CPaaS Alone Doesn't Organize Customer Data with Jeff Lawson
The 2022 Season Finale of TalkingHeadz features Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-Founder of Twilio. Jeff is always clear, articulate, and friendly. I'm proud to say Twilio was born during my shift as a telecom analyst, and it's been exciting to watch it grow and transform. Jeff presented to analysts before the recent Twilio Signal Conference. He claimed that Twilio is always ahead of the industry. That's a bold (fighting words) statement, but he backed it up with a common sense observation. Twilio's customers create solutions that, in general, can't be purchased (yet). Lawson and Twilio more or less created the CPaaS category, an enterprise comms sector that is becoming a little crowded. That's probably one of Twilio's motivations to go broader and become a customer data platform (CDP) provider. CDP may seem totally unrelated to CPaaS, thus many perceive the change as a pivot. While there's some truth to that, Jeffs sees it as more of a logical extension. A lot of the CPaaS use cases support marketing, but they tend to be transactional rather than strategic. Twilio wants to better activate the information on customers that enterprises have, and the first step is to create a consolidated view. Regardless of how you spin it, this public, multi-billion dollar company is once again a startup that's defining (or converging) a new category. Check out this interview to get a better idea of what is on Jeff's mind.