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Telco is a commodity. You want to raise as much money as possible and you want to drive your margins down as it makes competition impossible.



Twilio runs on cloud providers (Amazon and Rackspace, at least when I interviewed with them). Anyone can build what Twilio does, whether thats a group of devs in a co-working startup space, or a large telcom (NTT, AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom).

On the web, there are no longer barriers to entry.


Strong competition is a barrier to entry.

If I'm an enterprise, I'll go with Twilio over some 2 week old startup because of its proven track record and the likelihood of being around in a year.


You don't start at the top. Barriers really are incredibly low but that's not to say its realistic to expect to land enterprise clients on day 1. The key is o build a sustainable business and work your way up while creating that track record. I think we've gotten way too used to these overnight success stories about startups (which aren't really true a lot of the time).

I hate to use this example because its a bit cliche but Google entered late into a field of established players and won. Microsoft beat IBM (this one applies only to the PC, I know IBM is still a force to be reckoned with). Stripe, Balanced, and Square are able to compete with PayPal for accepting payments. I know these arent all enterprise-specific but I didn't take the parent's comment to be about enterprise only.


It depends on the industry. There is no risk if I try out a new search engine as a consumer. But, if I'm building a phone application, there's a huge risk if I build it on a weak platform.


Really? Because AT&T went with Tropo over Twilio, and Tropo isn't nearly as big as Twilio.

What you'd do as an enterprise and what real enterprises would do are two different things.




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