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Comment by throwaway6497 | Hacker News Reader

Can some one explain the purpose of this other than marketing? I feel, we take it too far these days. This thing seems straight out of Silicon Valley HBO show. It is difficult to tell reality from fiction. Why code jam from NYC trade floor? What is the intrinsic value of this code jam to Twilio other than marketing. May be I am a bit being harsh. May be I am old school when I think we should all be rolling like Wozniak's (apple co-founder) not flashy brogrammers who would do anything for marketing.

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Honestly? I think this is Twilio's "we told you so"/fuck you" to wall street.

Investor sentiment around developer tools in Silicon Valley is still broadly negative. I worked for 3yrs at a company funded by prominent valley VCs and, unequivocally, they were trying to get us out of the "developer tools" business and "sell more to the enterprise market". The subtext being, "developers don't control budget in real companies".

And I think there's a grain of truth to that sentiment. You have to realize how much Twilio is a company built against the prevailing Silicon Valley wisdom of "how companies are built". These guys have a bit of a counterculture narrative, of "we're a developer tools company, we're growing, we're having a successful IPO, see, it can be done".

I, for one, think it's a great, harmless PR stunt. :)

> Twilio is a company built against the prevailing Silicon Valley wisdom of "how companies are built"

Sell NYSE:TWLO!

Puts my friend, puts are where its at.

Newly listed IPO stocks do not have options for a while.

You're correct, it takes a bit for an options market to form around a new security.

Let's get beyond the first day of trading before we start telling Wall Street, "Fuck you."

I love Twilio and wish the best for them with their IPO but having lived through the 1999 dotcom crash, publicity stunts and stock price hubris rub me the wrong way.

It's weird to dismiss this as marketing is somehow not a valid reason to do something! The entire IPO process is heavily about marketing yourself - to bankers, to asset management companies, to other investors, to future employees, to analysts, etc. Twilio is an API company, do you know how boring that is to most people? Most people can barely grip the idea of what an API even is, never mind what it does or why on earth you'd want to invest in it. This is an excellent demonstration of what the product does - it's giving physical form and a real world demo to an API company, and that's incredibly meaningful! Not to mention they are all over the news media today - this is their day, and this provides a great TV shot and provides good info to viewers. When Square IPO'd, they brought the readers to show off to viewers. When you have an API company, you have to be a little more creative. It's just a really great idea, don't be so hard on them :)

One way it could have happened: marketing says "let's have someone live code from the NYSE trade floor, that'll be great marketing"- and an engineer begrudgingly does it.

Another way it could have happened: some engineer nerded out, and said at a team meeting "can I live code from the NYSE trade floor? It's silly but would be super fun!". To which marketing replies "yeah, and that'd be great for the company image too- do it!".

You seem to interpret it as the first version, but for all we know it could be the second. Something that would not be out of line with the personality of someone like Woz either.

I worked in Twilio's marketing department from 2011-14. A key part of our marketing 101 classes for new recruits was that marketing was not a bad word. In fact, to not market a product is an insult to it. The highest honor you can pay to all the hard work that went in to the product, is to market the hell out of it and make sure it gets used.

Exactly. If someone doesn't want to get their product out to customers, it's a shame they don't have a product they believe in.

It's also a shame when true believers market their product endlessly.

Much easier for someone who doesn't want to hear it to simply not listen than for someone to hear about a product they need that the creators are unwilling to talk about.

How did you tackle internal negativity from engineers who as a whole tend to skew towards the "anti-marketing" sentiment?

Are engineers against marketing, or are they against emotion based marketing (think car or clothing ads)?

I've encountered engineers throughout my career that have been against all of it.

Also from the Twilio marketing team (2011-2013) as a developer evangelist...

First, by being developers. The first word in our title was "developer" and each of us had 10+ years of serious ship-it experience on projects large and small from all over various industries. Even if we didn't know that specific problem, we had shared experiences and mindsets.

Next, by treating everyone with respect. It didn't matter if you were in a "boring" job behind the scenes or the most amazing job with accolades and attention or the person making the purchasing decision, you are someone to be treated with dignity and respect.

Finally, by being hero makers. That was our internal code name at the time. Our job was not to promote ourselves and get our names out there. It was to help make that developer, that hacker, that entrepreneur be admired and a hero in their organization. That meant helping them design, build, and ship useful tools quickly that would work today, tomorrow, and a year from now.

My 0.02.

This is 100% a marketing tactic. A good one at that and Twilio will probably see a decent ROI from it.

> May be I am old school when I think we should all be rolling like Wozniak's (apple co-founder) not flashy brogrammers who would do anything for marketing.

Woz would be a no one without marketing. And similarly Jobs would be a no one with Woz's product development. I'm not sure why you feel the need to address "has marketing gone too far" when you can simply chose to ignore it?

I just posted pretty much exactly this point and then read further down the read and saw this.

I think people get caught up in the product, and forget that sales is just as important to the core business.

It's not just empty fluff marketing. If I asked people on my floor if they knew what the company does, they would have no idea. Watching a demo like this enables the company to emphasize the simplicity involved in their product and enables understanding of what the company actually does vs "idk some tech company".

That sounds like marketing to me. But don't know what's wrong with marketing in the first place. Having good marketing is essential.

I think the above poster wasn't disputing the "marketing" part, he/she was saying this wasn't "empty fluff" marketing (meaning it was potentially USEFUL marketing).

Wait, why does it have to have a purpose besides marketing?

>> "...the purpose of this other than marketing..."

In fact the whole purpose of having a stock exchange floor is 100% marketing. The real action happens in a colo in New Jersey; the trading floor only exists for the cameras and the NYSE would carry on perfectly fine without one.

"we should all be rolling like Wozniak's (apple co-founder)"

Apple wouldn't be Apple if it rolled like Woz.

They're marketing directly to people who would want to know about why they would IPO in the first place. Mission accomplished, non?

Why in the world would there need to be ANY other reason other than marketing?

I think it's neat demonstration. They've got a simple point to get across, and this is a decent enough way to make it.

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