Twilio Names Former Skype Executive Ott Kaukver as Vice President of Engineering
Former Skype Head of Engineering Brings Product Development Experience and Team Leadership Skills
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 15, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Twilio (http://www.twilio.com), the cloud communications company, today announced the appointment of Ott Kaukver to the position of vice president of engineering. Kaukver joins the company to lead Twilio's growing core engineering and operations teams and to expand Twilio's product portfolio.
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Kaukver comes to Twilio from Skype, where he served as head of engineering, managing the development of Skype products and growing a global engineering team. Upon joining Skype in 2004, Kaukver built up the engineering team, essentially from scratch, to over 100 in 18 months. Under Kaukver, Skype launched SkypeOut, a $1 billion product line that accounted for 80 percent of Skype revenues in 2005, and grew the engineering department five-fold, to over 300 people, in three years.
Scaling Skype's engineering team, of course, served the purpose of globally scaling their massively successful and influential Voice over IP product. According to a February 2013 report from TeleGeography, a telecom market analysis firm, Skype's 2012 cross-border Skype-to-Skype voice and video traffic grew 44 percent year over year, to 167 billion minutes. This number means that worldwide Skype usage is now equivalent to over one-third of all global international phone traffic.
Kaukver also established Skype's Mobile Engineering Unit and worked with mobile providers to develop a native Skype experience on all key handheld platforms.
"We are delighted to welcome Ott to our growing team in the new role of VP engineering. He is a technologist by passion and entrepreneur at heart with specialized experience in building scalable product development teams in consumer focused environments," said Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson. "We look forward to his insight and innovation and can't wait to see what we'll build with him on our team."
Kaukver has a proven ability to deliver profitable software products and lead significant engineering teams. Prior to his role at Skype, Ott served as the General Manager of Software Development at Helmes, where he turned a loss-making M&A into a profitable consulting business unit earning €2 million annual turnover with sustainable margins. Ott holds a Bachelor of International Business Administration from the Estonian Business School and an MBA from INSEAD.
"Joining Twilio is an honor and a privilege," said Kaukver. "Being a part of a rapidly growing team who is inventing the future of communications is very special indeed, and I'm extremely excited about the opportunities ahead of us. I look forward to building a team that is rapidly expanding--we are always looking for more talent and this will be among my top priorities."
Twilio is hiring in all departments, to see a complete list, please visit https://www.twilio.com/company/jobs.
About Twilio
Twilio (www.twilio.com), the cloud communications company, is reinventing telecom by merging the worlds of cloud computing, web services and telecommunications. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud, allowing web developers to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into their web, mobile and traditional phone applications. The company is privately held and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
SOURCE Twilio
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