There was nothing funny about the way Jeff Lawson left Twilio, the startup he co-founded in 2008 and grew into a multibillion-dollar public company that allowed businesses to communicate with customers through text messages and phone calls. Activist investors had pushed for management changes, or even a sale, and Lawson resigned as CEO in January. He now describes his role at Twilio as “shareholder”. No wonder he needs a good laugh.
Since he is a wealthy person, Lawson has the means to acquire all the laughs he could possibly need, along with a few belly laughs. Last week he bought the legendary, if somewhat faded, satire factory The Onion. To do this, he created a company called Global Tetrahedron, inspired by the name of a fictional evil corporation used as a gag by the Onion writers.
Lawson won’t say what he paid. To operate the site, he hired former NBC reporter Ben Collins as CEO, former Bumble and TikTok executive Leila Brillson as chief marketing officer, and former Tumblr chief product officer Danielle Strle as as product director. He promised to keep the entire editorial staff. Then he immediately did something that was never part of Twilio’s business model. He asked The Onion customers to give him their money, in exchange for “absolutely nothing,” Lawson says. Suggested donation: one dollar.
Remember when The Onion was a huge cultural force? It was founded in 1988 in Madison, Wisconsin – it’s still in Chicago today, smartly avoiding the smug two coasts – and achieved much-loved status, first in newsprint and then online. Everyone seemed to read and quote it. Some of his memes still resonate — the headline “‘No way to stop this,’ says only nation where this happens regularly” is reposted after mass shootings, more than 20 times so far, and never fails to attract attention. But it’s been a long time since his 1999 book Our stupid century was a runaway bestseller. There was even an Onion movie, although it wasn’t. Animal House; five years after it was filmed, it was released directly to video. In recent years, Lawson says, although The Onion’s loyal editorial staff has remained biting and witty, visiting the site hasn’t been much fun. As Lawson wrote in a tweet, under the traffic-obsessed regime of its owner G/O Enterprises, “The Onion was stifled, like most of the Internet, by Byzantine cookie dialogs, paywalls, bizarre belly fat ads, and clickbait content. »
How will Global Tetrahedron solve this problem? “The vision is basically to free The Onion from this very traffic-driven programmatic page views and ad impressions strategy,” Brillson says. “We want to get out of their way and make it a truly independent space, rather than being part of a private equity firm.”
This is where the idea of donating dollars comes in. When I told Lawson that it reminded me of the upfront annual fees WhatsApp charged in the years before Facebook bought the service for $22 billion, he confirmed that that was indeed the inspiration. WhatsApp was a Twilio customer, and Lawson didn’t initially understand the value of the fees. One day, he interviewed Jan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp. It was around 2010, and new chat apps were popping up every day. “I asked Jan, ‘Why are you charging $1?’ With all these competitors, why would you put so much friction into your registration process? “, Lawson recalls.
Koum responded that the fees were critical because chat apps were a dime a dozen. “Usually you just download a chat app, use it for five minutes and delete it,” Lawson recalls Koum explaining. “But if you ask someone to contribute $1 and they do it, there is a financial investment. It’s a symbolic thing. Once you put something in, you care more about it. Not to mention, when hundreds of millions of people signed up for the service, those dollars turned into real money.
