The end of Twixt
Well, the Twixt team (of which i'm a member) heard the kind of news on Tuesday Nov 17 2015 that you really don't want to hear: "all Twixt positions eliminated immediately"
Big surprise. Business Unit head, senior mgt, product, support, backend and frontend teams, over 20 people, all laid off. Including myself. Wow.
Twixt was started almost 3 years ago as the first new Product AppNexus built in a number of years. Twixt was the brainchild of Andy Atherton, business lead and Vlad Gorelick eng lead. I started in August 2013 when there were 6 devs. Since then the team grew to over 20 people spread over San Francisco and Mountain View offices. Twixt was a startup within a startup (AppNexus). The twixt team was purposely located on the opposite coast from AppNexus in NYC to allow it full freedom to grow and innovate.
Twixt went live over a year and a half ago. At the end of 2014 we exceeded our targets for customer spend. We were all excited and proud when over $100M in spend flowed through Twixt at the end of 2014. That was an important success. However the original goal of gaining bottom up adoption by users did not work out. End users were slow to adopt.
So the strategy pivoted to targeting top down and gaining Enterprise adoption. This it turns out, was a harder sell, things move a lot slower, approvals, legal, reviews etc. The sands of time were now running strongly against Twixt. They say time is the enemy of startups and that's certainly true. Features had to be added to Twixt to support the new strategy. The team worked very hard during 2015 to define and build those features. Twixt team became very proficient running Agile sprints and delivering to production every 2-3 weeks. Since summer we've all run at an intense pace, I recall I worked until 11pm 3 nights 1 week and 2 nights the next. We were all putting in hard shifts and making real progress. In the coming months the plan was to integrate Catalog buying from YieldEx (a 2015 acquisition). That would have been fun to add. That was the last major piece of the puzzle which Enterprise Customers wanted.
So what happened?
Ultimately Twixt did not get enough paying customers. The customer first strategy did not work out and switching to enterprise focus was a much more difficult and slower sales process. We all knew Twixt had to start paying our way and win some customers. Time was running out but no-one expected time would run out so quickly.
In addition I think the mothership (AppNexus) was having its own difficulties. Transactions dropped almost two thirds due to efforts to remove fraudulent content from their inventory. Suddenly financials looked very different. This for a company which was hoping to file for IPO this year. Safe to say that filings not happing in 2015 now.
In addition Fidelity (an AppNexus investor) marked down the value of AppNexus by 30% from a once high of $1.2Bn. They did same to a number of other large startups (MongoDb, Snapchat, Dropbox etc). I suspect that too must have been a factor.
Ironically, I heard Twixt just very recently had success on the customer front but its too late. Decisions were already made.
The Twixt team is awesome. We had product, backend, frontend and support teams. I worked on the Frontend team which included Ward, Andy, Damian, Ale and Bert. I think we worked really well together, got on well and liked working with each other.
Vlad was our leader. In the early days Vlad was our lead and developed a lot of the backend code. In addition to being our lead and manager, Vlad had a big influence to set the culture, open, egoless, hard working, focussed, fun. I took over as UI lead when Vlad moved onwards and upwards. It was a great pleasure for me when we recruited my good buddy Ward to join our frontend team in Dec 2014. Abitha joined in the last ~6 months as our manager as Vlad was promoted and was a good addition to the team. I liked the working relationship Abitha and I developed.
The backend team was lead by Eric C. and included Glenn, Niraj, Eric K and Jiasen. Great engineers all of them and a pleasure to work with. Eric C. is a wizard.
The product team included John and Ashish with design help from Mike and Maloney design. Katherine and Zeeshan provided customer support but also helped with QA, Katherines notorious windows machine with IE was infamous.
So whats next for me?
Well, I've been on Twixt a little over 2 years and thoroughly enjoyed my time. When I joined I was looking for a change and an opportunity to learn new things. Working on product development is great. I love the focus on quality, of wanting to build something the right way, writing unit tests, code walkthroughs, peer reviews, having input into product features. We had great collaboration with the Product team. Some people talk about Agile and think standups, sprints and so forth ...but Agile is Individuals and interactions, Working software, Customer collaboration and Responding to change. I think Twixt had that in spades and it was awesome. We worked as a team where everyone had a voice and requirements were iterated and improved by everyone.
The people I worked with were all awesome. I wish AppNexus could have kept us together even if we worked on other products. But it wasn't to be.
So in my next position I want continue the type of work and type of culture we built at Twixt.
January '16: some warning signs had been flashing with articles such as this and this and this layoff article. At the time when Twitter announced layoffs I wondered if it was a harbinger of things to come...so it was. I see usa today is reporting on it now, so its for real.
Twixt was started almost 3 years ago as the first new Product AppNexus built in a number of years. Twixt was the brainchild of Andy Atherton, business lead and Vlad Gorelick eng lead. I started in August 2013 when there were 6 devs. Since then the team grew to over 20 people spread over San Francisco and Mountain View offices. Twixt was a startup within a startup (AppNexus). The twixt team was purposely located on the opposite coast from AppNexus in NYC to allow it full freedom to grow and innovate.
Twixt went live over a year and a half ago. At the end of 2014 we exceeded our targets for customer spend. We were all excited and proud when over $100M in spend flowed through Twixt at the end of 2014. That was an important success. However the original goal of gaining bottom up adoption by users did not work out. End users were slow to adopt.
So the strategy pivoted to targeting top down and gaining Enterprise adoption. This it turns out, was a harder sell, things move a lot slower, approvals, legal, reviews etc. The sands of time were now running strongly against Twixt. They say time is the enemy of startups and that's certainly true. Features had to be added to Twixt to support the new strategy. The team worked very hard during 2015 to define and build those features. Twixt team became very proficient running Agile sprints and delivering to production every 2-3 weeks. Since summer we've all run at an intense pace, I recall I worked until 11pm 3 nights 1 week and 2 nights the next. We were all putting in hard shifts and making real progress. In the coming months the plan was to integrate Catalog buying from YieldEx (a 2015 acquisition). That would have been fun to add. That was the last major piece of the puzzle which Enterprise Customers wanted.
So what happened?
Ultimately Twixt did not get enough paying customers. The customer first strategy did not work out and switching to enterprise focus was a much more difficult and slower sales process. We all knew Twixt had to start paying our way and win some customers. Time was running out but no-one expected time would run out so quickly.
In addition I think the mothership (AppNexus) was having its own difficulties. Transactions dropped almost two thirds due to efforts to remove fraudulent content from their inventory. Suddenly financials looked very different. This for a company which was hoping to file for IPO this year. Safe to say that filings not happing in 2015 now.
In addition Fidelity (an AppNexus investor) marked down the value of AppNexus by 30% from a once high of $1.2Bn. They did same to a number of other large startups (MongoDb, Snapchat, Dropbox etc). I suspect that too must have been a factor.
Ironically, I heard Twixt just very recently had success on the customer front but its too late. Decisions were already made.
The Twixt team is awesome. We had product, backend, frontend and support teams. I worked on the Frontend team which included Ward, Andy, Damian, Ale and Bert. I think we worked really well together, got on well and liked working with each other.
Vlad was our leader. In the early days Vlad was our lead and developed a lot of the backend code. In addition to being our lead and manager, Vlad had a big influence to set the culture, open, egoless, hard working, focussed, fun. I took over as UI lead when Vlad moved onwards and upwards. It was a great pleasure for me when we recruited my good buddy Ward to join our frontend team in Dec 2014. Abitha joined in the last ~6 months as our manager as Vlad was promoted and was a good addition to the team. I liked the working relationship Abitha and I developed.
The backend team was lead by Eric C. and included Glenn, Niraj, Eric K and Jiasen. Great engineers all of them and a pleasure to work with. Eric C. is a wizard.
The product team included John and Ashish with design help from Mike and Maloney design. Katherine and Zeeshan provided customer support but also helped with QA, Katherines notorious windows machine with IE was infamous.
So whats next for me?
Well, I've been on Twixt a little over 2 years and thoroughly enjoyed my time. When I joined I was looking for a change and an opportunity to learn new things. Working on product development is great. I love the focus on quality, of wanting to build something the right way, writing unit tests, code walkthroughs, peer reviews, having input into product features. We had great collaboration with the Product team. Some people talk about Agile and think standups, sprints and so forth ...but Agile is Individuals and interactions, Working software, Customer collaboration and Responding to change. I think Twixt had that in spades and it was awesome. We worked as a team where everyone had a voice and requirements were iterated and improved by everyone.
The people I worked with were all awesome. I wish AppNexus could have kept us together even if we worked on other products. But it wasn't to be.
So in my next position I want continue the type of work and type of culture we built at Twixt.
January '16: some warning signs had been flashing with articles such as this and this and this layoff article. At the time when Twitter announced layoffs I wondered if it was a harbinger of things to come...so it was. I see usa today is reporting on it now, so its for real.
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