Twilio S-1
There&#x27;s a lot there not to like:<p><pre><code>    Revenue: $166,919,000
    Net Loss: $38,896,000
</code></pre>
So they&#x27;re still not profitable. This is surprising, since they don&#x27;t have any big capital investments. They&#x27;re not doing anything that takes a lot of R&amp;D.  The thing runs on Amazon AWS.  They&#x27;ve been operating for years and should be profitable by now.  Yes, they&#x27;re growing fast, but the costs don&#x27;t rise in advance of the growth. You don&#x27;t have to prepay Amazon for AWS.<p><i>&quot;Each share of Class A common stock is entitled to one vote. Each share of Class B common stock is entitled to 10 votes and is convertible at any time into one share of Class A common stock.&quot;</i><p>So the public stockholders have no power. The insiders can&#x27;t be fired. Google and Facebook did that, but they were big successes before the IPO.  It&#x27;s unusual to try to pull that off when you&#x27;re unprofitable.  The NYSE, on which they want to list, didn&#x27;t allow multiple classes of stock until 1986.<p>WhatsApp is only 15% of their revenue, so that&#x27;s not a big problem.<p>Twilio&#x27;s big thing is telephony integration. They have a SS7 gateway and can integrate Internet and telephony. If Amazon or Google offered that, Twilio would have a big problem.  Google has Google Voice and Google Hangouts, but doesn&#x27;t offer telephony integration via a usable API. Yet.<p>This IPO is an exit for their VCs. They were all the way up to a series E round, and since they grew fast by losing money, the early investors had to pour in a lot of cash.