Extremely well said. Yours is a more in depth and eloquent version of what I wrote in the first section of this essay:
"This is an essay about go-to-market strategy and market development. It’s also an essay about company culture.
Specifically, it’s about how the market focus and culture that helped a company reach significant heights can rapidly transform from critical assets into potential liabilities…and what to do about it.
While Twilio is the focus of this essay, this essay is not just about Twilio. It could be about about ANY potentially disruptive company with brilliant founders, venture-scale ambitions, great products, a top-notch team, and traction to die for."
Oh. I looked into it a bit, looks like that's something "Aesop Story Builder" does. Not sure if they have settings that you can control through their interface. If they do, it looks like the relevant option might be called "arrowKeys".
I did not insist anything about "doing traditional enterprise sales."
I said that when a company successfully crosses the chasm, it has established a leading positition in a mainstream market.
What that mainstream market is or the channels the company uses to win it is entirely dependent on its products and the landscape of products it either must displace (in an exiting market) or pre-empt (in a new market).
For example, Facebook crossed the chasm after it opened up beyond .edu and pushed MySpace into complete irrelevance.
Salesforce, when it closed a huge deal with Merrill Lynch (I think), made "the cloud" safe for everyone.
And as a counterpoint, Snap has not crossed the chasm, despite a $25b IPO.
And arguably, neither has Twitter, despite over $2bn in revenue and being public for years.
> And as a counterpoint, Snap has not crossed the chasm, despite a $25b IPO.
I think it is a bit too early to call this one. I'd rather give Evan Spiegel and his team a few more quarters to see what they've got in store against Facebook now with IPO money in the bank.
> And arguably, neither has Twitter, despite over $2bn in revenue and being public for years.
Granted you qualified your statement with "arguably", but why do you think this when there is no corollary for "tweeting" outside of Twitter's service? If Twitter goes belly up today, who will step in their place?
I don't mean to say that Snap won't cross the chasm, just that it hasn't yet.
If it had, its position against Facebook would have been strong enough that Facebook would not have been able to clone its core feature into Instagram and cause Snap's growth to stall.
Twitter is a more interesting question.
Twitter's product and position are unique, yes, but IMHO, the company pursued a market (advertising) where they had no clear advantages over Google or Facebook.
The result of that mistake has been stagnation. Barely evolving product, flat user growth, declining revenue growth, and no clear path to long term profitability.
In other words, Twitter not only did not cross the chasm...they fell into it and got stuck.
I'm the author, and am not even the least bit bitter. I love Twilio. I wrote this because I want them to succeed.
A successful IPO has no necessary correlation to having crossed the chasm.
You've successfully crossed the chasm when you are the clear market leader in the a "mainstream market" segment.
In Twilio's case, that would be Being at the center of communications infrastructure for Fortune 500-1000 companies.
They've made some inroads (ING, etc). But most larger enterprises are still using Cisco/MSFT/Avaya and other on-premise tech for call centers, conferencing, video chat, collaboration, etc.
Also: Twilio is not profitable and it just lost one of its highest volume customers (Uber) who had been using it for "point solution" use cases, mostly around automated SMS and voice.
So if you disagree, that's fine. I'd find it much more productive to know what you disagree with and why than the ad hominem accusation that I'm a "bitter former employee" which is a. Not useful and b. False.
I think it's important to remember that what Twilio offers is a commodity, and there are no switching costs, which limits their market value.
Just as it's easy to spin up comms on Twilio, it's getting easier by the day to spin up Twilio-esq infrastructure itself. They had first mover advantage, but it doesn't seem good enough (not taking into account their largest customers deciding to internalize the functionality to reduce costs).
> what Twilio offers is a commodity, and there are no switching costs
There are plenty of switching costs. Porting numbers from one carrier to another with zero downtime, for example. Negotiating a contract with a new carrier. The new carrier may not support numbers, calls or SMS in some countries you are currently supporting. Testing deliverability and call quality across multiple carriers in multiple countries; you might discover that the new carrier routes messages/calls using unreliable carriers. The new carrier may not have good procedures for avoiding toll fraud. Sending SMS messages that contain Unicode might render like à on some phones; Twilio put a lot of time into figuring out how every carrier treats those on the wire and ensuring that messages get rendered properly. Fallback procedures may break.
If you want to host it yourself now you probably need a NOC, and to test binds, and to test the fallback protocols, and to figure out every edge case that carriers have with respect to certain numbers, messages or routes.
Ex-Twilio here too.. and worked for an SMS aggregator before that.
While working with one carrier is easy, working with 5, 10, or 100 is a horrible pain in the ass. In addition, you need a compelling reason to convince higher ups in your org to sink $texas-sized dollars into this.. long before you can send that first message.
Uber is a special case as they needed coverage in countries that Twilio didn't support. Further, they had a ridiculous pile of money. Since they had to stand up the architecture anyway, adding the "easy" countries made sense.
Disruption (REAL disruption) happens when janky, poorly-featured products come along and do one key, valuable thing much better than their established, mature, full-featured competitors.
The janky upstart uses that small edge (and its much lower costs, price points, or other efficincies) to get a foothold, then steadily builds out a complete solution that is more compelling than the status quo...which then finds itself disrupted.
With that context in mind, here's the opening line of Bloomberg's Terminal Info page:
"The Bloomberg Terminal brings together real-time data on every market, unparalleled news and research, powerful analytics, communications tools and world-class execution capabilities — in one fully integrated solution."
I'd like to draw your attention to that first two parts: "real time data on every market, unparalleled news.."
To gather and process that data and unparalleled news, Bloomberg employs an army of human news gatherers. The company is private, so I don't know their financials, but I'd be willing to wager that its news gathering organization is one of the top contributors to Bloomberg's COGS.
Meanwhile, how many trades (and how much $$$) in equities, currencies, and commodities happen every day based on information about something that just happened in the world?
How much of an advantage does having that information first confer to the person who gets it?
Is it not conceivable that, had Twitter had focused 100% on turning the one billion-plus everyday humans with smartphones into news gatherers and leveraged a mix of software and professional analysis to turn it into data and info that traders would love to pay for...that it could have beaten Bloomberg at the "real time data and unparalleled news" game with a MUCH lower cost structure?
> Is it not conceivable that, had Twitter had focused 100% on turning the one billion-plus everyday humans with smartphones into news gatherers and leveraged a mix of software and professional analysis to turn it into data and info that traders would love to pay for...
People are posting pictures of their food and calendar quotes; it's not that Twitter cannot utilize the information ... there's just not much to work with in the first place.
Absolutely, you're right. The argument is just a hypothesis and unfortunately, the known laws of physics don't allow us the time travel capabilities necessary to actually test it.
However, what you're saying fits in quite nicely with the thesis of the argument: If Twitter had seen itself as a platform for capturing and analyzing "the real-time state of the world" instead of a "social network" or a "media company," its opaque product would likely have been less of an issue.
Real time state of the world is a nice platform for the ones who want to check the real time state of the world every day. Most of FB/Snap/Insta's B+ users just want to shoot the breeze with their posse.
There are a fair number of companies (and governments) who would pay a LOT of money ($$ hundreds of millions/year) for an accurate picture the real time state of the world every day.
But the users would need incentive to contribute their streams. You have to put the two pieces together.
If Twitter accepts the role as a news outlet, they're still in an awkward position. Conventional news networks are already grasping to maintain relevance in a world increasingly self-connected. If Twitter overtly embraced that as its primary value proposition, all of its support from media companies, which are really what propped it up IMO, would vanish overnight.
Completely disagree. Media companies are utterly dependent on Facebook and Google for revenue. If Twitter had succeeded in growing as Facebook did, Twitter would also be a platform that media companies believe they must be on. They couldn't afford not to be on Twitter.
In fact, with nearly 320 million users, media companies already believe they need to be on Twitter to reach their audiences. With a billion users, it would only be more true.
People have external incentive to use Facebook and Google. Facebook: keep up with friends and family. Google: find stuff online.
Twitter's only incentive is its use as a broadcast platform for people who are, in general, otherwise famous. People hop on to interact with and read content from them. If large numbers of this group decided that Twitter represented competition and not an asset, they'd dump it and the attraction would go away.
For years the only place I heard of Twitter was television channels desperately begging people to get online and tweet them. It has finally penetrated to the point where most fairly tech-savvy people have started an account and issued 3-4 tweets, but that took years of constant pushing by mainstream outlets.
+1000%. Dick did what he was brought in to do. The way it panned out is another strong datapoint for the argument that consumer internet companies should be led by product/visionary types while detail/implementation types run the operation of the business.
I think Dick is actually a pretty good CEO and told a good story and had a good vision for Twitter as a business. It was just a vision for "Twitter as it exists right now" which is what a hired gun CEO is going to have a vision for. I can imagine Dick being a great founder/CEO.
But yes - surrounding Jack (pre-Evan switch) with a STRONG #2 was the move. When that didn't happen, can't blame them for not seeing it at the time!, Dick was probably the best they could do. Still, it's sad. Evan's vision for Twitter was correct and more obvious now than ever.
"This is an essay about go-to-market strategy and market development. It’s also an essay about company culture.
Specifically, it’s about how the market focus and culture that helped a company reach significant heights can rapidly transform from critical assets into potential liabilities…and what to do about it.
While Twilio is the focus of this essay, this essay is not just about Twilio. It could be about about ANY potentially disruptive company with brilliant founders, venture-scale ambitions, great products, a top-notch team, and traction to die for."