There was nothing funny about the way Jeff Lawson left Twiliothe startup he co-founded in 2008 and built into a multibillion-dollar public company that allows businesses to communicate with customers through text messages and phone calls. Activist investors had been pushing for management changes and even a liquidation, and Lawson resigned as chief executive in January. He now describes his role at Twilio as a “shareholder.” No wonder he needs to laugh a lot.
Being a rich person, Lawson has the means to get all the laughs he could ever need, with a few chuckles thrown in. 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 joke by the Onion writers.
Lawson won’t say how much 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 chief product officer. He promised to retain all editorial staff. Then he immediately did something that was never part of Twilio’s business model. He asked The Onion’s 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 even now in Chicago, cleverly avoiding both snooty coasts) and achieved beloved status, first in newsprint and then online. Everyone seemed to read it and quote it. Some of his memes still resonate: the headline “’There’s no way to prevent this,’ says the only country where this happens regularly.” is republished after mass shootings, more than 20 times so far, and it never fails to draw attention. But it’s been a long time since his 1999 book. Our foolish 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 straight to video. In recent years, Lawson says, although The Onion’s loyal editorial staff remained acerbic and witty, visiting the site wasn’t much fun. As Lawson wrote in a tweet, under the traffic-obsessed regime of its owner, G/O Companies, “The Onion has been stifled, along with most of the Internet, by byzantine cookie dialogue, paywalls, bizarre ads about belly fat and clickbait content. “
How will Global Tetrahedron solve this? “The vision is to basically free The Onion from this traffic-based strategy of page views and programmatic ad impressions,” Brillson says. “We want to get out of their way and make them a truly independent space, rather than being part of a private equity company.”
That’s where the idea of donating dollars comes into play. When I told Lawson that it reminded me of the original $1-per-year fee WhatsApp charged in the years before Facebook bought the service for $22 billion, he confirmed that was indeed the inspiration. WhatsApp had been a Twilio customer, and Lawson initially didn’t understand the significance of the fee. One day he asked WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum about it. It was around 2010 and new chat apps were appearing every day. “I asked Jan, ‘Why are you charging $1? With all those competitors, why would you put this friction into your sign-up process?'” Lawson recalls.
Koum responded that the fee was critical. because Chat apps were plentiful. “Usually you just download a chat app, use it for five minutes, and delete it,” Lawson remembers Koum explaining. “But if you ask someone to contribute $1 and they do it, they have a financial investment in it. It’s something symbolic. “Once you put something in, you care more.” Not to mention, when hundreds of millions of people signed up for the service, those dollars became real money.