Grit with Joubin Mirzadegan · Oct 19, 2026 · 1h 7m · 58m saved
With Jeff Lawson, Co-Founder and CEO of Inertia, Co-Founder and former CEO of Twilio
Photo via inertia.com
Twilio went public in 2016 with roughly $230 million to $240 million in revenue and seven quota-carrying sales reps worldwide. Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio and now co-founder and CEO of the fusion company Inertia, told Joubin Mirzadegan on Grit that the company had built more products when it should have been selling the ones it had.
Most founders who leave a public company after 16 years start another one in the hottest market. Jeff passed on AI, bought The Onion, and then started a company to build fusion power plants, a project he expects to take 20 years.
"Don't go public without understanding your go-to-market. This is my lesson for everybody." — Jeff Lawson
Jeff built Twilio from a developer tool into a public company and ran it until 2024. Inertia, which he co-founded with the lead designer of the government's record fusion experiment, has $450 million of committed capital.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 67 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
Twilio had 7 quota-carrying sales reps at its IPO, and hired almost 100 in the six months after
Almost every startup is limited by distribution, not by product, a framework Jeff credits to his former COO
Jeff passed on starting an AI company because the foundations it would build on are so uncertain
The Onion's revenue has grown more than 5x since Jeff bought it and stripped out the ads
Fusion ignition took 60 years and about $30 billion of government money, and no startup had tried to commercialize it
Jeff treats fusion power as an engineering and supply chain problem, not a science problem
Inertia aims to break ground on a gigawatt power plant around 2030
1. Twilio's First B2B Product
Twilio began with a rejection. Jeff had only built products for consumers before, and the early investor Mitch Kapor turned him down.
Jeff Lawson says Twilio was his first business-to-business product
"I had only done consumer products before. This was my first sort of B2B-ish product." — Jeff Lawson
Jeff recalled Kapor's reason in his own words.
"I don't think you know how to run a go-to-market for developers. So come back to me when you figured out more about how to run the go-to-market here." — Jeff Lawson
Jeff said he then had to go and learn what "go-to-market," the plan for how a company finds and sells to its customers, even meant. Twilio's early answer was a company with "no strategy other than build a product that customers will pay us for."
