SendGrid Labs
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
Some sections are still being researched2 / 4
Sections to complete：02 · 05
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
SendGrid Labs was the internal incubator program of SendGrid, the Boulder-based email deliverability platform (founded 2009, serving 100,000 web app companies including foursquare, Pinterest, Airbnb, Spotify and Pandora). Led by VP R&D Mike Rowan, Labs was created to build innovative tools solving common developer pain points around productivity, efficiency and scale — things SendGrid's own engineers found distracting from core product work. Its first public release was Loader.io, a free cloud-based load-testing service for developers to stress-test web apps and APIs with thousands of concurrent connections, distributed through Heroku, AppHarbor, cloudControl and other marketplaces.
02 / FAILURE REASONS
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Labs launches
SendGrid launches its internal incubator, SendGrid Labs, with a co-located office inside an accelerator co-working space; its first offspring, Loader.io, is born in late 2012 and publicly released as a free service in early 2013.
- Parent acquired by Twilio
Twilio completes its acquisition of SendGrid in a ~$3 billion all-stock deal on February 1, 2019; SendGrid — and with it SendGrid Labs — becomes a wholly owned Twilio subsidiary. The Labs program itself never failed; it ended as part of the acquisition.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN / AFTERMATH
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.