I am bummed to be missing Twilio’s annual Signal Conference this year. Not just because Jeff does a fantastic keynote, but because Twilio always announces a truckload of amazing new goodness. Here are just two great things from yesterday: first, a marketplace for add-ons which lets third parties connect with Twilio’s 1 million developers (a milestone also announced yesterday) and second, programmable Twilio-powered SIM cards for IoT applications (in conjunction with T-Mobile). While the annou...

I am bummed to be missing Twilio’s annual Signal Conference this year. Not just because Jeff does a fantastic keynote, but because Twilio always announces a truckload of amazing new goodness. Here are just two great things from yesterday: first, a marketplace for add-ons which lets third parties connect with Twilio’s 1 million developers (a milestone also announced yesterday) and second, programmable Twilio-powered SIM cards for IoT applications (in conjunction with T-Mobile). While the annou...

The team at Twilio has done an amazing job making telephony accessible to developers. Making and accepting calls, as well as sending and receiving texts is now as easy as a couple of lines of code. The simplicity of Twilio’s API is such that most developers are literally up and running within minutes. At the same time because of the ingenious REST API which makes calls and messages addressable, there is no limit to the complexity of the applications that can be created using Twilio. Now Twili...

The team at Twilio has done an amazing job making telephony accessible to developers. Making and accepting calls, as well as sending and receiving texts is now as easy as a couple of lines of code. The simplicity of Twilio’s API is such that most developers are literally up and running within minutes. At the same time because of the ingenious REST API which makes calls and messages addressable, there is no limit to the complexity of the applications that can be created using Twilio. Now Twili...

We are excited to be investors in Twilio as they transform telephony from cumbersome, proprietary and expensive into an easy-to-use web service. We also love the team’s creativity in promoting Twilio to developers, including the idea for this week’s contest: lunch with the USV team. We will be working with the Twilio team to pick the winner from this week’s entrants. As such, I thought it would be helpful to point to some of the criteria that we look for in evaluating innovation on the web. F...

We are excited to be investors in Twilio as they transform telephony from cumbersome, proprietary and expensive into an easy-to-use web service. We also love the team’s creativity in promoting Twilio to developers, including the idea for this week’s contest: lunch with the USV team. We will be working with the Twilio team to pick the winner from this week’s entrants. As such, I thought it would be helpful to point to some of the criteria that we look for in evaluating innovation on the web. F...

Last week, I participated in a panel on the implications of SaaS/Cloud for SMEs. One point that was made by several of the panelists is that a big advantage over on-premise software is that you are always on the latest version and thus get to benefit from improvements over time. Those improvements can be additional features but they can also come in the for of reduced prices. Amazon for example has cut their prices for EC2 and also made such cost savings available as reserved instances and mo...

Last week, I participated in a panel on the implications of SaaS/Cloud for SMEs. One point that was made by several of the panelists is that a big advantage over on-premise software is that you are always on the latest version and thus get to benefit from improvements over time. Those improvements can be additional features but they can also come in the for of reduced prices. Amazon for example has cut their prices for EC2 and also made such cost savings available as reserved instances and mo...

I have previously written about non-linearity and how it messes with our reasoning. In business non-linearity abounds. One example that has been discussed a lot is the change between going from a price of 2 cents to 1 cent compared to the change with going from 1 cent to free. Twitter wouldn’t be twitter if it had charged just 1 cent per tweet. One area where this is also true but more subtle and less well understood is product simplicity. Steve Jobs is clearly on to something very powerful b...

I have previously written about non-linearity and how it messes with our reasoning. In business non-linearity abounds. One example that has been discussed a lot is the change between going from a price of 2 cents to 1 cent compared to the change with going from 1 cent to free. Twitter wouldn’t be twitter if it had charged just 1 cent per tweet. One area where this is also true but more subtle and less well understood is product simplicity. Steve Jobs is clearly on to something very powerful b...

When investing in consumer services, we try to be active users of the services. That tends to provide a fair bit of insight about what is working and what is not (as long as one keeps in mind that one may not be the exact target user!). To do something similar for our more developer directed investments, I have long been meaning to build a little project using MongoDB and Twilio. But usually the extremely rare cycles that I have available for code go into fixing something on DailyLit. Over La...

When investing in consumer services, we try to be active users of the services. That tends to provide a fair bit of insight about what is working and what is not (as long as one keeps in mind that one may not be the exact target user!). To do something similar for our more developer directed investments, I have long been meaning to build a little project using MongoDB and Twilio. But usually the extremely rare cycles that I have available for code go into fixing something on DailyLit. Over La...

The amazing team at our portfolio company Twilio has done it again: taken something that was previously complicated and made it super simple. This time they set their sights on business telephone systems (formerly known as PBXs, which – if anyone remembers – is short for Private Branch Exchange). Most legacy PBXs are incredibly hard to program. For instance, the one we have at Union Square Ventures, has some completely proprietary setup which essentially requires us to pay someone every time ...

The amazing team at our portfolio company Twilio has done it again: taken something that was previously complicated and made it super simple. This time they set their sights on business telephone systems (formerly known as PBXs, which – if anyone remembers – is short for Private Branch Exchange). Most legacy PBXs are incredibly hard to program. For instance, the one we have at Union Square Ventures, has some completely proprietary setup which essentially requires us to pay someone every time ...

Earlier this week Twilio announced that their SMS service is now available for delivery to 150 countries. That’s a big deal because many Internet companies have users around the globe with international audience often growing as quickly or faster than US. Not only can Twilio now deliver SMS to those international audiences but it can also do so in local language by providing unicode support. The SMS announcement follows on the heels of voice being made available in Italy and Germany going int...

Earlier this week Twilio announced that their SMS service is now available for delivery to 150 countries. That’s a big deal because many Internet companies have users around the globe with international audience often growing as quickly or faster than US. Not only can Twilio now deliver SMS to those international audiences but it can also do so in local language by providing unicode support. The SMS announcement follows on the heels of voice being made available in Italy and Germany going int...

Twilio has been growing rapidly in the US and they recently launched in the UK for voice with text coming soon. In addition to geographic expansion, Twilio has also been adding awesome new services such as Twilio Client and Twilio Connect. We are excited to be supporting Team Twilio together with the fine folks from Bessemer with a $17 million Series C financing. Congrats to the entire team on a fantastic year!

Twilio has been growing rapidly in the US and they recently launched in the UK for voice with text coming soon. In addition to geographic expansion, Twilio has also been adding awesome new services such as Twilio Client and Twilio Connect. We are excited to be supporting Team Twilio together with the fine folks from Bessemer with a $17 million Series C financing. Congrats to the entire team on a fantastic year!

This past weekend I finally tackled two projects that I had on my to do list for quite a while. Had I known how easy they would turn out to be I would have worked on them much sooner. The first was setting up the 212 area code number I had bought for Susan a while back. As a longtime New York resident she really didn’t like that we got a 646 number when we moved back from the suburbs. As it turns out you can buy unused 212 numbers. All I wanted to do then is to forward that number to our 646 ...

This past weekend I finally tackled two projects that I had on my to do list for quite a while. Had I known how easy they would turn out to be I would have worked on them much sooner. The first was setting up the 212 area code number I had bought for Susan a while back. As a longtime New York resident she really didn’t like that we got a 646 number when we moved back from the suburbs. As it turns out you can buy unused 212 numbers. All I wanted to do then is to forward that number to our 646 ...