Why Jeff Lawson Took Twilio Public
After a wildly successful IPO for the communications platform that powers the likes of Uber and Airbnb, its founder reflects on the journey thus far
BEFORE TWILIO, adding a voice, video, or text-chat feature to an app was difficult. Telecom companies had archaic technology and wanted to lock other companies into long, expensive contracts. Jeff Lawson, the founding CTO of Stub-Hub, along with Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis, wondered why a developer wasn’t able to add telephony and messaging capabilities to an app. So, in 2008, the three started Twilio, a San Francisco–based business-to-business cloud platform that allows sexier companies like Uber, WhatsApp, and Airbnb to do just that. By making a low-cost utility available to some of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups, Twilio became a hot
