We added a short preface to this podcast as Anson Funds (Moez Kassam) has reentered the Twilio story with this press release claiming they are behind the “departure of long-tenured director Byron Deeter and a proposal to declassify the Board.” Looks like Anson funds are going to clean up the old Twilio ‘Bessemer Board’. This will be good for the Twilio employees.
Now, through the discovery phase of Bill Peter’s arbitration Johnny and Bill believe that the framing of Bill was done by Mark Romeo, a Littler lawyer. Who is also the lawyer behind sending people to the homes of Johnny and I with a 180+ page subpoena to intimidate us. Tata Communications, you are funding this abuse.
We covered this week tyntec promoting Twilio’s routes into Mexico and Peru. This is an example of how prepayments work, and likely Twilio supported tyntec in winning that prepayment deal.
This is relevant because Twilio made a pre-payment to TCR in 2022 and received an 80% discount on reaching certain traffic volumes. When the non Italian members of the Kaleyra board learned of that discount, after Johnny informed them, the discount was removed. The suspicion is that the prepayment was also for ensuring TCR did not store any phone numbers. This design change was a surprise to Bill as the original design did include phone numbers, like the short code registry (which works). AND Bill would certainly not have agreed to such a change. Hence the current mess we see on spam SMS.
This week the current Twilio CEO (Khozema Shipchandler) blocked Johnny on Linkedin after he mentioned this TCR discount. Keep an eye on Twilio, this story is going to run as dots are being connected.
On a more uplifting topic, yesterday we had a great discussion with Alex Quilici, YouMail. I think it’s fair to say their insights on calling and messaging make them the most important company in telecoms at the moment. Johnny’s $1T market is based on one billion spam and $1500 fines TCPA lawyers could claim.
We also had a great interview with Dan Jenkins this week on Broadcast Bridge and CommCon.
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