Shareholders have been critical of Twilio's performance, and therefore Jeff Lawson over the last year or two though... They're in a difficult place. They don't have the margins of a SAAS company and they've been losing a lot of money.
This was fine in a low interest rate environment where investors are willing to pay up for growth, but when that changed investors wanted them to cut costs and show a path to profitability. As a result Twilio was forced to do large layoffs and refocus the business on products with higher margins.
Perhaps Jeff just didn't want to run the type of business Twilio needs to become in this new environment. He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who gets passionate about running a mature business that needs to focus on optimising profit margins above all else. I he think prefers to get stuck in and build things cool things, and for better or worse that's not where Twilio is anymore.
> He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who gets passionate about running a mature business that needs to focus on optimising profit margins above all else.
There is optimizing profit margins, and there is not losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year, year after year.
The large GAAP loses comes from dilution – mostly in the form of stock based comp. In theory if growth exceeds dilution then investors are still owning an appreciating asset, and if the stock is richly valued (as TWLO was) then it makes sense to fund that growth with capital rather than debt.
But yeah, as a shareholder I felt their stock based comp was egregiously high and it took management a little too long to realise we're in a new world and things needed to change... A side point, but that's actually why I invested in TWLO because the stock got so beat up and their SBC was so excessive that it was kinda obvious that things were going to need to change and the market would react to that positively.
The markets seem to be reacting favourably to this news and again I think that's because there was an assumption that Jeff Lawson was largely to blame for the lack of focus on profit optimisation.
Personally I think Jeff is a great CEO though and I didn't want to see him go. I just wanted him to make some tough decisions to stop the burn – which more recently he seemed to be doing. While I do think they need to be more finance minded in this next stage of the business, I would doubt whether a developer focused tech company like Twilio will benefit much from a managerial leader like Shipchandler. We've seen this mistake made repeatedly by tech companies in the past.
