will face a severe shortage of fertilizer(they get that from Russia at over 80%) along with India and since those are two big supply chains it might be that all these companies see a rise in one of their inputs via the supply chain disruption in the future towards April-May as decreasing their profits while at the same time increasing other costs.<p>So my question is why is everyone assuming that it is some other economic force than this if this is the actual looming economic near term disaster?<p>Think back a full year when we had the last supply chain disruption, did not Governments step in a fund grants to prevent the rise in input costs?
notably absent language about anti-racism in this RIF<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897195" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897195</a>
Stock is up 2.5% today.<p>It's my understanding, in Twilio's 15-years of existence ... they've only had 1 profitable quarter (out of 60 quarters).
I can understand a single layoff to "right size" the company, but a second layoff always points to an underlying problem that they didn't either believe or recognize only a few months previous. Which kind of makes me nervous. This as the Meta layoffs means that they didn't have a handle on the problem only a few months back.
Leo Laporte mentioned on security now last week that he was happy to move away from authy because it was run by twillio(a previous sponsor of the podcast). Have things been rough for the company?
I should probably start thinking about how to move all my 2FA codes out of Authy, at this rate I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly stick me with a monthly fee to keep logging in to my stuff.<p>Does anyone know how to do this? Authy seems to make it intentionally as difficult as possible to export TOTP keys and I'd rather not repeat the 2FA setup process for dozens of accounts.
The post states:<p>>"We’re winding down some of the perks we’ve historically offered, including our book and wellness allowances. We’ve also decided to sunset Twilio Recharge, which I believe in, but which (in retrospect) was ill-timed given our profitability goals."<p>Can someone say what "Twilio Recharge" is/was?
I make a living sending SMS in Europe (transactional, mostly for banks and insurance companies) and Twilio SMS pricing is <i>extremely</i> expensive for this geo. Even so, they keep losing money.<p>Just made a quick comparison with two competitors in terms in gross margin:<p><pre><code> Twilio: 52%
Sinch: 21%
Link Mobility: 24%</code></pre>
I love the Twilio product line, but always saw it as classic Product Lead Growth, self-service, self-scale. Surprised to hear of their troubles.
Are they selling below cost? Are they creating product lines or features that dont drive revenue? Is it high-touch corporate sales?
IMHO all these companies are flooded with account managers, sales, customer success, BDR, when they could just let customers choose their own plans, upgrade freely, etc, instead of "schedule a call with our team"