Twilio wraps $3.2B purchase of Segment after warp speed courtship

techcrunch.com

83 points·theBashShell··7 comments

For those interested in Segment, this is a talk of Peter Reinhardt about Product Market Fit and a bit of the history behind Segment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6pl5GG8RQ4

I like this talk really much.

Awesome journey. They pivoted to doing something completely different.

Twilio wants to be an end-to-end 'customer engagement platform' so this is a super strong acquisition; in one go they've bought a huge chunk of the marketing automation eco-system, which pushes them really far up the customer value chain.

From a personal perspective it'll be interesting to see how much this pulls/pushes Twilio into the ad-tech space.

Segment's 'Customer Data Platform' really found its legs in the marketing space, but they've recently made a very big push to a 'we can do everything your DMP does and 100x more' which was making pretty big waves in the sell side of ad-tech. One of the reasons I think it's so successful is their developer experience is about a million times better than their competitors.

If Twilio does continue this push up through marketing into ad-tech I'd be very long on them eating a nice chunk of that market.

Agreed. I'm also curious what their non-cookie based identity resolution approach would look like.

Somehow I would prefer to separate my product analytics from my messaging service.

Curious for an update on Centrifuge.

I led that team for a couple of years. A couple of the strongest and most prolific engineers I’ve ever worked with. Who comes back from a 3 day weekend with a 5k line diff to review, that adds dramatic improvements to the core system? Well, I saw that happen more than once while working with that team. (No we never asked them to work through the weekend)

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