Communication is a core function of almost every app, from ordering a pizza, hailing a ride, to booking a doctor’s appointment. This week, we deep dive into one of the leading providers of this core functionality, Twilio. Twilio is one of the stocks in our model portfolio for 2021 and we discuss why we think it is a strong company with room to grow. Also, Luke muses on his dreams of a space economy.
- Twilio is the world’s leading cloud communication platform, allowing other companies to embed multiple communication channels into their web, desktop, and mobile applications. They have grown revenues 10x in five years as digital transformation trends gather pace and were accelerated by the pandemic. Twilio estimates that their total addressable market is valued at $79B
- Its communications-platform-as-a-service business (CPaaS) is a scalable 'land & expand' business model, where marketing is targeted at developers and product managers. This strategy is clearly working as their customer count has increased 350% in three years to reach 221,000 by the end of 2020. Twilio's dollar-based net expansion rate (DBNER) has averaged around 140% each quarter in that time, meaning that customers are spending more on Twilio’s products and services over time
- Twilio has a strong focus on developers, providing them with all the tools to use Twilio’s services, and running an annual conference called Signal, where the company showcases its products and runs workshops to help developers get the most out of them. Over 10 million developers use Twilio services, generating network effects through a huge pool of developer expertise. The CEO, Jeff Lawson, has published a book titled “Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century”
- Twilio Flex is their fully-programmable contact centre platform, which includes features such as intelligent call routing and AI-powered chatbots. Flex came about from feedback from customers, who were building their own contact centre solutions using Twilio’s communication service. Flex now has 600 customers and its revenue in 2020 increased 184% from the previous year.
- Twilio completed its acquisition of Segment last year, a leading customer data platform (CDP) that allows customers to see a single unified view of all their customer interactions, and improve customer experience by tailoring communications to their usage patterns and preferences. As well as addressing the estimated $17B CDP market, Segment is a key part of Twilio’s plans to become the world’s leading customer engagement platform
- However, Twilio is not profitable yet as it reinvests heavily in growing its business, and with a market cap of $66B and a P/S ratio of 31, it has a rich valuation, higher than it has been historically. And the competition is heating up, not just from tech giants such as Microsoft and Cisco, but also from smaller pure plays such as Bandwidth and MessageBird. MessageBird, in particular, has a strong presence in Europe and Asia and may impact Twilio’s international growth, which currently only accounts for 27% of its revenues
The following companies are mentioned in this episode: BAND, FB, MessageBird, MSFT, TWLO, UBER
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