Developer Glossary
Twilio is the developer platform that powers programmatic communication, SMS, voice calls, video, email, and WhatsApp, for hundreds of thousands of applications worldwide. If your app needs to send a text message, make a phone call, or verify a user's phone number, Twilio is almost certainly the first tool you'll reach for. I use Twilio constantly in custom web application builds. It handles SMS notifications, two-factor authentication via text or voice, automated call routing, and real-time communication features. The beauty of Twilio is that it abstracts away the nightmarish complexity of telecom infrastructure into clean, simple API calls. What used to require contracts with phone carriers and months of setup now takes a few lines of code and a credit card.
Jeff Lawson, along with co-founders Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis, founded Twilio in 2008 in San Francisco. Lawson had previously co-founded several startups, including NineStar (acquired by Versity) and worked at Amazon Web Services. His insight was that communication was one of the last major areas of software that hadn't been turned into a developer-friendly API. At the time, if you wanted your app to send an SMS or make a phone call, you had to negotiate with telecom carriers, install physical hardware, and deal with arcane protocols. Twilio launched its SMS API at a tech conference in 2008, and Lawson famously demo'd it live by having the audience send texts that were processed by code he wrote on stage. They went public in 2016 and grew into one of the largest communication platforms in the world, acquiring SendGrid in 2019 for $3 billion.
Uber's entire ride notification system, every "your driver is arriving" text, ran on Twilio in its early years.
Jeff Lawson wrote a bestselling book called "Ask Your Developer" about the role of software developers in modern business strategy. But the more interesting Twilio fact is this: during the early days, Twilio's entire business model was considered so risky that virtually every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley passed on their first fundraising round. The telecom industry was seen as a graveyard for startups. Lawson eventually raised seed funding by cold-emailing 500 Startups' Dave McClure and getting a meeting. Also, Uber's entire ride notification system, every "your driver is arriving" text, ran on Twilio in its early years.
Visit: twilio.com