- The net worth of Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson has hit $1.2 billion due to his 5% stake in the company, according to Forbes
Twilio is a cloud communications company that is known for building SMS, voice, and messaging applications on an API that is built on a global scale. For example, Twilio is the company that powers Yelp’s restaurant reservation reminders and the ability for Uber users to call their drivers. And Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson has seen his net worth hit $1.2 billion due to his 5% stake in the public company, according to Forbes.
Lawson’s net worth more than doubled over the past three years as the Twilio’s stock increased substantially since going public in June 2016. Twilio had raised $150 million and achieved a $1.2 billion valuation when the company went public. And now the company is worth more than $19 billion as the company saw a 146% stock price increase over the last year.
Raised in Metro Detroit, Lawson has been an entrepreneur for most of his life. While he was in middle school, he started an events video business and filmed bar mitzvahs. And when Lawson graduated high school, he was making as much as $5,000 on some weekends to film weddings.
Lawson’s first Internet startup called Versity.com featured lecture notes for college courses. Lawson started the company while studying at the University of Michigan and he later developed StubHub’s original website as he was the company’s first CTO.
Upon graduating from college, Lawson interviewed for Amazon in 2004 and was part of the original team building Amazon Web Services (AWS). The ability to offer infrastructure as a service was inspiring for Lawson.
So Lawson decided to use the AWS model to launch Twilio with his friends Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis in 2008. Cooke left Twilio a few years ago and Wolthuis works as a product architect at the company with a stake worth over $250 million, according to Forbes.
Twilio’s platform is used in over 180 countries. And the company’s revenue grew from $88.8 million in 2014 to $650 million in 2018. During that same period, Twilio’s active customer accounts went from less than 17,000 to more than 64,000.
In terms of revenue, Twilio saw 63% growth between 2017 and 2018. However, the net loss went from $63.7 million to $121.9 million. Investors are still confident with Twilio as the platform charges clients based on usage and since the mobile market continues to grow so will Twilio.
Featured image credit: Jeff Lawson via Twitter
