Twilio Inc.
Founders
Jeff Lawson, John Wolthuis, Evan Cooke · Founded 2008 · HQ today: San Francisco, California, United States
Twilio was founded by Jeff Lawson, John Wolthuis, Evan Cooke in 2008 in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is now led by Khozema Shipchandler.
Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis founded Twilio in 2008. Lawson, who had worked on early Amazon Web Services products, wanted to make telephone calls and text messages as easy for developers to use as cloud servers. Twilio launched its voice API in 2008 and added SMS in 2010, charging per use with no carrier contracts. Developers adopted the product first and then brought it into their employers, a bottom-up model Lawson later described in his book Ask Your Developer. Twilio listed on the NYSE in June 2016, bought SendGrid for email in 2019 and Segment for customer data in 2020, and grew rapidly through the pandemic. Losses, a 2022 phishing breach, and activist pressure led to layoffs in 2022 and 2023 and Lawson's departure as CEO in January 2024.
Before Twilio, Jeff Lawson co-founded Versity.com, worked at StubHub, and worked on early Amazon Web Services products.
Jeff Lawson co-founded Twilio in 2008 and was CEO until January 2024, leading it through its 2016 IPO and the SendGrid and Segment acquisitions. He wrote Ask Your Developer (2021) about developer-led software. Jeff Lawson was born in 1977.
Software developer who previously worked at Amazon Web Services alongside Jeff Lawson.
John Wolthuis co-founded Twilio in 2008. He architected the initial telephony backend that allowed developers to send text messages and make phone calls using a simple web API. By completely hiding the incredibly complex, legacy telecom infrastructure behind clean code, Wolthuis built the technical foundation that allowed Twilio to rapidly dominate the developer communications market. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Computer Science PhD from the University of Michigan and early researcher in cybersecurity.
Evan Cooke co-founded Twilio and served as its first CTO. He was instrumental in designing the company's highly reliable cloud architecture, ensuring the API could scale to handle massive, instantaneous spikes in SMS traffic (such as during Uber surges or Airbnb bookings). He left the company in 2012 to return to academia and public service. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Khozema Shipchandler
Chief Executive Officer
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.
Aidan Viggiano
Chief Financial Officer
As CFO, she strictly enforces the new profitability mandates, cutting massive amounts of real estate and software expenses across the enterprise.
Jeff Lawson
Co-founder and CEO
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.
Twilio was founded in March 2008 by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis, who combined software engineering and cloud infrastructure backgrounds to reinvent telecommunications.
Jeff Lawson graduated from the University of Michigan, served as founding CTO of ticket marketplace StubHub, founded college notes portal Versity.com, and was an early technical product manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS) working on compute infrastructure.
Dr. Evan Cooke earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan, specializing in internet security and distributed network systems. He served as Twilio's Chief Technology Officer, architecting the initial distributed telecom routing network.
John Wolthuis was a gifted software engineer and University of Michigan graduate who co-architected Twilio's original REST API endpoints, HTTP webhooks, and TwiML (Twilio Markup Language), making telephony as straightforward as writing basic HTML.
The founders started writing the initial prototype code in a house in Seattle, Washington, before moving down to San Francisco, California, to incorporate and join the vibrant early cloud startup ecosystem.
The founders self-funded the initial prototype, followed by seed angel investments from Mitch Kapor, Dave McClure (500 Startups), and Chris Sacca, before securing a $3.7 million Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners in 2009.
TwiML (Twilio Markup Language) is an XML-based language invented by the founders that instructed Twilio's telecom servers how to handle phone calls and SMS (such as <Say>, <Dial>, and <Gather>), shielding developers from complex telecom protocols like SIP and SS7.
Jeff Lawson published "Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century" in 2021, arguing that forward-looking companies empower software engineers to solve core business problems.
After building the core architectural foundations and scaling the early engineering teams, Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis transitioned out of daily operational roles in the early 2010s to pursue new entrepreneurial technology ventures.
The founders established the famous "Twilio Magic" cultural values: "Be an Owner", "Empower Others", "No Shenanigans", "Draw the Owl" (figure out solutions to unsolved problems), and "Write It Down".
Jeff Lawson was named TechCrunch Crunchies Founder of the Year, featured widely on Forbes and Fortune tech lists, and celebrated across Silicon Valley as the champion of the "API economy".
Their core insight was that software would inevitably eat telecommunications: proprietary telecom hardware switches and carrier contracts would be replaced by simple, programmatic cloud APIs accessible to every developer on earth.
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