--:-- Host: Let's talk a little bit about the future of media. Are people going to be reading less? Great writing, great media, great culture in general is this inherently valuable thing. We've entered a world where attention is the scarce resource. There was one platform that stood up and said, "Hey, we are protecting free speech." And that was Substack. This was also an era where the blogging ecosystem was sort of dying. A really important moment to actually save blogging and writing on the internet. In the early days, people would often say to me in an accusatory tone, "Substack is just blogging with a business model." And I was like, "That sounds pretty good."
--:-- Host: We've been talking a lot about disrupting media. What are the big plans here? I aspire that the Substack app can be a place where you look back at the time you spend on it and think, "Damn, I'm glad I did that. That made me a better person."
--:-- Host: What if the future of media isn't controlled by algorithms or legacy institutions, but by independent voices building directly with their audiences? Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Chris Best, co-founder of Substack, along with A16Z general partners Katherine Boyle and Andrew Chen. They trace the origin story of Substack and its cultural impact, from standing up for free speech during a turbulent 2020 to reinventing the business model for independent media. We also get into the evolution of blogging, the rebundling of media, and what the future holds. Let's get into it.
--:-- Host: Catherine, we've been talking for years about how much we love Substack, even before we were formerly affiliated with the company. Why don't you go first and talk about what you find so remarkable or striking about Substack's impact?
--:-- Katherine Boyle: I think the impact is truly understated. And I think we've moved so fast as a country and as an internet and as a world in the last few years that we've sort of memory-holed what it was like in 2020, 2021, particularly for media. How crazy the 2020 moment was for anyone in the thought leadership space, anyone in the media space.
--:-- Katherine Boyle: So let me just go back to the summer of 2020. James Bennett, who was the editor of the op-ed page at the New York Times, was forced to resign for publishing an op-ed by a sitting senator who was still in office. The craziness around writing anything that was seen as heretical or asking questions or something that was seen as unorthodox in 2020—there were mass firings. Twitter deplatformed a sitting president, Facebook as well. It was an extraordinary time, and I would say a fearful time, where very many people were afraid to say what they were thinking. There were always rumors of people having unfettered conversations, how dangerous it was that people were having these conversations behind the backs of journalists.
--:-- Katherine Boyle: And there was one platform that stood up and said, "Hey, we are protecting free speech." And that was Substack. I think people forget that because it's just seen as, "Oh, of course, we're in this new time." Elon bought Twitter in November 2022. The Overton window has swung open. People can say what they think. But I think people have forgotten that only a few years ago, we were in desperate times where people were losing their livelihoods. No one was willing to say that freedom of speech was under attack. But the one platform, the infrastructure that was there to support those people—it was Chris, it was Substack, and they never wavered.
--:-- Katherine Boyle: So I think that is the cultural impact. Where we are today, we would not be where we are today without Substack. So I get very emotional. I'm a super fan of Substack. I was on Substack in 2021. I'm very proud of that. But it's one of these things where I think we need to remember that we could have been living in a totally different time and a totally different culture had people not stood up and had the courage to say that freedom of speech matters.
--:-- Host: Yeah, and this was years before Elon bought Twitter. It was just the first bastion of free speech. Chris, why don't you talk about when was the moment or what was the evolution for how you guys decided, "Hey, we're going to take this stance," even if it was going to upset some of your most important writers, even if it was going to upset some employees, some investors, their ecosystem. Talk about what that was like for you.
--:-- Chris Best: I've always seen the free speech thing as an important pillar, but not the main pillar of what Substack is actually setting out to do. The way we think of Substack is making a new economic engine for culture. The idea—and it's not a partisan idea, it's not a political idea directly—it's just this idea that great things are made by independent voices who can do the work they believe in, make money, have editorial freedom, have a direct connection with their audience.
--:-- Chris Best: The backdrop of starting Substack was just this idea that the internet came along and smashed a lot of the existing business models for culture. What came in the wake of that were these massive internet-scale networks that are phenomenal businesses and connected everybody like never before and had a lot of amazing positive attributes, but in my estimation, in our estimation, were kind of driving us crazy. The core of Substack is this idea of independence—the idea that the individual left to do the thing they believe, say the thing they believe, make the thing they believe, supported by an audience that's there for them, is a crucial ingredient in a healthy culture, in a free society.
--:-- Chris Best: Freedom of the press, freedom of speech is one necessary precondition for that. And I kind of think that in the long arc of history, that's not hopefully that controversial of an idea. I think it's a very American idea. But at the time, because the world was as it was, it was kind of out of vogue, shall we say, quite severely.
--:-- Chris Best: In 2020, the thing that surprised me was that the people who felt the brunt of that were not conservatives, were not Republicans necessarily. It was the people in the liberal media. In my telling, I would say selectively the best and most interesting people were getting thrown from the ramparts. The fact that this thing we were creating—this new economic engine for culture that gives you this independence—happened to be there at a time where a bunch of the most interesting writers in the world were getting summarily tossed from their long-time institutions, that lined up really well for us from a business perspective. It was spicy from a cultural perspective, but that's the gig.
--:-- Andrew Chen: Just quickly add—it's amazing to see on the other side of the coin with the blogging ecosystem, how much that's changed. We've gone through LiveJournal and Xanga and Blogger and we had Google Reader, RIP. Then you had a phase, Chris, when I met your co-founder Hamish initially, and the company was three people. This was also an era where the blogging ecosystem was sort of dying. You had the open WordPress-powered blogging ecosystem, but there was no economic model. You ended up with a lot of spam, a lot of people hacking poorly maintained PHP websites.
--:-- Andrew Chen: So I think this was also a really important moment to actually save blogging and writing on the internet—to actually create a model. For a long time, people just thought, "Oh, I'm just going to plug an Amazon book and get affiliate fees," or "I'm going to put Google AdSense all over my blog." That was the only way to create any sort of economic thing. For all of us in tech, it was cool to see that you had Ben Thompson from Stratechery really show that there's maybe an alternate model. But it was almost always a curiosity and something that was annoying to actually build. You'd have to set up your blog, set up your payments, do all these other things.
--:-- Andrew Chen: So I think it was also a really important moment for Substack to emerge from the internet media side to clean that all up and actually make it easy to put together something that became the big economic engine.
--:-- Chris Best: In the early days, people would often say to me in an accusatory tone, "Substack is just blogging with a business model." And I was like, "That sounds pretty good." If that's all it was, that would be pretty cool. And it turns out it's more—it's podcasting, it's a whole network. But I don't know, it seems good.
--:-- Host: Yeah, and it really achieves the dream of reaching your audience in the sense that if you have 100,000 Twitter followers, you can't really engage them and you're dependent on the platform. That's not as thrilling as owning your own email audience. What I love about what you guys did is you took the risk that, "Hey, we're going to give people their emails and they can choose to leave if they want to," as opposed to being trapped to the platform. But we're just going to build such a compelling offering that writers are going to want to stay. And it's amazing years later to see a large majority, if not all of the biggest writers, stay on the platform.
--:-- Chris Best: There's only one thing that's better than people staying on the platform, which is when people leave the platform, take advantage of the export features, and then subsequently return to open arms and come back. We call them boomerangs, and we love to see that too. I think the right to exit is really important. People thought that was very dumb. They said, "Well, if you just let your customers leave, won't they just leave?" In the short run, that might be true, but in the long run, that created the right structure for us. It meant that we have to—and still have to—build a network that has enough value that even though you can leave, you don't want to. And even if you do leave, you might choose to come back. I think that has caused us to keep the right thing at the forefront of our minds.
--:-- Chris Best: But I would say there's something even more important about the direct connection. It's not just that I can leave. It's that in my mind, what a subscription is, is the option to give someone the right to reach out and tap you on the shoulder. It's to say, "You don't have to send me an email all the time if you don't want to, but if you want to send me an email, if you want to send me a push notification, if you want to show up at the top of my inbox, I kind of give you that right." Something that lets you do as a writer or as a creator is to take creative risk.
--:-- Chris Best: Something I hear a lot from YouTubers—people who are very good at YouTube, people who have massive followings who are very successful—they say, "I have this idea for a thing that I could make and I know that it would be great and I know there's an audience out there who would like it, but I can't make it because if I made it the way that I want to make it, no one's going to see it because it doesn't please the algorithm." The direct connection, in addition to being a way you can bring your audience with you, is a way to give humans the power to override the algorithm and say, "Hey, I've got this trust relationship with my audience. I want to exercise it and go out on a limb and say, 'Hey, I want to call in that favor and have you pay attention to this thing that I'm saying is good.'" Sometimes it might be bad and you might unsubscribe, but sometimes it might be great and it might be something great that could not have existed if the only way to reach everyone was to please the algorithm every single time.
--:-- Host: So in the beginning, it was a blogging platform with a business model, as we just said, and the vision has gotten bigger into more of a network, more of a platform across formats. Expand on what is the big vision for Substack. I'm also curious how that's evolved—if the vision in 2018, 2019, 2020 is the same vision as it is now. Tell us a vision that we can trace the evolution of it.
--:-- Chris Best: I would say that we started from the very beginning with a very ambitious, some might say derangedly ambitious vision. The backdrop was that we think the internet has massively reshaped the economic incentives for media. The origin of the company—I'll briefly tell it because it's germane here—was I was taking some time off at my last startup and I'd always wanted to be a writer. I'd always been an avid reader. I've thought that what you read matters. What you read, the media you consume, is not just a way you spend your life. It changes who you are as an individual. It changes how you see the world and it changes cultures and societies. Great writing, great media, great culture in general is this inherently valuable thing.
--:-- Chris Best: My first instinct was I should make some of that. I could write an essay. How hard would that be? I know how to program, I know how to type. I started writing what was supposed to be this essay or this blog post detailing my frustrations with the media economy on the internet. So this is where it started. I'm like, "Wah, wah, wah. Look at all these great things the internet has done, but it's also created these mimetic evolutionary landscapes that are driving us nuts. This is going nowhere good. Look at how the culture is shifting. Wah, wah, wah."
--:-- Chris Best: I sent this essay to my friend Hamish, who's actually a writer, and he let me down very gently. He said, "It's 2017 and your essay is about maybe the newspaper businesses are in trouble and maybe Facebook is not an unalloyed good. Dude, we know. Everybody who's in my industry knows that. But the better question is, let's say all those things you're complaining about are true. What could you do about it? How could that be different?" And we started arguing about that.
--:-- Chris Best: So we had this sort of—I think this is an A16Z-relevant thing—this sort of techno-optimist idea that you're not going to turn back the clock. If there are new powerful technologies that are changing how everything works, and those things come with trade-offs and upsides and downsides and contingencies—historical contingencies where the world could tip in one of many ways—the right way to address that is not to lament it or to wish we should go back. It's to put these things to use in service of people. We should imagine what the best version of this future is as these new networks take off, as these new technologies take off, and we should work proactively to help usher in the better, freer, more exciting version of that future. Heady stuff.
--:-- Chris Best: Then we had this big idea, this grandiose thing. And then we just had the kernel of the way to start. The way to start was we could make it dead simple to start a paid email newsletter. That was a thing that there was probably like 20 people in the world who really, really wanted it, but they really wanted it. It was going to be the best thing ever for them. It was the kernel—the smallest possible instantiation of that much bigger idea where you were going to create this new economic engine that lets any independent voice make the things they believe in and make real money doing it. It's a way around the cold start problem because you could have an individual person. The very first Substack newsletter made total sense. So we started with a very grandiose version of Substack firmly fixed in our minds. Even then, we always imagined—I think we looked at YouTube as something that was maybe the closest version to this thing that already existed.
--:-- Host: Talk more about how you decided to launch Notes or go from, "Okay, we've got this business engine where we've got all these writers making a lot of money. Where do we go from here?"
--:-- Chris Best: I'll tell one step before that because it went into my thinking. Very early on in the early days of Substack, we were like, "Okay, the thing that's going to be really different about Substack is it's all going to be paid because that's the thing that aligns the incentives. That's the thing that makes this thing different. So in order to be very pure to our vision, we're not going to allow anybody to have a free Substack or to send emails to free people." That evaporated with our first customer because he was like, "Oh, okay, then I'll just use MailChimp for the free version and then I'll funnel the people here." He created this stitched-together thing and it was like, "Oh, this is really dumb because if you want to be successful, if you want to make a successful paid Substack, you have to have a free Substack. And in order to make that experience good and have the conversions actually work, we should just support that." It's not an abrogation of our vision. It's actually that you need this other thing for the thing to work.
--:-- Chris Best: Then the thing we realized not too long after that was the same was actually true about Twitter and about the social networks. In 2018, 2019, if you wanted to have a successful Substack, you had to also have a successful Twitter or a successful Facebook or a successful LinkedIn presence. You had to have some top-of-funnel place. The same way that the legacy media was struggling and you had to have Facebook traffic or Google traffic or something, there were always these other networks that were the source of your business. So even if you were this independent writer—excuse me, independent creator—you were downstream of these other platforms.
--:-- Chris Best: That had both a philosophical consequence—we're trying to make this place that has these different incentives, but you're still at the whim of the crazy Thunderdome. You still have to play the Twitter game or the Facebook game. And it had a very practical problem: those networks don't give a shit about you as a creator that makes money. Mark Zuckerberg can decide in a fit of pique that people are annoying him about politics, so he's going to turn off politics. If you're a politics creator that depends on Facebook for your livelihood, that's an existential event. It's not even because they're trying to do that. It's just that these networks twist and turn, and they don't really have any intrinsic interest in helping you build your audience and make the thing you believe.
--:-- Chris Best: So we had this idea that in the long run, the only way we were going to really make that work for people was to build one of these networks ourselves that was built on different laws of physics. We were going to build a network, a place, a destination—a place you could go and experience the internet and have all of those great things you get from social networks, but with a different business model and a different incentive structure. It's not going to replace them, but it'll live alongside them. It'll be the one place on the internet where it actually does want you to succeed. It actually does want you to go and find something interesting and long-form to read or long-form to watch. It does want you to find and fall in love with something enough that you might choose to pay for it. That's going to create a very different feel from everywhere else that just wants to keep you glued to the screen. So we had this theoretical idea of why we had to do this thing, but we also knew it was going to be quite difficult. It's very hard to start a new internet-scale network. And it took years.
--:-- Andrew Chen: And by the way, Chris, to your earlier point on the algorithm, it's so interesting to watch all of the major platforms move towards the algorithmic "for you" world. In that world, the creator's relationship with their audience is even further away. It's literally like maybe it doesn't matter. This all originally started with, "Oh, we have this problem of any social app where you need people to follow enough folks so that they get enough feed content. Well, one way to solve that is even if you're not following somebody, maybe we'll just kind of suggest things." It turns out the algorithms are so good that maybe that should be their entire feed—just suggested content. But then what does it mean as a creator to even build a following on one of these platforms? Even if you have 100,000 followers, maybe they'll see none of your content because the algorithm cares less and less about the follower graph these days.
--:-- Chris Best: Definitely. There are two tacks you could take with that. The one that I think a lot of people's first reaction is to say, "Oh, algorithms are bad. The algorithm is severing our ties, putting us into bubbles, exposing us too much to people outside." There are trade-offs with algorithms, therefore algorithms are bad. I think a more productive take is that algorithms are powerful and they're a tool that people use, and they serve the ends that we tell them. If we tell them better ends, they'll help us get better results.
--:-- Chris Best: This is something we talked about a lot at Substack because I think a lot of our users felt at the time, "The good thing about Substack is there isn't an algorithm and I just connect directly. That's the thing that's actually good." I think the take we have is that there's something much better than that: what if there was an algorithm that actually served you and was actually trying to help you find the things that you deeply valued? The nerd term for this is an objective function. If the objective function was actually closer to—in other words, the secret hidden master that the algorithm is serving is actually your own interest rather than trying to sell you more ads.
--:-- Host: You have a very sophisticated writer base, and by extension, a very sophisticated reader base, very high-value audiences. Now, especially with video, people aren't used to paying for video in the same way they're used to paying for writing, partially because of your Substack's innovation there. Will you also launch an ad network at some point? Or do you think that risks the golden goose in some way? How do you think about that?
--:-- Chris Best: I kind of take the same thing we talked about with an algorithm, the same thing about building a network. I'm going to say the same thing when we talk about AI, which I assume we will. I see sponsorships, advertising as a powerful force. The thing that would break Substack is if we just looked at the same way that the legacy social media things built advertising and said, "Oh, we're just going to copy that." That's going to work because if we did that, we would be importing the incentive structure and the business model that puts the platform at odds with the people on the platform.
--:-- Chris Best: On the other hand, there are a ton of Substackers today. Some of them are, in my opinion, some of the very best Substackers who are selling sponsorships. I think there's a version of unlocking more economic opportunity, more economic upside that is aligned with the idea of independence, the idea of having differentiated value and quality. So we're very interested in doing that. But my belief is we have to take a first-principles approach and not just stuff ads in a thing, but ask the question, "What would the good version of this be?" and help build that.
--:-- Host: Yeah, I think the bear case for ads has been sort of dumbing down content or clickbait for the masses. The bull case has been that it allows niche writers to monetize without charging their audience a ton, or it doesn't succumb to audience capture in the same way that a subscription could. There are pros and cons with both business models, and you guys have to figure out how to integrate it in a way that works for the reader and the writer.
--:-- Chris Best: I think the same is true of all this magical AI technology that's coming online. We're building a live product that feels like doing a FaceTime call and then magically turns into a highly produced podcast and a YouTube video and a series of short-form clips and a transcript. Pretty soon it's going to be in whatever language you want. We're going to live in a world where one thing you could have is a bunch of AI slop that keeps dumb people clicking. The other thing you could have is a future where there's way more creative leverage and where the people who are making this independent stuff, who have the independent voice, can do way more, can make something much better, can realize their vision much more fully. In all these things, I think you look at the technology not as good or bad. You look at it as a powerful means to an end. If you pick the right ends, then applying the technologies is very exciting.
--:-- Host: This is something I think you were so early to understand that is sort of common knowledge now or becoming more common knowledge, but wasn't five years ago: everyone can be a creator and we don't have enough content. I think there's this horrible meme—"Podcasts are over, we have too much content, there's too much online." Actually, it's the opposite. If you look at any of the For You feeds, most of it is now AI slop, which says that there's just a dearth of extraordinary content.
--:-- Host: What I always thought was so brilliant about what you understood about professional writers, having been a professional writer yourself, was that it was almost like you were inside my psyche. The hardest part about writing is writing. It's really hard to get started writing if you're a true writer and you have writer's block. Everything you can do to make the production of that writing easier, everything you can do to create the flywheel where your readers are expecting something, you're artificially creating deadlines, you can create something very quickly that turns into a host of different products that then gives you the positive feedback loop you need to keep doing it. From the very beginning, you really understood the artist's way or the writer's drama of just how difficult it is to be a creator. That exists within everyone. None of us have writing as our day jobs, but all of us are writers. All of us are creators on this pod.
--:-- Host: If you can make people's lives much easier and make the creation loop easier, people who have day jobs will then do it and create magical, great content to rival the kind of terrible content that now is being produced by these meme farms. I think that was a very early insight, and you're seeing AI push this direction where it's going to be this hybrid of really creative people using AI to make beautiful products that otherwise would have a barrier for entry that's way too high.
--:-- Chris Best: Yeah, I started a whole company to procrastinate from finishing an essay, so I definitely know that a bit. The thing you're describing—the way I would have put it at the time and I would still put it—is we've entered a world where attention is the scarce resource. That's actually not new with AI. I date this to the social media, the internet revolution. When I was a kid, you could get bored. You could be sitting around and you'd be like, "Dang, I wish I had something to pay attention to right now." If you could give me something free to distract me, that would be a really good deal. That was the situation where the original media, social media network giants rose up. It was a land grab for attention. Everybody has so much attention to give and not enough things to distract them. We have won that war. We have won the war on boredom.
--:-- Chris Best: Nobody has the problem of "I have five minutes and I don't have anything to do to kill that time." But the amount of attention I have is not infinite. So now I live in a world where there's no scarcity of content, but there's a huge scarcity of good content. There's a huge scarcity of things that are worth paying attention to.
--:-- Chris Best: This is the fundamental insight of Substack. As somebody who has one life to live, if I could spend a little bit of money to get better culture, better ideas, more interesting use of my time, things that help me become more the person I want or aspire to be, that's a phenomenal deal. It would be insane of me not to be willing to spend money or spend a bit of effort to find that better thing. People are starting – the culture is starting to catch up now – to this reality that's been true for a decade: you're spending your life when you choose what media to consume.
--:-- Host: I think another huge contribution that you guys have made is around price discovery. It turns out the true value for, let's say, Noah Smith isn't 80K writing at Bloomberg. It's a million dollars or whatever it is that he makes now writing on his own. If only it existed when Katherine was a reporter at The Washington Post, maybe she wouldn't have had to suffer through this venture career.
--:-- Katherine Boyle: Yeah, two people on this, maybe three – all of you are actually people that we've tried to recruit to be Substackers, but wound up at A16Z instead. It was fascinating to see you guys align value capture and value creation in a way that wasn't aligned beforehand. We're starting to see not just people go independent, but also the rebundling happen where people like Barry, where I'm on the board of Repress, build Substack-first media companies. Talk a little bit about the unbundling and rebundling and the future of how you see media companies being built.
--:-- Chris Best: This reminds me of one of the first things Mark Andreessen ever said to me when we were talking about Substack. He said, "You're going to do to media what the venture capital industry did to software companies." There used to be this time where if you were somebody who knew how to build great software, the way to do that would be to get a job from somebody in a suit who would tell you what to do and pay you a salary. The hidden reality was that the people who actually could make the things were creating so much value that they were massively underpaid and under-recognized.
--:-- Chris Best: Once you could free them up from that structure and put the people who are actually making the thing in charge, it massively increased variance in a very positive way. Not every software programmer is going to be a great founder, but the best founders who actually build the thing are so much better and the results are so much more interesting and extreme and wonderful than the world where they just got bossed around by software company middle management. The net effect of pulling the talent out and unleashing it – putting the lunatics in charge of the asylum in tech – was a renaissance. I think the same thing is possible in the cultural industries.
--:-- Chris Best: The people who are actually making the stuff are the heroes. They're putting themselves on the line. If we're going to have a renaissance and a new flourishing of culture, those are the people that are going to make it. The ambition I have at Substack is to build what they need – build the tools they need, build the network they need to have a fighting chance to win. I think we're on the way.
--:-- Andrew Chen: Yeah, it's interesting. There are solo capitalists like the Noah Smith example, but then there are also people who go on and build bigger platforms, much bigger than their individual selves. I think of them as ambitious media founders. We have a whole team at Substack dedicated to the principle that if you're an ambitious media founder, we want Substack to be the best possible place to realize the biggest version of your ambition.
--:-- Host: Let's talk about the future of media. There's only 24 hours in a day, only a portion of that people spend engaging in content, and it all competes with each other. Looking out a few years, do you see the amount that people spend on overall content increasing? If video is obviously going to increase, are people going to be reading less, or is it just more of everything? How do you view consumption habits changing over time?
--:-- Chris Best: I wrote this piece called "The Two Futures of Media." I think inevitably when you ask these questions, you get into weird philosophical questions. What is the purpose of media? One purpose is to entertain, to have some effect. The extreme way to say this is people use media like a drug. I'm going to sit there, scroll this thing, watch this thing. It's going to create a pleasant feeling. That side of media is going to get supercharged. We have very sophisticated AI goon bots now. Is that a good thing? I don't know, but it's happening. It's almost approaching wireheading – the science fiction idea of plugging a wire into your brain that stimulates the pleasure centers. That future is here. It's only accelerating.
--:-- Chris Best: The stronger the technology gets, the stronger that thing becomes. And the stronger it's a hazard for people, quite frankly. There's a mode of consuming media that is like drug addiction – compelling in the moment, something you want, something you'd be willing to pay for with your time – but it pulls against your long-term interest. The media you consume is not just how you spend your time, it's who you become. It degrades you. It makes your tastes more base. It makes you want more of the dumb thing. That's already happening. It's going to continue.
--:-- Chris Best: But that's not the only purpose of media. The other purpose is culture. It's to live in a society, to become the kind of person you want to become, to figure out how to live and act back on the world – the intersubjective multiplayer game of building with other people. People really want that too. The same technologies that make the first thing more compelling can make that second thing more compelling as well. What we can do at Substack is create a version of that thing that is also fun, also good, also empowering. You don't have to be a monk to use Substack. You could scroll TikTok or you could go to the library and flip through microfiche, but nobody's actually going to do that.
--:-- Chris Best: If we can take the good, interesting, culture-laden future of media and make it really compelling, have people make money from it when they make something truly great, and have people realize that they can look back at the time they spend on the Substack app and think, "Damn, I'm glad I did that. That made me a better person. That made me more interesting." I think that is possible. When the world changes, when technology reshapes everything, change becomes inevitable. But which version of the change happens is contingent. People ask, "Is the future determined or is great man theory true?" I think it's both. There are inexorable changes that happen no matter what, but in the moments of change, which future emerges is contingent on the choices people make and the accidents of history.
--:-- Chris Best: What is possible for us to do is build a version of that second future of media where people are reading things that make them smarter, listening to conversations that plug them into the world, acting back on the culture, participating in ways they value. That creates a ton of economic value and creates a whole world that is intensely valuable and great. Is that going to be the world everybody goes to? No. Some people are going to sit on the AI goonbot. But we can make a real difference by making that second future as good as possible.
--:-- Andrew Chen: Building on your culture point, I've started to see some academics also on Substack. We've been talking a lot about disrupting media. I'm also curious if you think much about academia or books or adjacent industries. Or is that a distraction?
--:-- Chris Best: I'm a total crank on the subject of academia. I think a lot of science is totally broken. The scientific project is incredibly important – one of the most valuable things in history – but the practice of science and the current situation in academia, especially in academic publishing, is pretty far from good. Maybe peer review is a huge mistake and doesn't actually work. There's this massive crisis of huge bodies of fake science that nobody believes because it's all LARPing. I'm very interested in the idea of applying some of these same principles. What if you give people an alternative? What if there's just one way you could do science – go on the internet and publish it? I think that's pretty radical and pretty interesting. I see some early shoots of people doing that. It's a topic I'm excited about, but hasn't been central to our efforts so far.
--:-- Andrew Chen: I was going to say something about books. The process of why people decide to write books today is a really interesting decision. First you have to spend a multi-year project to actually write a book. I worked with HarperCollins to do *The Cold Start Problem*. I think it's been three or four years. It takes three years to write a book. If you get enough pre-orders to sell 10,000 units, that's a bestseller. People are not reading books right now, which is insane. There's literally one book printer left in the US. If Michelle Obama decides to write a book around the same time as you, the printer's booked for the next X months.
--:-- Andrew Chen: Compare that to the amount of work involved in writing a book versus being able to click the publish button and have that go to 100,000 people's inboxes each day. It's a completely different thing. There's certainly cultural prestige in the fact that books have been around forever. But I imagine it changes over time. When people were playwrights and film gets created, they said, "People love film, but it's not as prestigious as plays." Then TV was the same: "People are watching a lot of TV, it's not as prestigious as film." Then we go down the same thing with YouTube stars and streamers. The ability to reach hundreds of thousands of people with something you write over a cup of coffee is so powerful from an ROI basis compared to writing a book or a Substack. They're not mutually exclusive. If I were to redo my whole thing, I probably would have written it all on Substack and then taken it and put it into a book, instead of locking myself into hotel rooms during vacations trying to crank out all those pages.
--:-- Chris Best: I agree. There's this cyclical moral panic that happens. It certainly happened in media: "People are writing on the internet without an editor. Oh my God, what are we going to do?" That was media's version. The same thing is happening with books. People are reading, but it's not in a book. They're reading things on the internet. The book process is incredible to me. It's always legacy industries realizing that the internet actually is a thing. The same content you were going to produce in a book or write for a print paper can be put on the internet. There are always these moral panics that we're getting dumber or people aren't reading enough. I just don't think people are looking at it holistically. People are reading in different ways. The moral panics about the actual medium are very cyclical, happening since the birth of the internet. It hasn't affected our ability to read or our ability to make arguments. It's more the moral panic of industries realizing things are changing and they have to adapt.
--:-- Host: There's an interesting question about what is the source of intellectual culture these days. Is it more streamers? Is it more Twitter nonsense? Is it more professors? More journalists? Alex Denko wrote this interesting case for why it's long-form writing. One of the reasons he said was that it's not that everyone reads the long-form writing. It's that an important group of people reads it and then translates it or transmits it in a different format. The masses then engage with that content. Having a more sophisticated understanding of the supply chain gives us a greater appreciation for long-form writing as a source.
--:-- Andrew Chen: To your point, everything you read in printed-out pieces of paper in traditional press is delayed by a huge amount compared to the actual discourse happening on the internet. Long-form allows you to generate really original thoughts. Then all the meme wars are where the real discussion happens in real time. You have both flows generating cultural knowledge over time.
--:-- Host: Chris, we're here partially to celebrate your big round. 100 million? Is that right?
--:-- Chris Best: 100 million, yeah.
--:-- Host: So talk about why raise $100 million. You're already crushing it as a business. There's already a lot of cash. What are the big plans here?
--:-- Chris Best: The big story to me is we've had this long-term ambition for what the pieces of Substack are. I literally put this meme in my pitch deck – the handshake meme. One hand is a model that supports independence. The other hand is an internet-scale network. That's the core of what Substack has always meant to be: a model that supports the independents, but also a part of the internet that's a first-class destination with a thriving scene that feeds it.
--:-- Chris Best: After years and years of working to make that a reality, we have that fledgling network alive now and it's growing. I see the next phase of Substack as feeding that machine and helping it grow and throw off all this value – economic value for the creators and cultural value for the world. It's going to mean rebuilding the company to match that scale and ambition. This fundraise was really just a way to unlock that transformation. We're in an exciting period of reimagining the product, the company, and what this thing can become.
--:-- Host: That's a great place to wrap. Chris, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
--:-- Chris Best: Thanks.
--:-- Host: Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com slash A16Z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.
--:-- Host: As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures.
