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.

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

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...

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!

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.

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...

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