Danielle Strulé

In the best way. In the best way.

And we called the Onion Union.

Still pinching ourselves, I think. It really is wild how much happened and how quickly it all came together. Since then, we've migrated off of the old Kinja CMS and made a new website and launched a newspaper and pivoted the business model to memberships. It is amazing how much we've gotten done.

Just truly so proud to be a part of a team that can help keep the lights on and hopefully blinking a little bit harder. And it's just a pleasure to be a part of it.

We definitely needed a plan. We worked closely with our incredible CFO, Scott Kidder, to model out how we would run the business based on information that we got from GEO about basically the P&L model. And intel that we got from the union about what was needed, we built out a deck, built out a spreadsheet. Scott is so good at spreadsheets.

We came out to meet the union and get a sense for they like us, we like them, we love them. It was pretty quick after that, like the following week, Jeff came in hot and was like, yeah, I mean, like, let's meet up and talk about this. So we came back to Onion Global HQ, brought Jeff this time. Yeah, we were off to the races.

Yeah, he started as an intern and ended as COO, I think testified in the Hulk Hogan trial, and truly has always been a living legend of digital media in my mind, but also a friend. Just couldn't have asked for a better one. He also handled all of our DNS transfers because he was a childhood IT prodigy. Seriously, he had like an IT company from eighth grade.

Jeff has gone on the record saying that he wants to own the Onion for the rest of his life. He has also talked about how excited he is to make an investment for the long term and not have to worry about the quarterly reports from his lifestyle as Twilio CEO. I think, like, also Twilio is extremely cool, incredibly powerful, crucial, but...

It is so much more fun to be the owner of The Onion, I'm sure.

I mean, he's he's incredibly patient. And Jeff really put him on the spot here. Jeff has enough money that he can be in this one for the love. But, you know, we're also not a charity. And he is very rigorous with us about what our model says, how we're meeting the model. And but it's more important to him how we meet the moment. Jeff, if you're out there, buddy, I hope to make you proud.

I think that they had to know that the Onion was a real crown jewel in the portfolio. And there's a lot of people at Jio who definitely wanted to find a great home for it. And I think that we all feel delighted that this is the end result.

Too quickly, Nealey. Too quickly. Ben made me do it this fast so that we could meet the timeline of the DNC being in Chicago. We wanted to roll out at this moment. I mean, the way that it works is you have a transition services agreement with the company that you're acquiring from. You know, we were allowed to stay on Kinja for... like four months.

I'm sure that they would have extended it if we needed longer. But yeah, you know, we're in a Slack room with the geo people. There's so many little logistics to get sorted out on the way. But I think we're in a great spot that it's finally done. And we're five days into not Kinja anymore. And it's all happening.

We kicked the tires on a lot of stuff. We talked to a number of really great agencies. Honestly, it was really like a fun sales process to be the client representing the onion in a bidding process between design and dev shops wanting to work on this project. Yeah. Everyone has been so great. I would have hired them all if I had four onions.

But yeah, we worked with a company called MG Strategy and Design. They're distributed and have a lot of deep experience in newsrooms, both in paper and digitally. So we have been excited to work with them on both getting the website up and getting the DNC paper designed. And templates for our new papers moving forward. And they're like just such a dream team.

They have something like 200 collective years experience in newspapers and digital newspapers. We moved on to WordPress. We looked at other platforms, of course. But yeah, moving fast. Here we are.

Ask him what he's going to do to keep Tumblr in its glorious state. I ask him that once a year.

What?

If you look at the pie chart of revenue sources, we don't want any one piece of the pie to be so massive. And I think that we'll have a number of revenue streams that all work together to support the wider web of the Onion universe.

We don't want to put a paywall in front of The Onion. That was a really wonderful and crucial alignment that we had with Jeff from the get-go. The Onion should remain free for everyone on the planet on its website. We want these headlines, these jokes, this often very real take on the news to travel far and wide. So, yeah, no paywalls.