Twilio Raises A $70M Series D As They Consider An IPO

If the next logical step for Twilio is an IPO, does that mean that they're not profitable? If they are profitable, why is an IPO the logical next step, does an IPO provide specific value to the company (or any company) beyond financing?

beachstartup• 13 years ago

indirect marketing. press coverage. easier to recruit people based on equity compensation (liquid market for shares). 'legitimacy' in the eyes of some potential customers. connected into investment banking world for future transactions (debt issue, equity issue, M&A, etc).

m0th87• 13 years ago

Aren't IPOing companies almost universally profitable?

lambtron• 13 years ago

Groupon was not profitable when they filed for S-1.

pbreit• 13 years ago

No. The main point of an IPO is to raise money which profitable companies need less.

fosk• 13 years ago

This makes no sense. You can be profitable, and still would like to raise money from the public stock market to pursue activities that are more expensive than what your currently profitability can sustain, like expanding the business globally, or enter in new markets, or build new products. It's about business and the business it's about money, so there's nothing else that an IPO provides except immediate liquidity. The side effects are bad, like sustaining lots of bureaucracy because of the heavily regulated public stock market, or exposing your company.

runT1ME• 13 years ago

Telco is a commodity. You want to raise as much money as possible and you want to drive your margins down as it makes competition impossible.

toomuchtodo2• 13 years ago

Twilio runs on cloud providers (Amazon and Rackspace, at least when I interviewed with them). Anyone can build what Twilio does, whether thats a group of devs in a co-working startup space, or a large telcom (NTT, AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom).

On the web, there are no longer barriers to entry.

7273743• 13 years ago

An IPO creates a liquid market for existing shareholders (management, private equity) to cash out. Seriously. There are cheaper forms of financing if all they wanted was to expand operations.

kirinan• 13 years ago

As someone who just went through an IPO at a tech company, congratz Twilio, its a huge achievement! Enjoy it!

RobSpectre4• 13 years ago

Thanks partner. Lot of work before we get there - looking forward to the next leg of the mountain.

mehrzad• 13 years ago

Can someone explain Twilio in relation with open federated protocols (something I care about)?

hughes• 13 years ago

Awesome! We send and receive thousands of SMS messages with twilio every day, hopefully this helps them get better international incoming message support ;)

Twilio Raises A $70M Series D As They Consider An IPO

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