In 2009, a former snowboarding merchant and two coders promised David Cowan and Ethan Kurzweil to disrupt the whole telecom industry with a simple five function software library for web developers, and somehow Jeff Lawson prevailed upon them to make a seed investment in Twilio. Twilio’s focus on developers paid off, enabling applications like Airbnb, Venmo, DoorDash, Lyft and Spotify, and, by 2020, generating a $35 billion market cap.