Businessweek Extra- Twilio CFO

after two rally Wow. So Twilio works with everyone from lift to Uber, Shopify and Instacart to Netflix, Twitter, Yelp, and Morgan's Stanley lending Tree into It and more. My conversation began with the company's recent quarterly update, but we had a strong performance, I would say pretty much across the board. We are in the early innings of what I would characterize as really a generational opportunity in this

space of customer engagement. I think what we found during the course of is that when customers embrace software, when they embrace agility, and in particular, when they decide to build things on their own own, that they tend to be the ones that are winning. And we're lucky to be able to power a number of their use cases, right, and that's exactly what you guys are doing, providing the

tools for them to be able to do that. How much though, of what you're seeing is a surge to digitally catch up and expand because of COVID in the shutdown and the big move for the world to digital and e commerce. How much is to catch up in your view? That's a great question. I do think it's more an acceleration, I would say, than catch up. We

feel like the shift that's been happening is permanent. You know, we've done a number of studies I'm sure you've seen a number of external studies as well that basically suggests that businesses are not going to go back that over of them in fact planned to either increase or maintain the levels of investment that they've been making in customer engagement after the pandemic. So we're very excited about our

prospects going forward. Well, what do you guys do once you kind of land a customer, right, and you get kind of that initial level and you know, relationship between you and the customer, Like, what are the next layers that you can help in terms of helping the customer

with what they're doing. Yeah, I think what's important about our business model, which is really exciting and keeps the cost down as well, actually is that most of our interactions start because a developer inside of one of the companies that we're working with starts working on our platform,

develops a use case. We notice that there's a certain amount of activity there, and once we do, we have a salesperson contact the company and we start doing some work with them, and they'll start with the use case. It might be an SMS, it might be a one time notification of something, but then will offer some of the other aspects of our portfolio. It could be voice messaging, it could be other SMS use cases, it could be email, you know. Now it could be segment with the company

that we just bought with respect to data. So there are any number of things that we can do for a customer as it relates to customer engagement. I'll give you a great example. You know, last week, obviously we are all watching what was happening in Texas, and you know, we were able to deploy a hotline in twenty four hours to help them manage thousands of calls, not just with respect to all of the emergency response activity, but also you know the vaccine distribution and the logistics associated

with that. We're not just doing it in Texas, for doing it all the way from California all the way across the Maine as well, so it really does run the gamut. Well, I'm glad you took took us there, because that is certainly something we kick off every broadcast talking about the latest and greatest fingers cross when it

comes to COVID and the vaccine. Talk to us a little bit more about what you folks are doing at twilio to help others when it comes in particular to getting that vaccine out and communicating and communication within communities, because we know that has been something that was certainly lagging, uh certainly early on. Yeah, So part of it is deploying a hotline. Another part of it is using our SMS capabilities so that we can provide patients with alerts

and scheduling information. Another part of it is so that medical professionals can communicate with one another in a time sensitive way visa V text messaging. And so if you just consider all of these different areas that allow medical professionals patients folks that are attempting to get the vaccine in the hands of patients. It just allows for a very seamless experience. It makes sure that patients are able

to get the information when they need it. They can get it through whatever channel they want, whether it's SMS, whether it's voice, whether it's email. And these same solutions can be used to register folks and then constantly communicate with them to make sure that they're keeping their appointments and that they go back for the second vaccine as well. Yeah, it's great and it creates some organization. Um. I think that many would would argue that wasn't quite there in

the beginning. Okay, I want to go back to what you guys are doing and where you go from here, especially once you start working with a customer. We had on James chalk Mark earlier covers the tech sector, and I said to him, okay, so if you were talking, uh to the CFO of Twilio, what would you want

to know? And he said, you know, what's interesting is how do you improve you know, how do you kind of boost beyond once you start working with a customer and you are providing data and working with them, how do you kind of improve upon that in terms of productivity, And I'm curious, how do you guys think about that and taking your services to the next level for your customers. Yeah,

I'll give you a great, great example. Obviously, tax season is right around the corner and one of our marquee customers has been H and R Block historically, and just in the last quarter, we've expanded our relationship with that customer as they prepare for the tax season. Obviously there's a huge surge and the amount of activity that they see, and what we're doing is actually giving them tooling so that they're able to provide better virtual tax support using

our Twilio video product. Obviously, last year around this time, the pandemic was just starting. It wasn't quite clear how things were going to play out. And so now above and beyond the the voice, SMS and chat capabilities that we're already providing them, they can now also enhance the experience between H and R Block and their consumer base using a really simple and easy to use in app API to deploy video to make for a richer consumer experience.

That makes a lot of sense. What about all the data that that's coming into all of these customers that you guys work with um and and helping them in terms of be more productive with that use of data kind of the data overloads. Yeah, that's a great question. So we actually bought a company towards the end of

last year. It's called Segment and Segment their entire value proposition of the company is to really focus on data, and one of the things that they do uniquely well, there's the only company to my knowledge, on the planet that can actually pull it off, is that they can grab data out of all of the unique silos inside of a company, put that data together orchestrated in a way, organize it in a way that makes it really simple to understand what's going on with the consumer experience, so

that what we're then able to do is help our customers ensure that they can then deliver a rich consumer experience. So using all of these disparate data sources, we've got the proverbial one pane of glass that allows you then to subsequently deliver something that's really personalized, really rewarding if you're on the consumer ended experience. Sounds like a big growth area for you guys. Absolutely, we're really excited about that. Acquisition.

We've signed on some interesting winds recently, and I think there's a lot more that we can do with it. We're just getting started. So because I want to ask you, you do work with just about everybody. If you go to your website, it's Lift, it's Ubert, Shopify, it's Instacard, it's Morgan Stanley, it's lending Tree, it's Netflix, it's Twitter,

it's help. What are you hearing from those clients which crossed so many different industries, What are you hearing from them and what are you seeing in terms of your working with them, about what that tells us about how the business environment is and what's going on more broadly in the economy, maybe what kind of year one might be. Yeah, I think what's never been truer than it is today is this whole idea around the importance of customer engagement.

I think we're all used to one way experiences sometimes with our customers, and unfortunately those experiences weren't enabled previously by technology. But now enter Twilio and some of the things that we're able to do to help really drive that rich consumer experience so that you, as a consumer can do business with the clients that you really care about, you can get the kinds of messages from them that

you really care about. Obviously, for our customers that helps them drive a revenue event, But to the consumer herself, it's really important because that individual is able to get the information that they want, when they want it, through the channel that they want without it kind of becoming this annoying clutter that we sometimes experience otherwise through these channels.

And so customer engagements the name of the game. And I think going forward, every one of the companies that we're working with, they see more share of wallet going towards these customer facing interactions, and we think that's going to continue. We think it's part of a long term secular trend. Frankly, Okay, so that's the trend. But what does it say the economy doing well? Second half story?

You know, from from these conversations, what does it tell you about the visibility for our economy and really our business environment. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a macro economist, obviously, I'll i'll maybe kind of answer your question through the lens of our our consumer experience, our customer experience. Excuse me.

What we're generally seeing is a lot of strength in the marketplace, and whether it's uh an online retailer, whether it's an e commerce provider, whether it's a brick and mortar bank, We're seeing a lot of traction and a lot of activity. And so I would say we're cautiously optimistic about the way that the broader economy plays out, just based on the activity that we see on our platform. We do see a significant move of that activity from you know, sort of an uh AN in person environment

more much more towards an online environment. I think many of the things that we were used to previously attending in person, as much as I'm desperate to go, you know, do a restaurant in person, I think we're all getting used to as consumers um the idea of getting things delivered and and having communications tools help orchestrate some of that. So I think you will see a shift in the

way some of these organizations work. But we're broadly optimistic, I would say, cautiously so, just given what a what a dynamic macro environment it is out there. Hey, one last question in terms of you guys seem to be firing out also Landers. It's really impressive and impressive story and company to watch access to workers, any labor constraints. Where are you finding maybe problems as you move forward that maybe can be holding back your growth and just

got about forty five seconds. Yeah, that's a great question. I don't see any real issues in terms of our ability to access talent. I think, if anything, Like many other companies, what we're finding is is that as everybody's working from home, there's a global talent market that we can get our talent from. And we're really excited about that. That was because the most ship channeler CFO of the

cloud communication platform company Twilio. You've been listening to Bloomberg Business Week Extra, be sure to listen to our Bloomberg Business Week Daily radio show, airing live Monday through Friday at two pm Wall Street Time on Bloomberg Radio, and watch US two on our daily broadcast on YouTube. Just search Bloomberg Global News and catch Tim on Bloomberg Quicktake, available on Bloomberg dot com, slash qt and streaming on platforms like Roku, Apple TV, Samsung TV, and more. I'm

Carol Masser and I'm Tim Stanovick. This is Bloomberg