This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic from Bloomberg Radio Well the CURRENTISHO of bloomber Business Week magazine. It's just on newsstands, online and on the Bloomberg. It's all about the year ahead. The comprehensive coverage includes a list of the fifty companies to watch. On that list, Twilio. Uh, it's a company. It's a stock that was one of the last year's high flyers up two amid a time of robust demand
for its communications software. Joining us right now to talk about the company and also about his new book is Jeff Lawson, who is chairman, CEO and co founder of Twilio. He his new book, Ask Your Developer, How to Harness the power of Software developers and win in the twenty first century. Jeff joins us on the phone in San Francisco. It's taken a week to finally get to here. And we appreciate your patients because we've had a lot of news breaking that is often preempted stuff. Um. Just nice
to have you back with us. How are you in Congratulations on the book bank, Carol, It is great to join you today and doing well as well as you
know people do during a pandemic. But really excited to get this book out there because I started writing this book about the power of software developers and innovation and the power that software is playing, and so many businesses and so many industries started writing this book actually you know before COVID, and I think the last year has just shown even more so how important digital innovation, digital communications, but agility essentially in business is when factors outside of
our control are changing constantly. Well, I think that is spot on, um, and I want to dig into the book specifically, but I do want to ask you about this past year. Like some companies, your business, uh, Twilio benefited as we were all working from home and companies needed more than ever before really to communicate with their customers, and they needed you know, your infrastruction infrastructure software. Um, what was the year like for you? How would you
sum it up? And when did you all of a sudden see that it was going to turn out to be a strong year for you financially? Well, you know Tolio's product. We are a platform that enables companies who are building things in software to be able to communicate digitally using digital communication channels like voice, text, messaging, chat, video, email,
and more. And so you know what we have always provided to the world even before covid was first digital customer engagement ability to connect people together using digital technologies. Number two software agility because we enable software developers to build communications into all the apps and experiences that we have every day. And third is cloud scale. When somebody builds something on toilio, it just works everywhere in the
world that works at any scale. You have to worry about racking and stacking servers and all this kind of stuff. That's why many of the best companies in the world have been using Toilio to build these amazing customer experiences, you know, like uber list and Shopify and amazing companies that are leading the edge. But which are the companies we know about right as consumers, But we don't understand kind of how it all works or how it gets
to us exactly behind the scenes. And if you think about those three things that I just mentioned, like digital engagement, uh, cloud scale and software agility. While the world needed those even more because as we had to reconfigure our world to get rid of human to human face to face interactions replace them with digital equivalence, and we needed to re a factor the whole world in real time with these changing conditions. While the things actually brought to our
customers was incredibly valuable. Were you surprised though, at how strong the demand ultimately and how it played out for you guys? You know, not really. I had an early sentence. I'll tell you that when the when the pandemic began um in, you know, early to mid March of last year, we saw a really quick influx of customers all realizing that they needed to build. You know, there were say needs time to build, like we've never dealt with a
global pandemic before. We need to reinvent our customer experience. We need to contactless delivery, we need to accelerate our online order abilities. We need to see patients remotely for for telehealth, like there are all these use cases coming to prominence that in a very like in the course of a week, so many customers reaching out and saying, our road map has changed, Our priorities all just changed. And Tali has be a big part of how we're
gonna respond to the pandemic. And so I think we got a pretty early view into the importance of it. That's why we leaned in. We said, we're here to serve our customers during this time, to make them successful the pandemic and build even tighter customer relationships during this pretiod time. That's going to be so successful for our customers and for the world. Jeff, I want to talk
more about the book. I've just got about forty seconds, so I do want to ask you what does one look like for you guys in terms of what kind of visibility and just quickly if you could, and then we'll come back and talk more. Well, we see twenty as having been an acceleration of the trends that have long gone on of the world moving to digital, of every industry becoming a software industry, and every company having to really up their digital game, and Pandemic accelerated those
plans often times in companies. By six years that rod Maps got accelerated is going to be no different. That acceleration is a one way path, and every industry and every company who expects to win in this digital economy is going to have to keep up the pace of invention and agility in using software to serve their customers and so I think we're going to continue to help companies unlock these amazing digital experiences. Forgive me, Jeff, and we love talking with you because you've got to go
a lot of places with us. But if I'm not a person who's into software, am I going to be like, Okay, why do I need to read this book? And it sounds like we all need to read this book in terms of understanding, especially in an increasingly high tech world. You know, we've certainly seen that over the last year. Why did you write it? Who are you addressing and what's the message you want to get out here? This book is written actually for people who aren't the developers
and aren't the software people. It's written for the wide variety of business executives who know that software in many ways represents the future of their company. Because every company is in the star we be in struggle to build great digital products and experiences to serve their customers in this era where the interface that we have with our customers is now oftentimes an app on a phone or a website. Therefore, it's the companies that build great software experiences.
Those are the companies who win the hearts and minds and wallets of their customers, and so so much has been said about this, you know, and the software is eating the world, and so many industries have been challenged by the nature of software and how software is changing these industries, but not a lot has been said about how the business people who aren't software developers, who aren't technologists, how do they partner with the technical talent in their
company or the technical talent they want to bring into their company to actually successfully build those great digital products and experiences. Because at the end of the day, the technical people and the business executives are all aligned in what they want. They want to build amazing products and experiences that millions or billions of customers are gonna love,
that will drive business growth. Yet oftentimes there's this invisible divide between the business executives and the technical talent because they speak different languages. Right. And the interesting thing is that I'm a CEO of a public company, I'm also
a software developers. I've have a foot in both of these worlds, and so I wrote the book to try to build that bridge, to talk to business executives and tell them what goes on in the world of software and what their developers are actually doing and how they can work with those developers to unlock innovation and build great software that will differentiate their company in the eyes of their customers, because that is how you win in this disual, right well, and I feel like in many ways,
it's like after the financial crisis, um, we looked at CFOs very differently because CFOs how to figure out financially, how to get their companies through a really difficult crisis. And it wasn't just you know, accounting guys, you know, checking out the numbers. They became really key and implement you know, and and strategical to companies. And I feel like that's what we see now with ct O s
and i T departments. Increasingly it's not just like, hey, I need a new mouse pad, you know, it's a lot more strategic, um, you know, especially as almost every company has become a tech company. Well, first, I do need a new mousepair. Okay, I'll get I'll get right on it. You're absolutely right. Twenty years ago, You're right,
I T was a cost center. It was about you know, laptops for the employees and printers and you know, maybe uh, you know, the financial system that customers never knew about or cared about. But nowadays, when the company their interface with their customers is a digital one, customers suddenly care about the quality of your software. Are you using software to differentiate? So software has moved from the back office and cost center to the revenue driver of so many companies,
and it actually it's something that customers care about. Think about your bank, you know. It used to be that your bank was a bricks and mortar store that you walked into and if it was well decorated, well lit, the teller was friendly and they gave your kid a lollipop, you'd say, well, I like my bank. Nowadays your bank is a software app on your phone, and you like to your bank if the app is fast, if it
doesn't crash, and if it makes you like easier. And the act of achieving those things is really the act of companies listening to their customers and answering the problems that their customers need solved with all that software. And
that's fundamentally an act of building. And that's why so many Silicon Valley companies, who oftentimes higher developers as the first thing they do, that's why they end up challenging so many different industries but every company is starting to adopt that methodology if they want to compete and win in this era. And that's what this book is really about. It's the playbook for how to do that well. And your customer line up, whether it's Uber, what's app, whether
it's Left, whether it's Nordstrom, whether it's Nike. I mean you really kind of look into so many different areas of the corporate world based on what you're seeing from some of your customers and where they're spending money. What does it tell you maybe about our environment, our broader market environment. Well, I think that it's it's just it's just a truism that in the digital economy, the companies with the best digital experiences are going to win the
heart spinds of wallets of customers. Yeah, and I look at you know, it's not just about the startups, and it's not just about certain companies. It's really every company. In the book, I talked about the story about Domino's Pizza actually, which has been a huge, like look at
their stock place over the last decade. It's an amazing story of a company that transformed from a pizza company to a technology company and the seat it all started with the CEO of Patrick Doyle about a decade ago, realized that he needed to transform Dominoes into a technology company. Let's he be destructed by all the food delivery services. And he started on this path. He hired a great leader to leave the organization and then empower them to
go listen to customers and serve them. And it's a great example of how a company one doesn't typically think of as a technology company has unlocked this innovation and in doing so created tremendous shareholder value and the return to go. If anyone hasn't seen it, it's just like sleeper success story of the last decade. Yeah, it's really it's really remarkable. We've we've talked about their story a lot. Hey just got about forty seconds left here, Jeff Um.
As technology and your own company becomes more entrenched in everyone, what's the responsibility of technology? You know, we saw Amazon pull off parlor Um. Do you agree with that that they've got to also be responsible in terms of who they work with and just quickly on that if you could, Yeah, absolutely. You know, in a society, you know, the words you use matter, the actions you think matter. I mean, that's what it means to be in a society together. And
this is nothing new, right. It used to be that if you walked into a movie theater and yelled fire or ice cream shop and started shouting racist epithets like you'd be kicked out very quickly. This is a digital equivalent of that. That's why technology companies, and really most companies have terms of service, acceptable use policies, and if customers can't buy it by them, then companies have the right to say we don't want you as a customer. And that's really what you see going on. And it's
nothing new. It's writing, uh in the digital realm. Hey, listen, good stuff is always good. Luck with the book, Jeff. Thank you Jeff Laws and chairman's CEO, co founder of Willio. Check out his new book, Ask Your Developer, How to Harness the power of software developers and win in the twenty first century.