We’re honored to have been named to Fast Company’s annual list of the world’s most innovative companies.
Companies must innovate, and innovate consistently, to keep up with the market’s pace of change and remain successful.
Those companies that do reap the rewards of success, from attracting and retaining top talent to achieving marketplace leadership, and so much more.
But being an innovative company means more than launching new initiatives or issuing blanket boilerplate statements about the importance of innovation. It’s more than paying lip service to the latest trends.
To relentlessly pursue growth means regularly challenging assumptions and standard ways of operating, which can at times be uncomfortable—even painful.
2020 brought that truth into stark relief. Never before has innovation been more critical to business success—and never before have so many obstacles been put before it.
That’s why it’s our honor to be named to Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2021, and named top innovative enterprise company, for facilitating communication at a time when lives across the world were defined by lockdowns and social distancing.
Fast Company’s list names our platform of communication-facilitating tools as the key reason behind why we made the list.
“During the pandemic, usage of Twilio‘s omnichannel (voice, text, chat, video, email) communications applications doubled; after receiving expedited HIPAA certification in March, the company became the go-to choice for much of the healthcare industry and began offering its video platform for free to organizations dealing with COVID-19 restrictions. The video business unit has seen a 540% year-over-year increase in weekly minutes.”
And it’s true: making it possible for companies of every size and industry, across the world, to reach their customers at a time of unprecedented change is undoubtedly a huge reason for our success as a company.
But we owe our success as a team, and our ability to continue to innovate throughout the pandemic and into the future, to much more than a suite of products.
It’s thanks to our customers, whose dogged pursuit of innovation themselves inspired us every day.
It’s thanks to our employees, who took the challenge of COVID-19 and a worldwide pandemic head on, as they continued to provide exceptional support to our customers.
It’s thanks to the teams who empowered those employees to gain authorship over their working lives, with everything from flexible leave policies to work-from-home equipment to specific support for working parents and those caring for loved ones.
It’s thanks to the increased focus on racial injustice and social issues, on equity and inclusion, that lead to the formation of even more robust, aggressive goals related to diversity and inclusion that now and forever will guide how we do business at Twilio.
And it’s thanks to the builder mentality that sits at the core of our DNA, that empowers all of us here to not wait for the future, but instead to build it ourselves.
Congratulations to the companies we share this prestigious list with, and to all the teams, organizations, nonprofits, and unrecognized leaders who innovated, built, struggled, labored, and thrived through 2020. Here’s to 2021 and our success, together.
Sara is responsible for growing Twilio’s community of developers while simultaneously bringing Twilio into the enterprise market. Prior to Twilio, Sara was SVP of Marketing at Salesforce where she was responsible for the positioning and go-to-market strategy for Sales Cloud, the world’s leading sales platform. She holds a BS in Business Administration from Bucknell University and an MBA from The Anderson School of Management at UCLA.