Not only did the two companies outperform their Q3 targets, but Twilio and Bandwidth also raised their FY 2024 guidance. RCS was top of mind…
The WSJ's Joanna Stern recently highlighted the frustrations many of us share around text messaging spam, and the tools and tactics she covered were spot-on—some…
The Docket Digest is your go-to source for staying informed about the FCC's actions in the voice and text messaging space. In our industry—highly regulated…
In one week, the US will elect a new president; in four weeks, the biggest Black Friday / Cyber Monday (BFCM) ever will kick off…
Starting with my note to The Docket Digest subscribers last week, I explained that we’re expanding The Docket Digest’s focus by tracking FCC’s EDOCS, its…
Earlier this year, I mentioned that Tata Communications is a complex business, which is why simply replacing Kaylera with Tata in my CPaaS financial discussions…
The first woman to win the Marconi Prize; a spectrum auction innovator and trailblazing regulator; and two entrepreneurs who brought wireless connectivity to underserved areas.…
The morning of my fireside chat with Vonage CEO Niklas Heuveldop at the ConnectMobile stage, the GSMA released a report stating that wireless operators were…
The Docket Digest helps you stay informed about everything the FCC is doing in the voice and text messaging space. We operate in a highly…
Cassie Mogilner Holmes, a distinguished professor of marketing and behavioral decision-making at UCLA Anderson School of Management, holds the Bud Knapp Marketing Professorship. Born and…
Now in its tenth year, SaaS Capital released its private company benchmark survey. Unless there is survey data (like what SaaS Capital has), it’s harder…
Like last year, this year’s Somos Summit exceeded expectations. There were new voices and topics but the recurring theme was the same: to trust more,…
Before the interest rate reduction, Sinch, Bandwidth, Upland, and LINK Mobility (four of the seven companies) traded at a discount to their last twelve months’…
When Huggy and I sat down to discuss The Friction Project—his book with co-author Bob Sutton—the plan was to record the conversation to help me…
At over ten times its last twelve months’ (LTM) revenue, Klaviyo leads the valuation race. Its $8.31 billion valuation puts it in the same zip…
Growth endurance measures a company’s ability to sustain high revenue growth as it scales. It’s calculated by dividing the current year’s growth by the previous…
I started my plea to invest aggressively in RCS with thirteen rapid-fire questions to assess your RCS readiness. Some of you shared that you had…
Did the “Hello World” version of your RCS demo embarrass you? Does your company have a public RCS demo? How does your customer get started?…
The last one to release its results, Braze too presented healthy revenue growth—a first-ever non-GAAP profit—and gave some interesting insights into its RCS adoption roadmap.…
In 2012 Dave Boddington won a Bronze Cannes Lion for the Best Integrated CampaignLed by Mobile for the London Olympics activation with the Coca-Cola Global…
Describing iConectiv merely as a number information provider would be an oversimplification. In North America alone, it operates three core registries: LERG (how phone calls…
With a robust background as a Global Product and Sales Leader, Nick Parmar has consistently propelled global sales growth and spearheaded business development in highly…
Like its peers, LINK Mobility showed strong results in Q2. Unlike its peers, however, it is the only CPaaS company to report double-digit improvements in…
This week’s FCC update comes from The Docket Digest, an email subscription service that’s currently in private beta. It is an AI-generated, human-curated update for…
Klaviyo reported $222 million in revenue with a 35% year-over-year growth rate and SaaS-like 77% gross margins. At this rate, it is possible that the…
Chris Wendt is one of the original authors of STIR/SHAKEN, a webRTC pioneer, and the co-chair of the joint IPNNI Joint task Force between ATIS…
At $1.1 billion in revenue, with a 51% gross margin and improved free cash flow, Twilio took the prize for both earnings and profitability beats.…
An "FU Meter" measures aggregate negative responses to a text messaging campaign. While standard opt-out monitoring captures responses to explicit commands like STOP, END, or…
Ready for an apolitical discussion about political text messaging? I will be joining Stefan Heller, Brien Jones-Lantzy, Stephanie Lashley, Anna Quint and Julie Sweet (moderator)…
I highly recommend subscribing to the Humans of Telecom podcast. Host Anurag Aggarwal offers a unique perspective on the global telecom industry by profiling the…
“I didn’t know that’s how it [10DLC] all worked,” I overheard an audience member say at the MEF Leadership Forum in Miami in 2023. The…
Thrown into the deep end at my first industry trade group meeting in 2013, I quickly learned the harsh realities of navigating challenging industry discussions.…
ICYMI, if you updated to iOS 18 Beta 2 in the US, cross-platform RCS works for you, though only for text messages—it still falls back…
Twilio is the target of a TCPA complaint that could redefine the industry’s compliance landscape. TCPA complaints are routine for any large communications platform; however,…
With 117% Net Dollar Retention (NDR), $15 million net cash flow, and 44% of revenue from non-US customers, Braze delivered a strong quarter despite a…
ICYMI, iOS 18 Beta is out. Of course, I used this opportunity to see if I could get a mini Mr. Watson moment. It did…
I’m starting a personal catalog of RCS showcases that will be amazing on both iOS and Android. The goal is to test interoperability and see…
Ronak Shah talked about redesigned tap backs and scheduled messages, text formatting and text effects, and iMessage and SMS via satellite. He spoke of how…
Surinder Anand is an expert in RCS Business Messaging (RBM) with deep technical and product knowledge, experience in launching and monetizing RCS Business Messaging. As…
I’m enjoying reading Fei-Fei Li’s The Worlds I See. I usually reserve my book recommendations until the end of the year, but if you’re looking…
At this year’s WWDC, Apple might disclose the workings of the RCS-iMessage bridge. While major announcements around AI are expected, many hope Apple sheds light…
In my Stanford GSB Exec Education finance class, Ilya Strebulaev claimed he’d teach us half of what we needed to know about M&A in the…
For anything beyond one-way notifications, SMS offers a terrible user experience. It supports only 160-character texts, rudimentary images, emojis, and little else. Any functionality beyond…
Since 2012, I’ve maintained a dynamic list of public companies I follow. If it is true that software is eating the world, then understanding these…
ICYMI, last month four states experienced a 911 outage due to the oldest reason in network operations: cutting the wrong cable. Jokes aside, the workaround…
Overall, the cohort delivered double-digit revenue growth but with some disclosing single-digit declines; many showed no appetite for M&A, but one is evaluating eleven acquisitions;…
Pricing is critical to RCS success. If priced too low, it dilutes the medium and turns it into a source of spam. If priced too…
For me Hugh Varilly, is an early and excellent example of when it’s better to ask than to assume. In the summer and fall of…
Stephanie’s "One Expert, One Topic" column reminded me of our collaboration on the ADP RCS 2FA use case. Implementing 2FA on RCS addressed a significant…
CPaaS earnings season kicks off in a week, and even temperamental optimists like myself are pensive. This marks the first de-risked year—the first year-over-year comparisons…
A pioneer in text messaging, Stephanie Lashley is responsible for the operational, financial, and strategic management of Bandwidth’s text messaging products and leads a team…
Mobile operators charge companies to access their SMS networks. These charges, commonly known as pass-thru fees, are immune to the sender's purchasing power. In fact,…
An award-winning salesperson Nitya Kirat is also the author of the Amazon bestseller, “Winning Virtually: 10 Tiny Habits for BIG Virtual Selling Success.” His client…
Last week Beeper was acquired by Automattic in a deal valued at $125 million. We don’t know what this means for its FCC petition, but…
“Interoperability” is a long word to write and say. Yet it’s at the heart of any David vs. Goliath tech story. The success of any…
There is a classic adversarial interoperability play happening in messaging right now. It involves Beeper (the maker of Beeper Mini), Apple, and the FCC. Android…
Not only did Dallas native Lance Dacy train me to become a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), he helped me train some of the smartest…
In Messaging and Growth in the Pandemic, we unpacked the drivers of pandemic-led growth. We discussed why it was a one-time event, with little to…
When Tata Communications acquired Kaylera, I thought it would be a simple swap and a way to introduce a more global perspective. This was naïve.…
Much to the relief of industry insiders, Twilio is keeping its Segment business. Some feared that Twilio would bow to investor pressure, and that would…
The five companies I watch—Bandwidth, LinkMobility, Sinch, Upland, and Twilio—ended 2023 with $9.2 billion in revenues. Collectively, they are projected to end 2024 with a…
In a series of posts I call ‘the Klaviyo papers’ I wrote about Klaviyo’s business model. Klaviyo, like Attentive before it, and Twilio before it,…
ICYMI, T-Mobile announced fines on senders of spam content that went into effect in January and an update (thanks, Glenn Richards) that went into effect…
Salesforce made “as-a-Service'' a noun. Attach it to the end of any category, and the business model is self-evident. Not only has Salesforce a SaaS…
For almost 30 years, Alex Bobotek has dedicated himself to safeguarding mobile communications integrity. As a pivotal figure in the Messaging, Malware, Mobile Anti-Abuse Working…
By March 2020, the pandemic had shut down the world. Its effect on businesses was swift and brutal. Airlines, hotels, restaurants, manufacturing, retail, health, and…
Upland announced its Q4 results. While it beat its Q4 guidance, its 2024 guidance gives no clarity about the company’s future directions. The company will…
She once bicycled 3,000 miles cross-country just for fun. Some would say Somos Chair and CEO Gina Perini has always shown a penchant for the…
Twilio, Sinch, and LinkMobility together brought in a total $7.6 billion in revenue for 2023, and there are three learnings from their earnings reports. Efficiency…
Munz Bharde started as a Y2K programmer in 1997 before venturing into the dynamic world of e-commerce. This transition marked the beginning of a diverse…
Watch, as I geek out like a Trekkie at Comic-Con. I’ve been attending the Wireless History Foundation’s (WHF) Hall of Fame dinner for several years…
New in 2024, Caitin Long and Zach Kunkel are cohosting a new series, The State of Business Messaging. I had the chance to share my…
The seventh week of the year kicks off the earnings season for the messaging space. On Valentine’s Day, within twenty-four hours of each other, Twilio,…
With Verizon’s announcement last week, the US support of RCS is now at 100%. This, combined with Apple’s Thanksgiving surprise, means that RCS will work…
The FCC will adopt new rules that codify in law how senders should deal with opt-out requests. Last summer, on behalf of the MEF, I…
A competitive weightlifter who recently took first place at an Orlando deadlift open, Bradley Partner Alexis Buese is a commercial litigation powerhouse. With a wealth…
Niklas Heuveldop, Ericsson’s North American CEO, has been appointed as CEO of Vonage, marking a significant leadership change. The head-scratching acquisition has been an ongoing…
Industry conferences, like the Pacific Telecommunications Council’s (PTC) conference, are hotbeds of collaboration. They often have a festival-like atmosphere, with multiple stages serving as focal…
Glenn Richards, once a Brooklyn city boy and now a horse farm owner, has many facets beyond his role as Partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw…
Last week we discussed the first three FCC rulings from December. This week we examine the final ruling and its industry impact. The FCC ruled…
Ariana Huffington, Bill Gates, Ben Chestnutt, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Michael Dell, and Steve Jobs changed entire industries and, in some cases, the world. HuffPost…
Last year I shared the most popular emails as per Substack. Here are my most-clicked blog articles as per my WordPress plugin: 1. My Best…
I envisioned the idea in 2022 and one of my most exciting projects of 2023. Both contributors and readers have told me I’m onto something.…
At the last meeting of 2023, the FCC enacted four new rulings around text messaging: Require blocking of texts upon notification by the Commission Declare…
It would make sense for me to reach out to my EZ Texting co-founders for a guest post. Not only were we born within a…
From Sinch’s headquarters in Stockholm, Laurinda Pang leads 4,000 Sinchers around the globe who empower brands to connect with their customers across messaging, voice and…
Welcome to the third edition of the annual book recommendation list. The rules are simple: 1) The books cannot be current-year books (there are two…
Jay Patel is the VP & GM of Cisco's Webex CPaaS business, a role he assumed following Cisco's acquisition of his company IMImobile for $730…
As a behavioral design expert and the author of two bestselling books, Nir Eyal has a lifetime of training for his role as a guide…
In the latest round of Q3 earnings in the CPaaS sector showed a steady march towards profitability and responsible growth. Growth and the CPaaS Market…
Huggy Rao, the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has spent over forty-five years shaping the minds of…
Just a quick one today, pointing you towards this morning’s newsletter which covered the FCC’s latest initiative, led by Chairwoman Rosenworcel, on understanding AI’s impact…
In this morning's email, my thoughts on the recently concluded Somos, Inc. summit, including:1. clarifying my first-ever on-the-record future predictions,2. KYC is good friction (ask your car…
John Lauer is your archetypical serial entrepreneur. While most famous for founding Zipwhip—sold to Twilio for a whopping $952 million (based on the closing date…
Barbie Brewer boasts a prolific career in people and culture. For six years, she championed the HR initiatives at Netflix, overseeing a team dedicated to…
Terry Hsiao is an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor with extensive experience in cloud software, mobile apps, wireless networks, and fintech. He has founded multiple companies…
As a daughter of a career diplomat, Junga Kim has a lifetime of training for her role as Partner at Reed Smith’s Global Commercial Dispute…
Curiosity and patience are the bedrock to good storytelling. They have been integral tools to Stacey Estrella's approach, aiding her clients in discerning their own…
Communicating with clarity is a core skill of leaders, and Matt Abrahams has been teaching leaders how to communicate for almost thirty years, eleven of…
Even before Pray.com, Steve Gatena had a storied career. A former NCAA champion and USC football player (and winner of a Rose Bowl championship), Steve…
A mechanical engineer with an MBA and the daughter of a master electrician, Sheila Stafford has both the quantitative chops and the intuitive understanding of…
By any yardstick, Brian Frons is a trailblazer. As the former head of Disney's ABC daytime television, he is one reason daytime talk has become…
In text messaging, consent is the golden ticket to outreach. If there is implied consent in subscriber-initiated communication or in emergencies, then outbound communication, especially…
Every brand needs to have an RCS strategy, even in the US, where interoperability issues and sub-25% device penetration have CMOs questioning whether the investments…
Fred Hillebrand, a Wireless Hall of Fame inductee and SMS inventor, is the editor of a scholarly work on the history of SMS. This compact…
A spam-free network exists solely in marketing copy. All networks, regardless of size, experience spam. Every network operator recognizes this and relies on feedback loops…
Recently, I had the opportunity to organize the content for the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) leadership conference in Miami, an event that brought together some…
UCLA Anderson School of Management has a Business Creation Option (BCO) as part of its MBA program. Students can elect to take two quarters (twenty…
Today, recipient feedback is a blunt instrument. You can either entirely block a number on your device, or submit the offending message to 7726 and…
"In many deals, people get so focused on the wedding, they forget about the marriage.", says Huggy Rao when describing why 50% of M&A deals…
There are 7 billion textable cell phones deployed on 750 mobile networks. This ubiquity and diffused oversight makes SMS spam impossible to stop and unwieldy…
I did not consent to any of the political text messages I received in the last election cycle. Not one. It didn’t matter whether I…
Editor's Note: Thomas M. Johnson Jr. was the General Counsel of the FCC from 2017-2021. As general counsel through most of Ajit Pai's tenure as chairman, Johnson…
"Unprecedented," "never before," "for the first time" are some of the terms used when describing current times. But when every unforeseen event is catastrophic and…
I blog on Software, Startups, and Simplicity, where I make the case that building software and running software companies has gotten unnecessarily complex. It doesn't…
With nine weeks left in the year, many SaaS leaders are looking at their revenue dashboards rather nervously. If you foresaw how tough Q4 would…
One of the highlights of my September was the recently concluded Mobile Ecosystem Forum’s MEF Connects USA conference. I helped bring together a lot of…
Micromanagement is the antithesis of autonomy. You can’t run an autonomous organization and be a micromanager. And yet attention to detail is critical to a…
Be a manager long enough, and you'll either initiate a staffing cut or be asked to execute one. There is plenty of literature about who,…
The goal of onboarding is to make the new employee a contributor as soon as possible. It is crucial to get it right, and yet…
I knew writing about Twilio's ZipWhip acquisition would take time. I didn't expect it would require over 6,000 words across six posts. Of all the posts,…
Some books provide unexpected insights into our professions. The source of the wisdom is just as surprising as the insights themselves. Through various points in…
Bessemer’s 2022 State of the Cloud report is a must-read. Three insights stand out: Startups need to show high Sales & Marketing efficiency: “For every dollar a SaaS…
Wireless networks are universal, pervasive, and heterogeneous. They are a fertile testbed for interoperability-driven innovation. Text messaging is but one example of how complex event…
I was tagged on LinkedIn with a request to share a list of recommendations for someone who, due to a medical issue would be spending a lot…
In the payments industry, your leverage is your proximity to the payment providers: Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. In the messaging industry, your leverage is…
In 2016—the year it went IPO—Twilio had 36,000 customers paying it $270M to transmit messages. This was an eight-fold increase in revenue and a three-fold…
Twilio paid $800 Million to acquire ZipWhip. At 10x revenue, the valuation was high for the asset. As deals go, it wasn't the biggest in…
US customers sent 2.2 trillion text messages in 2020. In other words, the wireless operators have created a big party—one which application developers, marketers, and software companies…
A startup is a lonely endeavor that never works alone. It works with a dominant player, whether in an app store like a marketplace or…
A Startup accrues technical debt at a breathtaking pace. It is inevitable, expected, and painful to watch for even the most pragmatic engineers. If you're…
The moment working source code is live, it is legacy. The code is "in production" and has forever documented the decisions that created it. These…
For any software business, the online signup is the lifeblood of customer acquisition. The new tooling available to developers makes it easy to build and…
I stumbled on the questions I wrote about last week circa 2013-14. Fresh from our first round of funding (Series A to fund EZ Texting's acquisition), I…
The best managers are superb capital allocators. They take expensive investor money and assign it to the proper growth initiatives. Accountability for a team or…
Building a shared sense of purpose is easy when the company is young. There is plenty of work to do and not enough people to…
At 75 books read a year, Stephen King considers himself a slow reader. By his scale, my reading speed would be closer to a sloth.…
Once it has won over the geeks and early adopters, new technology needs to win the heart of the everyday user. You do that by…
Smart founders are comfortable with perpetual ignorance and combat it with tireless learning. The preceding Twitter-friendly headline would aptly summarize this article, but outside of…
All Founders are arrogant. How's that for a polarizing statement? If you're a founder and disagree, it means you haven't been rejected, denied, denigrated, ghosted,…
A startup, like any risky endeavor, requires the persistence of a punch-me doll. As long as a Founder is a principal in the company, they…
Step 1: Don't be like Steve Jobs. Down Memory Lane The first iPhone came out in 2007. Whether or not you were part of the…
If a product is only as good as its feedback loops, then only the feedback of the customer matters. There will be many stakeholders, but…
Building a culture of belonging in a company is hard. Stanford's Huggy Rao says that the best cultures create a sense of mutual ownership, where "I own…
A recent filing in a TCPA case uses source code to back up claims made by the plaintiff. The filing is interesting because it shows how hard…
Introduction If you've spent any time in a strategic planning exercise, you might hear SWOT thrown around like a verb, like a needed activity to…
Tesla Autopilot, Boeing 737 Max, and the US Supreme Court decision on the TCPA make an odd group. But, they all rest on the increasingly fluid boundary…
For a few years now, I've had a rule: I never read a book the year that it comes out. I initiated it a few…
Summer is upon us, and so are the many recommendations of books that one should read. I’m a big fan of reading lists—they keep my reading queue…
If genius results from untiring work over long periods of time, then every founder building a company is a genius. They know the customer, the…
Tucked in The Checklist Manifesto, an already quick read, is a little manifesto for any learned profession. The author—Atul Gawande—calls them the four expectations of…
When it comes to bandwidth, 5G is like having your cake and eating it too, in this case the cake is double chocolate, no fat*.…
Things have to be simpler than the alphabet soup of three and four letter acronyms that are used to gauge a product's usefulnes. The argument…
A robust, vibrant, living company culture needs strong feedback loops. It’s pretty easy to accomplish this when it’s you and your co-founder in a garage, a team…