On a quiet street in the Dogpatch, Jeff Lawson is tinkering with the engine of a Caterham Super Seven 2000 he’s building from scratch. His hands are stained with engine oil and marked by a scar from when he sliced his palm open on a metal car part.
Many wondered what Lawson would do after leaving Twilio, the multibillion-dollar tech company he founded and led for 16 years, in January 2024. His LinkedIn timeline offered few clues, saying only that he was on a career break for “personal goal pursuit.” He bought the satirical newspaper The Onion, leaving everyone wondering if they were part of the joke.
Now, Lawson’s next act has arrived. And he isn’t just building sports cars. He’s helming a bustling startup hub called Founders Garage.
Opened this year, the space could be described as the inside of Lawson’s brain made physical: a hobby and arts studio crossed with a professional tech incubator. The first floor, dubbed “Lawson’s Auto Shop,” is home to the nearly finished car he’s building, work benches cluttered with tools, and a rather impressive collection of pinball machines, which Lawson describes lovingly as “mechanical marvels.” Upstairs on the mezzanine is a more typical coworking space, decked out with desks, phone booths, and Lawson’s office.
Last year, during his career break, Lawson decided to build a car and began looking for an external garage after his wife banned him from using the one at their house in Noe Valley. It was a bucket-list item he had after growing up in car-crazy Detroit and spending decades in the world of software.
“I could rent a little garage and go there and be alone,” Lawson said. “Or I could rent something bigger and interact with people building the next generation of startups.”
Lawson opted for the latter and reached out to Bessemer Venture Partners to bring the idea to life. Lawson and Bessemer go way back — the firm invested in Twilio’s seed round in 2009. The cloud communications startup rapidly grew out of its office in SoMa and went public in 2016. Lawson stepped down as CEO following pressure from activist investors and purchased The Onion shortly thereafter.
He shows no hint of bitterness about not running Twilio anymore. The often beaming 47-year-old is savoring having the pad of his dreams to work on his passion projects and experience the AI boom vicariously through the startups in residence.
Founders Garage will house four cohorts every year, with eight startups in each class. Unlike larger, more formal incubators like Y Combinator, Lawson and Bessemer will take no equity from startups in the program (though they plan to invest in some of them).
“We’re interested in the personality of the founder,” said Lindsey Li, vice president of Bessemer’s San Francisco office. “Are they curious? Are they coachable? Are they willing to contribute back to the community? That’s what we’re selecting for.”
Every Friday, Lawson and Li hold office hours for the startups, coaching founders on everything from the nuts and bolts of business plans to storytelling strategies. Wednesdays are reserved for a tradition Lawson started at Twilio, wherein he invites a special guest to have dinner with the founders. Participants have included early Twilio employees, “The Lean Startup” author Eric Ries, and Render CEO Anurag Goel. The first cohort of startups just wrapped up their residence with a Demo Day, attended by a squad of Bessemer investors.
Having weathered several tech booms and busts during his time in San Francisco, Lawson hopes to foster a community like the one he was a part of in the early 2000s, when techies were all busy hacking together apps for the iPhone. He sees a similar opportunity for AI and wants to pay it forward.
“There’s a lot that I can share with the next generation of entrepreneurs,” he said. “My primary goal isn’t actually to make money from these companies.”
Lawson now considers Founders Garage his “headquarters” for anything he’s doing. He takes meetings about The Onion in his office, sitting at times in his curvaceous, larger-than-life Gaetano Pesce Up chair. (It retails for around $7,000). He dabbles with fun projects, like designing a 3D printed widget that displays which of the garage’s bathrooms are in use.
Most of the time, he’s working on his car or helping startups grow — two processes he’s found have striking parallels.
“There’s all this advice out there, and then nothing works the way it’s supposed to,” Lawson said. He thought building the car would be easy if he just followed the 150-step manual. Of course, there have been complications at every turn. “That’s what it’s like building a car and a startup.”
The result is a space that feels like a physical and metaphorical workshop. Sometimes, the startup founders help him troubleshoot car problems as they kick around new products and business plans. “As the car has been built, I’ve seen all these startups go through that same journey,” he said.
Lawson’s taken an extendible three-year lease on the garage, giving him something else startup founders crave: optionality. “It could be a fun period of life, or it could be an enduring institution,” Lawson said. “We’ll see.”