Press
December 19, 2011
Forbes 30 Under 30: Social/Mobile – by Elizabeth Woyke, Forbes Magazine
August 17, 2011
Hey Tech Startups: Winter is Coming by Laurie Segall, CNN Money
“This will be my third winter,” said industry veteran Danielle Morrill. “If you’re going to do startups for the long term I think you have to learn to weather this over and over again.”
During the 2001 dot-com bust, Morrill was working at her family’s financial services firm. It took a big hit in the post-Sept. 11 fallout. She later joined Pelago, a pioneering location-based recommendations engine that launched in 2007 — right before the Great Recession set in.
“That company kind of boomed and busted,” she said. “Traction wasn’t going anywhere.” She quit in 2008 — at the height of the financial crisis — to move to cloud communications startup Twilio, where she currently works as director of marketing. Pelago was sold to Groupon earlier this year.
Twilio is in good shape, Morrill says, but if the economy stays so volatile, she expects liquidity to be an issue for newer startups and the venture capitalists that fund them.
March 11, 2011
Twilio Powering Mobile Start-Ups at SXSW by Jenna Wortham, New York Times
“SMS and voice isn’t necessarily sexy, but everyone can do it,” said Danielle Morrill, Twilio’s first employee, who handles recruiting and marketing for the company. “Billions of people have phones, and so we’re rethinking the role and the power of the telephone.”
Twilio lets developers build applications around voice telephony and SMS functionality with relative ease.
“We’re like Amazon for Web services but where they are doing cloud computing, we’re doing cloud telecom,” Ms. Morrill said.
