Twilio Inc.
Leadership History
2 leaders · 2008 to present
Khozema Shipchandler is the CEO of Twilio, in the role since 2024. The first chief executive was Jeff Lawson, from 2008.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Khozema Shipchandler | Chief Executive Officer | 2024 | Present | 2 |
| Jeff Lawson | Co-founder and CEO | 2008 | 2024 | 16 |
Twilio reported FY2025 revenue of $5.067 billion and net income of $33.8 million, then grew Q2 2026 revenue 22% to $1.50 billion. Khozema Shipchandler is CEO, and the company had 5,492 employees as of June 30, 2026. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Twilio makes most of its money from usage-based fees: customers pay per message, per voice minute, per email, or per verification sent through its APIs, so revenue rises with their traffic. Messaging alone generated $2.878 billion of FY2025 revenue. On top of that usage base, Twilio sells subscriptions and committed-spend contracts for Segment (customer data), Flex (contact center), and newer AI and identity products. Carrier pass-through fees, such as U.S. A2P 10DLC surcharges, are billed to customers and inflate reported revenue, which is why Twilio also reports organic growth that excludes incremental carrier fees.
Chief Executive Officer
2024 – Present
2 years (current)
Shipchandler initiated a brutal restructuring program, laying off massive portions of the workforce to aggressively drive Twilio toward GAAP profitability.
Taking over as CEO in 2024, he shifted the company's focus away from unprofitable hyper-growth toward heavily optimizing the highly lucrative core communications platform.
Co-founder and CEO
2008 – 2024
16 years
Lawson famously pitched Twilio to investors by live-coding a functioning conference line in 3 minutes, proving the massive potential of APIs in replacing legacy telecom hardware.
As the long-time CEO, he aggressively scaled the company into a $60 billion behemoth before intense pressure from activist investors forced him to resign in 2024 following growth stagnation.
These officers report to the chief executive and are not part of the CEO timeline above.
Twilio's main risks are carrier fees, messaging commoditization, competition from Sinch, Infobip, Bandwidth, Vonage, AWS, and Salesforce, plus Segment execution and enterprise-spending cycles.
Twilio has had two primary CEOs: co-founder Jeff Lawson, who led the company for nearly 16 years from founding in March 2008 until January 2024, and Khozema Shipchandler, who took over as CEO on January 8, 2024.
Jeff Lawson established the "Ask Your Developer" philosophy, pioneered the bottom-up API business model, completed the 2016 NYSE IPO, orchestrated multi-billion-dollar acquisitions of SendGrid and Segment, and grew Twilio from zero to over $4 billion in revenue.
Following post-pandemic tech sector contractions, persistent multi-hundred-million-dollar GAAP net losses, activist investor pressure from Legion Partners and Anson Funds, and challenges integrating Segment, Lawson resigned as CEO and Chairman to allow fresh operational leadership.
Khozema Shipchandler joined Twilio in 2018 after a 22-year career at General Electric (where he was CFO of GE Digital). At Twilio, he served as Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and President of Twilio Communications before becoming CEO in January 2024.
Shipchandler prioritized GAAP profitability, slashed discretionary overhead, reduced stock-based compensation, initiated aggressive multi-billion-dollar share buybacks, and focused product development on AI agent communications and core communications efficiency.
Through disciplined cost control, automated customer support operations, targeted workforce rationalization, and re-accelerating organic communications usage, delivering Twilio's first full-year GAAP net profit in FY2025.
Legion Partners and Anson Funds pushed for operational accountability and a potential sale of Segment in 2023. Twilio added new independent directors to its board, concluded an operational review that retained Segment, and committed to disciplined capital returns.
Jeff Epstein, former CFO of Oracle and longtime Twilio lead independent director, was appointed independent Chair of the Board of Directors in January 2024, separating the CEO and Chairman roles.
Twilio executed two major restructuring rounds—cutting 11% of staff in September 2022 and an additional 17% in February 2023—to right-size operations after pandemic over-hiring and align headcount with realistic growth expectations.
Shipchandler established a disciplined capital allocation framework: re-investing in high-margin organic R&D, avoiding dilutive mega-acquisitions, and returning hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash flow to shareholders quarterly via share buybacks.
To cement Twilio as the indispensable communications, identity, and customer data infrastructure for the artificial intelligence era, powering autonomous agents that interact with billions of consumers worldwide.
By keeping developer API documentation simple, intuitive, and developer-friendly while enforcing strict enterprise sales efficiency, pipeline accountability, and gross margin thresholds internally.
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