5 Questions with Twilio’s new Chief Digital Officer Reeny Sondhi

Reeny Sondhi is joining Twilio as our new Chief Digital Officer and will lead the scale of all technology operations needed as we focus on scaling and becoming an end-to-end customer engagement platform.

Reeny joined Twilio from Autodesk, where she served as Chief Security Officer, responsible for driving the company’s security and trust strategy for infrastructure, products, and services. Before Autodesk, she led security engineering for EMC, now part of Dell.

She made a transition to security after years in product management, launching multiple hardware and software products. Reeny serves on the board of Rapid7, a growth business in cybersecurity, and has been recognized by San Francisco Business Times as one of the “Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business.

We asked her five questions to get to know her and see what she’s excited to build at Twilio.

If your life had a theme song what would it be?

“Beautiful Day” by U2. It is a song of hope and finding joy in what you have. It reminds me of my dad’s advice about looking for happiness and beauty around me especially in my darkest days.

Best or worst advice you’ve ever been given?

Worst advice: The worst advice I ever received was early in my career when a manager told me that I should plan out every step of my career with where I want to be all clearly laid out. And, if I don’t, I am unlikely to succeed. My career has been anything but linear and I have taken paths I could not even have imagined when I started. I am glad I didn’t take that advice seriously.

Best advice: Love yourself for who you are and bring your complete self to every situation.

What’s your favorite meal to cook?

I am a decent cook and I like to experiment with all kinds of cuisines. For my favorite meal to cook though, I go back to my Indian roots. My specialty is a curry called Chicken Do Pyaza (chicken with two kinds of onions). It is a hearty, spicy and flavorful dish

What excites you about taking on this new role at Twilio?

I have been a customer of Twilio for several years now and have admired how simple it is for developers to leverage the platform to build meaningful interactions with customers. I look forward to leading the team that builds the technology operations that are core to enabling dependable and trustworthy outcomes for businesses and strengthening relationships with their customers. I’m excited to join Twilio as we continue to scale and reach new audiences – all in service of our customers and their end users.​​

Which Twilio Magic value or principle resonates most with you?

I have to say, I love the simplicity behind Twilio Magic 2.0, and all four of the values resonate with me. If I were to pick one, it would be “Be an Owner.”

I have strived hard to earn the trust of my customers from the early days of my career when I was a product manager to my last job, where I needed to build confidence with our customers that we could protect their data better in the cloud than they could on-prem. Taking and driving accountability and having the opportunity to connect my team’s work to making Twilio better every day energizes me.

Welcome to Twilio, Reeny, we can’t wait to see what you build!