How Twilio Got Coached Employees 5x Less Likely to Quit

When Twilio was scaling through hypergrowth with 8,000+ employees, they faced the classic retention trap: hire fast, lose faster. Their solution? Give every single employee — not just executives — a dedicated coach through BetterUp. The results were hard to believe: coached employees were five times less likely to leave, managers stuck around at nearly seven times the rate, and performance ratings jumped 32%. But the number that really changes the conversation is for underrepresented employees. Black and LatinX coached employees were 4.6 times more likely to stay and 79% more likely to get promoted. That's not just retention — that's equity through coaching. Now BetterUp has launched an AI-only version called BetterUp Grow, trained on more than four million coaching sessions. In today's episode, we break down what Twilio actually did, what made it work, and how the economics of enterprise coaching just fundamentally changed.