When Lee Kirkpatrick joined Twilio as CFO in 2012, the telecommunications software startup was full of promise and growing fast. With just $12 million in revenue, however, any talk of going public was far away.

But if Kirkpatrick had any doubts that the startup he had joined was headed for an IPO, they were dispelled quickly. Shortly after he started, he and his boss, CEO Jeff Lawson, sat down for an informational meeting with prospective investors. During the conversation, Kirkpatrick said that he was confident that some day Twilio would get to $1 billion in revenue.

From across the room, Lawson glared. “What do you mean just $1 billion?” Kirkpatrick remembers an irritated Lawson asking him later. “That’s when it really hit me,” Kirkpatrick adds. “I’m working with someone who has a lot of drive to do something transformational.”

Kirkpatrick went on to shepherd Twilio through its successful 2016 IPO. He left the company in December 2018 after helping to put it on a trajectory of sustained growth. At the end of 2019, it was on track to report annual revenue of more than $1.1 billion and to grow another 30% or so the following year; its market value was more than $14 billion at the beginning of 2020.

While the IPO was an important milestone for Twilio, it didn’t happen overnight. For more than two years, Kirkpatrick and his finance team, raced the clock to get the company ready for the scrutiny of the public markets. His behind-the-scenes story helps shine a light on the painstaking work that takes place inside a company long before it gets to tell its story in an investment prospectus.

It would be another two years after that investor meeting before Twilio officially began planning for an IPO. Several things had to fall into place first. “Twilio was a good company in a good market with a big opportunity,” Kirkpatrick says. “But the mathematical chance of being successful or hitting a billion dollars still felt small.”

Throughout 2013, however, Twilio’s business began to mature. Late in 2014, as the company reached $100 million in recurring revenue, Kirkpatrick’s team realized the power of the company’s model—which relied on developer adoption—rather than traditional sales, to bring its product to market. “We only found two other software companies, Salesforce and Workday, that achieved $100 million in revenue faster than us,” he says.

That realization was both good and bad. “Twilio was in rarefied air,” he says. But it also meant that its journey to an IPO would probably be shorter than those of others, leaving less time to prepare and less room for error. “It put a lot of pressure on the …