Twilio ($TWLO) has found someone to replace Roy Ng, its former chief operating officer who left in December. The cloud communications platform provider announced on Wednesday it has hired former Salesforce COO George Hu to fill that role. Not only does he have experience within the enterprise, but he’s an accomplished entrepreneur, having sold his workplace feedback tool Peer to Twitter in 2016.
“George helped build Salesforce into the leading cloud [Software as a Service] and platform company, growing it to more than $5 billion in revenue during his tenure,” said Twilio chief executive Jeff Lawson in a statement. “I’m excited to have George’s operational expertise and go-to-market skills helping us reach Twilio’s next stage of growth.”
Hu’s predecessor left in December, so Lawson has gone several months without a chief deputy. Ng served as Twilio’s COO for a little more than two years, helping transform the company into a public entity — if you watched the company ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, Ng was the one with a selfie stick.
And while Ng shepherded Twilio into a new phase, it’s up to Hu to do the same, but this time focused on extending the company’s reach beyond individual developers and startups into the enterprise. Twilio has already taken steps to cater to large businesses, those with an I.T. department that is likely skeptical about new technology at first.
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Prior to joining Twilio, Hu was at Twitter by way of acquisition of his startup Peer, which specialized in workplace feedback. But for 13 years before that, he was at Salesforce, where he served in various management roles, including those around product marketing, applications, product, and more. He eventually rose all the way to the top management tier, serving four years as COO.
“I see this as a massive opportunity that has the power to change how every company engages with its customers and employees, limited only by the imagination of developers and businesses in every industry and market globally,” Hu remarked in a statement.
