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Sanjay Mehta

API Economy at Signal · Mumbai, India

I spent my twenties building things nobody could see. I was a backend engineer at Twilio from 2017 to 2020, working on the voice API, the system that lets developers add phone calls to their applications with a few lines of code. My code handled millions of concurrent voice connections. Zero users ever saw my interface. That's the API economy: invisible infrastructure that generates billions in revenue.

At Twilio, I learned that API design is product design. Every endpoint is a UX decision. Every error message is a support ticket waiting to happen. Every breaking change is a trust violation. The companies that win in the API economy aren't the ones with the best technology; they're the ones with the best developer experience. Twilio won against competitors with better voice quality because Twilio's API was easier to use. That's it. That's the entire competitive advantage.

In 2020, I joined Postman as a product lead, working on their API platform features. Postman had an extraordinary distribution advantage: 20+ million developers used it to test APIs. The strategic question was how to turn a testing tool into a platform, how to move from "the place where you debug your API" to "the place where you design, build, document, test, and monitor your API." I led the product strategy for API governance and spent two years learning that platform transitions are the hardest thing in product management. You're simultaneously serving your existing users (who want the tool to stay simple) and your future users (who need the platform to be comprehensive).

I left Postman in 2023 to write about the API economy, which I believe is the most underreported story in tech. APIs generate an estimated $2 trillion in economic value annually. Stripe processes $1 trillion in payments through its API. Twilio enables 150 billion interactions per year. AWS's revenue is essentially API calls priced per invocation. And yet, most tech coverage focuses on consumer apps and AI models.

My first Signal piece was a deep dive into Stripe's API versioning strategy and why it's the best example of long-term product thinking in the industry. It got shared by three Stripe engineers, which I consider the highest possible validation.

I live in Mumbai, where I grew up, after spending six years in San Francisco. I'm a competitive table tennis player, I collect mechanical keyboards (I have 11; my wife has opinions about this), and I believe that the best documentation in the world is written by Stripe, followed distantly by everyone else.

Experience

• Product Lead, Postman (API Platform)
• Backend Engineer, Twilio (Voice API)
• MS Computer Science, Georgia Tech

Articles by Sanjay Mehta (16)