Woke Tech Company Twilio Announces Firing Based on an ‘Anti-Racist’ Lens

On September 14th, Tech company Twilio’s CEO Jeff Lawson shared a letter with employees announcing the company’s decision to lay off 11% of its workforce as part of a restructuring plan.

According to their website,

Twilio is a customer engagement platform used by hundreds of thousands of businesses and more than ten million developers worldwide to build unique, personalized experiences for their customers.

We’re known for democratizing channels like voice, text, chat, video, and email through APIs, making it easy for every organization to build meaningful interactions with customers on the channels they prefer.

But that’s just the beginning. With Segment, the world’s leading customer data platform, we now empower businesses to capture first-party customer data in real time, analyze it in a single view, and use it to supercharge interactions at scale.

Here is Lawson’s full letter.

Twilio Corporate Letter PDF by Jim Hoft on Scribd


In the letter, Lawson said the decision to implement layoffs” are about aligning our investments more squarely with our priorities, as well as running our company more efficiently overall.”

But in a woke world, a lay-off isn’t just a business decision, it has to have an agenda.

This was tremendously difficult. For those impacted today, we applied a rigorous selection process to examine which roles were most tightly aligned to our four priorities. Similarly, we looked at the size of the investments we’ve made and whether they are working for our company. We ultimately found that some investments no longer make sense and identified areas where we can be more efficient. By no fault of the Twilions impacted today, we’ve curtailed our investment in areas of Go To Market where customers can succeed without as much human intervention, as well as making targeted changes to be more efficient in areas of R&D and G&A.

As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.

Lawson did not elaborate with any actual details about what that means.

 

 

Thanks for sharing!