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Mustafa Ali

Mustafa Ali

Mustafa Ali is Senior Director of Growth at Twilio, leading self-service and product-led growth initiatives, and a panelist on AI product strategy discussions including Mercury Fund's event at The Ion in Houston.

Sep 25, 2026

13:41
So when groups like Anthropic and OpenAI have access to what some might call the super app, They have all of the intelligence layer and what's left for someone that's trying to build something vertical? And what's the difference between Anthropic being able to build a cloud design and do that somewhat well, fairly well, really well, and maybe vertical software?
14:14
Yeah, it's a good question.
14:15
And, you know, I think a lot of people in the audience are builders.
14:18
And maybe I'll use that example, right? Like, imagine you're about to close the deal with your biggest customer yet, right? You're really excited about it.
14:27
And they say, well, actually, we're pretty big and we need like... multi-user to use your stuff right like multi-user authentication uh and you know user management and then permissions and this and that because we're a big customer you're like okay sure right and what do you do like you go back open up cloud code and it's like you know okay like let me research what i can do but you also look online and there's these companies odds zero and octa and these different companies that do user management and you're like wow this is expensive like you I can just ask Cloud Code to replicate multi-user authentication, and I don't need to pay a lot of money to the vertical of user authentication, right? So you go into Cloud Code, and it's like, add multi-user authentication, enter, right? And it comes back to you with multi-user authentication.
15:19
You do another demo with your prospective customer, Their demo looks great, permissions, multiple users, things are really nice.
15:28
Then you have the next call with them and they say, oh, is it SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant? And now all of a sudden, OK, what do you do? Do you go back to Cloud Code and say, make my app HIPAA compliant? Enter? Let me see what happens.

21 MINS LATER

36:48
What are you guys seeing there and how have you thought through your models and how pricing has evolved?

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