This Week in Startups - Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson: the next $60B, Engage, Segment acquisition & more + Who actually uses Oculus? | E1308

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

It was great to have Jeff back on the pod! But first, Producer Rachel gives some updates on TWIST Founder Meetups (01:54) and Jason talks a bit about Oculus (14:12). Then, Jeff Lawson from Twilio joins (24:42) to discuss their new mission to build the leading customer engagement platform, the launch of their new product Twilio Engage, lessons from scaling & their big acquisitions, San Francisco and more!

Okay, everybody, we got a great show for you today. My pal, Jeff Lawson, the CEO of Twilio, is joining the program for his fourth, one, two, three, fourth appearance, and his first one since 2019. We talk about building as a public company, growing Twilio to a $60 billion market cap, their segment acquisition, and we talk about Twilio's new product, Twilio Engage, which they just announced today. Thank you for giving us an exclusive. But first, producer Rachel and I are going to talk about twist meetups and how you can get involved. We're doing meetups in New York, Chicago, Boston. We're going to do them in Tokyo, London, everywhere, and they're going really well, and we want you involved. Then I'm going to talk about Oculus. I did a tweet. A lot of people got

feelings, a lot of people got upset. Well, it happens sometimes when I tweet, and I tweeted, hey, people don't use their Oculuses after like the first week or two. Why? Well, I got a lot of interesting answers, and I have some theories. We're going to get to it all today on an amazing episode of this week in startups. Thanks for tuning in everybody. This week in startups is brought to you by Marketer Hire. Need expert marketing fast, hire vetted marketing specialists this week from the company that's already used by Netflix, Allbirds, and more. Get $500 off your first hire at marketa hire.com slash twist. Novo free business banking. If your bank charges outrageous fees, you need a bank account that's built for small business.

Get your free business banking account in just 10 minutes at banknovo.com slash twist. And Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-O-W-D.com slash twist. All right, I want to give you all an update on the This Week in Startups Meetups that we will be having in cities all over the world. With me to talk about it is the manager of our Twist Meetups. Her name is producer Rachel. Welcome back to the program, producer Rachel. Hi.

How are you? I am about to bring up the page for this weekend startups too so everybody can see. Yeah. So if you go to this weekin startups.com slash meetups, you can see all of our meetups. and you can become a founder organizer. We're only having these events for founders right now. And some members of our syndicate, angel investors, we're keeping this very focused on founders and investors

because that's the core of the business. Eventually we'll let other people in, but we are doing a series of missions for the organizers. Why are we doing those? Well, what I found in the past is sometimes when you do these kind of TEDx kind of events, the wrong people want to get involved. The people who want to get involved sometimes are selfish people who are looking to use it as a marketing channel. Well, I have no interest in that.

I don't want a bunch of salespeople using this to sell SaaS software, recruiting services, or accounting or illegal. Not that there's anything wrong with those professions, but that's not what the show is about. And I don't want people and running the advertising on the show or using this to market. That's not the point. It's for founders, by founders, and for investors by investors to start. So we put people on three missions. Rachel, explain what the three missions are.

So the three missions, starting off with Meetup One, Meetup One is all about getting comfortable. It'll be about five to ten founders, and everyone's going to meet up, pay their own way, have a meal, get a coffee. Some people have actually even decided to go to areas like parks, especially if that's something that you think would be a little bit safer. And another place decided, I believe it was Chicago,

to do a public library. And I thought that was really cool. So that's Mission 1. And if you go to the website, you'll see, we can zoom in on this, that Los Angeles did their first mission and New York completed their first mission. London is on the books.

Tokyo is on the books for their first mission, October 28th. Austin also October 28th. Boston, October 29th. Chicago, October 30th. San Francisco, November 4th. So that week, there's five different ones going on. And that's really exciting.

So that's mission one. Five to ten founders, you get to know each other. It's kind of the planning committee. And we did this because we want to purposefully make it small to start. You get to know each other. You build a little bit of culture. Everybody can talk to each other. It's not a free-for-all, which is what sometimes the marketers want to create.

It's just as many people as possible to get as many emails as possible to start spamming people. It's not what I want. And my name's on these things. So I've got to trust that it's founders, right? Rachel, we've got to trust these founders. and you're actually talking and meeting all of them, right? I am having a vet everybody who signs up to attend, and there are some updates. So I've noticed that there's been an influx of people applying, which is absolutely great.

But because of that, I am going to have to ask people now to include their LinkedIn URL in a meetup. So even if you applied to join a meetup in the past, I would still really like it for you to keep applying to meetups as those sign-up sheets open up because I do not have some LinkedIn URL. Got it. So the reason we're asking for LinkedIn URLs is because salespeople and marketers are already sneaking in, aren't they, Rachel? Yep. Yeah, they are. I feel really bad when I have to send those emails asking people to refrain from coming until later a meetup. So it would be really awesome if everybody could do that. Yeah. It's not that we don't like salespeople. We have salespeople at all of our companies, but we're trying to make this not, we're trying to make it be balanced. So we're starting with founders. Then we're adding. investors. And then meetup number two, what's the footprint for meetup number two? So meetup two is more on the networking side because you will have a little bit more people around 25 to 50 founders. You can meet up. Jason always says, meet up, have dim sum, have pizza.

It's more of that vibe where you're probably going to need a reservation or at least a call ahead with that many people. And again, that is 25 to 50 people for meetup two. And then meetup three, that's the big unlock. Meetup three. That's the big unlock. Meetup three. Yeah, 50 to 100 people, and that would actually include hosted content. And Jason will call in and he's been saying on the live that he's going to pick and choose which cities he actually goes to. So that's something to look out for. I think that'll be exciting. Yeah, I mean, if people make it to meet up number three, they get 50 to 100 people will, and that's the big reward, we'll actually record it.

I'll come on live. Maybe I'll meet a couple of companies. Maybe I'll take a couple of pitches, do a couple of ass jasons, maybe do a little founder mentoring, whatever. I can do to be helpful, put it on a big screen. And so what we try to do here, Rachel, and for the audience is, the first one requires no reservation. It's five to ten people. You can, I mean, get a reservation, but you can go to a cafe, you can go to a park? You don't really need to worry about it. Number two, 25 to 50 people, as you're saying, you may need a private room. You may need to ask a pizzeria or a burger joint. Hey, can we get the back room?

Or if it's a bar, just give them a heads up. Hey, we're going to have 25, 50 to people coming on a Tuesday. They'll probably be stoked and put out some mozzarella sticks or, uh, you know, some chips and salsa, whatever. My recommendation on these always when I was broke was Mexican pizza, because you can buy a pizza for 20 bucks and feed eight people. You know how it is. You can keep the prices low and make it accessible for everybody. But obviously, number three, now you need AV.

You need a quiet room. You're going to need microphones. It's going to get more complicated. And then number four, we're going to allow people to even, I don't know if we announce this, But number four, we're going to allow people to have sponsors, right? And we do mention that, actually. So we just want people to kind of work their way up here.

Now, we knew have some people like London is really professional group of people who decided to do this. And they want to go a little faster. So I asked them, please just pump the brakes a little bit. I know London's like a serious city. I know you got everything dialed in already. But just work with us and going through the three missions. They want to kind of jump to mission two or three out of the gate, which I appreciate. But if it's got my name on it, let's see.

let's do a little paste thing here. I want people to get to know each other, right? I'm really relying on those founders. And then we're also going to do the bracelet thing. So explain the bracelets we're going to do. So when you attend the events, you're going to have different color bracelets, the people that are attending.

I believe you said green bracelets and red bracelet. Was it like that? Orange bracelets for founders. Orange bracelets and founders. Orange is the color of this week in startups, our official color. And then for investors we'll have. Are those?

gray bracelets then because we're or blue bracelets investors give money and money is green there you go so green um shout out to hidey on our team hidey's been very very nice and helping me uh do that because she made note that those are going to take quite a long time to come oh right supply chain issue so anyway we'll have the nice rubber uh bracelet like the lift strong one yeah so we'll have those when you're at the event you'll get it this week in startup's founder bracelet or uh in orange or this uh the simp advocate.com angel investor in green. And so then in meetup number three probably will have those. We'll ship them to your location. We'll pay for it. Don't worry. And then you give those to people as they come in the door. Boom. Now when they come in the door, yeah, you know who you're talking

to. You got an icebreaker. Oh, tell me about your firm. How often do you angel invest? What companies have you invested in? Oh, you're a founder. Tell me about your company. So potential cities that we're looking for include? So you see those potential cities down there. But actually, I'd like, like to talk more about Berlin, Portland, and Sydney over on that right-hand side, because you guys are so close to be able to actually have your first meet-up.

We just need a little bit more people to apply. And this morning, we got enough people for Philly. So that's going to be moving soon. Yeah. Philly cheese steaks. Here we go. I mean, for me, it's all based on food. So I'm going to be, depending on how good the food is, I'll be coming out to some cities, but I'm really excited about this.

And thank you, Rachel, for doing it. All of the coordination occurs on Slack. So if you want to talk to Rachel, you can do so at this week in startups.com slash Slack. There you go. We make it super easy for you. This week and startups.com slash meetups to get information on the meetups, this week and startups.com slash slack to join our Slack.

And if you come to the Slack, remember, the Slack is for conversations, not promotions, conversations, and to coordinate the meetups, talk about the show. It's not for you to invite people to your event, to put job postings, to try to market your product, keep it to conversations. Like, be a normal person. You don't go to a dinner party and, you know, immediately start selling people insurance. Don't do that in Slack. It's lame. All right. Thanks again, Rachel. Also, a little programming note. Tell everybody about our new OK Boomer segment that we're

going to start on Fridays, Friday show. Yep. Yep. So the OK Boomer segment is going to be focusing around interesting things that the next generation is using the internet for, such as trends. and other things that others may not be aware of. Kind of think of things like, what are people doing in crypto. You can tease a couple of the ideas we talk about. Okay.

Some of the ideas that we're thinking about, for example, is the meme that's happening on Twitter where you see people posting red flags. Also, we're checking out TikToks where people are giving resignation memes of SpongeBob. And if you don't know what those are, don't worry, you're going to have to stick around until Friday and we'll break them down.

Yeah, so the concept is, young people are using the internet and technology in all kind of ways that maybe boomers don't understand I'm Gen X, but we thought it would be funny since you're Gen Z or a millennial? You're Gen Z. I'm probably, yeah, I'm probably a Gen Z. This is kind of just like a joke,

but it'll be every Friday. End of the show. Rachel's, Rachel reporting will go out and we'll interview somebody who resigned. I think the resignation thing to me is fascinating. I was watching on TikTok. People are live streaming or recording their resignations and they're handing in a SpongeBob SquarePamps mean that says,

I'm going to be out of here or something. And they record themselves resigning, which I thought was absolutely fascinating. So if you have ideas for OK Boomer, the new Friday segment, and if you have ideas for other segments, we'd like to have other segments. Preferably, I'd like to have a segment with a puppet, Nick. If we could have a, yeah, Rachel Reporting.

You may want to get that handle, Rachel Reporting. I'll check it out. Somebody's got to have Rachel Report. But that would be good for your long-term career. All right, Rachel, thank you so much. Bye, guys. Don't you wish you could hire a ringer to help scale out your marketing team? I know you do. Well, with marketer hire, you can and you can do it right now. Marketer hire gives you access to expert freelancers on demand with no long-term contracts and no risk.

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slash twist. Again, marketer, M-A-R-K-E-T-E-R-H-I-R-H-I-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-S-T-T-R-S-T-R-T-S-T-R-R-R-R-T-S-T-R-R-R-R-R-R-T-S-T-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-T-S-T-R-R-R-R-S-T-S-T-W. All right, I did a tweet. what's going on with Oculus? Is anybody actually using these? And I just pointed out a trend I see all the time. And I didn't mean any offense to the Oculus team, by the way. This is not specific to Oculus. It's really about VR. But Oculus is the leader. So I mentioned them. So again, apologies to anybody at Oculus who took this personal. I know Parmelucky, the founder of Oculus, who is no longer at Oculus, liked one of the rebuttals to my tweet. But here's the tweet. I said, every person I know who has bought an Oculus uses it for a couple of days. They won't shut up about it for one week, and then they never bring it up again, which is to say they stop using it. Explain slash name this pattern. I named it the Oculus try, oh my, and goodbye. So I was being a little cheeky, maybe a little sharp elbowed. Ryan Engel, whose Twitter bio reads, creator of Top Golf with ProPut for Oculus, Golf Scope founder and CEO, former CTO Wikibai, extremely bullish on VR, responded, not according to our usage metrics. Real data is greater than Twitter anecdotes. However, if people you know didn't buy it to game,

then it's probably right. It's primarily a glimpse into the future for non-gamerers. We skew older golf averaging, because I asked a follow up question like, who's using it? And he said, averaging around 30 to 40 years old, mostly male, but apparently a higher female percentage compared to most VR games, our game is very social and pretty relaxing. So I think it's a nice escape, my 65-year-old dad has been playing a daily for a year. He also noted, someone can say they hate VR, but the data says

they play 10 hours a week, yada, yada. And so I responded, and I thought this is a very interesting insight, because almost everybody I know who's bought one of these headsets from Oculus, which is the leader, and they're really affordable, and they're super impressive. Like, that's why I was saying, people get really excited about it and then stop using it, so I'm just wondering

out why that is. The people I know who bought these were all PC gamers, like they were intense gamers. And I think the issue is, if you're an intense gamer and you really like PC games or console games, I think VR is not as good. It's not as good of an experience. So if you've got a lot of gaming enthusiasm and you're really the tip of the spear, I think VR is a step back for you. It's not as engaging. You might like playing Sabre, whatever. Dancing Sabre one or you might like this golf one. But I came up with another theory because then there's the people who play casual games,

right? And there's many more casual gamers on phones playing bejeweled or cut the rope or angry birds or, you know, candy crush. You know all these games. Farmville. I think those people might also be interested in VR, but it's not portable in the same way, right? So who is the audience? Well, I thought this was interesting.

So I really appreciated the response I got back from Ryan about golf. And we should book them for the show, by the way, producer Justin. What they've explained, I think, is, listen, playing golf on a PC or playing golf on your iPad, those experiences might not be that fun, right? Do you want to play golf on your PC or golf on your iPhone? I don't think so. but the real world golf, that's hard. You got to get a bucket tea time. It's massively expensive.

So that if you were considering golf versus like real world golf versus VR golf, VR golf is cheap and easy and fun when compared to real world golf. It's much cheaper. It's much easier. You don't have to get in a car. And it's a lot of fun. So maybe there's something about real world activities that are expensive. and hard to do.

Mountain climbing, scuba diving, skiing, I'm thinking out loud here, flying an airplane, hang gliding, maybe you even include dangerous in this. So things that are dangerous and expensive that maybe only rich people can do or that are, you know,

take a lot of coordination, maybe those are perfect for VR. Because VR is about creating a world. Well, if you're doing a first person shooter or you're playing, you know, Diablo, whatever game you're into a Fortnite, maybe that doesn't work as well, but these other things do.

So I thought this was kind of interesting. A frequent source of scoops on Twitter and Facebook features Jane Wong, aka Wong M. Jane, worth following, frequently posts playing the game Beat Sabre, which is kind of like Guitar Hero with lightsabers. And I actually played this. We bought two of the new Oculus. My kids loved it.

We used it for a week. And it's been sitting collecting dust ever since. And I think I paid 50 bucks for it. But my lord, beat saber is awesome. That is a very fun game. And I think that's like another perfect example. You really, what do you can do go fencing or something? You really can't play a Star Wars lightsaber game.

I'm surprised that Beat Saber, lightsaber, I'm surprised they didn't get sued by Lucasart. It feels like they just stole the IP from Star Wars because they are literal lightsabers. I'm not sure how that was allowed. Does anybody in the Noddy Gang know, my live viewers? Do you know if Lucasart gave a lot? license. Somebody looked that up if Lucasart gave their permission for Beatsaber?

Was there any lawsuit or, because it did feel to me unfair for them to copy lightsaber so blatantly with Beetsaber. I mean, I don't, I'm not trying to start trouble here. But, I mean, they could have called it sword or some saber and not made

a glowing lightsabers. I mean, it's literally glowing lightsabers. And they should, I would say Disney should just buy this company. If I was Disney, I would threaten to sue the company and then give them a buyout offer at the same time. I would say, here's the hard way. Here's the easy way. And if they're not in compliance.

And what an amazing thing, Beat Sabre would be if you could play Obi-Wan or Darth Mall or if you could battle other people and you could have the IP of Obi-Wan teaching you, you know, there's a specific style that Obi-Wan and Quigong Jin used versus a Shokitana. And according to some of our live listeners here, Facebook bought Beat Sabre. and there apparently is another game, Vader Immortal, which is actually licensed properly. For those of you who are asking, if you own IP, the reason you see these lawsuits so frequently, in fact, Lucasfilm back in 2016 sued some Jedi school because they were training people on Knitabers.

The reason IP owners have to do this is because if you don't, the lawyers tell you, if you don't sue somebody for infringing on your trademark, then some really bad actor can use your trademark and point to the times you didn't sue other people and say, well, you didn't stop them and they did more infringing or did equal infringing, therefore you can't stop up. So it's either you protect it or you lose it. You protect your IP or you lose it. So anyway, basically with this VR stuff, my personal belief is that the headsets are too heavy, too cumbersome, and the other options out there for gaming are too compelling, and that the software is just not there yet.

In other words, I think they've solved the platform problem. You know, there's a big enough platform out here. I think they solved monetization because people who have these will pay 50 bucks, $25 for these games. I did. Other people will, but it should be a little cheaper. And I think the software hasn't found, hasn't been refined enough. So I think, you know, Beat Sabre and Rec Room are the two that people really like.

I think it's going to take another maybe three revisions, two or three revisions on the software for somebody to make something that is so compelling that a million or two million people a day want to use it. And I think when you get a million people playing a social game per day, as opposed to per month, I think Rec Room says they have a million active users. When you start to get millions of active users per day, then when you show up to play a game, it really becomes interesting. So it does feel like we're on the cusp with VR. And I wonder if VR, the headsets are just too heavy, too expensive, too clunky, you know, the fear of tripping over animals in your house, children, bumping into stuff. And that may be AR. If you can pay beat sabers on Google

AR glasses and you see the beats coming to you and you can see your friends around, that would be super interesting. But I do give Oculus a lot of credit the latest headset that doesn't need to be plugged in or sync with your phone is dynamite. But the games are not as compelling as iPad games and PC games and console games. So that's where I think the investment has to come in.

But we'll see. I think the metaverse is a bit of a bust. I think the real world is more fun. If your bank charges outrageous fees, you need a bank account that's built for small businesses. You need to check out Novo's free business banking platform. Novo

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Give it a shot. It's amazing. All right, everybody. A friend of the pod, Jeff Lawson, is back with us. If you've been listening to this pod over the last decade, he's been on, I think, four or five times, episode 308 in 2012, episode 495 in 2014, episode 967 in 2019, and back again today. As you know, Twilio has been on quite a tear.

They IPOed in June of 2016, and they were trading at around $5 billion in market cap. And today, they're a $57 billion company, 12 times their first closing price. And it's because of some pretty spectacular earnings and growth. they're on a $2.6 billion run rate or so of 50% year over year. That puts you in the high growth category. And they have over 240,000 active customers as of June 2021. That's certainly gone up a bit. Over 6,000 employees.

And they've been buying a lot of companies. Major news since the last appearance when Jeff was on, they closed their segment acquisition in 2020 for $3.2 billion. And we actually had segments, CEO Peter Reinhart, on the program. episode 935 back in May of 2019. And Jeff, you're just off of launching Twilio Engage at your Signal event today, but welcome back to the program. Thank you so much, Jason. It's great to be back.

So it's been pretty crazy since your last time on the pod. We've had the pandemic. Everybody's gone to work from home. And as crazy as it seems, the pandemic for SaaS companies has been just as a absolutely an accelerant because people are spending more time online, online services, need more backend services like you provide. What has it been like for Twilio during this crazy pandemic? Obviously, we're taping this as the Delta variant seems to be waning.

We can only hope. And we almost got there on vaccines. So close. Yeah, knock on wood. Yeah. Well, you know, it's, as you said, it's an acceleration, right? which is the trends that have driven digital adoption and, you know, what people call digital transformation.

These things have been going on for the last 15, 20 years. You know, they got accelerated by mobile phones and smartphones. They got started in many ways because of the web. Well, COVID accelerated those trends even more, right? Because we become even more reliant on these digital workflows of getting things delivered to us instead of going face to face, of buying things. online instead of offline. And it's interesting, even trends like seeing a doctor via video, I think have experienced

a one-way acceleration, which is, you know, telemedicine, you know, was not invented during the pandemic. It had been around for a while, but, you know, most of our habits were like, oh, when I need to the doctor, I go to the doctor. That's what I do. Well, along came the pandemic and many people had their first telemedicine visit for one reason or another, whether it was just a, you know, well, regular checkup or a scrape or whatever it is, you saw a doctor via video and you realized, oh, wow, like, that was so much more

convenient. You know, if I need to see a doctor, you know, I don't have to call and schedule and then take a, take half day off of work, drive across town, find parking, sit in the waiting room where I assume I'm getting more sick, being in a doctor's waiting room. Yeah. They're like, all I need to do is take 15 minutes out of my calendar and join yet another Zoom, right, basically. Right. and see the doctor and how much more convenient that is.

And I think the net result of that is more people are going to get health care. You're not going to put off that appointment. Or for folks, especially those in rural areas, they will be able to see the doctor that they couldn't see. Or imagine folks who are hourly workers. We're seeing the doctor literally means going without salary. Right. Because you need to take a day off of work. And imagine if you're a kid needs to go to the doctor.

And you need to drive to like across the state. and to find that specialist and take days off of work and go without your wages, imagine all the medical appointments that just don't happen. Anyway, it's just one example, but I think it's such an amazing one because the acceleration of telemedicine is just one example. This is a one-way street. These experiences that we have had, we've realized just how powerful they are, how they give us back time, how they make us more efficient, and that, you know, we've been.

did a survey of a few thousand companies recently, and we asked them, how much did COVID accelerate your digital strategy? And on average, the digital roadmaps of companies were accelerated by six years. Wow. Six years. And that's backed up by some of the conversations that I've had with folks. I was talking with the CIO of a major big box retailer. And this was last year, and the CIO said, we saw a, for him, this was like mid-last year, he said, we saw a five-year acceleration of our e-commerce adoption in the course of one quarter. Wow. You can imagine just how companies have to pour resources in to support that growth, to support

their customers, and that has been just a critical acceleration. I remember that weekend. You remember the weekend where just really everything shut down? Yeah, that was like. I think it was the 12th. Friday the 13th. I'll never forget. It was Friday.

13th. And I think it was the 12th that the NBA canceled the game with people on the court and was like, everybody go home and you're like, go home? Wow, that's dramatic. That week, it was the week of March 9th, 2020, when just everything just got so real here in the United States at least.

And that weekend. So I was actually on a work trip that week. I got home. And it was like, We're all going into lockdown. And like, you can imagine like, you know, every executive team of every company was having calls of like, okay, what are we, you know, what's going on, what are we doing? We had shut down all of our offices early that week.

And, you know, there were real questions raised of like, okay, like, should we stop hiring? Should we even do you put a pause on all? Because who knows what's about to happen? Right. And an interesting thing happened. That weekend, I got so many emails from developers, customers, customers, partners, nonprofits,

you name it. People saying, I'm building a thing. I'm building a thing to help kids homeschool. I'm building a thing to help keep patients out of hospitals that are going to get overwhelmed.

I'm building a thing to help keep people safe or keep track of loved ones or blah, blah, blah. So many ideas. Suddenly we're coming out of the woodwork. And everyone was saying, hey, you know, Jeff,

you know, can you hook us up with credit? Can you find us help? I don't know how to do this. And in that moment, I realized just how important the builders of the world were going to be to help us all manage through this pandemic. Yeah. And in that moment, we decided it was like, we are not going to freeze hiring. In fact, I think we're going to grow.

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slash twist, and review the current deals. There's no payment involved until you decide to invest. That's our crowd.com slash twist to sign up for free. And if you look at the other silver linings that have occurred, you have this great accelerant, right? And doctors, if you just think about doctors, like, I'm assuming you and I both have, like, great doctors. We might have a concierge doctor. When you get to a certain station in life, you can pay to have a doctor who will talk to you on SMS. When you're part of the whatever HMO, they're not talking to you on SMS.

They're not going to do a FaceTime with you anytime. of the day or the weekend. Now that has, now doctors are embracing that. I'm like, wait a second, this is more effective. I can see more patients in less time. I can make more money. And so it's actually, everybody gets to benefit from maybe something that only elite people had access to, even when it comes to food delivery and those kind of things. There were many places that didn't even have food delivery. You had very few choices. And that expanded. And the big one for me, I don't know if you've been watching this the past week with MRNA. MRNA is going to create a vaccine for HIV and malaria.

Really? Like, there's a big argument here that HIV and more people die from malaria every year than will accumulate die from COVID. That's a certainty. And the suffering from HIV, I'm not sure exactly what those top line numbers are. But this is the MRNA advancements are going to change everything, right? and the fact that we've even been able to slay two or three more dragons that we never thought we'd ever slay. You know, they say necessity is the mother of invention, right?

Right. And during periods of drastic change to society, there is so much more necessity than ever. And you think about what happens in wars, what happened in the Cold War, the space race. And, you know, a pandemic is, I think, a similar thing where the changes that occur, the massive changes, in society create necessity to adapt to those change. And in particular, it's the software people of the world who can adapt incredibly quickly. Because software is so malleable. We can build anything in software. And that's what's so interesting about our current times is that whether it is changes brought

about by the pandemic or the acceleration of competition in the digital realm, the need for companies and organizations and entire societies to adapt to an accelerated pace of change has never been greater. And I liken it, you know, I released a book earlier this year called Ask Your Developer. Ah, cool. And the book is of all about how business folks can better partner with software talent and technical talent, software developers, to unleash their companies during this digital era. And I observed because I'm a CEO, but I'm also a software developer. I've got a foot in both worlds.

And I've observed many times that business people don't always know how software developers work. What do they do all day? And what makes a healthy software development organization from an unhealthy one? And how do I enable those folks? And for many business executives, the software talent, the software development is like a black box. They don't really know how it works. They think product specs and pizza go in one end and not the other end comes code.

And like, that's how it works. And so I wanted to demystify it and actually help folks learn how to work better with those software developers. And one of the things that I observed in the book is how there's a almost literally Darwinian evolution of every industry going on right now. And this has been accelerated by COVID and many other things. but it is essentially the need for companies to build in order to survive. And the basis of it, look, if you roll the clock back 20 years, and that's when IT was mostly thought of as this back office concept, and it was about your printers having paper in them

and like the financial system that ran somewhere in the bubbles of the company. They were like the photocopy room or the mail room. They were just a service provided to executives. Yeah, it was like a cost center and the idea that you would outsource it and save money wherever possible. It made a ton of sense. And like in that context would always be these questions, the famous questions, build versus buy, right? Yeah. And you know, you'd say, okay, well, we need a financial system or whatever it is we need. Well, you know, we could build our own. But of course, some vendor comes in and says, no, why would you reinvent the wheel? You're just going to buy

what we have. We've already done this. You'd be a fool to go build it yourself. And look, they were usually right back then. And so you just buy something. You buy Oracle, financials, whatever it is. Well, over the last 20 years, The power of software has moved from that back office, cost centering stuff, to the source of customer differentiation. The power for the company is the ability to serve customers in mobile apps and on the websites and digitizing all these processes. Think about your bank. You know, you no longer walk into a branch. Your bank is an app.

And so your ability. Look at the airlines. Like they never had apps. And now you open the United app, the JetBlue app, the whole experience is just flawless and perfect. they're not outsourcing that to somebody. They're not telling you to go to kayak. They're building that in-house, right? Think about what happens.

Like, with any flight, you get on the airplane, you take off, you land. It's hopefully on time. But, like, really, the experience in the air is not that different regardless of whose metal tube you're in. And really, it's all the stuff that you wrap around that experience that makes it, you know, that builds loyalty. That makes you say, oh, I love this airline and not that airline. Or I regularly want to fly this one. And that experience is something you have to build. you can't just get by a turnkey thing off the shelf from some vendor that you and all your

competitors are putting because guess what happens? Some startup enters the field. And they're great at software, right? And out of necessity, what do they do? They think about the customer. What is the customer need? How is the customer not getting served by the status quo? And if I can go answer that question, that I will build my business.

And out of necessity, they figure out something that will make customers care and then they start building their business. And when that happens, all the incumbents in an industry, first no one notices. Then they start getting bigger and bigger and bigger. They raise a bunch of venture capital and they start getting a lot of attention. And the incumbents one by one say, whoa, whoa, hold on. Like, we can't let them go, you know, win the hearts, minds, and wallets of our customers. We got to go do it. So they start building. And they start saying, well, we have to go listen to customers and building. And the survival of the fittest here. And if you think about it, survival of the fittest is those that adapt most quickly will survive.

and that's literally what's happening in industry after industry, which is adaptation to changing environment is what dictates survival. And so the companies that adopt software, that software mindset, that agility, and think my job is to go listen to customers and build the answers to their problems better than anyone else in my competitive set. Those are the companies that win. And so it's no longer build versus buy. It's build versus die.

Yeah. I love it. I mean, that's a great way to summarize it. If you, when you were saying that, I just had so many examples come into my head. The one I was just thinking of is look at Netflix versus Disney. Disney was selling Netflix, you know, Daredevil and a, you know, a bunch of the Punisher and saying, yeah, you guys figured out how to do direct to consumer. You've got this great app. Here, we'll sell you our IP.

And then all of a sudden, Disney's like, wait a second. We're losing. They've got our customers. Like, we need to have our own product. And what do they do? Just like you're saying, they hire a bunch of developers. They build Disney Plus. Disney Plus is an awesome product.

And now they're head-to-head versus Netflix. But what did Netflix spend? Ten years without anybody even considering competing with them. And then HBO Max is like, oh, God, Disney's doing this. We need to do this. And it was really Hulu and Netflix. Industry. Every industry has undergoing this transformation.

And here's what's interesting. So the pandemic has accelerated all these trends, right? And so every company is working to become a digital. company and working to build great relationships their customers, the pandemic, accelerated their need to do that. But it's also accelerated the digital giants. Netflix, Amazon, Google, Facebook, right? Think about fang.

Like, are we more reliant on those companies now than we were 18 months ago? I think probably so. Yeah, Amazon for sure. I mean. Right? I mean, I think people have watched a lot more Netflix than they did 18 months ago, right? over the past 18 months. And the amazing thing about those companies is the reason those experiences get better and

better and better is because they are building and they get better with the more we use them. So Amazon learns, hey, what are the things that Jason likes to shop for? What are the relevant products? And can tailor that experience, whether it's on the website, whether it's on the mobile app, whether it's when you're talking to an Alexa. It's like those experiences get better and better and better because there are. listening, they're paying attention. It's one fluid conversation. Your entire journey as a

customer is one giant conversation between you and the company where they are listening and tailoring back to you. And as a result of that, it is getting better and better and better. And so while the pandemic has accelerated everyone's digital roadmaps, it has massively accelerated the digital giants. And here's the thing. I think when you look at what's going on in our society today, I think companies and consumers, the companies are really worried about having to pay a digital tax to Apple, to Google, to Amazon, to Netflix. Like, do I, should this small handful of companies get 30% off the top of all of our businesses? I think every company is worried shitless about that.

Yeah. Because they're saying if they have the relationship with the customer and I can only buy the customer's eyeballs transactionally. And I have to win to get the next buy and the next buy. I have to pay them every single time. Wow, that is going to make my digital future really hard to unlock. And so company after company is realizing that they have to build great technology.

They have to build great data. They have to understand their customers. They can't just do the lazy thing of like, well, let me buy, let me outsource understanding customers to, you know, a company who I can just buy ads and say, go target people. and like I have to reacquire my customers every time. They're like, no, I have to build that loyalty, that relationship with my customers. And I need to do it directly. And I need to do it in a way that's unbreakable where my customers can't be auctioned off to the next highest bidder every day.

Yeah, they have to be your customers. You have to have their contact information, which if you think about your journey at Twilio, you know, we had a time period where people signed up with email or they bought something from an app store and you had zero relationship with them. Maybe you knew something about their phone when they installed these. app, maybe when they upgraded it, but that was all you knew. And now every signup, I mean, I think in no small part to what you did with Twilio, especially the early version with messaging on phones, the first thing people ask for is your phone number. And everybody in society is like, yeah, of course I'll sign up with my phone number. That's even better. But then you have Apple realizing this and then obscurifying and saying, hey, use your Apple login.

It would be more private. You don't have to give your email. So I'm curious what you think of, let's go into Apple specifically. They have tried to under the guise of, and I believe them, they want to protect people's privacy. They seem to be very focused on that. Seems like a noble mission to me. They're like, hey, we're going to obscureify the email. We're going to obscureify your phone.

What are your thoughts on that and the impact that has on businesses? Is it a good thing, ultimately, that they're protecting more privacy? Privacy changes that are going on in technology and in our society, whether they're driven by governments, whether they're driven by technology companies themselves, are positive. I think if most consumers knew what was going on behind the scenes and knew the kinds of data about them that was being assembled and amassed and how that was used to, you know, one way you would say target ads, that sounds fine. And other ways to say manipulate you.

I think people would be horrified. I mean, I remember I was talking to my sister, maybe this is like two years ago. And, you know, I was kind of talking about some of the dangers of Facebook. and I said that so they target ads at you really effectively. I was just kind of explaining how Facebook worked and like just the things to be aware of. And she said, there's ads on Facebook. You didn't notice every third post basically is an ad? No idea, right?

They design it that way. Right? You know, and it's super clever and they've built an amazing business. But at the same time, I think if people really understood how it all worked, they would say that they're not comfortable with it. And I think that's the reckoning that's been happening. which is society catching up with the advancements that have happened and asking the really good questions of like, what do we value as societies? And therefore, privacy is critical, but privacy is also making it harder for companies to build

their businesses, right? And that is further accelerating the need for every company to take their first party data and learn from it and get really good at using the things. that you volunteer to a company in order to help them tailor the experience. Do I think when I go to Amazon and when they say, you know, products you might like based on what you've browsed, do I find that creepy? No, that's useful. Yeah.

But if they were selling that to everyone else, like, now that's creepy, right? So when a company does it directly with you, that's called paying attention. Right. That's called being, you know, engaging. Yeah, I mean, that's the bartender. That's a bartender remembering how you like your drink and, you know, saying, hey, you want the regular, Jeff, here you go. One of my favorite examples of this is Nordstrom.

I remember several years ago, I was talking to Eric Nordstrom, and he said, you know, in the 50s and 60s where Nordstrom really came to its prominence in this era, people walked into Nordstrom because the salesperson knew your name, walked in the door, they said, how was that suit that I sold you last month for the wedding? Like, it was good? He's like, and that level of like high touch, that experience, that consistency like that That's what customers loved about Nordstrom. And now our strategy is we figure out how do we scale that feeling?

Because now we're obviously, we're online, we're digital, and like, we're not pretending like that's the world we live in anymore, but that's still the way we want a customer to feel. And I think that that is absolutely true. And the interesting thing is most companies, you know, how do all these systems work that they use to, like, build these customer experiences? It's like, while you went out and you bought a marketing class. You went out and bought a sales cloud. You went out and bought a CRM.

You went out and bought a contact center. You went out and bought an e-commerce engine. You have all these bits and pieces. They can't talk to each other. They're kind of turnkey apps. They're really hard to customize. And what you end up with is this really disjointed experience. And when your people, your product managers have an idea like,

wouldn't it be great if we could do this? And you turn around and you look at the app that you bought and you say, doesn't do that? All right. Well, I guess we're kind of stuck. And, you know, do you think Amazon just went out and bought a CRM? system and like plugged it in and said, okay, we're done. No, of course not. They built this. So it took years. Building your own technology, understanding that space of code.

Can you expect every company to go build the same things that has taken Amazon and Netflix and Google, like, you know, a decade to go build? No, every company can't be expected to go do that. And that's why at Twilio, we launched the Twilio customer engagement platform. And is that what you announced this week at the conference? Exactly, which is to say, like, we started in communications, you know, delivering the leading platform for voice and messaging and email and chat and video and all the channels of communications. What customer said is, hey, this is great.

You know, we powered a trillion communications last year. So it's like we're powering all these customer experiences. But it's the software that decides, you know, what message to send and what should it say and like, should I send it or not send it? Am I going to annoy Jason or am I going to delight Jason with this? Those are really hard problems. And it's a problem first of how do I understand my customer? So I don't just blindly go blast the same marketing email to a million people regardless of who they are or what they are in the journey.

How do I actually do a good job of that? How do I support a customer when they write in? Like if they need help, how do I make that a great experience? The agent knows who are. They know what you bought. You don't repeating your name and your account number and your mom's dog's maiden name 10 times. Like how do I make these experiences and a great ones? and you do that by building and by stitching these things together.

And like if you go over and look at the digital giants and say, well, they didn't just buy something off the shelf. No, they've built it. These great experiences are built, not bought. Well, then everyone else needs the ability to do that too. And so what we are doing is democratizing all of these great data systems and personalization systems so that every company will be able to execute with the same level of precision and personalization and customization.

So customer engagement platform is different than CRM, customer relationship management, or is it just your spin on it? That's the word you use because you're a communications platform and you did all this messaging before. So instead of saying, hey, this is a CRM, you're swapping in that engagement because that's at the core of what Twilio does. Am I reading that correct in terms of the marketing branding of it? positioning of it.

CRM is a B-to-B concept, right? CRM started as like salespeople typing in the notes on their sales conversations to enable sales teams to be more effective to all sales managers to understand the state of their pipeline. I mean, that's what CRM is. Sure. And if you think about it, you know, everything that a B-to-B company knows about their customers is basically what's been typed into a, what's been typed into a form, right?

Yeah. Oh, I talked to them and the buyer, the vice president is on vacation this week, whatever. Yeah. B-to-C? isn't about salespeople typing in notes. B2B is really, or B2C is about scale and data and building automation. Because there is no salesperson typing in a note. B to C is about paying attention.

How are customers using my apps? What are they clicking on? What are they viewing? What are they viewing? What do they return and using all that signal in order to make your company more relevant and better for those customers. And it's a completely different scale than the B2B problem. Like B2B, I think every salesperson typing and every note on the planet caps out at about

10,000 rights per second. Like if you summed up the entire CRM industry, 10,000 notes per second are made during the business day. And it's not being made in code. It's not like you're saying, hey, anybody who felt like price was the reason that they didn't engage with our product, we're going to send them this affordability or how to make more money using this product. It's not like they're programmatically using it in any way,

but what you're doing with the new platform is saying, hey, let's bucket people into segments and let's market to them intelligently and programmatically and make it feel more like the Amazon experience. So that means this product goes head to head with HubSpot, I would say, off the top of my head. I don't think there's really a, I don't think anyone has done this for B to C companies effectively. Got it.

I think most B2C companies have to go essentially build it themselves or really struggle to build it themselves because there's a lot to do. And so our goal is to deliver the platform that gives companies a leg up that does a lot of that heavy lifting for them so that then they can go in and build in their secret sauce, their magic, the things that they really want to build for their customers, and in doing so be able to compete on a level playing field. And so when I think about like, you know, consumer companies, it's a totally different scale. If the B to B world is 10,000 notes, you know, written at a time, it's like in the B to C

world, you're talking of like trillions of data points collected every second. Yeah. And so it needs to be architected completely different. It needs to be consumed in a very different way. Machine learning is critically important to make sense of all that data. And then personalization, you know, I was talking to at our conference this week, I was talking to Intuit, to Mariana Tesla, the CTO of Intuit. And she said that, you know, at Intuit, they used to have like, you know, a few buckets

of customers, like think about the life cycle of. a customer. They're like, okay, they were like a few categories. And, you know, so they could do some minor personalization to it. And she said with the Twilio segment, leading customer data platform that allows companies to ingest, like all this interesting data, how they're clicking on your products, how they're using the website, the mobile apps, all these data points, you can actually really start to understand your customer. And they've gone from a few buckets to over 500 different segments that they use to micro-target their customers. And in doing so, I've got an incredible lift in engagement.

I think they more than doubled the number of people who are actually engaging because they send you something relevant. You know, Jason, you've been a customer for 10 years and I send you the, you know, hey, you need help doing your taxes this year? It's like, no, of course, I've done it 10 years on you. Why don't you listen? Why don't you paying attention, right? Yeah, that's not the message for me.

And if you think about it, like when we're talking about this acceleration that occurred in during COVID, how many restaurants did you go to that move to, you know, toast? or whatever online platform for typing in your phone number, ordering on your phone, hanging on your phone. And have any of these restaurants emailed you yet and been like, hey, Jeff, you know,

uh, yeah, we, we know that you love, uh, burgundy's and, uh, we're having our burgundy festival this Sunday and we're going to have

Cocovin and we'd love to have you come and have a burgundy with it. Uh, you know, we've got this family meal plant, whatever is that. I mean, nobody's using the data. So it's almost like this collection of the data has occurred,

but the actual segmentation, of it and the micro-targeting or doing 500 groups, it's just, people don't get to it, do they? They just don't get to it. It's too hard. Well, it takes a lot of expertise. It takes a lot of talent. And the reason is you look at the digital grades, right? They have the talent.

They have armies of really great engineers building this stuff. And every company needs that same thing. And so that's what we're doing with our customer engagement clubs. We launched a bunch of things this week. But, you know, one of the big things we launched is a new product called Twitter. TILO Engage. So, Twillio segment, the leading customer data platform in the market, helps customers gather all the data from all those click streams and all those usage of apps. They can connect to everything and build a profile of the customer.

And the question is, well, what do you do with that? And so what we launched is Twillio Engage. That lets you act on that understanding of your customer. So based on that profile, you can create all sorts of different segments. You can create journeys. and then based on where a customer is in that journey, customize your messaging, so email campaigns, messaging campaigns, advertising campaigns. So it connects your digital communications, your digital advertising budgets into one place

where you build up the best real-time view of your customer, then use that to customize every one of these things. And I think back to like, you know, traditional, you know, marketing, you know, SaaS. And it's like, okay, most of the marketing clouds that are out there today were built in the era of email. We were built, you know, 15, 20 years ago. They have like, you know, oh, here's the six fields you can use to customize your customer record. You know, and if they're lucky, you know, customization means, you know, the email says, hi, Jason. And doesn't actually have the curly brace, curly brace first underscore name.

Right, exactly, right. And it's like, that's called custom. If you successfully do the merge of first name, you. You're called, it's been customized, job done, right? And then the marketers, these other things are like, what do they look at as success for this thing? They look at like opens and clicks. Right.

Right. And you say, well, that's really all we can look at is like, well, did anyone open the email? I guess that's good. You know, we got, you know, 4% people open the email. Oh, that's good. Like, well, no, what does the business really care about? Did this campaign actually result in Jason becoming a better customer?

Yeah. Then it moved Jason down the customer journey. And because segment is tight. into the data stream of all the systems, including your e-commerce systems and everything else, they can say, well, run a campaign, but you decide, you know, what is the target you're going to track to say success for this campaign? It shouldn't be opens. It should be, did he buy something? And that buying something might be two days later. But you can now take a very flexible array of outcomes that you as a business are trying to achieve and use those as the goal for your

marketers. And like, isn't that what everyone's really trying to do? Which is to use all this technology, understand your customer, engage with customer, ultimately to build your business. That's what Tullio engage lets companies do. Is there, as you talk, and I know you guys have done a really great job with the acquisition, Sendgrid, obviously, and segment being the two big ones, is there something happening now where all of these SaaS communication, CRM, marketing and sales platforms are converging into some singularity because, you know, there's Zendesk over here. here at Clavio, HubSpot, we talked about.

And then you mentioned Intuit, and they just bought MailChimp. And so you have all these disparate pieces. And it seems like I saw HubSpot had launched Salesforce-like features. Salesforce obviously added customer support. So is everything just going to converge into a platform, whether it's Salesforce's HubSpotts or yours, that just manages an entire customer's business? Is that what's happening here? And then there have a bunch of downtream questions from there, if that is happening,

in your mind. Is that a singularity? The short answer is yes, right? Think about the back office of the company. The back office, you know, like the CFO, right, you know, they've got a financial system. Kind of everything has to be tied into that financial system or else it doesn't exist, right? At most companies, if a revenue stream isn't actually flowing into the financial system, like you're not allowed to launch it, right?

And that's because actually keeping track of the financials of the company is important and have it all tied together because companies have to report their financials, right? You look at the front office of a company. How do you make money? How do you serve your customers? And companies have been cobbling together combinations of technologies, some that they built, some that they bought, trying in vain to stitch these things together to build that cohesive experience and largely fail it.

I don't think most executives wake up in the morning and say, like, do I really think we've dialed this in, that we really are able to take and have a view of our customer that incorporates everything we know about them and allows us to make some people. smart decisions based on that. The answer for every executive I've ever talked to is like to know. And as much as we're trying, we've invested a lot to try to do that. You know, the proliferation of like adding yet new more things to the mix is actually happening faster than we can actually bring all the data together and actually act on the stuff we already have. And so I believe that we will, companies do need a more sensical way to execute their customer facing parts. But

here's the thing. It's not going to be a turnkey app. It's not going to be like, oh, yeah, you just, you know, you plug it in and you hire some consultants, maybe to do some configuration, and then you're good to go. Because the customer facing stuff that you do, that's how you differentiate. That's how you serve your customer. That has to be bespoke. That has to be for your customer. It's, it's not that it's bespoke for the sake of being bespoke. It's, it is, it is a build because customers and competition demands it. But if your customer experience is the same as everyone else is, well, what's going to happen?

You're going to start to say, hey, well, in order to win, we have to be different. And what do we do? We go listen to our customers. Our customers say, hey, well, you know, it sucks about everything. I wish my bank did this. I wish my airline did that. I wish my whatever. And then when you hear that, you know, companies start building.

And say, okay, well, if we're the ones to do that, customers are going to love us more. And we're going to go in the hearts minds and wallets. Therefore, we have to go build. And so the platform that companies need to build this customer facing the full, facing part of their business. The top line growth engine of a business is a platform that enables them to understand their customers, act on it, and build.

That's what we're building at Twilio because we believe our mission is to unlock the imagination of builders. I like it. That's a new tagline. Yeah. If you think about it, builders build all sorts of things. Humanity is where it is

because the imagination of builders has gotten us to where we are. And we we have built amazing things. Now we built some problems too, but we have built amazing things. I mean, that is probably the defining characteristic of humanities that we build. Oh, it is. And therefore, and now one of the most powerful ways the human beings are building is number one, you know, in a capitalist society is building companies.

And like, that's our method of collaborating to build things more valuable than what we can build individually. And number two is with software, you have unprecedented ability to build at scale. And if you think about it, it's kind of mind-blowing that a software developer can sit down at a computer and a text editor and type in some magical codes and hit publish. And that code goes into an app store, it goes onto the internet, and now billions of people can use that thing that that person built. That is a scale of human creation that has never existed before. Yeah. That one person can now affect the lives of billions of people because of the scale of the internet and app storms and all this kind of stuff.

And that creates the opportunity for those developers and for the companies they work for is bigger than ever before. And that's what's so cool about the world that we live in now. It's incredible. I mean, you just think about the iOS ecosystem, the fact that you can make this app, It goes out to, you know, whatever, a billion iPads and iPhones. And obviously that's going to make its way onto the desktop eventually. And, you know, the same app will just run everywhere.

The counter argument to our Apple exerting control with their app store is, don't they deserve something for creating and maintaining that ecosystem? So if 30% is too much, what do you, if you were running Apple and you made a decision about the app store, what would your decision making be on what to charge and how to charge? I'm curious how Jeff would solve that problem. Because they should get something, right? It's a great question, but you also think about choice. You think about choice for end users and you think about choice for developers. And at some point you do run at such big scale that you do have to start to think about like, okay, well, you know, there's a de facto monopolies that do start to occur.

And I think that giving people choice and I think having developers opt into using Apple's services because they make their apps better, they increase customer adoption. That would probably be a better way. If there are payments that are really well integrated and are so easy because it's one click and a face scan and like you've done, if that is such a great experience,

then fantastic. Then developers shop to use it because they're a conversional goal. So earn it. I think in general earning it. But I will also say I do applaud some bits of what Apple has done, a lot of bits of what Apple has done, to create an ecosystem

him where there's some checks in place. So what I just said is like, you know, a single developer writing into their magical text editor can now affect billions of people. Well, with that great power comes great responsibility, Spider-Man. And I do think that unlike, you know, unlike some, Apple has taken that responsibility seriously. Very seriously. When you say some haven't, you're obviously referring to Facebook. We'll get to that.

You know, whatever. I love you as a guest. You're going to get honest in the second half. The last 20 minutes, always the best with Jeff. Go ahead. I've seen you've taken a few sips of a beverage, but I tell you I am not. Oh, that's ginger ale. That's ginger ale.

Sure it is, Jason. The ale part, for sure. But I think that with great power comes great responsibility. And that's why, say it is if I invented that phrase. I think that, like, that's why at Twillio, there's a number of things that we're working on. So first of all, Segment. Segment has only ever dealt in first party data. And in the early days of Segment, customers asked,

oh, hey, can we bring in all this third party data? Can we bring in all this stuff like we're buying data from? And they made a really good decision that was ahead of the time for them, which to say, no, we don't think the future is going to look like that. And we don't want to be a part of building that future. And that was pretty prescient of Peter and the team at Segment to say, we are only going to help you act on and understand your first party data

because we fundamentally believe that world of buying data and data brokers and all that kind of stuff is first of all, not long for this world we think once the world knows of honor it'll go away, so it'll be bad business, but also just ethically. We don't think that's,

that's not why we wake up in the morning is to build a company that lets you do that. Another thing that Tilly was working on and we talked about quite a bit at our conference this week is trusted communications. What does it mean? And, you know, I am looking at a world where when you communicate with somebody, you get a text message or a phone call.

Today, it's largely, you know, plus one, four, one, five, whatever, you know, you see this identity. You're like, do I answer this call? Is this a scammer? Is it my kid's school? Like, I don't know what this is. Maybe I should answer it. You get a text message. Hey, you know, this is your bank.

We need to verify your identity for, you know, wire transfer. Click here. You're like, is that real? How do I know? communications has historically not provided the information like that that web of trust to let you know should I trust this. And because of that, that's why you've got so many robocalls and you've got spoofers and scammers and fisher. Well, in fact, this was a criticism of Twilio in the early days was that people used the platform because you gave them phone numbers and they could burn through phone numbers. And then there was some abuse, right?

And you had to deal with that. And that was a hard decision for you because people wanted to pay for the platform. and their customers, but maybe they were using them in ways that you wouldn't want them to. How did you deal with it back in the day? And so, well, what we did is, you know, many years ago developed our acceptable use policy and said, okay, here are the ways in which we want our technology to be used, and here are the ways we don't want it to be used. And I think as a company, you do have the ability to decide what kind of customers you

want, what kind of use cases you want. And, you know, as long as you've got clear rules and you have to be able to. those to customers in your ecosystem, that certainly you should be able to decide how your technology is used. And that's what I think is really important. So this world of trusted communications, to me, is about building more trust into the communication networks of the world. Now, we can't do this alone because there's thousands of carriers in the world. There's all these different handsets in the world. And so it's really an ecosystem that is moving along. But invoice, for example, a new protocol called StirShakim that we've helped to bring to market along with the carriers has made it so that phone calls can now be trusted because they're digitally signed by the company like Twilio that is initiating that phone call.

Oh, wow. So like a very sign back in the day, like, hey, this website is legit and we know the address and the business, the tax ID or something. You can attach that to a phone number? That's brilliant. Well, well, you know, before all this, you know, if you're, I don't know, Verizon and there's an incoming phone call to your network, it kind of arrives at your boundary. You've no way of knowing if, you know, the phone number that it says it's coming from is actually true or not because the phone network itself was an untrusted network.

Well, I don't know how to say, I don't actually know the right way to phrase it. It was actually a trusted network. If you go way back, I'll give you a little history lesson here. AT&T ran the entire network in the United States. Then they got broken up into baby bells. And in the world where everybody was AT&T, like to be a participant on the phone network, you had to be 18T. That was your badge, right?

Yeah, you bought the phone from them. You can only buy a phone from them. Yeah, and all the equipment sitting in the network was 18. I mean, everything was 18T. And so it was just like, well, we don't need trust. It's trusted by default. Well, of course, then it got broken up into the baby bells. And then the Telecommunications Act of 1996 said like, oh, no, we're going to open up

this network. And it created CLEX and all this sort of stuff. Well, you still had all this running on top of a network with no trust model. And then you start to see all the bad apps. doctors popping up and people who drop phone calls onto the network and spoofing your phone number, Jason and everything else. And that's why it has gotten so messy. And so what we've been working on for the past several years, how are we being trust back in that network? And to me, that looks like when you get a text message from your bank, it's got a padlock. And instead of saying,

you know, plus one, four, one, five, or if it's a short code, you know, 404, 404, 404, whatever, it's, it says, you know, your bank. And there's that green padlock there that says this, is assured to be who they say. And you click that. It says, you know, Twilio is verified, the identity of the sender, right, blah, blah, that's how you know you can trust that message. And if that padlock is missing, that's when you should say, well, I don't know, do I trust this?

Or maybe even your handset just says, you know what? There's no padlock. I'm not even going to show it to you. That's the world that we're building towards where every communication is verified and you know who is sending it and you know that's authentic. And I think that will open the doors for even more interesting things. like commerce, like buying things over communications much more easily because if everything is authenticated, you know that it's safe to do that.

And many more interesting ways in which we can use messaging to engage with companies in ways that we did not even imagine possible. That was one of my favorite early Twilio experiences. I don't know if you remember, there was a company that was like doing e-commerce by messaging, you'd sign up. Then they'd be like, hey, here's a vinyl record that came out this, or these three vinyl records are coming out this Friday. do you want any of them?

And since they knew it was you on your phone number, you just say, yeah, I'll take two or yes to two. And then all of a sudden it just shows up the next day. And it was completely frictionless. I thought it was such a brilliant, elegant solution. But this is even better. I mean, if you knew who was calling you, then I could just get rid of my J-call strategy,

which I'm going to give up for the first time here. This is how I deal with it. Speakerphone. I have my phone in my cradle. Jeff, I just hit speakerphone and mute. Boom. Now, the person starts to say, hello, hello. Now, if it's somebody who's a friend,

to mine, according to a weird number. The way, Jason, it's Joe. Jason, you're there? And then I'm just, oh, yeah, sorry, I just hit the, under the mute button. Somebody who's a spammer, when they get the answer, but no sound and it's muted, they'll talk for like 10 seconds and, like, oh, my God, this is a waste of a phone call.

Take this number out of the database. So I just j-call them. I just j-call them. Let's talk about integration. There used to be a name for that. Remember, you screen your phone calls? The answer machine picks up and you could listen. Yeah, that was actually, you know, Google has that on

on my pixel, they had that screening, but they say, hey, we're screen. Oh, it's called Wildflower. That was the name of the company. Scott Kernett's company, I think. Remember, Wildflower was like the digital assistant where it'd say, hey, you're calling for Jeff. Let me see if I can get them on the line.

And then it were connected. It was really cool, telephony stuff in the early days. Let me ask you about integrating these companies, because you're building now the singularity, right, for communications and trusting communications, segmenting all these. It's a great vision. But you bought SendGrid and you buy segment.

These were not small. assets. These were big companies with a big customer base and Twilio had a big customer base. How did you get these three battleships aircraft carriers to become one armada, become one product, or are they still kind of separate disparate products? Because that was something you hadn't done before, I believe. How did you as a CEO figure that out? And how did it look like? Yeah. Yeah, it's a process. And these things don't happen overnight, right? They take a while. It starts with people, though, it really starts with bringing folks together as one team and building that shared mission. Because like when you acquire a company, they've got their mission, we've got ours.

And when you bring people together, what you need to do is start to build that shared understanding of what we're going to do together. And every time there's an acquisition, right, you know, there's a press release and the CEOs do a little press tour and they talk about this grand vision. And from the outside, you might say, okay, well, you know, that's done. Nice vision. Good job, guys. But in the reality is like inside the company, you have. have to go around. You have to evangelize. You have to talk to the teams and, you know, really sell. Here's what we're building. And then you got to figure out a whole lot of hairy details about how it's

going to work. And, you know, it's, it sounds good in the press release, but the reality is it's like, okay, now we got, you know, to integrate, you know, identity systems and building systems and all systems and even just getting the email to work, you know, between the two companies. I mean, these are just really, you know, mundane details, but it takes teams and a lot of work to go figure out how to do those things. And so, you know, you've got that. But the point of really all that, so how do I create an environment

where now these teams can actually collaborate and unlocking this vision that we have for the company in the long term and the reason why we're coming together and docking these ships together? So you get that buy-in on a people level and then you have to uncover, hey, how we're going to connect all this stuff together.

I'm curious, you've got the big valuation now. you've acquired two companies quite successfully. Does this make you more bold to want to do more acquisitions? Or do you look at it having done two big ones and say, you know what? We've got to be very, very careful with acquisitions, be very thoughtful. And let's face it, prices are sky high right now. The valuations are bonkers for these private companies. So how are you looking at M&A on a go-forward basis?

Or do you feel like you have enough here that you should just do what Zuckerberg basically has done since Instagram and Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It was like he did those two big ones. And he's like, yeah, just we're going to build features from going forward now. We're not buying anything else. Well, look, there is no golden rule. I mean, I don't think, you know, Zuckerberg one day woke up and said, I got to acquire something.

What's it going to be? Oh, Instagram, right? It's like, you think about where you're going. You think about this mission that you're on and a vision for what you're building. For us, it's building the leading customer engagement platform to help every company build a meaningful relationship with their customers because they understand their customers and then they can act on it. And when you look around and you see companies out there that are doing things that are very complementary to what you do and, you know, maybe are doing what you envision yourself doing and you

say, well, you know, we can go compete with them. But, you know, maybe it actually would better serve our customers and better serve our shareholders and everything. If we joined forces instead of competed, you know, that's the sort of analysis that you do. And, you know, the way I think about it is we're we're on a mission. We've got a roadmap. We know what we need to do. And if there was a company or companies that help us achieve that mission faster or better or more thorough than doing it alone, then that's a good reason to do it. But if we think we can build for our customers and we think we can unlock the value and we don't see folks doing it or we think we can do it better than what's out there today, then we build it. And that's the basic calculus.

And so I don't think there's ever a like, we'll never acquire or we must always acquire. I think it's a matter of like we know where we want to go. And if there are ways to get there are faster or better to serve our customers better, then those are the reasons why you might do it. You passed on MailChimp. Obviously, that was put on your desk many times over the years, I'm sure, as a possibility. What was your thinking there? It would seem like it was, in some ways, it might on the surface seem like an easy purchase, but I could see on another thing, you kind of have Sandgrid, you've kind of already built it. It doesn't seem like the hardest technology to build, so you'd just be buying a customer base. What was you're thinking with MailChimp?

Well, I'm not going to comment on another company and whether or not we ever saw them. Close. You've gotten very professional now, Jeff. Your super media trained. Can't get you to talk about milk, Jim. I'm not drinking that ginger ale, Jason. Yeah. But let's talk about as we get ready to wrap here, you've been very generous for your time, as always.

Work from home. And potentially going back, you know, it seems like the stuff we've talked about here, integrating companies, it's a lot of work, and it seems like work that would be well done in an office somewhere. You have great buildings and real estate portfolio. What's your thinking today at the end of 2021 about going back to an office, hybrid? I mean, it's a bit of a moving target. You know, before the pandemic, we were a bit of a distributed company. About 15% of our employees worked, you know, remotely, meaning they weren't attached to an office. And, you know, now that number is, you know, I don't know the exact number, but it's probably closer to 40 or 50% even.

And so we are definitely a distributed company now, as I think many companies are. And so the question is, how do you work as a distributed company? We've all figured out how to do that for the past 18 months. But I think we're also all seeing that we're humans. Human collaboration is built upon relationships and it's built upon seeing each other and shaking hands and breaking bread. And so the challenge becomes, okay, how do we get the productivity of being distributed and how do we get access to the great talent that we've been able to bring into Twilio in this

distributed fashion? And how do we let people live the lives that they want to build and many of those ideas of the lives they want to live. I've changed over the past year and a half. And that's great. And then how do we marry that with a strategy where, but we still build that human connection with each other. So I think what happens is,

you know, we talk to most employees. And this is like up and down the company. It's like most people think that they want to spend, you know, a day or two, a week at an office, you know, building those relationships and getting that face time, breaking bread and doing things that are really good for collaboration,

good for customers, good for the business, good for careers. but that's probably like a day or two a week. And then for teams that are completely distributed, I think the offices are basically off-site locations. So we just built out two floors in our headquarters that are basically built out as off-site venues. Because you've got a team who's got folks distributed around the country.

But, you know, I think quarterly, give or take, they're going to want to come and get together, plan out the next quarter, get that FaceTime, get break bread together. And so can they come to HQ? Can they feel, oh, I'm part of it. I'm in HQ. This is exciting for a few days. is a quarter and we've got this space that's built out just for this type of collaboration.

Then we go home and the next week it's another team there. And so I think there's going to be a lot of those types of things, but I will also say that we are optimizing for flexibility because I also think people don't necessarily know what they want. And I think we'll all evolve our thinking. And so I do take a little bit of grain of salt any time we survey employees because I think about most of the conversations that I've had with folks. I respect my own life and I say, do I really know what I'm going to want two years from now?

Yeah. I don't think I do. And even my thinking has evolved over the course of this summer. You know, I think at the beginning of Sarah, I was actually feeling pretty comfortable in, you know, this work from home environment. And we kind of feeling like we've gotten into our groove. Okay, we know how it works. We got all of our setup going. We got our lights and our cameras or whatever.

And I get to have dinner with my kids. And oh, this is fantastic. And I'll say, like, you know, when we started hitting that 12 month mark and the 15 month mark, you know, I just started really feel like, man, do I miss my coworkers? Yeah. Do I miss that FaceTime? Do I miss the... Because Zoom is all... It's very transactional.

You get on to do a thing and then you get off and you miss the time spent doing nothing. Right. You've been off. Having thought... That's what's lost. The beginning of the pandemic, you know, you had the Zoom happy hours and like that. Corny quickly, right? Yeah.

And so what have we lost? We've lost that connection. So, you know, an interesting thing that we did a few weeks ago at Twilio, we had an all And I just told everybody, I said, look, in most of our places, we can't get back into the offices yet. Or if you do, you have to be masks. So it's not that pleasant. So I get it. We don't want to go back to the offices yet. But if you can safely, go find another Twilion within 50 miles where you are. Go eat outside. Go to a park. Go stay outside. Do mask whatever you're comfortable with. But find each other. Get that face time and expense it to me. And I gave everyone a budget to go to go basically, you know, figure out.

a way to safely based on wherever they are in the world. We've got employees everywhere in the world. Wherever they are in the world, whatever's safe and whatever the regulations are where they are. But go figure out how to safely see your coworkers because we all need a kick in the pants. We got to get out. And we're in this habit now of like, oh yeah, what do I do? I wake up in the morning. I walk downstairs. At the end of the day, I walk back upstairs. It's like we're in this routine now. And just like we had to break our routines when we went into this pandemic, you know, working from home. How do we collaborate? We're on video all day. We now have to break our routines of the pandemic to start forcing ourselves, reminding us of the

humanity of what it means to build something together, to work together, and to force ourselves to get back into that routine. And so I think that's the mode that a lot of people are in right now. And we need some forcing functions to remind us to get out of our comfort zone that we've now gotten into, which is basically work from home most of the time to actually remember that building those bridges, building those relationships. We have to go out of our way to do it, but it is worth it. Yeah, it's really interesting you bring that up because I think the mental health crisis

in this country and then the isolation, people don't realize that they're getting depressed or that they're missing the human connection and it just slowly builds. And my theory on like when you see this crazy behavior where people are yelling at service people or wrestling in the aisles of a Southwest flight, I kind of think of it like a CPU, Jeff. Like somebody's CPU now is that 50, 60% anxiety and capacity from COVID, from isolation. And then, you know, if they have another 20 or 30% of their life's got problematic, and then all of a sudden, spinning wheel of death comes up because they miss their flight or, you know, something's gone wrong.

And they short circuit, right? And the mental health crisis that this is going to create in kids and adults, you know, you need to meet with folks. Let's, um, there's really just two more things I want to talk about, like big picture things. One is the great resignation and getting people to go to work because It seems like a lot of people are reconsidering their entire careers and lives because they stopped commuting. They spent more time with their kids.

They went to Tahoe and lived on, you know, went skiing four days a week. Like a lot of people are just not coming back to work or don't want to work differently or maybe work half the amount of time. And then I want to talk about just San Francisco as a city. So which one you want to go with first as we wrap here? The Great Resignation. The future of San Francisco. Your favorite city in the world, apparently.

Well, let's talk about San Francisco. Okay. So a lot of people have left. Seems like pretty chaotic in the city. Prices were really high. Getting people to move here was extraordinary difficult for all of us in our companies, like management teams. A lot of people would just say, I can't afford to live there.

I can't afford to home. What is your take on what's happening with San Francisco? You know, my take is this. San Francisco is my community. It's my city. It's where my friends are. It's where my family is. It's where my family's friends are.

It's where my kids' friends are. It's where their school is. It's my home. Yeah. And while the pandemic meant that we can work from a variety of places, the way I looked at it is, look, I'm a person of means. I have built a company in this city. I have made money because of that company that I built in the city.

And so many people in this city, in this community are struggling in this pandemic. And as a tech company, we are blessed with relevancy. Our products are relevant. Customers can use more of them. In fact, they need our products more than ever. That's not true for everybody in our society. No. So many people are struggling.

So what do we do in that moment? do we say oh i can get out of here and oh and by the way you have a middle finger on the way out and talk about all the problems the city has or do we roll up our sleeves and help and look i get it that a city is a tough place to be during a pandemic there are a lot of folks you know who lived a bunch of roommates living in a small place because it's expensive and i get it like if you got to get out because you need to preserve your um your mental health you need physical space, like all those things. Great. Absolutely. Go. Take care of yourself. Do what you have to do. I'm not talking about those people.

I'm talking about the billionaires. I'm talking about people with means, people who could live comfortably in this pandemic, people who could roll up their sleeves and help, but instead chose to get out and to give a middle finger on the way out and just say, look at all this problems, you piece of shit city. You know what I say to that? Fuck that. Yeah. when we are blessed with what we have in the tech industry, it's our job to say, how can I help? What can we do to help? How can we use our blessings for the benefit of our community?

Because I think companies exist because of a social contract that says the existence of corporations. Like, Twilio is a piece of paper filed in the state of Delaware. Right. But that's the company, right? That allows us to, you know, own properties. and sign contracts and employee people and all this kind of stuff. It's a construct. It's a construct that society has decided, you know, we're better off with this construct

or without it. Fantastic. That's the basis of capitalism. But you know what? If society is actually worse off because companies aren't actually improving their communities in society, then society can and probably should revoke that contract. And so the question is, I've always thought that our existence is Twilio. One of the reasons why we exist should be to make our community.

communities and society stronger because we existed. And I think great people want to believe in that. They want to believe that the fact that we are all here together means that we are doing good for those around us and we're a good neighbor. So when I look at what happened during the pandemic, where there's a whole lot of people of means who could have rolled up their sleeves and said help but instead just pieced out, when you wonder why people in San Francisco don't like tech,

you know that's why i mean i'd say the counter of the argument is city is miss or the counter people would give is hey the city's been really mismanaged and they hated tech okay this one seemed particularly bad that would be their argument and then hey they were hating tech before this before the pandemic i guess would be the counter what do you think the end game here is though because i anecdotally as an angel investor when i talk to young people what would ted lasso do you Oh, Ted Lasson do exactly. He'd make sugar cookies. He'd say, don't you know?

He makes some biscuits and try to make it better. That is one of the great things to come out of the pandemic with Ted Lasson. I get it. I get it. There's a lot of animosity in the city between tech and non-tech. We're going to do it. We're going to feed into it or are we going to say, you know what? I get it.

There's that history. But in this moment where tech is flourishing and so many are not, what's the opportunity to do? Is it to say, you know, screw you and I'm out of here? Or does it say, okay, let's help. Let's come together. Let's build the city together. of going forward. And we're going to do what we can do because we have these blessings.

I think that's the right way to answer that challenge personally. If only we could figure out the housing thing. I think so much of the strife in San Francisco got built up, unless I've only been here for a decade. But man, it was just watching people suffer to find a place to live and the prices went from $1,500 for a one-bedroom, well, way up to $3,500. And it was like, how do I even survive? They need to build a lot, a lot of housing. And it's just the nimbian this town is so crazy. All right. Final question then leaves us with the great resignation.

What are you anecdotally, emotionally, spiritually getting from young people, you know, people who maybe did well and they're 50 and could retire? And they're saying, you know what? I don't know if I want to work anymore. They're going through some existential crisis and getting harder to hire people. We got 11 million job openings and under 5% unemployment. So there's like 1.5 jobs for every person looking for a job. We went from this Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren saying like, oh my God, we have to raise the minimum wage to all of a sudden companies paying 18 to $30 an hour and going three times the minimum wage.

Because the market seems to be changing radically that there's a term, the great resignation, people don't want to work. Is this temporary? Look in your crystal ball and what are you seeing from executives? Like, do you have executives who are like, ah, don't know if I'm up for it. Don't know if I can do another decade. I think I'm going to go ski or, you know, go write poetry. What do you see? Well, I think in a lot of ways, I'll talk about the tech industry because, you know,

I don't have as much experience in other industries. But in the tech industry, people have always had a lot of options for where they were. Yeah. Right. That's not a new concept. Nope. Right. You know, sometimes people would say, well, you know, people are calling people every day with offer.

I'm like, of course, that's tech. That's how it's always been. So it always will be, right? And so if you start with the question of why do people work in the first place, obviously you have to meet basic needs. And so tech companies and tech jobs are often able to do that. And so then you really work because you are able, you connect with what you're building and who you're building it with. Right? You love the team that you work with. You love the customer you're serving and you feel like there's purpose to what you're doing. And so I think, you know, this moment in time, it just, it still goes back to the fundamentals of why people show up for work when they have many options of things they could do. And that is the blessing of workers in the tech industry is, do you feel a connection to your coworkers? Do you feel a connection to your customer, you're serving? And do you feel a greater sense of purpose? Are you part of something bigger? And so I think for leaders, it's really about reinforcing that, especially in this moment when connections to our customers,

is kind of broken. Connection to our coworkers is kind of broken. We need to rebuild those connections and we need to keep reminding ourselves as leaders and our companies and our people of like, look, here's what we're building that's bigger than the details of our day today, that's bigger than any one of our teams and what we're doing, bigger than what we're doing this year, and connect to that sense of purpose. That's why I'm so proud of the things that Twilio has gotten to do during this pandemic, you know, one of the, one of the really interesting things that happened this year, we committed, we created with Trio.org, Operation Big Shop, we called it. And what we decided, our focus for Twitter.org was going to be helping a billion people get vaccinated around the world equitably. And we're going to do that with our technology. We're going to do that with our people. We're going to do that with our people, with our resources. And so our technology is used by a wide variety of organizations around the world to educate people about vaccine. to provide the logistics of getting people to the vaccine and getting them to the second shot as well. So all those SMSes we got about your second shot and all that stuff, likely powered by Twelia.

That's awesome. Yeah, but we worked with NGOs, we work with governments, we work with private companies, we work with health care providers, we work with a wide variety of folks. And so far, we've already touched close to 400 million people with our technology. And we also gave $18 million to global vaccination. So the UNICEF to GAV and other organizations to provide equitable vaccine distribution around the world. And here's the startling thing.

And I did not. I was really surprised. Twilia was the second largest private company to contribute to that effort and the largest tech company to contribute to that effort. Wow. That's great leadership. I was like, aren't we? Isn't everybody going to, I know.

I was like, isn't everybody going to hop on this thing? we need to vaccinate the world, unless we get the epsilon variant and the, you know, and it's like, this is clearly what we need to do for the, for the health of human beings, for the,

for the survival of human beings, for our own society's functioning. Yeah. Aren't we all rolling up our sleeves and like, committing to our communities? And apparently the answer was no. And so look, I would just say to leaders out there,

we have to do something bigger than just ourselves. We have to do something bigger. than just like what any one person is doing or what one team is doing. Think about the company, its purpose, the impact it has on communities and the impact it has on society. And let's do those things. And when we do those things, I bet our employees are going to be more engaged. I bet they're going to recommit to our companies and say, yeah, this is where I want to spend the next year, five years, 10 years of my life because I feel like I'm contributing to something that matters. And so I think, you know, to me it comes down to that. And look, are a bunch of folks

going to realize there's life changes that they want to make? Absolutely. Should people seek the change that they want? Sure. People have to do what's right for them. But I also think as a leader, it's incumbent upon us to give our people reasons to believe. Reason to believe that what we're doing is righteous. What we're doing is good. What we're doing is is going to make us money and allow us to provide for our families and all that. It's going to allow us to serve our customers, but is also going to benefit the world. We'll be really proud of the time that we spent doing that. And I think that is the best reason for people to join a company, to stay at a company,

and if they don't feel that to leave company. And that's why, you know, during the last 12 months, Twilio has hired, I just saw the stat. We have hired over 4,000 people in the last 12 months. What? Wow. So two out of three people at Twilio or so, maybe half, joined in the last year. Yep.

Wow. Dude, that is a pace. my lord. So it's been a lot of growth. It's been a lot of growth. And I just think as leaders, you know, it's our job to try to create that connection between why we're doing the things that we're doing and how everybody's impacting that and how it's just bigger than us.

It's such an important point is why I love having our little, you know, check-ins every couple of years because I always get inspired when I talk to you. And I was just thinking about it. Somebody's asked me, like, why do you waste your time on these, like, founder university and, like, you know, teaching people how to be founders or doing, like, your accelerator, or like the late stage deals is where you make all your money. And I was like, yeah, that's true. But when people come to work every day, I was just thinking as you're saying it,

all the entire organization gravitates to the earliest we can support a founder. That's what my people find the most purpose in. It's what I find the most purpose in is when we really help a founder when it's two people in the company, not when we put the $3 million into the 40 person company. You know, like, does that take a lot of work? Does that take a big vision to, you know, be the sixth, seventh, eighth, eighth a million into a company? know. To be the first 100 K into a company, yeah, that takes guts, right? That that's where the support

comes in. And so I appreciate our time together, Jeff. I'll let you get back to the grind. Thanks for all you do. And for the audience, you got it there. You got your fourth installment of the Jeff Lawson tapes. We now have four of these. These are going to be, because we've had long conversations every time. And we kind of got deep in the end, these four are going to become I always try to make every discussion I have with a founder or anybody on the pod the best one like they ever do in their career. I hope out of these four, there's a good one in there. I got to go back and listen. Have you ever listened to yourself on these old pods?

I never listen to myself. I never do. I have an aversion to it. But I actually, when we do the fifth one, I'm going to listen to the first two again. All right. I'm going to put it on the calendar right now. If you'll have us for a fifth, one year from now, Jeff, you do your next big developer conference. We'll do it again.

Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me. You're on for the fifth? Let's do it. Okay. Thank you, everybody for listening. All right. We'll see you all next time on this week and start.

Bye-bye. Thanks, Jeff. That was great. Yeah, thank you, Jason.