Jeff Lawson is the co-founder and CEO of Twilio, founded in 2008. Twilio allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages. As a customer, anytime you call or text your Uber driver, you are using Twilio! Today Byron will talk with Jeff about his career leading up to founding Twilio, how they built the company and the challenges along the way to their IPO.

Insights and key takeaways from Jeff Lawson

• Internet connection can be the source of invention and inspiration in college: “I arrived at school in 1995. And so, many people arrived at college and the thing they were most excited about was alcohol or other girls or boys or whoever it was, and the freedom of leaving home. And for me, I arrived in the dorm and I was like, “Oh my God, there’s a 10 megabit ethernet jack in this,” remembered Jeff. “That was the thing that was most exciting to me. That was the most life-changing part about going to college. Not the alcohol or the parties or anything. And it was ‘95, so it was right after the Netscape IPO, and I remember one of the first things I did after I said goodbye to my parents was I FTPed down a copy of Netscape Navigator 1.0, and suddenly was able to start browsing this brand new thing called the web.”
• When Jeff was working on a startup he realized the importance of following your passion: “Why am I grinding out code with these skate kids all around me breaking my flow, when really I belong in tech?” asked Jeff. “I realized I had made that same mistake again, of not following my passion. I was pouring all my blood sweat and tears into a company where it was a good business opportunity, but wasn’t where my heart was.”
• Twilio was started because Jeff always believed that software is a super power: “Developers can build software quickly and iteratively to serve customers,” said Jeff. “Your work is never done because you can always hear the next problem or the next improvement, and put your mind to work and build a better version of your product.”
• Experimentation is the prerequisite to innovation. “If you can help a developer and help companies run more experiments for what their customers need, then you’re going to get more innovation. If you ruthlessly remove the friction, the barriers to experimentation, that is what you need to enable innovation. That was the guiding principle that we started the company with,” said Jeff.
• In the cloud your number one value proposition you’re selling is trust. “No matter what you do. If you’re a communications API, if you’re infrastructure as a service, or if you’re a SaaS product. What you’re fundamentally telling your customer is, “Trust me to run this part of your business for you.”

In episode 8, I visit Ippon MMA & BJJ gym in Bournemouth to talk with head coach: JEFF LAWSON. Quick search on YouTube for “Judo destroys BJJ” and if you’ve never come across Jeff before, you will once you watch the video of him executing a perfect throw, through to arm bar finish at Polaris 4. Contrary to belief Jeff is not just a black belt in Judo, he is in fact a retired MMA fighter and also a black belt in BJJ via the legendary Yuki Nakai’s lineage. 
We discuss BJJ, Judo, MMA, the pressures of running a gym, mental health and just about everything else. If you are in the Bournemouth area and want to train Muay Thai, BJJ, Judo, MMA, No Gi Grappling then please get in touch with Jeff at the gym: https://www.ipponfitness.com/

My guest this week is Jeff Lawson, the Founder, and CEO of Twilio. Twilio is a 15-billion-dollar company offering a cloud communications platform to its customers.  Twilio is used by customers like Lyft, Twitch, and Yelp to make communications in their products easy.  Jeff and I talk about why it pays to be a platform, how to be a platform, and how to sculpt a company culture. This is a must-listen for anyone building a business whether it’s a tech business or not.

For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.

Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub.

Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

Show Notes

1:18 – (First Question) –  Company vowels and draw the owl

5:26 – Significance of API’s

12:14 – How non-software businesses can transition into the space

         17:50 - Agile way of working at ING Belgium (video)

18:38 – How they strategize their product build

23:27 – The idea of asking your developer and why it’s so important to them

33:02 – How they codified their business culture

45:12 – Parting advice for people building platforms

48:13 – Kindest thing anyone has done for Jeff 

Learn More

For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. 

Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub

Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

Dave and Evan chat with Jeff Lawson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Twilio. 

Jeff Lawson realized that communications are essential to every business. He got the idea as a result of his experiences as an entrepreneur and developer during a time when the API model for technology services was emerging. Lawson and co-founder Evan Cooke created Twilio, and effectively created a new enterprise communications category: Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS). 

Twilio has enabled small, medium, and large enterprises to create powerful communications enabled applications. It also spawned numerous other providers that leverage Twilio's services and Super Network under the covers. Twilio’s platform serves people in over 180 countries. The company’s revenue has grown from $88.8 million in 2014 to over a billion in 2019.

In this podcast we ask Jeff to explain why it makes sense to target budget developers, hwo live coding became a thing, and several other topics including why customers pay for services with their shoes. 

Join Glitch CEO Anil Dash and Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson for a discussion about the ethical implications of technology in today’s society. Jeff and Anil discuss how social media and AI are changing the way we think about the impact of technology on society as well as the responsibility of tech leaders for this impact.

Missed the session? Here’s what Jeff talks about:

• How taking no stance as a business leader today, is taking a stance
• How to set concrete numbers for diversity goals
• The impact of corporate culture on employee happiness

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

Jeff Lawson

Anil Dash

Jeff Lawson is the Founder & CEO @ Twilio, the company building the future of communications allowing you to engage customers like never before on voice, SMS, WhatsApp or Video. Prior to their IPO in 2016, Twilio had raised over $250m in VC funding from some of the best in venture including USV, Bessemer, Salesforce and Techstars just to name a few. As for Jeff, prior to founding Twilio, Jeff was the Founder & CTO @ Nine Star Inc and enjoyed a spell at Amazon as a Technical Product Manager.

Sameer Dholakia is the CEO @ SendGrid, the category leader in email delivery, reaching half of the world’s digital users every 3 months. Last year Twilio acquired SendGrid bringing email into one seamless customer engagement platform. As for Sameer, prior to joining SendGrid, he spent 4 years at Citrix, where he drove the company’s product strategy for cloud infrastructure and server virtualization. Sameer joined the company in 2010, when Citrix acquired VMLogix, where he served as CEO and doubled revenues during each year of his tenure. Before that, he worked for 12 years at Trilogy, where he held key leadership roles helping the company grow from a start-up to a $300 million business.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Jeff came to found Twilio and what was that a-ha moment for him? How did Sameer enter the world of SaaS and come to be CEO @ SendGrid?
• How did Jeff and Sameer assess the culture fit between the 2 companies when deciding whether or not to join forces? How did they formulate and approach creating a new set of values with the 2 companies coming together? How do they distinguish between culture and values? How can leaders both be authoritative and vulnerable simultaneously?
• What does Jeff mean when he says, “the developer first approach is a maturation of the supply chain of software”? How has Jeff seen his original thesis for “developer first” evolve and change with time? What does truly special customer experience look like in the developer first model?  
• In terms of product strategy, how do Jeff and Sameer approach when is the right time to release a second product? What does Jeff mean when he says, “you have to maximise the number of at bat opportunities you have”? Why does Sameer think that SendGrid waited too long to release additional product lines? What were his core learnings from that?
• How do Jeff and Sameer think about what what truly special leadership looks like today? How do they approach speaking so that people will remember? What are some of their biggest tips to aspiring entrepreneurs with regards to that and team empowerment? Why do both Jeff and Sameer believe that so much of the management wisdom today is outdated?

60 Second SaaStr:

1. What do Jeff and Sameer know now that they wish they had known at the beginning?
2. The book they have gifted most often and why?
3. What does it take to truly be a great board member?
4. What do the next 5 years look like for Twilio? How big could it get?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Jeff Lawson

Sameer Dholakia

Jeff Lawson, the music director at Passion City Church, enjoys chopping up the voice of Kristian Stanfill and transforming a breath into a beat. While reassembling the song "Glorious Day”, he postulates that the Christian life is one that requires remix.