20VC: Twilio's Jeff Lawson on What It Takes To Create a Tribe, How To Create Anti-Fragile Organisations Through Decentralised Decision-Making and Why Values Are Nice But Principles Are Better
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jeff Lawson is the Founder & CEO @ Twilio, the company that allows you to unite communications and strengthen customer relationships across your business. Prior to their incredibly successful IPO in 2016 Jeff raised funding from some of the best including Bessemer, Union Square Ventures, Redpoint, Salesforce and Founders Fund to name a few. Before founding Twilio, Jeff was co-founder & CTO of NineStar, founding CTO of Stubhub.com, co-founder, CEO & CTO of Versity, and one of the first product managers for Amazon Web Services.
In Today’s Episode with Jeff Lawson You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeff made his way into the world of tech and startups and what that founding a-ha moment was for Jeff with Twilio? When explaining new ideas to people, what signals to Jeff that the idea is resonating? Are there clear indicators an idea is not resonating?
2.) Leadership: What does great leadership mean to Jeff today? How has Jeff's leadership style changed and evolved over the years? What does Jeff believe is the key to great storytelling? How has the leadership style required, changed in a COVID world? What have been the biggest inflection points in his leadership?
3.) Culture: What does Jeff believe are the 3 key ingredients to company culture? How can leaders create a tribe that people associate with? What are the biggest lessons we can take from sport and religion when it comes to culture building? At what points has Jeff been concerned about the Twilio culture? What did he do to rectify it? Why are "values nice but principles better"?
4.) Decision-Making: How has Jeff created a culture of decentralised decision-making? What has Jeff done to ensure the best ideas rise to the top? In what ways can leaders ensure people feel safe to be bold and go big, without the fear of failure? How does Jeff determine when to give or remove resources from new ideas? How does Jeff think about the importance of "focus"?
5.) Diversity: Frank Slootman previously said, "diversity should not override merit". What are the core problems that Jeff has with this statement? How do Twilio construct their recruitment pipelines to ensure diversity? Why does Jeff believe the secret to human assessment is one of "miles travelled"? What are the signals of this?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Jeff Lawson
Jeff’s Favourite Book: Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back. This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I couldn't be more excited for the show today, and it's such a timely one as just last week, this founder committed his company to being one of the first to dual list on the long-term stock exchange. I'm sure you've probably guessed it from that, but I'm thrilled to welcome Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO at Twilio, the company that allows you to unite communications and strengthen customer relationships across your business. |
| 0:22.5 | Prior to their incredibly successful IPO in 2016, Jeff raised funding from some of the best, |
| 0:27.6 | including Bessemer, Union Square Ventures, Redpoint, Salesforce and Founders Fund, to name a few. |
| 0:32.9 | And before founding Twilio, Jeff was co-founder and CTO of 9 star, founding CTO of Stubhubb.com, co-founder, CEO and |
| 0:40.1 | CTO of Versity, and one of the first product managers for Amazon Web Services. |
| 0:44.6 | I do also need, though, to say a huge thank you. |
| 0:46.6 | This schedule was a total team effort. |
| 0:48.4 | Scott Rainey, Byron Deter, David Cohen, Matt Garrett, so appreciate all your help with |
| 0:52.9 | questions today. But before we move into the show today, Mercury is building full-stack banking for startups, |
| 0:58.5 | applying under 10 minutes from anywhere for FDIC-insured bank accounts, physical and virtual debit cards, |
| 1:04.8 | domestic and international wires, in integrations with gusto, stripe, quickbooks, plaid, |
| 1:10.1 | and basically every other tool your startup |
| 1:11.9 | uses. They also offer unusual features like APISS, custom team management, and their newly launched |
| 1:17.7 | Mercury Treasury, a cash management product for high-growth startups. And they'll even help you |
| 1:22.6 | build your startup with Mercury Raze, a program to connect you to Silicon Valley's top investors, head to |
| 1:28.4 | Mercury.com forward slash sign up to apply. And speaking of full stat banking there with Mercury, |
| 1:33.7 | I have to say I just love using the AngelList fund admin platform to manage my investments. The team |
| 1:38.8 | and platform with AngelList takes care of all my back office needs so that I can really focus on |
| 1:43.5 | working with great |
| 1:44.2 | founders. Leading fund managers have made over 10,000 investments into 6,000 startups using AngelList, |
| 1:50.2 | all online and all in one place. And with the recently announced rolling funds, you can easily |
| 1:54.7 | find and invest in these top fund managers on angellist.com forward slash rolling. And finally, |
... |
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