Welcome to the 14th edition of GrowthDeck! If you enjoy reading deep dives like this, please share it with your friends or colleagues who would appreciate it. Now, let's dive in!

Today we are going to talk about a not so small 300 employee firm which generates close to $100M ARR, this article is going to be a little different we are going to deep dive into the journey and learn the growth drivers along the way!

So lets get into it, we are going to talk today about Plivo which is founded by Venky B and Michael Ricordeau. It all started as an open source project and went on to become one of the largest in their own space.

What is Plivo?

The company, Plivo specializes in providing communication solutions. When you sign up for something online and create a new account, you usually receive a verification code on your phone. This might seem like a small and familiar step, but have you ever wondered how it works behind the scenes?

Plivo's services are widely used by companies like zomato, Splunk, IBM for sending messages and phone call notifications to their customers.

How it started?

Their journey began with an open-source GitHub project, a communication framework designed to make it easier for web developers to create voice-based applications. Little did they know that this humble beginning would lead to something big.

Now, picture this: Two guys, Venky in the Bay Area and Michael in France, decided to work together on this project. They faced a big challenge - the distance between them. They continued on like this for like 9 months and got a lot of media coverage, due to this they were invited to a conference!

The real magic happened at an open-source conference in August 2011. They showed off their communication framework, and the audience was wowed. They did something incredible - callers could see where they were in a call queue and get a callback when it was their turn. Imagine that, it's something we take for granted today, but back then, it was revolutionary.

Their presentation caught the eye of some potential customers who saw something amazing. They were ready to pay for even more features, especially if Plivo, could handle it all in the cloud, saving them from the headaches of dealing with telephony stuff.

And that's when everything changed. Venky and Michael realized they were tackling three big problems: technology, cloud hosting, and connecting people globally through phones. So, they decided to pivot from just being a little open-source project to becoming a full-fledged business. It was the start of something incredible.

The journey from this to currently having closer to 100M $ Revenue and 300 employees is not a easy one. They encountered several problems on the way, we will go through some of them below and how they overcame that! Here is a quick look into their journey!