How Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler is turning the company around and beating SaaSpocalypse fears |
How Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler is turning the company around and beating SaaSpocalypse fears
In today’s CEO Daily: Twilio’s CEO on how he brought the company out of a “time of real peril”
The big leadership story: Why the U.S. cares about Panama, Gibraltar, and Malacca
The markets: A stellar day on the markets as semiconductor and AI stocks surge
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Maybe AI and software can be friends. Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler just delivered robust Q1 earnings that made his stock jump almost 25% on Friday—and plans to reveal a big initiative for the customer engagement platform’s next stage of growth at its annual conference this week. What a difference from early 2024, when he stepped up to lead Twilio, which lets users integrate voice, video, text, email and other communication channels. “That was a time of real peril,” he told me late last week. “Our growth had stalled out, we were burning through cash, we were not profitable, and we had a lot of pressure from activist investors.”
I’m thinking about that as I’m in Los Angeles today for the annual Milken Institute Global Conference. Just like fear of an AI-driven SaaSpocalypse can shift in a matter of weeks, the business landscape is ever changing, whether it’s the impact of war in the Middle East or the impact of AI in health outcomes. More on that in the coming days.
I was curious to hear Shipchandler’s take on what he needed to fix in stepping into the top job. Like many leaders coming into the CEO role these days, he knew Twilio well, having served in finance and operational roles since 2018.
First was a failure of focus as cheap capital had fostered a lack of discipline in making choices: “We would throw effort and resources and money at 100 projects,........