Adapting and Building Together In Strange Times

Adapting and Building Together In Strange Times

At Twilio, we're always impressed by the spirit of builders to improve the lives of customers and communities. In these unprecedented times, I've seen the builder spirit is especially strong.

First, my thoughts are with those who are impacted by COVID-19 already. I wish speedy recovery to all those who are ill, and to those whose loved ones are battling this virus. I also want to express admiration and gratitude to the medical professionals on the front line of treating those who are ill.

I wanted to reassure you that Twilio is here to serve your needs during this unusual time. Last week, Twilio migrated to a fully virtual operational model, and closed all offices globally. Twilio has long had a distributed workforce, so moving to fully virtual, with both the technology and the cultural norms, was completed last week. Our teams are up and running from home around the globe. For those interested in the details of our Business Continuity Plan, it's linked below.

As your world is changing, we're here to support you. In a way, Twilio was built for times like these. Every organization responding to this unprecedented crisis needs agility and global scale on demand—and Twilio is here to help with both. We've seen many customers develop ideas and quickly build and deploy them on Twilio to communicate with their teams and their customers. For example, I happened to meet with the VP of Innovation at a major hospital last week, and the next day they had a new use-case that emerged overnight to triage patients over the phone and video—and they turned to Twilio to solve this urgently. Cloud scale means we have capacity to take on global workloads nobody could have anticipated just weeks ago. We're here to continue powering your usual workloads, as well as new ones that are emerging.

I also want to point out that Twilio is now taking on HIPAA-compliant workloads, and we are now signing Business Associate Addendums (BAAs) with organizations whose apps involve Protected Health Information (PHI). If you, or an organization you know, is responding to this crisis and needs HIPAA-compliant communications, please have them reach out. You can reach out to our sales or support teams to help you understand the regulatory and compliance landscape in light of the PII and PHI you might now be collecting while responding to this crisis. You can also learn more at https://www.twilio.com/en-us/hipaa

Twilio.org has been busy responding to the emerging needs of health providers and non-profit customers building applications that support public health and safety applications. As always, we're in awe of your resourcefulness and creativity. Please reach out to coronavirus@twilio.com to request assistance from Twilio.org. We've also been making grants from the Twilio.org Impact Fund to assist with recovery efforts worldwide, and will continue to provide assistance where we see areas of need in our communities.

Lastly, I want to recognize, as a fellow human, these are unprecedented times. But stay calm, and know that humanity has made it through these events before, and we'll make it through again. Don't stay glued to the TV (or social media), go outside and take walks (that's still ok!), but do keep your distance—flattening the curve by #StayingHome is real, and will help save lives in your community.

We've been sharing and will continue to share resources that we think may be helpful to you as you reconfigure your lives and your companies to respond to COVID-19. Here are some of those resources that you may find useful:

• Business Continuity Plan for Resilient Global Communications
• Best Practices Content for PubSec, Health Care and First Responders
• Strategies for Building First-Class Engagements During COVID-19
• Email Communication During COVID-19
• Deploy Your Own Video Collaboration App in 5 Minutes or Less

Reach out to us if you'd like to partner on building solutions to aid in the crisis.

Thank you, and we're here for you.

Jeff Lawson is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Twilio. He can be reached on Twitter at @jeffiel.