What We'd Do With $15.5 Million in Funding
With Buzzfeed announcing a fresh $15.5 million in funding today, on top of its previous $11.5 million in funding, all web properties should stop and ask themselves: what would you do with that cash? We already have it planned!
• office radio with AM and FM.
• tiny house collection in the middle of the office's sculpture courtyard.
• a "sympathy big board," displaying only least-viewed blog posts.
• Ben Smith's younger, weirder cousin from Ditmas Park, Yaniv Smith.
• an actual awl.
• basement meth lab (because media companies just becoming tech companies is very 2011; 2012 is about dreaming bigger).
• a fearsome, extremely pretty, trilingual and totally useless secretary to be cruel and witty to visitors—preferably Jessica Joffe.
• multimedia vacation autoresponders!
• one each of the Romney brothers and the Huntsman sisters.
• a pancake machine.
• a team of twenty developers to work day and night to create an easy css hack that allows you to flow text between multiple divs in a CMS that also works in IE, because what the heck, how is this even still a thing?
• paywall, obvs.
• wet bar.
• raw bar.
We demand a picture of an awl on The Awl.
15.5 million could surely pay for a newsletter.
@armagnacforbreakfast – yes, one that appears regularly in my email inbox, AS PROMISED
Choire, I will give you $15.50 to buy an office radio.
@Mike Dang@twitter They probably have four awls already.
An armoire for the pile of sweaters
A cigarette vending machine stocked with Winstons, American Spirtits ( yellow) and Marlboro Reds
Test kitchen
Catmint patch
Spare awls
John Lobb shoeshine kit
A bowl of mixed nuts, heavy on the cashews
You guys couldn't handle a pancake machine.
With $15.5 million, I could finally lose my virginity.
maybe!
Give David Shapiro $1M to start a hedge fund. Balk could be your Macro strategist.
I hear foosball tables are making a comeback.
@Clarence Rosario The Barbie one at FAO Schwartz is only 20K!
Fingers crossed for a wet raw bar.
Maybe it's time to empty out the change bowl again?
@cherrispryte This was a joy to rewatch. And I didn't even cry when Cat made his appearance!
With that you should be able to buy Yahoo!, right?
@brent_cox AWLYahoo! would be so ferrealsies
Not enough bars.
@sharilyn Pull-up bar.
No 40 acre bear refuge at tip of lower Manhattan?
What? No luxury submarine?
@BadUncle Austerity affects us all.
@deepomega Maybe Choire should plant a Victory Garden at the Awl summer mansion.
Moon Hate Club T-shirts
That is not what DIVs are supposed to do. Stop thinking creatively.
(One JavaScript developer can help you with that, BTW.)
@iplaudius Imagine how many Hungarians they could buy.
AWL sponsored GOP Presidential debate with anatomically correct Balk Cock ™ mics for the candidates …
Uh, haven't we covered this before?
- a daily podcast, featuring Balk
- ANOTHER daily podcast, featuring Choire
- Ad-Free Fridays
- Acquire MediaTakeOut
- Bring on Bill Keller, Doris Kearns-Goodwin and Mika Breszinski as guest columnists
- spinoffs ("Gypset" to cover the "gypsy hipster set" in their farflung, hip travelspots, from Montauk to Marfa, "Fire Island" to cover, well, Fire Island; "DP" to cover porn; "Yakkin'" to cover sports; and "Impaction" to cover finance and business).