Tech company Twilio in San Francisco fires 17% of its employees five months after the layoffs

The San Francisco-based corporate communications technology service Twilio is cutting 17% of its workforce for the second time in five months.

The layoffs occur “because the two parts of our business — communications and software — are at different lifecycle stages and have different operating needs,” according to a statement from company founder and CEO Jeff Lawson. He also said that the communications division has “gotten too big” and needs to “get more efficient.”

“We’re exiting the last phase with a great market position, and very strong cash reserves, but unfortunately that’s not enough to get us through the next phase,” Lawson said in the release.

He continues by explaining that the company had to “the need to organize ourselves differently for success” in order to conduct a second round of layoffs.

SFGATE was informed by a Twilio spokesperson that the company’s San Francisco headquarters are unaffected by the “permanently close additional office locations.”

In September 2022, Twilio made an earlier round of layoffs public, announcing that it would be laying off approximately 800 employees—11 percent of the company’s workforce.

The reductions in headcount and office space continue to wreak havoc on the technology sector, particularly in the Bay Area. Zoom laid off 15% of its employees (with a salary cut for the CEO), Yahoo announced it would reduce its workforce by a fifth in 2023, and GitHub announced it would close its remaining offices. Unity, a developer of game engines, held a second round of layoffs last month.

Lawson stated that affected employees will receive a minimum of 12 weeks’ pay, plus an additional week for each year they work, in addition to the value of the company’s upcoming stock vesting. The health care benefits they will receive are not specified in the note.

According to Lawson’s note, company wellness benefits such as a wellness stipend and the program Twilio Recharge, which offers a four-week worker sabbatical every three years, are also being eliminated permanently.

According to a filing with the SEC that was made public on Monday, the layoff would cost the business up to $135 million in severance benefits and “related facilitation costs.” A different notable expense is shown in a separate SEC filing from February 3: Eyal Manor, the chief product officer of the company, received a bonus of $2.5 million.