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Five months since its last job cuts announcement, Twilio is also restructuring its business to split the communications and software segments.
Twilio, the US cloud communications company, has announced a second round of layoffs in five months in a bid to restructure its business and increase profits.
In an email sent to employees yesterday (13 February), chief executive Jeff Lawson said Twilio will be letting go of approximately 17pc of its global staff because the company needs to “prioritise profit far more than before”.
“A company optimises for its environment. For the last 15 years, we ran Twilio for growth, building a tremendous customer base, product set and revenue base. But environments change – and so must we,” Lawson wrote in the email.
“We’re exiting the last phase with a great market position, and very strong cash reserves, but unfortunately that’s not enough to get us through the next phase. We have to spend less, streamline and become more efficient.”
Lawson also said that the company will be splitting into two business units, Twilio Communications and Twilio Data & Applications, because the two segments “are at different lifecycle stages and have different operating needs”.
‘Current structure is slowing our progress’
Based in San Francisco, Twilio provides cloud-based communication tools to companies looking to engage with their customers more efficiently. It was founded in 2008 and reported revenue of more than $2.8bn in 2021.
While the communications side of the business needs to be more efficient, said Lawson, the software segment “must accelerate growth”.
“These are distinctly different tasks for our teams, and our current structure is slowing our progress toward both these goals, which are critical to our growth, our profit and our customer engagement platform ambitions,” he said.
Twilio Data & Applications will be led by Elena Donio while Twilio Communications will be led by Khozema Shipchandler. “Each will be able to sprint toward their goals with more focus and independence – but they’re also highly complementary,” Lawson added.
The latest layoffs come almost exactly five months since Twilio first announced a round of job cuts in September last year, when it said it would downsize its then global headcount of 8,000 by 11pc. The Business Post reported that this led to slashing the Dublin team by 30 employees.
While Twilio has not yet revealed the number of Irish staff being cut, it is likely the Dublin office will be affected again. Employees are expected to hear from the company by 8am PST if they have been affected by the layoffs.
“Outside the US, there is a broad range of employment laws, and we’ll take great care to guide these Twilions and their managers through these processes, such as required consultation periods,” Lawson said.
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