A few months after the seed extension, Albert Wenger, at Union Square Ventures, swooped in and led a $3.7 million Series A round in Twilio that valued the company at $12.4 million post-money, according to Pitchbook. Elite venture capital firms like Bessemer still thought they could make entrepreneurs wait for their money.Īt first, Bessemer proved too cautious with Twilio. It was an era in venture capital where investors believed they had some amount of leverage over startup founders. But he did kick the Series A down the road, accepting $125,000 from Bessemer as part of a seed extension. Ultimately, Lawson didn’t cash the check. What's the deal?” Lawson remembers asking him.
After the meeting, Lawson called his lawyer to ask him what to even do with the check. The seed extension check wasn’t exactly what Lawson was hoping for.
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“We’d like the opportunity to review more data before making a determination on the full Series A and therefore strongly recommend making this angel investment.”
“Twilio is a promising young company with a bold vision to make voice applications as easy to set up and maintain as web applications,” Kurzweil and a group of other Bessemer staffers wrote to the partnership back in 2009.
Lawson had been pressing Bessemer to lead a Series A round, but the firm decided it would be better to give Lawson a smaller investment to see if Twilio’s customers took to its new telephony products. In 2009, Ethan Kurzweil, then a senior associate at Bessemer Venture Partners, pulled out a $250,000 check from his jacket and slid it across the table to Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson at a diner in San Francisco.
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