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Hello, and welcome to the Twilio First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers remarks, there will be a question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the conference over to Bryan Vaniman, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Sara. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Twilio's First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Our prepared remarks, earnings press release, investor presentation, SEC filings and a replay of today's call can be found on our IR website at investors.twilio.com. Joining me today for Q&A are Jeff Lawson, Co-Founder and CEO; Elena Donio, President, Twilio Data Applications; Khozema Shipchandler, President, Twilio Communications; and Aidan Viggiano, Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, some of our commentary today will include non-GAAP financial measures and key metrics. Reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results and further information related to guidance, definitions and key metrics can be found in our earnings press release and the appendix of our prepared remarks, both of which can be found on our IR website. The information provided and discussed today also include forward-looking statements, including statements about our future outlook and goals. These forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that are described in more detail in our most recent periodic reports filed with the SEC, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our forthcoming quarterly report on Form 10-Q, which are available on our website and at sec.gov. Forward-looking statements represent our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made. Actual results may vary significantly and we expressly assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required by law. With that, I'll hand it over to Jeff for some opening remarks, and then we'll open the call for Q&A.

Thanks, Bryan. Before we hop into the call, I wanted to really take note of three things today. First, I wanted to note that the substantial actions that we took in Q1 are working, as you can see from our strong non-GAAP operating profit results. One quarter in, we're really starting to show the profit potential of this business. We're also one quarter in to our new structure. And as you can see from our Q2 guide, we're looking into continued headwinds as we built the sales capacity of our data and apps business and doing that in a very tough macro environment as well. But the good news is, I see our leadership role continuing and even expanding in this environment, and I don't see things like changes in our churn or losing share in the market. I see moderation in our consumer-facing usage patterns as well as us lapping our peak crypto usage from last year. And these are some of the headwinds that we'll talk about. But through all of this, what I really want to do is to thank the Twilio team. We've been navigating a lot of change over the last quarter. And I see Twilions every day navigating these changes with grace, with energy and understanding of the job that has to be done here, and it's truly energizing for me and for the rest of the leaders in the organization. That's really truly the Twilio magic in action. So thank you. Second, I'm sure this is on people's minds. The AI platform shift is upon us. Like the PC to web transition, the web to mobile, this is the next major technology shift in our society. Working with customers, we see many ways to activate customer data in segment across the whole customer life cycle using artificial intelligence. Now we'll have more to say about this during the course of this quarter and of course, at SIGNAL in August in terms of products, in terms of partnerships and in terms of customer use cases really looking forward to that. And the third thing I wanted to mention today lastly is go down. Now, onto your questions.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Thank you, very much. So, a question for Elena. You mentioned being in a strong position to actually reaccelerate bookings later this year. And Khozema, in their prepared remarks, you're mentioning optimism in being able to reaccelerate growth as the year progresses. I'm wondering, if you can just shed a little light on what is underpinning that positive thought process? And could it mean that Q2 might mark a bottom actually for the revenue growth rate or a local bottom for the revenue growth rate?

Yes. I mean I would largely echo what Aidan said. I mean, I think as she mentioned, crypto was pretty significant last year. And so as we lap that, I think we feel pretty good about our ability to come out of that. I think the marketing spend that we referred to was much more on kind of the customer side, if you will, not necessarily on our side. And so obviously, some of our products end up serving used cases that are marketing related. And so as customer marketing volumes have come down a little bit, frankly, that impacts both sides of our business to a degree. But it honestly impacts probably the communications business a bit more significantly upfront. We talked about the dynamics, and Meta, you know the company really well. And on the way up, like we react very, very quickly; and on the way down, unfortunately, we react very, very quickly. And so, as things kind of moderate, I'm really optimistic that we'll be able to come out of it pretty fast. And otherwise, it's kind of business as usual. I mean Aidan called out some of the industries, but otherwise, we continue winning, we continue expanding and we continue to maintain our share. And we're not seeing really any pricing pressure out there either. So, feel pretty good otherwise.

Great. Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead.

Hey great, thanks. Appreciate you taking the question. Just on guidance and what's assumed, given there are a number of moving pieces, you mentioned in the prepared remarks. Can you just maybe walk through, what you're assuming in terms of the macro and what you're seeing in expansion rates? Is this a consistent environment that's assumed? And then, just also thinking through the progression of some of the go-to-market improvements that you're making, is there a way for us just to think about the time line and progression of where expected benefits from those might start to play through? Thanks, very much.

Yes, I'll start with a bit on the second quarter and then -- this is Aidan, by the way, and then go a little bit into some of the traction for the year. So, it's largely macro as we think about the second quarter. So the market continues to be pretty dynamic, and we're feeling the impacts of a broader slowdown. And so you see that reflected in our guide. I think the other thing that's important to remember is that, the majority of our revenue comes from our communications business, about 85% of our revenue. As Khozema just said, that's a consumption model tied to consumer activity. So in that business, we are dealing with a combination of macro, as well as the tough comparisons that we just talked about on crypto. And so again, that's creating a headwind year-over-year as it relates to the second quarter growth rate. On the data and application side, Elena has talked about it as well, but we are rebuilding -- Elena talked about our efforts there to ramp up the sales force and really enabled the team further. And we're also doing that in a tougher macro cycle. So, I'd say on the communications side, it's a combination of macro, some tough comparisons on the software side, it's a mix of our efforts to rebuild plus the macro, and we factored all of this into our guide. So, I'd say some choppiness on growth in the short term, but despite that, we're focused on what we can control, which is delivering profit in any environment. As we think about the rest of the year, we're not going to guide quarter -- we're going to continue to guide quarter-to-quarter. We're not going to guide beyond the second quarter at this point. Again, given the fact that most of our revenue is communications and usage based makes it a little bit tougher to call. Like in light of that, we'll continue to plan conservatively guide quarter-to-quarter. I think, the other thing to consider is, as the macro recovers and the consumption-based model comes back, our growth will improve, our DD&E will improve alongside it, and we'll be well positioned on the other side with a much more efficient cost structure.

Appreciate the detail answer. Thank you.

Hi Ittai, this is Aidan. I'll take that. So, we don't provide guidance by business unit on revenue. But as you think about the second quarter, you can generally assume that the slower growth is attributable to both businesses. Though I would say, given the much larger size of communications, it obviously has a bigger impact on our consolidated growth.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Taylor McGinnis with UBS. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi. Thanks for taking my question. Just looking at the 1Q rev, the 1Q rev declined sequentially and the 2Q guide, I think even if you strip out IoT, assumes something similar. I know you mentioned that there hasn't been much change in churn. So, can you just provide more color on the drivers there? It seems like it might be some seasonality. But if that's the case, as we look throughout the rest of the year, any other seasonal patterns to keep in mind?

I'll start here and then if Elena and Khozema want to add, they can. You're right, churn overall has been relatively consistent. Where we are seeing some impact is, we are seeing a bit higher contraction again, really, we think, due to just lower spending on the part of our customers, and we attribute that to the macro. On the expansion side, we are seeing that at a bit lower rates than where we've been historically. And again, we think that's customers being budget conscious, scrutinizing their spend, and that's really a function of the macros -- the macro. The one area where we are seeing a little bit of an impact on new business, Elena has already talked about it, but is on data and application side. And as she has mentioned, we expect to gain traction there over the year as we ramp our sales force, and we expect bookings to reaccelerate towards the end of the year. So that just gives you a little bit of color in terms of how to think about revenue for the rest of the year, we're going to continue to guide quarter-to-quarter just given how dynamic the macro is. The only other thing I'll call out, which we have already is that, we do have some tough comparisons here in the second quarter.

I would just a little bit more color on contraction for Twilio data and applications. I think the good news there is that, when we see contraction, it is not that we're seeing competitive loss or competitive takeouts and things like that. It's really just customers belt tightening, their marketing spend going down, or their transaction usage, for example, on segment or utilization on segment, just going down because they are contracting. And so, we take heart in the fact that, the product is extremely valuable, extremely usable, but they, as customers, are going through tough times on their own. We see that show up in some of the contraction numbers that we're seeing. So, feel good competitively, but we've got obviously a contraction happening that is a newer dynamic over the past few quarters.

Appreciate the extra color. Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Derrick Wood with Cowen. Please go ahead.

Well, I would just add because we -- Khozema and I, partnered on this together, and we started orchestrating this move when I was still in the -- had a go-to-market role. Like I would say, we looked at what is the ROI of each cohort of sellers and supporting roles within the go-to-market organization and really took a close look at where our rep in was yielding discontinuous growth and where it was and we cut that out, and we made a concerted effort to make sure that sort of everywhere we are at injecting human capital, we're seeing a return for it. And so that's how I think about the fitness level that we've created across go-to-market now in both communications and data and applications.

Yes. And I guess just the last thing I would add, Nick, is that in spite of all these changes that we've kind of undergone in communications business, we've maintained share, customers sustained on the platform, we haven't seen any elevated churn, and we continue winning with some really material accounts. So, that to me is a significant number of proof points that things are moving in the right direction. There's obviously more work to do. But starting off the year with strong profitability, which is kind of where we were oriented, was really important for us. And now the rest of it is execution.

Great. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Samad Samana with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking my questions. So I wanted to ask maybe on the software side of the business, and I was a little bit late, so I apologize if this has already been asked. But just as you think about the -- I know you're investing for rep, but if you think about the bookings trends even as maybe customers spend on marketing is a little bit less, just how should we think about the changes and how that's driving maybe leads into the pipeline, the type of conversation that you're having? Is it changing the nature of where customers are viewing you, versus just maybe the near-term financial results, which have been impacted by changes? And then I have a follow-up.

Great Jeff. That's very helpful. Thank you so much.

Your next question comes from the line of Matt Stotler with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys, this is Alex [ph] on for Matt. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to speak about the partner channel. If you could talk to any updates you might have there, especially with the GSIs and regional Sis. How are you enabling those partners? Do you have any thoughts on expanding the partner contribution going forward? Thanks.

I will take that one. It's Elana here on the data and application side. We see a big role for partners, both today going forward. We've got a fiber and ecosystem of partners and particularly partners on the SI side, not just global SIs, but regional as well. And so, I'd say that the SI community is performing well in the big ecosystem as well as black, so those tend to be different partners. We also have a couple of others that I wouldn't necessarily put in the SI bucket, but are, I think, pretty interesting for us today, segment, the top partners within the AWS IV Accelerate program, which connects AWS sellers and our sales process. We're seeing some good deals from that. And then on the flex side, we've got several partners that sort of span just the SI world, but also build product side by side with flex as well. And so, I'd say that we are -- I said over the past couple of calls, actually that this is an area of focus and investment for us. I think we're seeing some good green shoots there, lots, lots more to do. I don't know if statement has anything to add on the comp side.

Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Fred Havemeyer with Macquarie Capital. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thank you. I wanted to ask about some of the segment wins that you were talking about there. I think the selection of customers was actually quite interesting. You have a health care company. You have a database company. You have a wireless company that has a more expansive relationship with Twilio. So, could you talk about perhaps some of the use cases that these companies are using segment for? And where those companies are finding value right now with segment?

Segments super interesting. We talk a lot about B2C, and there's definitely fantastic brands that are direct to consumer or have a big consumer element to what they do that are really out there working to find, identify, engage, acquire and just better nurture. Those kinds of relationships in a way that is cost effective, really fast and petty and gives them the ability to do things that they can't do with their traditional kind of cobbled together CRM infrastructure. That said, we do have a percentage of our segment customer population, that's also B2B. And so people that play in both B2B and B2C that are finding ways to sort of cross-pollinate their own channels and their own customer identity is using the power of segment. And so, we see customers do everything from sort of the core sort of data platform use cases and really using us for things that are quite simple, but hard to pull off. And then we have customers that are growing set of customers that are adding on capabilities, so Engage, for example, and our new Unify capability that we talked about in our prepared remarks. So those are a couple of things that we're doing. I think long game, we expect the customer data platform to sort of be at the center for there to be a lot that we do with that. And so from Engage, for example, actually engaging your customers getting out via our different communications channels to utilizing segment information, to have better experiences with Flex in the call center or in a digital sort of in-app communication mechanism that a customer might be using with Flex. So we see a ton of extension capability here with that CDP as the center.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex

Hey, guys, thanks for taking the question. I guess maybe just the first question is, the gross margins in the quarter were actually better, I think, than we anticipated. I think that was the best performance in the last -- since Q1 of last year, is international didn't go down as a percentage of the total revenue. Was there something else that you're maybe walking away from business more that had a lower gross margin in the quarter? I know that we're not guiding to it, but at least from a trend lining perspective, how should we think about that? And then I've got a quick follow-up for Jeff.

Hi Alex, this is Aidan. Yes. So it was 52.3% in the quarter and that was up sequentially about 170 basis points. So that was positive. Although, I would say we'll continue to see variability on this line. And so it's largely a function of the mix of products and also within the messaging business, the mix of geography where the traffic terminates, which is a little bit different than the international percent of revenue that you're looking at, which is based on customer headquarters. And what we saw this quarter relative to last quarter, there was a different mix in terms of where traffic was terminating and that drove the better gross margin overall. As we think about going forward and how to think about this, we're really orienting the business more to gross profit dollars and the gross margin rates, given the strong unit economics, in particular in the messaging business. And so that will continue to be our focus as we move forward is really orienting the team to gross profit dollar generation. And as long as we can do that with the right cost structure, we think that's a good business to keep doing.

Got it. And then maybe, Jeff, one for you. You talked about AI and generative AI with respect to segment and CDP. I guess, one common question we get is the notion of bidirectional messaging, conversational messaging seems like that trend is having a massive moment right now in the marketplace. Can you maybe talk about the puts and takes and the potential tailwinds to the communications side of the business from generative AI, what you're seeing in customer conversations that you're having existing or new around that?

Yes. So just to give you a quick backdrop, I mentioned at the beginning of the call that generative AI is the next platform shift in technology. A matter it's in technology, it's actually in society. And if you think about the -- when these ships occur, like the PC or the arrival of the PC and the PC to the web, and the web to mobile, right, you can see the kind of disruption that occurs in market after market when these transformations happen. In fact, it's interesting, there was a Wall Street Journal headline today that says, is this the iPhone moment. And I think, absolutely, I would answer yes. Yes, it is. Now there's an interesting question though, if you remember in the early days of, say, the web, where companies were trying to figure out what do we do? Do we give a brochure on the site? Remember when companies used to say, like we're not allowed to like off of our site because there's a legal problem of that? Everyone’s like, what? So people have to figure out how to use these new technologies in the corporate setting. And I think that's what the conversations I’m having with customers now are exactly that, right? Is this ready for an enterprise use case or is a bot that I put in front of my customer is going to start like talking saying stuff that I don't want to say, right? Is it going to start having a dialogue with my customers about God knows what -- or are they going to stay on topic and can talk about my products, my services and all that kind of stuff. And so I think that's where a lot of the work is going right now. And I think there's really good questions that are getting answered every day that work we are doing, work others are doing in terms of like how to keep these large language models on topic and provide boundaries for them so that they are useful in a corporate context. And that stuff is getting resolved, I think, pretty quickly. And so the converse -- I'll put you into a conversation now with the customer recently which I think is indicative of what I think is going to happen. It was I was talking to a customer, a very large financial services company. And they were telling me how they had spent the last seven years building out all of the intent to have a bot for their service use cases that could contain customer culture containment as the -- didn't have to reach a person. And they said, well, this containment was after seven years of work or whatever, it's about 40% and so 60% of the call is made through that. And I asked -- and we're talking about large language models, and I said, do you think you're going to keep that investment or do you think you're going to start from scratch in the large language model world. And the customers say now, I will keep that investment, but hopefully, large language models will help us move it forward from 40% up from there. And through the course of the conversation, we talked a lot about what's possible in the architecture of these new language models and how they can work with segment customer data and things like this. And at the end of the conversation they asked again, do you think you're going to keep that 40% -- the investment you made over the last seven years that got you to 40% containment? And the customer said, no its going in the garbage can, right? Like every decision we've made for the last seven years about what's possible is now like a relic of the past and we are up for relitigation and potentially new approaches, new vendors, new ways of implementing it because large language model world just upends what is possible. And I think that is why it is a gift in terms of creating new opportunities for companies like Twilio who is helping our customers to activate their customer data across the customer life cycle, take CRM, which has historically business like kind of a sleepy area of like just a database, not activated, making useful across many different touch points. Large language models are an absolute gift, and I'm very happy that we bought segment when we did because the data that is in segment enables a company to customize these interactions based on who they're talking to. The end user, the customer of our customer, and that is very powerful. So anyway, this is day zero of large language models, and you'll be hearing more from us in the course of this quarter. Obviously, we have signaled in August and I would not be a responsible technology leader. If AI wasn't prominently a part of what we're talking about at Signal, so we'll have more coming, and I hope everybody joins us in Signal in August.

Perfect. Thank you guys.

Your next question comes from the line of Siti Panigrahi with Mizuho. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys, it's Phil on for Siti. Thanks for taking my question. In your prepared remarks, you guys noted a flex win with a major financial services company. Would we love to learn a bit more about this win, as it sourced through an SI partner. And how well is flex position to compete with the other CCaaS vendors?

So a couple of things. We -- I don't believe that one was partner sourced. But it's a deal we've been working on for a few quarters. They are -- it is a legacy takeout, and it is sort of a contact center specific use case. But I would say, because you asked about Flex, that's really not our only use case. We're starting to see sort of a cold lessing around three or four key things that we see really playing well in the market. So, first is sort of this in-app digital communication and that digital concierge kind of capability, and we see a lot of great direct-to-consumer brands utilizing flex in that way. Secondly is sort of a high-touch contextual sales kind of moment, and we see certain large retailers and some other financial institutions playing in that area. And then lastly is sort of our core contact center use cases in the service and support area. And this example that you mentioned happens to live a rate in that area, and that's the one that was in our prepared remarks today.

Okay. Thanks.

Your final question comes from the line of Michael Funk with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks for squeezing me. Two, if I could, quickly. So Aidan, one for you if I could. The operating margin guidance for 2Q, I saw you called out a number of factors pressuring that sequentially. However, I would have thought the full quarter of the head count reduction, potentially positive mix shift would have offset the reversal for example, you called out other things. Are there other factors going into that?

Thanks for the question, Michael. So, we try to be pretty transparent about this in the prepared remarks, because we are expecting profit to be down quarter-over-quarter. So you gave a lot of information there, and I recognize it's a little bit counterintuitive given the timing of the restructuring in the first quarter. So let me just like to walk through some of the pieces and I'll talk about what will continue beyond the second quarter as well. So, first, the first quarter benefited from a $12 million onetime accrual reversal related to the sunsetting of our employee sabbatical program. That will repeat in the second quarter or beyond. We guided to lower quarter-over-quarter revenues, which directly impacts our gross profit as well as our operating profit. And then we expect a number of different cost items to be ahead with quarter-over-quarter. First, merit goes into effect in the second quarter as it does every year. And so that will obviously go into effect Q2 and for the rest of the year. We're moving some employees who talked about this in the prior earnings call. We're moving some employees to cash bonuses from equity-based awards. This is for a subset of our employee base, but it will help moderate stock-based compensation expense growth going forward. And but that in the period presents an OpEx headwind. We've also made some changes to our incentive compensation structure to the communications sales team to better align to Twilio’s financial goals. And while that doesn't result in any difference in cash being paid to a specific sales executive, there's a bit of a difference in accounting in terms of what is incurred in period versus what is deferred over time. And so that creates a little bit of a headwind. And then lastly, we do expect more normalized levels of marketing and travel spend in the second quarter. I'd say we're pretty light in the first quarter, just post the reorganization as teams are settling into the new structures. We just didn't spend as much as we had planned we would. And so all of those items more than offset the full quarter benefit of the restructuring actions that we announced in February, but we're still guiding to $65 million to $75 million we raised the low end of our guide for the year to $2.75 to $3.50, and we're tracking really well to date.

That’s very helpful color. I appreciate it. Thank you.