CEO Jeff Lawson Reflects on the Peaks and Valleys of Twilio’s Growth Story

Today’s episode is with Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio. He’s spent the last 13 years building and running the company, including leading through a successful IPO in 2016. 

 

In today’s conversation, Jeff looks back on some of the peaks and valleys in Twilio’s journey, and his own evolution as the CEO. He dives into some of the initial wins, like going against conventional wisdom to launch a second product in the early days of Twilio. He’s equally game to unpack some of the mistakes along Twilio’s path — like when one of their biggest customers, Uber, significantly scaled back their investment in Twilio’s products. 

 

Jeff also opens up the pages from the playbook he pulled from his time at Amazon, chiefly Twilio’s “write it down” company value, and makes his case for why PowerPoint is a terrible decision-making tool. He takes us inside Twilio’s C-suite, including why they do post-mortems when things go right — not just when they go wrong. He also sketches out his “aha” moment that his executive team needed to argue more. 

 

Today’s conversation is a must-listen for company-builders across all industries and growth stages, as well as folks that have hopes to someday occupy these same seats. 

 

Jeff’s new book is titled “Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century.” https://www.amazon.com/Ask-Your-Developer-Software-Developers/dp/0063018292

 

To learn more about how Twilio approaches company values, check out this article on First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/draw-the-owl-and-other-company-values-you-didnt-know-you-should-have

 

You can follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffiel.

 

You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson