Winning with Data

Chapter 6From Hacks to Harmony:The Typical Progression of Data-Driven Companies

All of this latent curiosity brewing in a company's teams will precipitate a slew of questions that must be answered with data. As the mass of questions increases the pressure of the data team to respond, companies progress through four stages of data sophistication.

Twilio provides the communications API that enables phones, messaging, and voiceover IP to be embedded into web, desktop, and mobile software. Developers all over the world use Twilio's software to help users connect. The company was founded by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Walthius in 2007 in Seattle and San Francisco. Twilio has raised more than $200 million in venture capital, and as of February 2015, more than 560,000 developers use the service.

Using Twilio, developers can dynamically buy telephone numbers for calling and sending text messages. Whenever an Uber passenger calls a driver to coordinate a pickup, he uses Twilio. When a Home Depot customer asks for a general contractor referral to help him with his shelving, Home Depot's Red Beacon uses Twilio to match the customer with a trusted service provider. Even Coca-Cola uses Twilio to dispatch field technicians to repair ailing vending machines. As more and more communication moves to mobile phones, Twilio has become the switchboard for millions of conversations, text messages, and transactions globally.

Twilio's position in the ecosystem affords it a global view of the ...