Jeff Lawson – How to Build a Platform

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:48)
My guest this week is Jeff Lawson, the founder and CEO of Twilio. Twilio is a $15 billion company offering a cloud communications platform to its customers.
Twilio is used by customers like Lyft, Twitch and Yelp to make communications in their products easy. Jeff and I talk about why it pays to be a platform, how to build a platform and how to sculpt a company's culture. This is a must listen for anyone building a business, whether it's a tech business or not. Please enjoy our conversation.
So Jeff, it's kind of a random story how this conversation came to be, which was I was trying to figure out who to study, what companies to study when it came to learning about APIs.
And a friend mentioned that Twilio should be the first company. I go read all the financials. I found you on Twitter and on Twitter, you have a number that you can text. So I texted that number and sure enough, it works. It got to you and I invited you and here we are. So a great example of the company technology itself leading to a really interesting conversation. I thought a fun place to start would be, we're kind of surrounded by some interesting, what looked like company values. And there's one that stood out and you see owls all over your office, which is draw the owl. I have to start there because it's just the one that I can't figure out what it means. So I'm very curious. Can you describe what draw the owl means?

**Jeff Lawson** (2:00)
The best values that a company has, I actually believe require some explanation. Because if it's like, we're like integrity.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:07)
Work hard.

**Jeff Lawson** (2:07)
Yeah, you're like, okay, you just kind of dismiss it out of hand. But you arrive at a new company and you're talking about the values and one of them is draw the owl.
Those are the ones you remember because they're real and you take time and you have to explain them. So draw the owl goes back to one of the early memes of the Internet.
And in the early days of Twilio, we couldn't get enough of it. Here's how the meme goes. Just a picture. You can Google this. Just Google draw the owl and you'll find this. It's a picture. It says, how to draw an owl is the title. Step one, draw some circles. And it's got like head circle and like a sketch little body circle. And then it says step two, draw the rest of the owl. And it's got a beautifully drawn done owl. It's like it's a two step process. Just sketch some circles and then draw the rest of the owl. So it's funny, but for some reason, this meme wouldn't die in the early days of Twilio. We'd be printing it out, putting it up on the wall, taping it to the back of monitors. And then it started creeping into our conversations. Like someone would email, it was like when we were small, we were 10 people, someone emailed the whole company, hey, does anyone know how to do this or that? And inevitably somebody would just reply with this meme.
And we're like, why is this funny? Why does this work? We kind of thought about it and we're like, well, this really represents the very notion of what it takes to get something done, to build something, because there is nobody here who's going to give you the instruction book of here's exactly the hundred steps you have to go through to actually get this job done or to build this company, because it's not that obvious. The opportunity is here because we have to figure it out.
And so the subtext underneath draw the owl is figure it out, ship it and iterate.
There's no instruction book. It's ours to write.
And it's this call to action really, if you think about for builders saying, look, when something is hard or ambiguous, you don't know how to do it.