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Twilio

Twilio – Another ‘Rags to Rich’ Success Story.

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Twilio is a renowned platform as a service, providing cloud communication services to its worldwide customers. The company is situated in San Francisco, California, U.S., and is mainly known for its web service APIs that allow web developers to add Twilio’s voice and communication service to their software.

Twilio makes use of the Amazon Web Services to run its communication system, such that establishes a connection between  HTTP and the public switched telephone network (PSTN) using its APIs. The company is one of the biggest promoters of the open-source community and has made a few open-source software for developers, including OpenVBX.

Jeff Lawson, along with Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis, founded Twilio in 2008. Jeff Lawson is the CEO and the main brains behind the founding of Twilio. He used to work at Amazon Web Services and founded his passion in cloud computing. His passion became the basis of Twilio, and today Twilio is not just an idea but a company worth $63 Billion market capital.

Twilio
Image source: vectorlogoseek.com

Back Story Of Twilio

Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis founded Twilio in 2008, keeping the customer experience in mind. While working at multiple software companies, the three founders had realized that they could achieve anything through coding and the customer experience has to be the basis of their company.

The founders went to multiple investors with the proposal to build the company that would develop APIs for communication, many liked the idea, but looking at the risk, they refused to pay the money. In the end, the three of them collected their savings and started the company. They did not even take their salaries for a few months. In fact, Lawson and his wife sold all their wedding gifts to raise the money for their startup.

The startup started from two locations initially, i.e. from  Seattle, Washington, and San Francisco, California. Twilio made its first software for rickrolling, an American prank platform. The software brought a lot of press attention to Twilio. Later, the company launched a cloud-based calling and messaging API, named Twilio Voice in November 2008. The API was the first of its kind. Later in 2010, the company also brought a text messaging API followed by the launch of SMS shortcodes ( in public beta) in July 2017.

In 2009, Company raised a sum of $250,000 in its seed funding, Mitch Kapor, The Founders Fund, and Dave McClure being a few of the major investors. In its first round of funding, the company raised $3.7 million, where Union Square led the funding. In its round B of Funding, Twilio managed to raise around $12 million, followed by $17 million in a Series C round in 2011. Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Fidelity, T Rowe Price, Altimeter Capital Management, Arrowpoint Partners have been some of the leading investors in Twilio.

The Growth

Twilio went public in 2016 on New York Stock Exchange, with a 92% increase on the first day of its trading. In September 2010, Twilio started the Fund to encourage startups and provide them seed money. In the last decade, the company has also made some major acquisitions, including Authy (2015), Tikal Technologies (2016), Beepsend (2017), Ytica (2018), SendGrid (2018), Core Network Dynamics GmbH (2018), Electric Imp (2020), Segment (2020), and Zipwhip (2021), etc.

The company today employs around 4,500 people worldwide. As per the 2020 records, Company made profits worth US$1.76 billion. The company started from voice API and today develops products including SMS, MMS, SIP Trunking, WebRTC, 2FA, Call Center, etc. SendGrid is one of its subsidiaries.

About the Founder

Jeff Lawson is a famous entrepreneur and software developer, well known for founding and leading Twilio. Apart from Twilio, he founded Nine Star Inc, Stubhub.com, and Versity.com Inc. Lawson joined the University of Michigan to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science but dropped out to concentrate on a business, which he started while studying at the university. Before founding Twilio, he also worked at Amazon (AWS) as the Technical Product Manager. Lawson has also written a book named Ask Your Developer.

The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk – A Jeff Green Founded Successful Start-Up in the Digital Marketing Space.

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Advertising in the digital era fuels the branding of each and every business. Jeff Green and Dave Pickles decided to found The Trade Desk when they detected a gap between marketers and the right information they needed to build an ad. If one doesn’t have plenty of accurate data to forecast and analyze the behavior of the target audience, it is not possible to create an ad that will resonate with their needs or pain points. Both Jeff and Dave realized that this unavailability of data is giving a hard time to the marketers as well as content creators to monetize their platforms. And, The Trade Desk was founded in 2009 as a solution to this problem, helping digital ad buyers around the world.

About The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk is a successful company in the digital advertising sector that focuses on data-driven advertising campaigns for digital ad buyers. TTD offers one-of-a-kind SaaS which is also the largest independent demand-side platform (DSP). The company is based in Ventura, California. TTD has three main products to offer advertisers at various companies and agencies. Let’s have a look at the services provided by TTD.

The Trade Desk
Image source: businesswire.com

Services of TTD

First, the demand-side platform is all about using data in the smartest possible way. The clients use data to derive accurate information that gives a better idea for strategizing ads. This helps the businesses plan in a way to reach more audiences before pouring heavy amounts of money into creating ads. The demand-side platform helps a client to build a complete planner only by providing information like goals and budgets. With the help of cross-device targeting, your ads reach the right kind of audience for your product or brand. The AI-driven technology of TTD also helps gain recommendations and insights based on the type of data you are looking for or your goals.

Second, the data management platform works with the existing data of a client and provides insights about who could be your potential customers. The data management platform of TTD helps a client to discover new people who they can approach to increase the customer base. There can be many new businesses, where the company hasn’t hired any in-house data researcher or analyst. So, TTD will help to surface the right type of data and create new relevant audience profiles for your company.

Lastly, TTD APIs is also a choice for the company’s clients if one is interested in building customized solutions. This will increase the efficiency of a company as one will create a personalized solution depending on more parameters of the company. It means a company will use more of its data to create a competitive advantage and hence will gain clearer insights about its customers and workflow.

Behind the Scenes

Before co-founding TTD, Jeff Green established an online auction advertising company called AdECN. Microsoft acquired the company in 2007 and Dave started working for the company right after that. This is how the two of them met and founded TTD, a new adventure in 2009. In 2010, the company successfully raised $2.5 million from investors like Founder Collective and IA Ventures. Jerry Neumann and Josh Stylman are two angel investors that backed TTD in the early days.

TTD was established in the sector of digital marketing where the opportunities for growth were unscalable especially in this digital age. The company succeeded very quickly and in 2015 TTD was featured in Forbes as one of the Top 10 America’s Most Promising Companies. The same year both the co-founders were named Ernst & Young Entrepreneurs of the Year. In 2018, the company launched two AI-based tools, namely, Koa (An AI forecast engine) and The Trade Desk Planner. With these two innovative products rolling out in the market, TTD acquired the second position in the list of 100 Best Medium Workplaces by Fortune.

About the Founders

Jeff Green studied marketing communications at the University of Southern California. He started his career in Microsoft and founded AdECN, a demand-side advertising platform in 2003. Two years after Microsoft acquired the company, Jeff built a new start-up focusing on the buy-side platform, which is none other than TTD.

Dave Pickles is the current CTO of TTD and also a board member. Dave studied Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He started working for AdECN after Microsoft acquired it. Before that, he was a senior engineer at CallWave, an internet telephony startup.

ifs ab

IFS AB – A Sweden-based Enterprise Software Company Also Aiming To Improve Lives Of Underprivileged Population.

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IFS AB also known as Industrial and Financial Systems was born in 1983 in Sweden. The company specializes in developing and delivering enterprise software. IFS AB focuses on project-centric industries where it uses a single code base and develops ERP. Some of the sectors where IFS AB delivers such products are aerospace, manufacturing, automotive, oil, and gas, etc. With 4,000 employees, the company offers its products and solutions on a global scale to more than 10,000 customers. IFS AB is one of the most recommended suppliers in its sector and is currently led by Darren Roos (CEO of IFS AB).

About IFS AB

Since its foundation, IFS AB has made a big impact both in terms of business and uplifting the lives of socio-economically backward people. In terms of its innovative products and solutions, the company became the winner of the European Digital Technology Award among 150,000 companies. It has also won the 2019 European Business Award. Last year, Darren Roos won the Best CEO of the Year award for leading the company to such great heights. IFS AB believes in serving people who are in need of better living conditions and proper education. So, the company founded the IFS Foundation that is currently focusing on helping poor people of rural Sri Lanka.

IFS AB
Image source: www.ifs.com

History of the Company

After founding the company in 1983, the company launched its first product in 1985. The name of the software product was IFS Maintenance which after five years was included in an entire product suite called IFS Applications. Being a European company, the company gradually expanded into the Scandinavian region. It opened offices in Norway, Denmark, and Finland. After the New Year, it also opened an office in Poland. In the early 1990s, IFS AB expanded to Asia and North America. In 1996, IFS got listed on the Swedish Stock Exchange. Eventually, the company opened up an R&D center in Colombo.

In less than ten years of its releasing the first graphical user interface, it gathered 500,000 active users. In 2008, the company again launched a new GUI and started acquiring companies from various fields. IFS AB was acquired by a private equity firm in 2015. To date, the main product of IFS is IFS Applications which is an integrated suite of enterprise applications for businesses. It includes software for asset and service management, project management, manufacturing, and supply chain.

Business Growth and Acquisitions

In 2015, IFS recorded more than 1 million users of its GUI. The company has expanded to many international grounds and its operational focus has been divided into four groups. The first two groups focus on European markets, and the other two groups are in charge of management in the America and Asia Pacific region. The company has made a series of acquisitions in various countries from the US to the UK in the past 1.5 decades. In 2009, the company acquired MultiPlus Solutions followed by 360 Scheduling, a UK-based scheduling engine in 2010. In 2017, it acquired three companies namely Field Service Management Limited, WorkWave LLC, and systems Limited. This year, to date, IFS acquired two US-based businesses which are Axios Systems and Customerville.

IFS as a Philanthropist

For years, IFS has focussed on education and the importance of STEM subjects and thus partnered with many schools for financial support and scholarship. The company is heavily inclined towards providing education to those who don’t have financial support and create a bright future for the younger generation. The company also currently focuses on serving the backward local communities of Sri Lanka for the past 20 years. The IFS Foundation is addressing healthcare, sanitation, education, etc in these areas.

Darren Roos – CEO of IFS AB

Hailing from South Africa, Darren Roos is a famous business executive who has worked in multiple companies before joining IFS. He served as the Executive Board Member of Software AG and also as the President of SARP ERP Cloud. He completed his education at the University of South Africa. He was directly appointed as the CEO of IFS in 2018 when he first joined the company.

Deloitte

Deloitte – A 176-years Old Multinational Conglomerate Successfully Running A Professional Services Network.

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William Welch Deloitte founded the company back in 1845 in London, England. The full name of the company is Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited. It is a private company that operates a network of professional services in over 150 countries. It is the largest company in the world in the sector of professional services in terms of revenue generated and employees working for the company. Currently, there are more than 334,000 professionals offering services like consulting, financial advisory, legal, etc. in the company. Sharon Thorne is the present Chairperson of Deloitte Global and Punit Renjen is the CEO of the same.

About Deloitte

Deloitte, originally established in London, expanded to the United States in the late 1800s. In 1989, the company merged with Touche Ross and after a few years, the company rebranded to Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. But, the company’s name was again abbreviated to Deloitte later. the company provides a wide range of professional services like financial advisory, tax, legal, audit, risk advisory, and consulting. The company is not just the largest brand in the professional service sector it is also the third-largest privately owned company in the US.

Deloitte
Image source: www.consultancy.eu

The Early History of the Company

Hiring professionals to solve complex business problems is the root idea behind the establishment of Company. The Great Western Railway (GWR) was a company in England that generated revenue by selling equity to the public. In 1849, William Welch Deloitte was given the responsibility to audit the company. When the boom in joint-stock companies took place, eventually the demand for people with professional skills surged. So, George A. Touche established an accounting company in 1898 to meet this demand and started expanding the territory of Touche, Niven & Company.

The stock market crash of 1929 brought before all the fact that some bankruptcies were prevented due to proper accounting. When this matter was brought before the US Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, hiring independent audits was made compulsory for public corporations. So, the demand for accountants increased once again and many women accountants found jobs. On the other hand, William by then opened several offices after his journey started with GWR. In 1972, the company merged with Haskins & Sells, and the new company became Deloitte Haskins & Sells. In 1989, the company again merged with Touche Ross but many important people disagreed with the merger and the lead kept changing constantly.

Company in the Modern Era

A lot of discrepancies took place regarding the name of Deloitte and Touche. So, in 1993, the company was given the name Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited. In 1995, Deloitte Consulting was formed, and eventually, the company started expanding, acquiring, and opening new services. At the beginning of the 2000s, the company acquired Eclipse, Beijing Pan-China CPA, and the North American Public Service of BearingPoint. the company opened a new branch called Deloitte Intelligence and started hiring ex-employees of the Central Intelligence Agency created a very strong team of professionals. The companies acquired by them were very diverse ranging from the real estate sector to mobile advertising agencies. This helped company expand its services and also generate more revenue.

One of the most successful units of the company is Deloitte Digital which acquired 11 digital marketing agencies in the span of 5 years. In 2016, Deloitte and Apple went into a joint partnership to increase the sales of Apple’s mobile phones and engagement of Deloitte consultants for Apple’s products and services. The services offered by the company as well as its geographical market keep on expanding. As of last year, the company generated annual revenue of more than $45 billion.

About William Welch Deloitte

William Welch Deloitte, born in 1818, started his professional career very early. Only at the age of 15, he started working as an assistant for the Official Assignee at the Bankruptcy Court in London. While working as an assistant, he learned about business and eventually became an accountant. When he was 25 he opened his own office but his life took a huge turn when he became the first even independent auditor appointed. Eventually, he started establishing multiple offices of Deloitte and when he retired from the company, it existed as Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co.

Proofpoint Inc

Proofpoint Inc – An American SaaS Provider Specialising In Security Software.

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Proofpoint Inc is a security software company based in Sunnyvale, California, US. Eric Hahn founded the company in 2002 and since then it has grown into a big family of more than 3600 employees. Proofpoint is a very well-known and reliable company when it comes to providing SaaS and products. The main product of the company is providing security software for inbound email, email encryption, outbound data loss prevention, email archiving, etc. Proofpoint currently serves more than 8,000 organizations across the globe. Apart from its headquarter, the company also has offices in Australia, Europe, Canada, US, and several Asian countries. Currently, Gary Steele is the Chairman and CEO of the company.

History of the Company

In June 2002, Eric Hahn founded the company, Proofpoint Inc. He is most famous as the CTO of Netscape Communications which lost the market to Internet Explorer. For a year, the company made attempts to raise a good amount of funding. So, after it received Series A funding, the company raised $7 million and then decided to launch publicly in July 2003. During the initial days, venture investors like Benchmark Capital along with Stanford University backed the company. The same year, Proofpoint released its first product and raised another $9 million from Series B funding.

The first-ever product that was released by Proofpoint was called the Proofpoint Protection Server. This was built for medium and large-scale businesses and it used machine learning algorithms to detect spam mails more accurately. The span detection software was hit in the market in the 2000s and it was one of the top business properties. This led to the very rapid growth of Powerpoint as it gained many customers in a short span of time.

With the increase in the number of cyber threats in different forms, the products of Proofpoint evolved accordingly. The company also introduced features like email encryption and identity-based encryption in its products. In 2008, the company introduced Proofpoint on Demand- Standard Edition which was especially for small and medium scale businesses that don’t run on their own servers. In 2012, the company filed its first IPO and became a publicly-traded company. A few months ago, Proofpoint declared that it will be acquired by a private equity firm, Thoma Bravo.

Proofpoint Inc
Image source: itsupplychain.com

Shifting Strategies During the Pandemic

With the start of lockdown that is still continuing in many places, business scenarios and goals changed for many companies. Proofpoint also had to evolve because of the sudden change in the work environment and something it didn’t plan to do. A major part of Proofpoint’s solutions revolves around mail, especially direct mail programs. But with the onset of the pandemic, they needed to change strategies as employees of companies all over the world shifted to their home environment. Halting the services of the company was never an option, so the company laid new strategies according to the remote workflow within only a week and a half and made some effective changes. Proofpoint decided to modify their direct mail programs and focus on targeted intent-based digital outreach.

Acquisitions

Proofpoint has acquired several companies in its journey since 2003. The first company acquired by Proofpoint was Fortiva which was back in June 2008 followed by Secure Data in Motion in the same year. In 2012, the company acquired NextPage and next year bought three companies in a row, namely, Abaca Technology Corporation, Armorize Technologies, and Sendmail Inc. The two biggest acquisitions in the history of Proofpoint are Wombat Security Technologies and ObserveIT, both for $225 million. The company’s latest acquisition was in February 2021 when it bought InteliSecure.

Gary Steele – CEO of Proofpoint Inc

Gary Steele has been serving as the CEO of the company since day 1. He is responsible for all the successful funding rounds and filing its first IPO. Before joining Proofpoint, he worked at many famous companies like Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Portera, and Sybase Inc. He studied computer science at Washington State University.

SmartBear Software

SmartBear Software – A Company Originally Founded By Jason Cohen Now A Part Of Bigger Enterprise.

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SmartBear Software is an American-based IT company that went through several folds of acquisitions since 2003. Jason Cohen, a successful entrepreneur and also an author, founded SmartBear and sold the company in 2007. The SmartBear company that we see today is the result of multiple acquisitions that took place between 2007 and 2009. SmartBear Software is known for delivering products for software development and testing, API testing and management, etc. Currently, the company is based in Somerville, Massachusetts, US and it operates under the leadership of CEO, Frank Roe.

About SmartBear Software

SmartBear is an information technology company that focuses on developing quality software for its clients. The products and solutions of SmartBear encompass a wide variety of options from test automation to code collaborator. SmartBear develops its products in such a way that it is not only affordable but also easy to try and integrate into your current system. So, the company makes sure to provide quality solutions at affordable pricing. More than 24,000 organizations have used the products of SmartBear including some famous brands like Adobe, Microsoft, FedEx, etc. The SmartBear tools are used by more than 15 million users in over 194 countries for different purposes.

SmartBear Software
Image source: wikimedia.org

History of Today’s SmartBear Software

Jason Cohen bootstrapped SmartBear for seven years and turned it into a success. The company started generating profit in millions and then he sold the company in 2007. Insight Venture Partners acquired SmartBear Software during that time along with two other companies, namely, AutomatedQA and Pragmatic Software. These three companies became a single entity and operated as AQA Holdings which in 2010 became SmartBear Software.

Automated QA was a software company founded in 1999 in Nevada. The company was well-known for building automated software testing tools. The company, before the acquisition and merger, was featured in the SD Times 100 list in the software development field. Born in 2005, Pragmatic Software became the first Microsoft Certified Partner software company in Albania. As the three companies started working together as a single brand, it acquitted another business called Eviware in 2011. A series of companies was acquired by SmartBear in the next few years including AlertSite, Lucierna, Swagger, and many more. The acquisitions led to some of the founders joining SmartBear which uplifted the quality of the team. In 2017, SmartBear was further acquired (major stake) by Francisco Partners.

SmartBear During the Pandemic

Frank Roe recently became the CEO of the company which was two weeks before the lockdown started due to COVID-19. A situation of sudden shutdown and shifting to a completely online mode of work became a new challenge for each and every company. So, being the new leader of SmartBear, Frank tried to maintain a very strong communication line among the employees, not only meeting but also virtual social gatherings. Most of the employees at SmartBear are very young, so their enthusiasm and curiosity helped the company move swiftly to the WFH environment without such amendments. Frank also believes that one of the most important reasons that SmartBear has successfully stayed strong during COVID-19 is because of the entrepreneurial spirit in the team. As the founders of the business acquired by SmartBear have come on board and joined the team, it has created a diverse team bonded with the same spirit of passion.

Awards and Recognitions

The new SmartBear Software has won many awards in the past years and still continues to thrive. Some of them include becoming the best medium-sized company to work in 2014 which was awarded by Glassdoor. Boston named SmartBear as one of the ‘50 on Fire’ companies in 2019 and the next year it was in the list of 100 Best Places to Work in Boston 2020 by BuiltIn.

Frank Roe – CEO of SmartBear

Frank Roe joined SmartBear with 25 years of rich experience in the business world. He started off his career by working as a strategy consultant and slowly moved up the ladder. Frank worked for multiple companies including Deloitte Consulting, Incentive Systems, Progress, Oracle, RSD, etc. He joined SmartBear as the Chief Revenue Officer in 2018 and became CEO in February 2020.