Jeff Lawson, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Twilio

Jeff Lawson is the CEO and co-founder of Twilio, which makes cloud communications tools for software developers. The company went public in June and has more than tripled from its IPO price, driving the value of Lawson’s stake to nearly $500 million.

But having massive paper wealth doesn’t seem to have changed Lawson, who gained perspective from haing founded three companies prior to Twilio, including one that filed to go public in the late 1990s. Then the whole market fell apart and it went bankrupt shortly thereafter.

“My takeaway [from that] was to focus on things that are real, of value and have faith if you focus on the true fundamentals of business - happy customers, revenue, good employees - good things will happen.”

Lawson also talks about the lessons he learned about leadership and serving customers at Amazon.com where he was one of the original product managers for Amazon Web Services.