SendGrid is one of the leading email delivery systems with over 82,000 paying customers around the world. Twilio is an email provider and allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and provide other communication functions. Earlier this month, the communications specialist Twilio bought SendGrid for $3bn. Before the deal closed, ZDNet spoke to SendGrid’s VP of technical operations, Jamie Tischart, about email and its key requirements of throughput and reliability.
ZDNet: You have just been acquired by Twilio. How are the two companies to merge?
We are pretty excited about the convergence of these two companies, and they are really developer focused and there are a lot of great things we can do for our really large, combined, customer base.
Tischart: “We envision ourselves as the world’s most trusted communications channel.”
SendGrid
Tischart: How do you see yourselves?
We envision ourselves as the world’s most trusted communications channel and being able to serve all our customers with all of the channels that they might need with a really strong API basis to enable developers to create their solutions on our platform.
As a company where do you think you have come from and where do you see yourselves going to in the future?
SendGrid came from a couple of engineers who were fairly serial entrepreneurs, starting up these new companies and really struggling with how to approach email, how to get higher delivery rates and how to get things through to their customers. And what they did was they created a very strong API vision that would help companies find a much better way to communicate with their customers. It was primarily through the email channel but in a platform model that supported any communications channel that the customers would need.
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We focused a lot on having massive scale. Apart from the scale, we really pride ourselves on working closely with the ESPs across the industry to really prove the deliverability on behalf of our customers so that they can rely on a service that ensures that key communication whether it was a bill communication, or a password reset or whatever.
We focus on ensuring that their communications flow is reliable and will be fast, even if they want to send hundreds of millions of messages — and that somebody will be there to support them.
You say you scale massively, so what’s the secret to doing that?
Everybody is looking for that silver bullet of ‘how do you scale?’ Now if you go back nine years or so, we didn’t have Amazon and elastic scalability and services to rely upon. We had to really build services so that they were resilient, that they could scale independently. Thankfully, that all kind of bridged into the cloud-native design. Things like being able to scale independently as they needed to grow with our customer growth, that was a big part of it — and a lot of this came from, not one quick thing or one magic bullet.
So, we started by talking about what our projections were for the coming year and Black Friday. Some of our data scientists dug in to start predicting what our growth looked like and that would be from message size and the number of customers, and so on, and we used that data to start planning out how are we really going to support this size?