Interview with Nuzzel CEO Jonathan Abrams on news, Twitter, Friendster, founders as CEOs, and the future of Nuzzel
We talked to the CEO who some people think owns the one thing Twitter needs most — A few days ago, the Silicon Valley investor Chris Sacca was talking on Periscope about Nuzzel, the newsgathering app.
Context & Ripple Effects
Jonathan Abrams' Business Insider interview lands three months after Nuzzel's Android launch completed its cross-platform rollout, and is framed by investor Chris Sacca arguing on Periscope that Nuzzel owns "the one thing Twitter needs most" — a public endorsement from a major Twitter shareholder that effectively nominates a tiny newsgathering startup as strategic to the platform. For Abrams, twice-burned by the Friendster legacy he helped create, the interview is also a platform to argue the founders-as-CEOs case.
The conversation sets up the rest of Nuzzel's arc: by October Abrams is telling Nieman Lab about working directly with publishers rather than courting Twitter itself, and by 2019 the company ends up sold to Scroll, a subscription-infrastructure play, with both Abrams and COO Kent Lindstrom departing.
First-order effects
- Sacca's Periscope remarks put acquisition-and-partnership speculation around Nuzzel squarely into Twitter's orbit at a moment when Twitter's own leadership was in flux — the same period captured in the profile of COO Anthony Noto running point on live video while Jack Dorsey splits his time across two companies.
Second-order effects
- Rather than wait on Twitter, Nuzzel pivots toward publishers — the October Nieman Lab interview on media investors and publisher intent signals a deliberate broadening of its buyer set beyond any single platform relationship.
Third-order effects
- The endpoint in this corpus is telling: Nuzzel exits not to the platform it curates but to Scroll's subscription service, with its founder and COO leaving — suggesting social-news curation tools built atop Twitter get absorbed into reader-payment infrastructure rather than into the platforms themselves.
The trend: News-curation layers built on top of social platforms are migrating from platform-dependence toward publisher-side subscription economics, with founder exits marking each handoff.