News today that Jeff Lawson is gone from Twilio. What a legacy he leaves! He founded Twilio believing you should buy the things that won't give you any differentiation with customers, and build the things that will. He's remained a developer evangelist, and wrote in his book that as every industry becomes a software industry, the winners will be companies that build the best software - which really means, the companies with access to the best software developers.
I'm a big fan of 'Ask Your Developer' and love he cited Chee's "our goal every day is to suck less than we did yesterday," which sounds like a good goal to me!
I also liked that when asked by investors why he gave so much autonomy to small teams to own their priorities and roadmaps he said, "I'm sitting here right now, talking to investors, while my teams are busy talking to customers."
He encourages companies that are starting on their building journeys to starts small with modest non-mission critical projects. He's a builder at heart and seems to accept 'failure' as part of the process of creating something genuinely new.
One of my fav stories from his book is him and is dad building stuff with cardboard boxes when he was a child (I did the same). From boxes to billions of dollars, what he's built with Twilio is awesome. I look forward to his next project, you could say "I can't wait to see what he builds next" 😉.
#twilio #jefflawson
And shoutout to all the Twilions that made this massive migration possible! 👏🏾