Late last year I managed to pop by the Twilio offices in San Francisco to meet with Jeff Lawson, the company’s rockstar CEO and co-founder.
Twilio’s brilliance has been enabling anybody to use their telecoms infrastructure API to do almost anything you need with a telephone — and also with SMS. So, for example, if you’d like to get your billing system to call or text a confirmation, 10 lines of code will do it.
You only have to cast your eye over the example implementations (eBay, Airbnb, Hulu and so on) to see that Twilio has massive real world possibilities. (In many cases, the developers in these highlighted case studies had proof of concepts live in hours.)
Before Twilio, doing anything with the telephone system was a crazily annoying hugely complicated process.
There was one problem: Twilio used to be USA-only. You could call anyone internationally, just you had to do so from a USA number.
That’s all changed recently though — and right now, the company is supporting services locally in the UK, Canada, Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland and Poland. With more to come!
Check out Jeff’s video for more perspective: