jeffiel

I’ll share my favorite Om story.

It was 2010 and we were launching Twilio SMS. I went over to his office to pitch him the story, hoping we would cover the launch. He listened for 10 minutes while I walked through it, then said

“Yeah yeah I’ll write about it. But I want to talk about your health. Are you taking care of yourself? You could lose some weight…”

He wanted everybody to learn from his health journey. While mostly I wanted him to cover our news, and it was terribly awkward… walking home, I realized it was nice to be seen as a person not just a founder, a startup or a tech story.

Lots of folks hit the nail on the head, it's a structural problem with a telco network that was never designed to be open. I wrote about it back in 2019 in case folks are interested [0]

[0] https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/insights/compliance/your-p...

Timely! https://theonion.com/study-crows-intelligent-enough-to-steal...

This article is a little dated, since then we’ve released Fraud Guard. Our model can detect and block 98% of pumping traffic with only .1% false positive. It’s working really well to deter these fraudsters. If you’re interested, you can learn more here [1].

Were also rolling out a version for all Programmable SMS customers with a higher false positive rate due to the wider variety of use cases supported.

[1] https://www.twilio.com/docs/verify/preventing-toll-fraud/sms...

It's no cost to the user! Defaults are rolled out to everybody, but the users opts-into aggressive protection because of the risk of false positives. Note, this is Verify today. All Programmable SMS customers will get it soon as well.

At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers. Only talking to developers isn’t savvy or smart. AWS etc do the same thing.

We can have good APIs and make a compelling case to the business why they should pay for it.

I agree that sometimes our engagement messaging isn’t quite right for developers. As a developer, I prefer more technical and matter of fact marketing of products. But interestingly, as a CEO, sometimes I need companies to simplify the message especially in a domain I’m not an expert in and don’t want to become an expert in!

For the entrepreneurs in the HN community, it’s talking features vs benefits. Developers love what a product does in a literal sense because they’re close to the implementation. Business folks tend to look for the benefit statements more as they’re not as close to the implementation. It’s a like to walk when you’re talking to both!

It’s a good question because it goes to the incentives of a company to truly fight the problem vs saying the right things but looking the other way when convenient.

For us, we typically work with customers who are victims of fraud and the first time, we give them advice on how to better protect themselves and then refund them ~ the amount of profit we would have made. Ie we recoup costs but that’s it. For the financially aware, this is bad for our gross margin and profit but we do it to help customers the first time. After that though we expect them do implement some defenses otherwise our incentives aren’t aligned. Now however, we have Fraud Guard rolling out which should prevent much of the fraud in the first place.

There are other forms of bad actors but that’s the most prevalent these days.

Thank you Miguel for all of your contributions to Twilio over the past four years, and I hope your next gig is just as rewarding!

For all those interested in why we acquired Segment, and are focused on the integration of data and communications -- several years ago, we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective.

As a developer, I know that's really hard to pull all the threads together to make realtime personalization of every communication hard -- and Segment is so good at it.

So that's what we're focused on!

As an aside, the fraud and scam vectors of email, sms, and voice have grown a lot since we started the company 15 years ago. We are always fighting that cat and mouse game with the bad folks of the world. Are we perfect, no. But are we here to make money off those bad actors? Hell no. That's why we just launched fraud guard [1] for free to all Verify customers, and soon to all SMS customers as well. More to come like this.

Happy Father's Day (in the US) HN!

[1] https://www.twilio.com/docs/verify/preventing-toll-fraud/sms...

Hi Chris - CEO of Twilio here. I'm sorry for the issue. Fighting bad actors sucks, but we can do better to communicate with good faith builders like yourself. Mind sending me a note with your account at [email protected], and I'll escalate for you.

The prediction is really that these stars collided about 1795 years ago, and we may find out about it soon.

Thank you lmg643, glad we could help!

Hi - Jeff from Twilio. We're here to build the a great company for developers. The real story is APIs, not IPOs. Anything else is pure speculation :)

That demo is still using our short code - we need to update that demo to use our new long code product. Thanks for the bug find!

We're really excited to see what hackers can do to improve the world... Let's do this!

Great job Ducksboard team, looks fabulous. Have you looked into using Connect vs asking for credentials?

Deadbeat!

Check out ninjablocks too, really cool stuff they're building

Very cool! Are you coming to the Twilio Conference this week? If not, would love to have you in the audience. Ping me: [email protected]

Email me your account sid, and we'll enable international SMS for your account.

jeff at twilio

Great stats Garrett! Although I'd like to see #q-tips used as well.

I like that code is now measured in miles.

Love the realtime valuation by bus graph. Break that $200 barrier!

I think Bryce's point is that he doesn't like the way AngelList makes him feel about his investing.

Drop a note to [email protected], and we'll add you to the beta as soon as possible.

"Aside from frightening my bank a few times when I got large wire transfers from America, charging a lot of money is a great idea in every possible way."

That is a classic, congrats Patrick!

To correct a misconception, Twilio works with a variety of carriers, including Level3 and Bandwidth.com. Much like Google Voice, we work with a plurality of vendors for redundancy, geographic coverage, etc..

Voxeo also works with Bandwidth.com. "Bandwidth.com shares Voxeo's 'All-IP' worldview and as a result is an important voice network partner for us." --Jonathan Taylor, Voxeo CEO

http://bandwidth.com/about/read/flexNetwork.html

Ha, this reminds me of the Microsoft vs. GM comparison from yesteryears. Cars would crash unexpectedly, etc.

War is a political problem too, doesn't mean you shouldn't have an army ready.