The man who enables Yelp to send restaurant reservation reminders and Uber riders to call their drivers is now a billionaire. Jeff Lawson, who cofounded cloud communications services firm Twilio and is still its CEO, is worth $1.2 billion, primarily due to his 5% stake in the company. His fortune has more than doubled in the past three years as the popularity of mobile apps continue to rise. Twilio, which raised $150 million at a $1.
A serial entrepreneur, Lawson got his first taste of success in middle school, when he started an events video business that mostly filmed and edited footage of bar mitzvahs. By the time he graduated high school, the Detroit native was pulling in as much as $5,000 some weekends filming weddings. He launched his first internet startup—Versity.
After finishing college, Lawson interviewed at Amazon in 2004 for a fledgling division that was developing a cloud computing service. He spent 15 months working on what would become the e-commerce giant’s cash cow—Amazon Web Services —and was inspired by what he saw there.
Other tech startups noticed the ease and potential of Twilio. When streaming service Hulu was preparing to launch its premium subscription plan, it used Twilio to build a call center to support its new customers. When file-sharing platform Box wanted to enhance user security, it used Twilio to implement a two-factor authentication system with text messages.
Today, Twilio’s platform serves people in over 180 countries, from Swaziland and Azerbaijan to Switzerland and Brazil. The company’s revenue has grown from $88.8 million in 2014 to $650 million in 2018, and its active customer accounts went from under 17,000 to over 64,000 in the same time period. Between 2017 and 2018, Twilio’s revenue grew 63%, though its net loss widened from $63.7 million to $121.9 million.
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Source: Forbes - 🏆 394. / 53 Read more »