Fireside Chat with Jeff Lawson of Twilio

Dana Lawson

Thank you so much for having us, and thank you, Jeff, for coming. I want to clear up a rumor, though. As you can probably tell, we're talking between two devs, but now we're talking between two Lawsons. And if you thought for a minute I was a tech neophyte baby, I am. It's true. Me and Jeff are cousins. No, we're not. Okay, I want that on the record on the internet. We're not related. Quit sending me stuff about Jeff. This is the first time we’ve met. It's true.

Jeff Lawson

Keep sending me stuff about Dana, though.

Dana Lawson

No, you don't want that stuff. Trust me on that one, Jeff.

Well, thank you again for joining. So, as you heard, Jeff started Twilio in 2008. And today, we've been talking about the move to the modern composable web. Back then, we didn't have the word "composable." We kind of had, well, we did have the web, and we started this journey. Well, he started this journey before we had the concepts of headless. So if you think back to 2015 when Mathias started Netlify, he started this new concept called Jamstack. And Jamstack was really anchored on the concept of headless, which Twilio was really an early adopter of this technology. And I know a lot of times when you think about headless or composable, you're thinking of the UI. But it's more than that. Jeff, how does Twilio really approach their digital strategy? And what were some of the factors where you came and embraced this architecture?

Jeff Lawson

Well, you know, to me, the real, I'm going to start with the story. Actually, start with the story. Before starting Twilio, I was at AWS. And before AWS, I had started, of all things, a bricks-and-mortar retailer for extreme sporting goods.

Dana Lawson

Oh, that sounds cool.

Jeff Lawson

Skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, all these sports. And you're like, well, I don't do any of these sports. I don't skate, I don't surf. I don't do any of this. So you're like, well, what? Why was Jeff involved in this company? Which is a great question. I asked myself that very frequently. But what I convinced myself of at the time, I was like, look, we're starting this new brick-and-mortar retail business in the year 2000. So we have this opportunity to go create this customer experience unlike anything else. We already knew, e-commerce is obviously coming for retail. But we looked at stores like REI that had a climbing wall in the store. Like I could buy that stuff online, but I'd rather go to REI, actually, because I love that place. And so we said, can we do that before extreme sporting goods, which was a market that was twice as big and growing twice as fast as our REI's market? So that was what we were doing.

And so I started this business, and I was like the tech guy, right? And we said, okay, we want to do this member program, and kids or teenagers were our best customers. So we're going to do this thing where they get a card with their picture printed on it, and they can come and buy stuff on their card, and their parents can charge it up. We had all these really, really cool ideas. Then we had this point of sale system, and we're like, yeah, it doesn't do any of that.

We were a startup. We did not have the budget to go buy the IBM point of sale thing that real retailers had. And so we had this Win32 app that just did what it did. And so I started methodically building my own point of sale system from the ground up to do everything that the thing we had bought did using entirely web technologies as this was 2002 when we started building a single-page web application point of sale machine. This has no business being a web application. But it was the only technology I knew. I didn't know how to build desktop software. I only knew how to build web apps. So here we are, I'm building a single-page web app, and I spent 2 years building an entire point of sale system just so I could get to the point where I could start innovating on top of it and I could do the things we really actually wanted to do.

To me, this is the story of what it takes to build a great digital business in this era, right? Because if you think about it since the last 20-25 years, tech went from being this notion of this back office thing where it was largely, do your printers have paper in them, and do your laptops work and stuff like that. And in that world technology was like a cost center, and it was not strategically differentiating and all that, so companies went and outsourced it all.

Well, over the last 20 years, of course, technology and digital has gone from the back office to being the point of the company.

Dana Lawson

That's right.

Jeff Lawson

Because web and mobile and all that has become the products. My favorite example is the bank. 25 years ago, you liked your bank if it was a right-hand turn on your way home from work, if they had enough parking, and if they gave your kid a lollipop. You're like, "I like my bank." Now, of course, I like my bank if it's a good mobile app, if it doesn't crash, if they use Face Unlock and all those things. You're like, "Okay, that's a good bank." And that has completely changed the notion of every competitive landscape in every market because now the great digital companies, the ones who can execute on digital strategies, become the ones that win market share. And the ones who basically can't build differentiated digital experiences, they're the ones who nobody cares about, right? They slowly atrophy over time.

And so every company as a result of this has started to become builders of technology and builders of software, just like I had been doing in that retail business. Saying the way we are going to differentiate, the reason you are going to buy a skateboard from us and not buy it online is because when you come to our store, there's a literal skate park in the store. Your little card that we gave you, that's your scan to get in, and you get a 10% rebate on everything you buy in the store. Actually, we started putting webcams in the skate park. This is 2003 where it would do the motion capture and actually know who was in the skate park at the time, tag it to your account, and actually put photos online of you so you could show off to your friends, "Hey, check me out in the skate park!" This was like bonkers stuff.

Dana Lawson

Right on! I mean, where were y'all in 2003? I don't think we were building web apps that connected online that uploaded. That was before we even had the inklings of social media and some of the modern things today. That's incredible.

Jeff Lawson

Yeah, I can tell you about how I got banned from Fry's Electronics trying to do one of those things.

Dana Lawson

We'll get to that story after this.

Jeff Lawson

So, anyway, but to me, that is the point of being great digital executors. And here's the thing, you cannot be a great digital business and therefore win the hearts, minds, and wallets of customers in this digital battlefield in every market. You cannot do it if you're just buying off-the-shelf software, right? Because then you and all your competitors are completely undifferentiated. You've all bought the same off-the-shelf thing, plugged it in. Theirs is red, and yours is green, and theirs is blue, but other than that, it's the same thing. You're like, "Okay, well, how am I going to win in this market?" Well, along comes some startup that's like, "Guess what? We build software, and we're going to go create an amazing experience, and we're going to go listen to customers, hear a problem that no one has solved for them yet, and we're going to go build that."

When that happens, a bunch of startups do that, and they're wrong, and they go out of business. But every every once in a while, one of them gets it right, and suddenly they start taking over an industry, and that's what we see as all the disruptors in every market. And when that happens, if you are not a company in terms of an incumbent in the market, and you can't go build and go match the capabilities that some startup discovered your market actually wants, then over time, that startup's going to get more and more traction. They start doing more and more of what you do, and that's why incumbents tend to start to freak out and start to build innovation centers, software, and all this kind of stuff. And that's just inevitable. It's a form of Darwinian evolution in every competitive set.

If you think about evolution, it's your ability to adapt to a changing environment like the survival of the fittest. Well, when markets evolve, the companies that can adapt, i.e., change themselves, write new software, build new experiences, they're the ones that will adapt and therefore survive. And the companies that are static, it's like, well, no, I bought something off the shelf, I can't change it. They're stuck there, and then they basically atrophy and die.

So I think that there's this new notion that’s not like the old question of to build versus buy. Do I want to build software? Do I want to buy software? Now I think it's build versus die. And that's the Darwinian evolution notion. You have to be a builder of software if you're going to win in the digital era.

So the question is, I can't build everything, Jeff, right?

Dana Lawson

No, you can't. And, why would you? Why would you spend that time trying to build everything?

Jeff Lawson

Yep. So thus the software supply chain has emerged. It's taking all the parts of software that companies need in order to build these great experiences and delivering them as, basically, the parts so that they can be the assemblers of it to realize their vision for how they're going to go in their market.

But you know, just like General Motors does not make every part of the car, they have a vision for the car and how it's going to come together, what it looks like. But they outsource the seats, steering wheel, dashboard, seat belts, and everything else to all these companies. Well, the same thing happens in the digital world, where every company has to become a builder of software, but they're going to outsource all the different parts of that to companies who can create the componentry that they need in order to put it all together with relative ease, not having to become experts in every one of those domains and actually build digital experiences.

So you get Google Maps and all of that. You get Twilio for communications. You get Stripe for payments. You get Netlify. You get all these companies who sprung up to really be the supply chain of the digital era.

Dana Lawson

And I think it's important. That's why today we've been talking about that flexibility, because I love what you say in your book. Excuse me, if you haven't got it, you should go get it. Ask the developer. And don't worry, folks, it's not about developers, it's about locking into what your developers do because we know every company is a digital company. And we know that experience that we want. Most people don't want to go into a brick and mortar store anymore.

Jeff Lawson

Especially if it's a left-hand turn.

Dana Lawson

Especially if it's a left-hand, those are the worst.

Jeff Lawson

How many folks in here are technical? How many folks are on the business side of things?

Dana Lawson

We got about half and half.

Jeff Lawson

The book, by the way, is actually more for the non-developers.

Dana Lawson

I think it's really about unlocking that understanding and putting those constraints. What I love is the quote in here that goes into that flexibility and being the supply chain of the experience. Where composability fits in, is that flexibility to really meet people where they are. You say, "Have conviction about the product you're building and the customer you're serving, and let that be your guide." Nobody wants an off-the-shelf product where it's just blue or green, because your customer demands and wants more. If you're customer-centric and you approach your architecture and your business that way, especially in this new modern world where you're taking the Lego bricks of the things that have already been built and putting them together to delight people, it's really some of the tenets on how you can approach the needs and the demands of what people want from the business that you're serving.

I see that you touch on that as your approach in the book on how to really think as business leaders. How can we enable those developers to be customer-centric? How can we approach our sales team to also have that thread between the two departments? Because, believe it or not, when you're building software, all of the functions, if they're orchestrated and aligned, are able to move faster. Our technology that we're bringing unlocks that value chain, to allow that agency across the business but have that same mindset. I just love that about the book.

Jeff Lawson

I think it's interesting how many folks in here are a founder or have been a founder at one point.

Dana Lawson

Oh yeah, we got a lot. We’ve got quite a bit of founders here.

Jeff Lawson

Awesome. I think back to the early days of Twilio in 2008. On any one day, I might be talking to a customer, trying to get them to adopt the product, doing customer support, having an idea for a product, writing code, and making the Costco run to get pretzels for the office. That would be any one day; you do all those things.

Of course, in that world, you've got it all right in your head. How everything intertwines, that customer conversation I had to how much cash we have in the bank, to that line of code, they all kind of fit together in your head, and it all makes sense. Then as a company grows, you start growing the different functions. You hire a sales team to do the sales, support team to do the support, product teams to design the product roadmaps, engineers to go write the code, and an office manager to go to Costco. And so what you start doing is, by design, you're creating these silos of different people who do different jobs, right? You have to do that, obviously, but what you unintentionally do is now create all these divisions between the people who are building the products and the people who are using the products. It's so easy to let those silos just grow and grow and grow, such that the people writing the code have never met a customer and have no idea what customers need. They're just following a spec. They're like, "Well, the spec says, here's an input, and it's got 40 characters," but they have no idea why anyone needs that input field or what the point is. How soulless is that?

Dana Lawson

Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Lawson

That is a soul-crushing job, in my opinion, to be writing a bunch of code for people you've never met, for purposes you can't even understand because no one bothered to explain to you why you're even writing this code in the first place. To me, that is a great recipe for a bunch of [ __ ] code and probably [ __ ] products.

Dana Lawson

It is, and you're harming yourself! A [ __ ] job.

Jeff Lawson

To me, a much better solution is to say, "Okay, let's take our team, a multi-function team that is here to get something done." Let's, instead of sharing with them a solution to a problem, we want you to write a form that's got input fields. Go to them with a business problem that your company or your customers have, and say, "Hey, I don't need you to build a form. What I need you to do is make it so people can sign up for our product in 30 seconds or less. That's the problem we're trying to solve here. We don't need a form; we need an easier-to-use product." Now, you'll get a bunch of engineers, product people, and marketers sitting together in a room, saying, "Aha! What can we do?" You get better software written faster, with probably better outcomes.

Dana Lawson

And that matters. It's not just about shipping **it faster, it's about shipping the right **it faster and really meeting your customer where you are. You got 2 potty mouths up, here you're welcome today. But I really think that's just one of the ways that we approach the problem. You're talking about that whole supply chain of those experiences. Every one of us in the business play a part in that and understanding the problem is the way to solve. It is not by coming and being solution based. I love that when we talk about the modern composable web and the approach to our software architecture, that's where we want to keep that flexibility in mind so we can do those experiments that we have conviction about, but we can also then have your business users engaged in that.

I don't know if you heard, but we released Netlify Create today which is a visual UI abstraction that allows the non-technical business user to go make those changes, interact with the developer, and be a part of that supply chain. As you're making the websites and building the applications, I think it really comes back down to these principles that you've outlined in the book. But with that, Twilio acquired Segment which is a composable customer data platform back in 2020, about 3 years ago. How did that decision with Segment factor into this vision of meeting the customers where you're at with them being a composable solution? What were some of those reasons behind that acquisition?

Jeff Lawson

Well, you know, it's interesting when you look at it, we've always been in the customer engagement business, right? So, people use our APIs. We are the leading API for email, voice calls, and text messaging. You use these APIs to build relationships with customers, to power some part of that customer journey. Whether it's when you're signing up for a service and you're getting your two-factor authentication code, a marketing email, or calling the contact center, these are all points in the customer journey. When you do a better job of engaging with the customer, you're going to win their hearts and minds. If you do a [ __ ] job, customers might say, "I hate that company."

What we see is companies using us for different use cases, but they're all different steps on the customer journey. We realize that the biggest impediment in companies doing a good job of talking to their customers across any of these touchpoints (sales, service, marketing, product, etc.) is knowing who the customer is and knowing what to say to them. How often do you get emails from companies that have no idea who you are? You might just click unsubscribe. I remember a time when I bought 20 black t-shirts from a company I liked, and the next day, they sent me an email about a sale on women's hats. It wasn't relevant, so I unsubscribed.

This happens all the time. We realized that the two sides of building a good customer relationship are engaging with them over digital channels and understanding them. So, how do I collect a bunch of data about my customers and turn that raw data, those streams of data like clicks, scrolls, what they click on, what they don't click on, what they buy, what they don't buy – all of that is signals about who customers are and what they want – into an understanding of the customer. It's like creating a customer profile that I can use to better engage across any of those moments.

Whether it's marketing with better personalization and targeting, personalization on the web or mobile app, or making it easy for the contact center agent to access relevant information about you in seconds, instead of typing away for minutes. There are numerous use cases where putting the understanding of the customer and the points of engagement together makes a lot of sense. So, we bought Segment.

The thing is, most people have thought of CRM as supposed to solve this problem. Oh, CRM, is this thing where if I've got every bit about my customer sitting in this one spot, it'll be perfect, and I'll know my customer. Well, it turns out that CRM actually does a horrible job of that because it's an app originally designed to let sales people take notes while they make their calls and let sales managers report on the deal status. So why would that be the end-all-be-all of everything you know about your customer? In fact, it's a tiny part of what you know about your customer, especially for a B2C company where there's no salesperson? That has nothing to do with understanding your customer.

The real understanding of your customer is the aggregation of all the various data points coming out of all those various apps that companies build. Putting them together and then turning that into an understanding of the customer, a profile. So that's what Segment does, and that's what we take. When you think about the composability of it, this is again an area where an app is never going to answer this question.

Dana Lawson

Yep.

Jeff Lawson

This isn't an app problem. It's an infrastructure problem. It's a problem of the plumbing of a firm being orchestrated to allow for heterogeneity, to allow for the many apps. Like every company, you've got the marketers buying their cloud, the sales people buying their cloud, the data warehouse people buying their cloud, the product people buying their clouds. Everyone's going out buying their own clouds.

And so what you need is an architecture that accommodates that. You have to expect that there's going to be more systems over time, more data over time, more complexity over time, and you need an architecture that says, "And when that happens, I know how to make sense of it." In the same way that saying, "I don't want to buy an app for my website. What I want is a platform that enables me to build something once, put it out there, learn, iterate, bring in new capabilities over time. Oh, and I see my competitor copied me. Great, I'm going to keep moving forward.” That's what you want. It's not a matter of just buying the e-commerce app, and I’m done.

Dana Lawson

No, it's not good enough. With the advancement of the tool space and technology as a whole, it's getting bonkers again. We were talking about what I think was a really interesting time in tech — the rise of a new way of thinking about cloud tools and everything becoming obtainable. You didn't have to go through a long list of ticket hell to get infrastructure built or servers commissioned. You could just go get this software and stitch it together. We're going even further.

And you know, I have to ask you about AI because this wouldn't be a tech conference in 2023 if we weren't talking about AI. When you talk about customer-centricity, it's not just a single app. It's a group of apps, a group of services, a bunch of data that you're collecting to give that best experience. How do you see the rise of generative AI and machine learning, which has been around for a minute? A lot of people don't realize that, but they got educated earlier today by Brooke. It's not a new concept, but the acceleration of these large language models and the way we're approaching tech is unparalleled right now. How do you see that affecting this whole supply chain of those experiences? Now that we have the right architecture, how are we going to integrate it, and if you haven't yet, what are some advice for starting? What are your thoughts today about these tools?

Jeff Lawson

Well, what I would say is that on a scale from one to bonkers, this is bonkers.

Dana Lawson

It’s bonkers!

Jeff Lawson

I don't know about you all, but I am convinced that large language models can reason. I don't know, how many of you believe that?

Dana Lawson

I do.

Jeff Lawson

It's up for debate, for sure, right? Actually, not a lot. Interesting. I believe they can reason because you give these language models problems, and you see that they methodically figure out how to solve that problem and solve it, and it does it with astounding accuracy. Not 100%, but by the way, people are far from 100% too, right? Have you seen the new vision model that came out 2 weeks ago? GPT-4V?

Dana Lawson

Oh yeah.

Jeff Lawson

Do this for any of you who have ChatGPT, I think you have that upgraded version to do it. But, draw a picture. Draw a triangle, put lengths on two of the sides, and on the last side, just put a question mark. Take a picture of that, upload that to ChatGPT, and just submit. Don't even say anything. You don't have to say anything. All you do is give it that picture, and it will say, "It looks like you have a triangle of sides, you know, 3 and 5, and the third side is a question mark. I'm assuming you want me to calculate the length of that side. Here, I'll go do it using Pythagorean theorem." You know, it just does it, right? And you didn't say, "Can you please calculate the side of a triangle?" You just gave it a picture with a question mark, and it intuited, this is what I think the human means.

Dana Lawson

It’s bonkers.

Jeff Lawson

That is because for the first time in humanity, we have machines that can reason. It used to be that only human beings had that ability, and we don't know how it works. We don't know how these work either *points to head*, but the outcome appears to be the same.

Dana Lawson

It's like telepathy.

Jeff Lawson

And so reasoning, this thing that used to be in the realm only of human beings, now it's in the realm of computers. So what you end up with is an abundance of intelligence coming down the line. You can start to see it, and you're like, "Wow, so in the coming decade, the cost of intelligence could start to approach zero, in the same way that during the Industrial Revolution, the cost of physical labor started to.” It's not zero, but it gets very close to it compared to the cost of a human being or a horse or whatever, doing manual labor. Now you've got machines that can do it, and I think you're seeing the same thing happen to intellectual labor.

In that world, what's not possible? What are you going to be asked to do? What are our companies going to be able to do in that world? I think this is going to be a field day for every company. In our domain, we announced something called Customer AI. If you imagine AI as it is and what it's capable of, and you say that AI knows everything about my customers — every click, every scroll, every purchase, everything — what could that AI do to run my company? You're like, "Wow, it'll automatically generate marketing campaigns. It'll automatically provide customer service. It'll probably do a whole lot of sales, at least pre-selling. It will be able to personalize websites. It will be able to give one-to-one personalized emails to every single customer. It'll optimize every little thing for every single customer."

Because if you had a person assigned to every single customer at your company, listening, paying attention, taking notes, personalizing every part of the experience, you'd be like, "Well, that'd be amazing. My customers would love me." If I had a human being dedicated to each and every customer knowing them intimately well and making everything an amazing experience, y'all would sleep pretty well at night knowing that your customers are well taken care of. But of course, that's a ludicrous economic value proposition, except now the cost of intelligence is coming down to zero, basically. You can do that, AI will do that. In fact, I think what is going to happen is that companies are going to get 10 times better at serving their customers at one-tenth of the cost.

Because customers are going to have these amazing experiences, and it'll cost companies very little to do it compared to what they would have had to spend otherwise. So that's the future that's coming.

I think that's just one particular future in our realm of how companies can serve their customers. Instead of giving them these disjointed, horrible experiences, actually giving them a really good integrated experience because AI can connect the dots really well and activate itself across all those touch points. But I think every part of our companies are going to experience accelerations like that and changes like that. So the question is, are you ready to harness those new efficiencies and opportunities in this abundant intelligence world that we're now entering?

To me, a lot of that is, first of all, everyone has access to large language models, which has already basically become commoditized. Who would have guessed that 6 months ago?

Dana Lawson

The acceleration is bonkers! Back in our days, in that ticket hell, and you'd say, "Okay, I have a concept. Let me draw it up, write it up, define the architecture, go through an RFP, design everything end to end." And now we have these tools that are already built. It’s still build versus buy, but it's more so buy, connect, think, and react. Now that we have AI, which is totally a commodity just like the Edge in some ways, people demand it and expect it. What do you tell companies and businesses that are like, “I know that I want to make the customer experience better. I know that I want to reach my base. I want to delight at every turn, and I know I have to have AI at some point in the center.”? How do you get people started? What's some advice you could give?

Jeff Lawson

I think the 2 things people should consider when it comes to AI is, number 1, if everyone has access to the same large language models, the real question is how you create differentiation with the unique proprietary data that your company has. The data that you bring to bear can be used by AI to get better outcomes than your competition. In our domain, we're like, "If you have better data about your customers, you can serve them better." But every company will also have domain-specific data. If you're a farmer and you have better data about your soil and what factors lead to better crop yields, you can use AI to achieve higher yields than your competitors.

Every company has its own domain. So, thinking about your data assets and getting those data assets ready for AI, and just getting the disparate data sets together in a way and place where they can be activated with AI, is the number 1 thing people should be working on today.

The second thing I would say is there's all this fear about hallucinations and mistakes that machines will make. Firstly, it will get solved pretty quickly, and it might be solved by the language models themselves. It's such a fundamental problem that somehow GPT-7 will solve it. Secondly, I would say, who cares? Humans make mistakes too. We have thousands of years of evolution teaching us how to deal with people when they make mistakes. You see people get in car accidents all the time, and nobody cares. But if a robo-taxi gets into a fender bender, it's all over the news because it's novel and unique. We don't understand it yet. Why is the robo-taxi sideways on the road? No human driver would do that because machines are failing in novel ways we don't understand, so it takes time to get used to it. But at the end of the day, you have to ask, is this better or worse than the human outcome?

If you live in San Francisco, there's all the debate that rages about robo-taxis. But I was recently talking to some contact center analysts who advise companies on what contact center they should buy — the industry analysts. There's a lot of discussion about what's going to happen with AI and all this kind of stuff. One of them asked me, "What happens if it hallucinates?" I was like, "Well, then I guess it hallucinates." Let's think about contact center agents. We're putting these people up on a pedestal as if they're perfect and amazing. There's a 400% turnover rate in that job; literally, the average tenure in most contact centers is about 3 months. So, those people are making mistakes all the time too. We're just accustomed to it; we know it's a high-turnover job. They're not always going to be great. So, do you think it's going to be better or worse in an AI world? It's probably going to be better.

I think there's a lot of fear because it's new and different, which is human. I'm not trying to say, "People, get over it. Technology is everything, and it's the future." I don't believe that. But I do believe that it's human nature to be afraid of what we don't understand. We're at the leading edge of technology, and there's a lot that we don't yet understand. People adapt very quickly.

Dana Lawson

People are resilient.

Jeff Lawson

A year from now, all those robo-taxis that people are afraid of will probably become commonplace. They’ll be like, “Oh yeah, of course.” You won’t even think about them anymore.

Dana Lawson

That's true about all these technological advancements. At first, you're unsure, but then it becomes a viral sensation that we can't get enough of. AI is an extension of humanity because we're the ones training it. It’s learning off of us. If we're fallible, then the machines will have some fallibility as well. Over time, they’re just gonna get better and smarter, making us better and smarter about the human condition and what we can do and how we can play a part in it.

I think it's natural to have fear of the unknown, but we have to approach it with an open heart and an open mind, knowing that, at the end of the day, it’s still us in charge. Humans are still here, and we're still making the right decisions.

Jeff Lawson

I kind of think about the Industrial Revolution, which impacted many industries and farming, for example. There used to be a lot of human and animal labor on farms that is no longer needed due to tractors and mechanization. Farms are now much more efficient in terms of how many people are required to run them. People were initially afraid of what would happen to jobs, but many societal changes occurred. People moved to cities, there was urbanization, more education, and people shifted to other forms of work. The result was that we can now feed billions of people who wouldn't have had enough food without this mechanization. Billions of people are now not starving and are actually able to live lives that wouldn't even be possible because they wouldn’t be born, if it wasn't for the fact that we got much more efficient at actually growing and creating food supply. It's a direct result of the Industrial Revolution, which brought down the cost of physical labor.

I don't pretend to know what all these changes will be and I think anyone who does is full of [ __ ] probably, but we're signing up for that level of change in our society which is tremendously interesting. There's a lot of responsibility on all of us. It's also an amazing opportunity for every software developer, entrepreneur, and company to figure out how to make a better world and better products for your customers. When these shifts happen in technology, it resets the playing field. Look at what happened to Microsoft; they were written off, but the playing field shifted, and now suddenly Microsoft is on top and AWS is scrambling to catch up. Who would’ve guessed that, even 3 years ago? The playing field is getting leveled. It's what you can do with AI that will likely dictate who is in charge 5 years from now. Hopefully, it's your companies.

Dana Lawson

That’s incredible. I can't wait to see what gets even more bonkers, wild, and weird out there because, at the end of the day, we're all here trying to make it better for every human on this planet with what we create, develop, and build. We all play a part in that. Jeff, thank you so much for coming and talking with us today. It was great to have you here.

Jeff Lawson

Absolutely, thank you Dana. Thanks for having me. Thanks everybody!