Operators Ep 32 Transcript
Delian Asparouhov:
Hi everyone. My name is Delian and I'm a principal at Founders Fund, a Venture Capital firm based in San Francisco. This is Operators where I interview non-VC, non-CEO, non-founder operators that make the startup world go round.
Delian Asparouhov:
Today. I'm interviewing Alyson Welch, VP of enterprise general business at Twilio. Prior to Twilio, Alyson was the head of sales at Zignal Labs in early stage startup specializing in real-time media intelligence, and also spent 15 years at Akamai technologies. She has been an advisor at First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. She currently sits on the board of directors for Girls in Tech and also founded Poppy, a financial wellness organization for women. I hope you enjoy the show.
Delian Asparouhov:
Cool. Well, Alyson, thank you so much for coming onto podcasts, [inaudible 00:00:59] story career. I typically like starting up these conversations by just reversing all the way back to the very beginning of people's careers. When you graduated and went off and joined Accenture as a management consultant for three and a half years, can you tell us a bit about just sort of what that decision was, why you went into there out of school and sort of what areas you specialized in while you were at Accenture?
Alyson Welch:
Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me. This is great. And I so respect other guests that you've had on this podcast. So I feel flattered to be here and it's great to meet you. I joined it was [Anderson Consulting 00:01:37] at the time. So I'm [inaudible 00:01:39] myself Accenture. It was basically a time in undergrad where I was in a small university, liberal arts degree. I was an economics and French major in college and really didn't know what I wanted to do. I came from a family, educated family. Both my parents were in the medical field, but I certainly hadn't pursued a medical degree and wasn't on my way to med school. So, I found myself looking for that sort of continuation and education and not a formula, just job job. I'd always had jobs out of in high school and during college, but more in the services' industry.
Alyson Welch:
And I knew I wanted to get into corporate at some point. And the recruiters in our schools were coming in from the big five and they promoted the idea of go to the big five firms and you'll have the opportunity to essentially get what is the equivalent of an MBA. And whether that was true or not, that was an appealing message to me because I wanted to continue my career and have more of the business acumen available to me, but I really didn't know what I was going to do with it. I thought, oh, maybe I'll be on the partner track in these companies. I want to travel. This looks like a great way to do so and have a steady career, steady income. Financial security has always been really important to me for just being financially independent as a woman. And, I continues to meet today as I raise my family, et cetera.
Alyson Welch:
So I think, the Anderson Consulting and the other big five programs at the time were just really structured to give me someone who didn't have a lot of direction in terms of what I wanted to do, a bit of a path forward into corporate America.
Delian Asparouhov:
With some pretty, amazing timing, after about four years there, you decided to, a month and a half before [inaudible 00:03:34] join a tech company. I guess I'm curious, how did you end up deciding to join Akamai and what was it like going through the first 45 days when everything, I'm sure it felt like the world was collapsing.
Alyson Welch:
It was one of those things where I was living in San Francisco and of all of my peers and friends at Anderson consulting, we had what at the time was this really strange thing, which was an E-Trade account. And, we were basically day trading these stocks, [Reband 00:04:07], Oracle and [Siebel 00:04:09], these tech startups that we didn't know anything about, but we were hearing our friends getting into the internet and getting into what was the cloud, the early cloud migration at the time. And a friend of mine from Anderson pulled me in and said, "Hey, you should go check out this company, Akamai. It just went public and the stock is going crazy." I think it was trading at $300 a share. "Come over here and take a look." And so, I took a look and they really liked the people, Boston-based, which was appealing to me to be part of a company that wasn't necessarily headquartered in San Francisco, ironically in the Silicon valley.
Alyson Welch:
The Silicon valley wasn't at the time Sand Hill. It was becoming very venture-oriented, but it was still in the early phases of development, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera, up and down the corridor. And so to me, what Akamai was set out to do in terms of democratizing access across the internet to enable companies to build their first websites and expose their brands in new ways was super disruptive, really hadn't been done before. People weren't building corporate websites. E-commerce wasn't there yet. So, I jumped into Akamai. I don't know if it was 45 days later, but I remember my strike price was $200 a share. And, didn't take that long for it to drastically drop. And so, it was a really incredible transition and awakening when I talk about the importance of financial security to have that big of a transition early in my career. I think has really actually been a good thing for me over time to understand the volatility in the technology markets and withstand some of those transitions that time.
Delian Asparouhov:
And I guess, I actually don't know Akamai sister at the time, but was there even massive team [inaudible 00:06:06] or how your role changed? You're just like a complete reset or was it sort of same job as expected, sorry that your options under water, but you'll get like a refresh sometime next year.
Alyson Welch:
Yeah. The leadership team was amazingly calm. So, I joined in January 2001 and the company history is pretty incredible. So, we actually lost our co-founder in 9/11 and he was on the United 11 flight first plane to go into the World Trade Center. And the rest of the leadership team was actually supposed to be on that plane with him. And for some reason, and I'll never know the real reason, but Paul Sagan, George Conrades, and a few others stayed back in Boston and we're not on that plane. And so, the company dynamic pivoted completely in that way. So not only were we faced with an economic downturn, but we were also faced with a major loss of an innovator and a leader. And so, [Tom Leighton 00:07:07], who is his co-founder and his partners at the e-team level really stepped up and took on extreme leadership, what I call extreme leadership.
Alyson Welch:
And so, they were able to really focus us. They were mature. They'd run businesses before. And I think, that really was an important factor in the dynamic of the company to get us through that time. But yeah, I mean, I went from working with clients to building out their solutions, to really working on the collections team and trying to find companies that were disappearing during the [.com 00:07:46] bust. And yet at the same time, holding up the team and the morale and being part of the DNA that was forming in terms of really believing in the technology mission that our founders had built and carrying it forward, it was a pretty interesting time.
Delian Asparouhov:
I'm going to say, yeah. Did it feel like there was a particular moment that sort of felt like the end of the dark period or the beginning of [inaudible 00:08:11] no longer discharge sort of recoup losses and restructure, but actually like, "Oh, we can survive through to the other side" where was it obviously you guys were going to the beginning where it's like, "We've got a real product. We got customers." A lot of the pets.coms of the world, they're going to die, but we can make it through it or, it was that sort of a potential risk factor. And then [inaudible 00:08:28].
Alyson Welch:
That taught me that. That's a great question. That period taught me to look for companies in the future that had more of what I call the aspirin value than the vitamin. Twilio serves in that place today for me from a communications platform perspective. But, Akamai, take 9/11 as an example, we had lost our founder. We were reeling from that loss, and really unsure of the future. But at the same time, the news sites time, CNN, Yahoo, were all going down because the internet couldn't withstand the demand. And we were going in and sending up servers around the world and trying to help companies continue to get access to information, to help their employees communicate, et cetera. So, I really realized the value during that experience of what a must have technology looks like versus a nice to have and what really the requirements of value are in your technology stack as you're building a long-term viable company.
Alyson Welch:
And so for me, I took that with me in the future and sure there were some moments of exploring companies and career opportunities that may have seemed like, "Wow, this is super disruptive and different," but if I didn't pursue them, it was probably because I got back to the point of, I don't know if this will withstand a significant course correction, and I'll have to say, I mean, looking at where we are now, 2021, I made some mistakes in that decision with Google, and Facebook, and LinkedIn, and places that I wish I had spent time in my career.
Delian Asparouhov:
Yeah. I guess, shifting from consulting world into Akamai [inaudible 00:10:13] consulting, some level of sales been built into it. But imagine Akamai was [inaudible 00:10:18], much more direct. But, you talked through a little bit of just how that tradition went in terms of, obviously, a very different type of role. Were there things that were sort of, very easy early on, I'm sure. Making decks is sort of the same in consulting and sales, but closing deals relatively different. And then also, how did that relate to obviously selling aspirins a lot easier than selling a vitamin and how did that play into that process?
Alyson Welch:
Yeah. The consulting environment, at least the consulting environment that I lived through, I was in the process design consulting framework within, but now is Accenture. There was a real methodology and a real training ground. We went to a training center for three weeks and literally were taught how to speak, how to talk, how to discuss and gather requirements from the functional owners within the companies. We were staffed, go from that really structured process, an annual review banding process. You knew exactly where you were in line in terms of where your career was going to a startup to a 50 person. I think actually, Akamai was 200 people, 50 million in revenue when I got there. Huge difference. But I was also, I didn't know what to compare it to. I was 20, I don't know, some 20 year old plus, but I can't remember how old I was when I joined.
Alyson Welch:
And so, it was me learning quickly, taking the problem, solving the business consulting, discovery skills from what consulting had taught me and applying those into customer experiences and then really believing in the technology. I think, those two combined the fact that I had the training of the professionalism and the discovery and the polish of what a consulting environment can teach you combined with really believing in the message that we were taught. What we taught, what the product could actually deliver for our customers and the value that it could present really yielded a positive result. So, my advice to people who are looking at their careers is make sure you're passionate about the category that you're going into. If you're going to take a sales role in a quota in a startup, because if you're not passionate about it, if you don't think it's disruptive, it's really hard to wake up every day with a quote on you having to do that day in and day out.
Delian Asparouhov:
And so, yeah, speaking of day in, day out, you ended up [inaudible 00:12:56]. You stay at Akamai for over 14 years, I guess, can you talk through sort of what made it so attractive to stay for an extended period of time? You mentioned, there were plenty of opportunities that sort of sound like, came by your way. Was it sort of mentorship that you were having there? Was it the upside and opportunity? Was it the learnings? What really kept you around?
Alyson Welch:
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that first thing was just the DNA and the culture of the company and the fact that they were so thoughtful to take care of all of us during a really treacherous time, 9/11, and the fallout of the .com bust. The other thing, though, that was really positive, that kept me going and that I didn't realize was such a value now, as I look back was the innovation. So, we were becoming a multi-product company quite quickly. And so, we had a number of offerings and they were able to create a number of different go-to market strategies for us, so that we were relevant and competitive, and we could really sell across a number of different categories within the business. So, multi-product was important. I had really strong mentorship. My leaders, I felt like they cared and they were invested in my career.
Alyson Welch:
And then, the upside from an earnings perspective, it was more than I had ever experienced just being able to. I was nervous about carrying a quota and having a variable compensation. And both my parents thought I was crazy that I was taking a pay cut in base to become a salesperson from a consulting compensation structure. And it ended up just being completely fruitful and a multiplier for me from a compensation perspective. So, it created some really financial economic value categories for me that I didn't have before, that I didn't have access to before.
Delian Asparouhov:
And you ended up being there while the company scaled from 50 million annualized all the way up to north of a billion. He dropped through maybe some of the sort of major projects, the sales side, you feel had the most impact or contributed the most to that growth that you think were integral to that scaling up.
Alyson Welch:
Yeah, absolutely. So I thought I already talked about multi-product and we went from a kind of a traditional content delivery platform to adding in innovation around, media and media streaming, global access, being able to support companies in multiple countries and delivering scale for them in minutes versus months, if they were to build out their own data center structures, et cetera. And then, we got into some really interesting acquisitions. So, through way of acquisition, we are able to diversify our portfolio and become a higher margin product portfolio in more of a software driven business. So, we weren't as reliant on the networks and the data center disrupt distribution to handle some of our scale and our revenue growth. And so, I learned through all of those things about scale, and I learned about agility, taking a lot of different roles, helping people come up to speed being part of hiring and pivoting.
Alyson Welch:
And I think that, the time I spent in consulting helped me with that because it reminded me when I was being staffed and sent off to different projects. I didn't really have an ability to choose. I was just kind of told where I was going. And, that was something that I think, I was much more agile in my ability to accept those changes in that growth than some of my peers. And then I think, we just, we had to look at the market and react and be responsive to our customers. And I think, we were really customer centric similar to, I always think about Amazon. Amazon always takes it back to what does the customer need? And I think, Akamai was, in an early way, approaching the market that way as well.
Delian Asparouhov:
[inaudible 00:16:54] at the beginning of Akamai, things vague, very unstructured and they're not being much of a process. Can you talk through, I guess, certain areas as it started to scale up how processes, I guess, got implemented. And I'm sure also with new product lines, you sort of restart the clock and there's zero process. And then eventually, you start to see them discover product market fit and figure out what that process is. Can you talk through, if you remember, an example or two of just what that sort of transition looked like from earlier stage, no process to eventually, very regimented, very clear quotas bands, stages of career progression from people that were joining?
Alyson Welch:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, we used to bring, we didn't have enablement. The structure of bringing people into the business in a startup was very different than when we were at more of a turbo business, and we were able to fund and support more of a start group experience or university and really kind of give you a certification for being part of the company and structuring the onboarding experience so people could feel like here's what it's like to be at this company. And I think, a lot of hyper-growth companies go through that, certainly at Twilio, we're doing much of the same where my onboarding five years ago was much more fragmented and kind of on my own. I was the artist of my own onboarding. Whereas when you're in a bigger company, that's more established, you have a lot of support and various set pathways that you're directed to ensure that you're gaining as much information as possible. And ultimately, the business trying to slow down or, excuse me, accelerate the ramp time. Definitely not slow down. Accelerate is the key word there, the ramp time.
Alyson Welch:
And then, the other part ... I'm forgetting the second part of your question. Sorry.
Delian Asparouhov:
It was just like, especially with these new product lines, imagine what the core product is going to be processed, but, it sounds like part of the [inaudible 00:18:53] for consulting was sort of helping and being more agile or adaptable to sort of these new product lines. [inaudible 00:18:59] examples of whether it's through an acquisition or through natural product evolution where you help sort of take a new product line from zero to one, what that process was like?
Alyson Welch:
Yeah. So, one example at Akamai, and I think we do the same thing here in some ways at Twilio is, we bought a company. In this case at Akamai, we bought [Netley 00:19:18] which was a web acceleration security platform and bringing that company in. We didn't just suddenly bring the company in and say, "Okay, everyone's going to carry this in their bag." We deployed specific specialists and resources, and it was an executive assignment to be staffed in this team. It was a special kind of SWAT team that learned everything about this technology and where your specialists bringing the best, a better quality of experience to the customer about that specific product. So, I find that with new products, whether it be acquisition or beta pilots that you're running within the company about a new concept, bringing in specialist teams or smaller teams to help the core sales team and the core go to market team, come up to speed and really determined product market fit.
Alyson Welch:
You may even start in a specific targeted market, maybe a specific for a retail market. And I remember, that's what we did at Akamai. We had this one product that we were really assuming was going to be very successful in the e-commerce vertical. So, we just started a small tiger team and eventually it grew into its own business unit was the standalone kind of P and L. But yeah, I would say that's something I think is replicated pretty often within new product and entry in larger companies.
Delian Asparouhov:
And then, after obviously a very storied career at Akamai, you decided to leave. I'm curious, sort of what led to the decision to decide to leave and how did you end up sort of landing at Zignal Labs? How did that opportunity come about?
Alyson Welch:
Through a friend, and it was a great opportunity, but it was a big pivot. I went from a billion dollar plus company to a pre-revenue, zero to 10 million, never done that before. I never started in a place of running the entire sales organization or having the responsibility to set up and run the sales organization full stop with all the cross-functional resources and moving from a specific function. I had a large team at Akamai and a lot of revenue responsibility, but I didn't have the responsibility of revenue operations and enablement, and all of the dotted line functions that I kind of took for granted. I think, I encourage everyone to do this at some point in their career. And I really encourage you to pick a product line that you're passionate about. This is the time, if you're going to do a startup like that early stage, if you're not the founder, you better really want to be the founder. You have to think about it that way. I don't know if you agree with me there, but it's hard.
Alyson Welch:
It's like building a house from scratch that you don't know. You're not a contractor, a general contractor. And so, and your founders don't know either. So, we're all finding our way through the market together. So it was a big transition. But a friend of mine introduced me to the company, met the board, met the executive team, and I was really interested in this space. They were doing things with real time media, real-time data that I hadn't seen before and the visualization, it was early stage data visualization, real-time data visualization. And, I was super excited about what they were doing. And, what I learned too is how transferable some of their original customer stories were to the rest of the market.
Alyson Welch:
And, I stayed there. I was only there for two years. I found that over time, I missed the bigger company, the bigger platform. So, I did transition out of that opportunity and moved into Twilio, which was more of, I think it was about 500 person company when I joined. And going forward, I think when I do a startup at that stage again, I think I would, but I really enjoy sort of the more mature product market fit builds. I think that's where my value can really be added as a leader to a sales organization or a revenue operations team.
Delian Asparouhov:
Yeah. I guess maybe, what were some of the things that very clearly translated from Akamai, whereas like [Salesforce 00:23:26] implementation or customer discovery calls, just super easy to transfer to startup land versus what was the one or two things. It was like, having less resources or not having sales operations set up yet, or a whole SDR team, that'd be like, we're just much more difficult or more surprising in of a level of like building a house together without even knowing what the floor plan looks like.
Alyson Welch:
Yeah. I think that the thing that I didn't have going into that, that I really appreciate now was the sales operations, the importance of a strong sales operations partner. I'm not one who can set Salesforce app top down. I've never worked at Salesforce. So, depending on a CRM partner to help me structure and really see the data and understand what's going on with the customer, and the pipeline, and the revenue, because there was some revenue and there was some customer behavior. We had a lot of data insights from the platform. Being able to see that, and then start to decide what resources we should prioritize in terms of hiring. I took a bit of a gut on some of those decisions and in hindsight, it would've used a better indicator from data to help me determine, do we need more of an enterprise resource to cover this market, or is this more of should we really load up an SMB focused and should we work with partners and agencies to build the muscle here and the market awareness.
Alyson Welch:
So I think, that was something I took for granted and a larger company is a really strong sales operations partnership that was providing me with that data. But now, I'm much more independent and looking at data and I'm glad I had that experience because I think I've become stronger in that area. I still think sales operations is probably my most critical business partner, some cases.
Delian Asparouhov:
Yeah. Maybe on the flip side, it sounds like you learned there, picked up some skillsets at Zignal Labs that have now impacted your career since then. If you had a handful of things, you'd say you pulled from there that you've now implemented until your ever been, critical and sort of decisions or systems you've implemented there, what do you feel like you sort of brought from, let's say both Zignal but then also obviously from the past?
Alyson Welch:
Zignal, for me and Twilio, I applied the hiring. So, the most massive hiring pace I've ever hired through that startup time was Zignal versus Akamai. We were kind of steady growth at Akamai. And Zignal, we did a lot of certain hiring, which was helpful to me when I got to Twilio because we've been doing a ton of search hiring more so than anywhere I've been in my career. So, that just having to think through the velocity of the pipeline for recruitment and what it takes to get people up to speed and the ramp time and the levers that you can leverage to improve ramp time. That was really helpful from the startup experience over to Twilio.
Delian Asparouhov:
Was it mostly just like the scale of how many candidates we really need to pull in and the conversion rate of that or the sources, or how to set up those teams? What were the [crosstalk 00:26:34]?
Alyson Welch:
I think it was more, I mean, there was definitely that, but it was also the understanding the funnel and what the impact of a waterfall on ramp, understanding the profile to hire. So, we experimented quite a bit and you can't just pull people from one tech company to the other and assume that they're going to be happy and successful in the new category that they've selected. You need to figure out what is the real profile for this company, this culture, this product, and the customer that's going to resonate. And, it's just not one for one, and I learned that the hard way for sure. And a number of different hires over time.
Delian Asparouhov:
And then, I guess, from the world of Akamai where there things that given the type of company structure or scale, the fact that it was public, that really just directly also applied into Twilio that really helped accelerate your sort of speed up there.
Alyson Welch:
Yeah. No, absolutely, the global collaboration, structuring large enterprise agreements. When I arrived at Twilio, there wasn't really the concept of approaching an enterprise across the multiple product lines perspective. We were really kind of looking at it as a developer-led, product-led approach. You can self-service and the customers wanted to be able to buy in a different way. So, we had to build that muscle out, and I leveraged a lot of experience from Akamai to build out those enterprise agreements over time.
Alyson Welch:
There's a lot of takeaways and comparisons between Akamai and Twilio that I've enjoyed taking advantage of. I think, they're both engineering-led, very technical companies. So, building bridges with product and making sure that there were relationships and that customers had access and can see the roadmap and understand the future vision of the platform and the capabilities there in was something that was really important as well.
Delian Asparouhov:
And then one thing that's probably somewhat shared between both companies, but I feel like, especially at Twilio is it's different than let's say just standard enterprise SAS company, where there's a clear and fixed contract value. There's a significant amount of it that it's sort of usage-based. And I'm curious, how do you guys balance, trying to sort of accurately come up with a sort of quota for salespeople in terms of ACV or TCV when the contracts themselves don't necessarily fully come to fruition until utilization sometimes happens? And so sometimes, the company afterwards were over-utilized versus another one might take a really long time to activate, and you don't even really have that data until a year end. How do you guys actually think through sort of setting that? What's the strategy for setting quota in this type of usage based environment, as opposed to sort of fixed contracts where they're clearly understood at the very upfront?
Alyson Welch:
It's not a straightforward give everybody a million, five quota. There's certainly, we look at account propensity. We'd look at spend propensity based on data, and we make some assumptions based on historic behavior of the customer. But we also have this factor that is unique, I think, to our platform and will be unique in the product-led industry. And that is, not every company is going to sign commitment or contract, so you're not even going to know. So, the best sellers at Twilio have the ability to partner with our customers to develop a long-term forecast and they forecast. And if they're accurate with that forecast, they're rewarded.
Alyson Welch:
So, we have a sort of initial reward system, and then we have a realization reward system. So the more accurate, the more effective you are, the better your outcome from an earning perspective and really the better the outcome for the customer as well, because they're taking advantage of the unit economics that are accurate for their forecast versus having to earn them as they go. And I think, that's one of the benefits of product-led and how you can work with your customers to bring them to the best value.
Delian Asparouhov:
And I guess, in this world where things are sort of either product-led plus utilization-based, is it more likely, I guess, in the Twilio world for account executives that not only responsible for the close, but also the nurture given that you have to go in and get so deep into this forecasting. Do they end up pretty closely staying with that customer to sort of help with enablement? Or how do you guys think about that sort of sales versus enablement handoff, if it's not necessarily the same person?
Alyson Welch:
Yeah, we do. We do partner with, so we do have CSMs in customer success who managed top account relationships as well, and are responsible for net revenue retention in partnership with the account executive. But, the account executive is ultimately the primary point of contact, the quarterback for the customer relationship and responsible for that ultimate revenue attribution that they've demonstrated through forecasting and through contractual relationships that we've built through limits of liability, indemnification agreements, revenue commitments, et cetera. So, it's really a team sport at the top level. And then in some of the mid levels, we have more efficiency where we don't have dedicated customer success models. And the [AE 00:32:00] does carry the responsibility for nurturing the customer and ensuring that their launch and their onboarding is successful. And then, they have shared resources that they can pull from. So, we've developed products, launch products and customer support products that will include for those customers that they have a good experience, but ultimately it's AE who's enabling that experience.
Delian Asparouhov:
Yeah. I guess, across these different segments of the business, how do you guys actually handle, let's say, goals, prioritization, team structure differently between these various segments of the market? Do quota structures actually look quite different for the sort of different segments and how does it differ?
Alyson Welch:
Yeah. We have a ratio model just like, I think every company based on, I think, based on a lot of different factors, but total cost of sale always comes into it versus revenue. And so, we model our business that way. So, I run our enterprise business. My ratio model may be slightly different in ratio because of the accounts than propensity and the [inaudible 00:33:07] than someone in say a growth market. But, it's really interesting too. We have to be. Some of our growth customers are our largest revenue producers because they're building on our platform or the enterprises are adopting or migrating to, and the disruptor category can be a really large revenue segment for us. So, the quotas aren't necessarily stamped out by segment. We look at a number of different factors to come up with what those values are.
Delian Asparouhov:
Yeah. How does the account, obviously I want an enterprise where it's adoption sort of know that there's going to be a sort of value in customer success because there's such a wallet share that one can take over. And so, it warrants it, whereas disruptors obviously early on might even be self-serve on day one and all of a sudden you realize a year later they're actually one of your largest enterprise accounts. How did that type of handoff even happen when you have a customer that maybe has never spoken to anybody at Twilio, but all of a sudden there's a massive customer that probably warrants some level of caretaking? How does that [crosstalk 00:34:10]?
Alyson Welch:
[crosstalk 00:34:10] they have in the early days, [Jeff 00:34:13] didn't really want anyone to talk to customers because we provided such an awesome self-service experience for the developers and the documentation was developed so that you had access. You were a web developer, you knew what to do. You understood the language and this is where we are today. We actually hope that there has been customer engagement in those cycles, even if you are a self servicing, because it's still important to understand the intent. And that, the goal of the business and there's economics that they can take advantage of that if they are growing at that rapid rate, we'll both hooves them in the long run and help them achieve scale and revenue growth that they're anticipating as well. So, I think we're far more covered than we used to be.
Alyson Welch:
We always have work to do to ensure that our customers are getting the care and feeding that they need at the appropriate time. And we use data and signaling and certainly management to ensure that we're covering the market. But yeah, I'd say the difference is, a lot of the developer-oriented build mindset customers who don't necessarily want, they don't need the technical support or the guidance. They can read the docs. And they're very independent. In those cases, we respect that and we want them to feel like they have access and independence, but we still want to understand their business goals so that we can ensure that we're aligned to support them from an economic perspective. And that's always, sometimes, a difficult relationship to manage because they may not have time or interest to share those details [crosstalk 00:36:02] the dynamics we're still working through.
Delian Asparouhov:
And during your time at Twilio, you ended up actually deciding to join as an advisor to both First Round Capital and Bessemer. Can you describe a bit about sort of why you decided to take on that kind of nights and weekends project, but then also the benefit it provided from sort of having a broader perspective into the startup ecosystem and how that affected your work at Twilio?
Alyson Welch:
Yeah. I always like to learn. And I just think that, the closer you can be to early stage development, the better, because you'll learn something and hopefully I'm giving back too. So, it's kind of a selfish thing, but instead of going into a company full time and taking on the role, I'm committed to Twilio and I really enjoyed the business that I work in today, but I want to share my learning and vice versa. I want to hear what is being disrupted because I think that the career path of a sales leader and a revenue leader is just it's ripe for disruption. And there's always going to be more. And if you're not familiar with the emerging markets and some of the emerging strategies, you might get left behind. So, it's a little bit of paranoia. And it's also just interesting.
Alyson Welch:
My involvement has been an early stage founder. Discussions like, when is it right to hire a go to market or a head of sales? What should that head of sales look like? What kind of skills? And I give my honest opinion, they may or may not be right, but I've been kind of an advisor to people that in different stages of growth, usually in the fairly early stages. And I really enjoy that.
Delian Asparouhov:
And then, if you had to give a piece of advice to a fresh young, 20 plus year old, that's coming out of a three and a half years of consulting and looking to get into the world of startups, sales, mentor, et cetera, and eventually wants to be a VP at a public tech, SAS company, what do you feel is the best advice? I guess relative to of course, no longer the .com bus, but instead it's September 2021. What do you feel is sort of the best path or the best place to join? [crosstalk 00:38:11]. Yeah, exactly. You can start again, snap your fingers [crosstalk 00:38:14].
Alyson Welch:
And if I can do it all again, I would have done an international assignment for sure. I probably would have definitely taken a role in sales, but I really love it when I see people moving around operationally and understanding the full function of a business. So, I've seen some of my colleagues do that and it really rounds out their perspective and it just going to make them stronger leaders. So, I can kind of tell who's going to be the next COO or CRO or evolving leader from the Twilio team, just based on some of the things that people have been willing to do and during their career who are earlier in their career here. And it's really cool.
Alyson Welch:
So, be willing to take, if you're curious, don't worry so much about the financial security. I leaned into that a little bit too much and was less, I didn't want to take a risk. And I think, the more you can get a well-rounded perspective on how the business runs, the more opportunity you will have and the more you'll bring to the business. And then, international is always a good idea.
Delian Asparouhov:
Makes a lot of sense. Well, yeah. Alyson, thanks so much for taking the time to come to the podcast. That was really enjoyable conversation.
Alyson Welch:
It was fun. Thanks for having me. Great to meet you.
Delian Asparouhov:
Thanks for listening everyone. If you'd like to support the podcast, please sign up for a paid [Subtext 00:39:40] subscription, which we use to pay for transcripts, mics and other improvements. If you have any comments or feedback on what kinds of questions I should ask, who should come on the show, or anything else, please do let me know. Have a great rest of your day.