What if the future of media isn’t controlled by algorithms or legacy institutions, but by independent voices building directly with their audiences?
In this episode, Erik Torenberg is joined by Chris Best, cofounder and CEO of Substack, along with a16z general partners Katherine Boyle and Andrew Chen.
We trace the origin story of Substack and its cultural impact, including how it reinvented the business model for independent media. We also explore the evolution of blogging, the rebundling of media, and what the future holds as attention becomes the scarcest resource.
Timecodes:
00:03:15 - Substack’s approach to free speech
00:15:36 - How Substack builds product
00:19:39 - Algorithms aren’t all bad
00:22:01 - Would Substack launch an ad network?
00:29:10 - How Substack is changing media
00:33:01 - How will media consumption habits change?
00:38:09 - Disrupting mainstream media
00:45:15 - Why Substack raised $100 million
Resources:
Find Chris on Substack: https://cb.substack.com/
Find Chris on X: https://x.com/cjgbest
Find Andrew Chen on Substack: https://andrewchen.substack.com/
Find Andrew on X: https://x.com/andrewchen
Find Katherine on X: https://x.com/KTmBoyle
Find Katherine on Substack: https://boyle.substack.com/
Transcript:
00:00:51 - Substack’s impact
Erik Torenberg 00:00:51
Katherine, we've been talking for years about how much we love Substack even before we were formally 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 00:01:03
Yeah. 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, but particularly for media, how crazy the 2020 moment was for anyone in the thought leadership space, anyone in the media space. So let me just go back to the summer of 2020.
James Bennet, who was the editor of the op-ed page at the New York Times, was forced to resign for publishing a sitting senator. An op-ed by a sitting senator who is still in office. The craziness that was around writing anything that was seen as heretical or asking questions or something that was seen as unorthodox in 2020.
There were mass firings, you know, Twitter deplatformed a sitting president, you know, Facebook as well, right? It was an extraordinary time and I would say a fearful time where very many people were afraid to say what they were thinking. You know, there was always rumors of people having unfettered conversations, like how dangerous it was that the people were having these conversations behind the backs of journalists. And there was one platform that stood up and said, "Hey, we are protecting free speech." And that was Substack.
And I think people forget that because it's just seen as, "Oh, of course we're in this new time. You know, Elon bought Twitter in November 2022. The Overton window has swung open. People can say what they thought," and 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. And so I think that is the cultural impact. We would not be where we are today without Substack.
So I get very emotional. I'm like a superfan of Substack. I was on Substack in 2021. I'm very proud of that. But it's like, it's one of these things where I think we need to remember that we could have been living in a totally different time, in a totally different culture, had people not stood up and had the courage to say that freedom of speech matters.
00:03:15 - Substack’s approach to free speech
Erik Torenberg 00:03:15
And this was years before Elon had bought X and it was just kind of the first bastion of free speech. Chris, why don't you talk about sort of, when was the moment or what was the evolution for how you guys decided, "Hey, we're gonna take this stance, even if it's going to upset some of our most important writers, even if you're going to upset some employees, some investors, the ecosystem."
Talk about what that was like for you.
Chris Best 00:03:37
I've always seen the free speech thing as sort of an important pillar, but not the main pillar of what Substack is actually setting out to do. You know, the way that we think of Substack is making a new economic engine for culture and the idea, and it's not a partisan idea, it's not a political idea directly, it's just this idea that, you know, 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. Basically, you know, the backdrop of starting Substack was just this idea that, hey, you know, the internet came along and smashed a lot of the existing business models for culture. And what came in the wake of that was these massive internet-scale networks that are phenomenal businesses and that 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.
And the core of Substack is this idea of independence. This 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 this like crucial ingredient in a healthy culture, in a free society. And freedom of the press, freedom of speech is one necessary precondition for that. 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, just because the world was as it was, it was kind of out of vogue, shall we say, quite severely. I think in 2020, the thing that surprised me, the people that felt the brunt of that were not conservatives, were not Republicans, necessarily.
It was the people in the liberal media, and, in my telling, I would say, selectively the best and most interesting people that were getting just thrown from the ramparts. And the fact that this thing that 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 longtime 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 00:06:11
And maybe just to quickly add, I was going to say that it's amazing to see on the other side of the coin with just the blogging ecosystem, how much of that's changed. We've gone through LiveJournal and Xanga and Blogger, and we had Google Reader, RIP, and then you had basically 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 dying, and 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 these poorly-maintained PHP websites.
I think this was also a really important moment to actually save blogging and writing on the internet, to actually create a model that, for a long time people just thought, "Oh, well, I'm just going to plug XYZ 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 this in any sort of economic thing. And for all of us that are in tech, it was cool to see that, you know, you had Ben Thompson from Stratechery really show that oh, there's maybe an alternate model. But it was almost always like a curiosity and something that was annoying to actually build. You know, you'd have to set up your blog. You'd have to set up your payments. You'd have to do all these other things. And so, I think also a really important moment for Substack to emerge from the internet media side to actually clean that all up and actually make it easy to actually put together something that became the big economic engine.
Chris Best 00:08:13
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, "You know, that sounds pretty good. Like, 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, that seems good.
Erik Torenberg 00:08:28
It really reaches the dream, achieves the dream of reaching your audience in the sense of, if you have a hundred thousand Twitter followers, but you can't really engage them, and you're dependent on the platform, that's not as thrilling as owning your own email audience.
And I think 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 wanna 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 00:09:10
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?" And I think, 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. And I think that has caused us to keep the right thing at the forefront of our minds.
But I would say I think there's something even more important about the direct connection, which is, 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." And something that that lets you do as a writer or as a creator is to take creative risk.
Something that I hear a lot from YouTubers, people who are very good at YouTube, people who have massive followings, who are very successful, is, "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." And so the direct connection, in addition to being this 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.'" And 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.
00:11:19 - Substack’s vision
Erik Torenberg 00:11:19
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? And I'm also curious how that's evolved, if the vision in 2018, 2019, 2020 is the same vision as it is now.
So tell us the vision, then we can trace the evolution of it.
Chris Best 00:11:44
I would say that we started from the very beginning with I think a very ambitious, some might say derangedly ambitious vision. Again, the backdrop was kind of, we think that the internet has massively reshaped the economic incentives for media.
The origin of the company, I'll just briefly tell this because it's germane here, was I was taking some time off in my last startup, and I had 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. It changes who you are as an individual, it changes how you see the world, and it changes cultures and societies. And so great writing, great media, great culture in general is this inherently valuable thing. And my first instinct was, "I should make some of that. Like I could write an essay. How hard would that be? I know how to program. I know how to type." And 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, "Waaa, waaa, waaa, look at all these great things the internet has done, but it's also kind of created these, you know, mimetic evolutionary landscapes that are driving us nuts. You know, this is going nowhere good. Look at how the culture is shifting. Waaa, waaa, waaa." And I sent this essay to my friend Hamish, who's actually a writer, and he let me down very gently.
He said, you know, "It's 2017, and your essay is about, you know, maybe the newspaper businesses are in trouble, and maybe Facebook is not an unalloyed good. Dude, we know, everybody knows that. Or everybody who's in my industry knows that. But the better question is, 'Let's say that all of 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. And so we had this sort of, I think maybe this is an a16z-relevant thing, this sort of techno-optimist idea that it's like, look, you're not going to turn back the clock. If there's new powerful technologies that are changing how everything works, and those things come with trade-offs, and there's upsides and downsides, and there's contingencies, there's 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, "Hey, we should go back." It's, "Hey, we should 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." You know, heady stuff. So we had this big idea, this big sort of grandiose thing, and then we just had the kernel of the way to start.
And the way to start was we could make it dead simple to start a paid email newsletter. And that was a thing that there was probably 20 people in the world that really, really wanted it, but they really wanted it like it was going to be the best thing ever for them. And it was the kernel; it was like 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, make real money doing it. It's a way around the cold start problem because you could have an individual person, like the very first Substack newsletter made total sense.
So we started with the grandiose version of Substack firmly fixed in our minds. Even then, I think, we looked at YouTube as something that was maybe the closest version to this thing that already existed.
00:15:36 - How Substack builds product
Erik Torenberg 00:15:36
Talk more about how you decided to launch Notes or go from, "Okay, we've got this sort of business engine where we've got all these writers making a lot of money. Where do we go from here?"
Chris Best 00:15:47
I'll tell one step before that because it went into my thinking, but very early on, in the very 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. And so in order to be very pure to our vision, we are not gonna allow anybody to have a free Substack or to send emails to free people." And 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."
And he created this stitched-together thing and it was like, "Oh, this is really dumb because if you want to be successful, if you wanna 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. And it's not an abrogation of our vision. In order for the thing to work, you have to provide this other thing." And then the thing that we realized not too long after that was the same was actually true about Twitter and about the social networks, which was, you know, 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. You had to have some top of funnel place, you know, the same way that the legacy media was struggling, and you had to have Facebook traffic, or you had to have Google traffic, or you had to have something.
There was always these other networks that were the source of your business. So even if you were this independent writer, independent creator, you were downstream of these other platforms, and that had both a philosophical consequence, which is we're trying to make this place that has these different incentives, but you're still at the whim of the thunderdome, right?
You still have to play the Twitter game, or you still have to play the Facebook game. And it had this very practical problem of those networks don't give a shit about you as a creator that makes money. And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg can decide in a fit of pique that people are annoying him about politics.
So he is going to like turn off politics. And if you are a politics creator that depends on Facebook for your livelihood, that's an existential event. And it's not even, because it's like they're trying to do that. It's just like, hey, 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.
And so we had this idea that in the long run, the only way we were going to really make that work for people is to build one of these networks ourselves that was built on different laws of physics. And so we were going to build, you know, a network, a destination, a place that you could go and experience the internet and have all of those great things that you get from social networks, but with a different business model and with a different incentive structure.
It's not going to like replace them, but it'll live alongside them, and 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.
And 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 sort of this theoretical idea of why we had to do this thing, but we also knew that it was going to be quite difficult. Like it's very hard to start a new internet-scale network. And it took years.
00:19:39 - Algorithms aren’t all bad
Andrew Chen 00:19:39
By the way, Chris, to your earlier point on this, on the algorithm, it's so interesting to watch actually all of the major platforms move towards the algorithmic For You world because in that world then actually the creator's relationship with their audience is even further away, right?
Maybe it doesn't matter. And this all originally started with, "Oh, well, you know, we have this problem of any social app where you need people to follow enough folks so that they get enough feed content, and, well, one way to solve that is even if you're not following somebody, maybe we'll just kind of suggest things." And it turns out then the algorithms are so good that maybe that should be their entire feed is just suggested content.
But then what does it mean as a creator to even build a following on one of these platforms if, even if you have a hundred thousand followers or whatever, maybe they'll see none of your content because the algorithm is caring less and less about the follower graph these days.
Chris Best 00:20:40
Definitely, and there's two tacks you could take with that. And the one that I think a lot of people, their first reaction is to say, "Oh, well, algorithms are bad, right? Like the algorithm is," whatever, "It's severing our ties. It's putting us into bubbles. It's exposing us too much to people outside our bubbles." But like, whatever the thing is.
Okay. So trade-offs with algorithms. Therefore algorithms are bad. I think a more productive take is: algorithms are powerful, and they're a tool that people use, and they serve the ends that we tell them. And if we tell them better ends, they'll help us get better results. And so this is something that we talked about a lot at Substack because I think people had this—there was a lot of our users who felt like at the time, they were like, "The good thing about Substack is there isn't an algorithm, and I just connect directly. And that's the thing that's actually good." And I think the take that we have is, there's something that's much better than that, which is what if there was an algorithm that actually served you and that was actually trying to help you find the things that you deeply valued and actually had a, you know, like the nerd term for this is an objective function.
If the objective function, in other words, the secret hidden master that the algorithm is serving is actually your own interest rather than, you know, trying to sell you more ads.
00:22:01 - Would Substack launch an ad network?
Erik Torenberg 00:22:01
You have a very sophisticated writer base and then, by extension, a very sophisticated reader base, very high-value audiences.
And now especially with video, and people aren't used to paying for video in the same way they're used to paying for writing, partially because of Substack's innovation there. Will you also launch an ad network at some point, or do you think that risks sort of the golden goose in some way?
Or how, how do you think about that?
Chris Best 00:22:25
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 do. But I see, you know, sponsorships, advertising is 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. Like, that's gonna work." Because if we did that, the thing we would be doing is importing the incentive structure and the business model that puts the platform at odds with the people on the platform.
On the other hand, there are a ton of Substackers today. Some of them are like, in my opinion, some of the very best Substackers, who are selling sponsorships. And 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.
And so we're very interested in doing that. But my belief is we have to take sort of a first-principles approach and not just, you know, stuff ads in a thing but ask the question like, "What would the good version of this be?" And help build that.
Erik Torenberg 00:23:49
Yeah. I think the bear case for ads has been sort of, "dumb-it-down content" or sort of "clickbait for the masses."
The bull case has been sort of 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. Basically 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 00:24:22
And I think the same is true of all of this magical AI technology that's coming online. I mean we're building a live product that basically 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, and pretty soon it's going to be in whatever language you want.
And we're going to live in a world where, you know, one thing you could have is you could have a bunch of like AI slop that kind of keeps dumb people clicking. The other thing you could have is you could have 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.
And so 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, and if you pick the right ends, then applying the technology is very exciting.
Katherine Boyle 00:25:21
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, which is that everyone can be a creator, and we don't have enough content.
I think there's this horrible meme, like podcasts are over, we have too much content, there's too much online, and it's like, actually it's the opposite. If you look at any of the For You feeds, I mean, most of it is now AI slop, which says that there's just a dearth of extraordinary content.
And what I always thought was so brilliant about what you understood about professional writers, and having been a professional writer, it was almost like you were inside my psyche, the hardest part about writing is writing. Like it's really, really hard to get started writing if you're like a true writer and you have writer's block. And so everything you can do to make the production of that writing easier, everything you can do to sort of create the flywheel where your readers are expecting something, you're artificially creating deadlines, if you can create something very quickly that turns into a host of different products, that then gives you the positive feedback loop that you need to keep doing it.
Like there was something about, from the very beginning you really understood sort of the artist's way or the writer's drama of just how difficult it is to be a creator. And that exists within everyone, right? None of us are, our day jobs are not writing, right?
But all of us are writers, all of us are creators on this pod. And so there's something about, 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 like meme farms.
You had a very early insight, and you're seeing, sort of, AI pushes this direction where it's going to be this hybrid of really creative people using AI to make beautiful products that otherwise it would be like the barrier for entry is way too high to do that.
Chris Best 00:27:15
I started a whole company to procrastinate from finishing an essay. So I definitely know that end of it. The thing you're describing and the way I would've put it at the time and I would still put it is: we've entered a world where attention is the scarce resource.
And that's actually not new with AI. I date this to kind of the social media, the internet revolution where it used to be, like 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, and if you could give me something free to distract me, that would be a really good deal."
And that was the situation where the original social media network giants rose up was it's like, there's this land grab for attention. Everybody has so much attention to give and not enough things to distract them, and we have won that war. We have won the war on boredom. Right? 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. And 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, and this was the fundamental insight of Substack is, you know, 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 actually a phenomenal deal, and it would be insane of me not to be willing to spend money or spend a bit of effort to find that better thing. And people are starting, the culture is starting to catch up now, I think, to this reality that's been true for a decade. That, you know, you're spending your life, when you choose what media to consume.
00:29:10 - How Substack is changing media
Erik Torenberg 00:29:10
I think another huge contribution that you guys have made is around price discovery, where it turns out that 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 had existed when Katherine was a reporter at the Washington Post, maybe she wouldn't have had to—
Katherine Boyle 00:29:33
Wouldn't have had to suffer through this venture career.
Chris Best 00:29:34
There's two people on this, maybe three, all of you are actually people that we've tried to recruit to be Substackers that wound up at a16z instead.
Erik Torenberg 00:29:43
And so it is just fascinating to see you guys align, kind of, value capture and value creation in a way that wasn't aligned beforehand. And we're starting to see not just people go independent, but also sort of the rebundling happen where people like Bari, where Katherine is on the board of The Free Press, um, build Substack-first, you know, media companies and other people as well. Talk a little bit about sort of the unbundling and rebundling and kind of the future of how you see media companies being built.
Chris Best 00:30:16
This actually reminds me of one of the first things Marc Andreessen ever said to me when we were talking about Substack.
He said, "You're gonna do to media what the venture capital industry did to software companies or to tech," which was, there used to be this time where if you were somebody who knew how to build great software, the way that you could do that would be to go get a job from somebody in a suit that would tell you what to do and pay you a salary.
And the hidden reality of that situation was the people who actually could make the things were creating so much value that they were massively getting underpaid and under-recognized compared to what they were doing. And like less obviously but even more interestingly, once you could free them up from that structure, and you actually put them in charge, put the people who are actually making the thing, make them the boss, it massively increased variance in this very positive way. Didn't always work, right? 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 whoever was the software company middle management, that the net effect of kind of like pulling the talent out and unleashing it and putting the lunatics in charge of the asylum in tech was this renaissance, basically. And I think the same thing is possible in the cultural industries. I think that 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 and the people that are investing in them and, you know, investing their time and their money and participating. And the ambition that I have and we have at Substack is to basically just like build what they need, build the tools they need, build the network they need to have a fighting chance to win. And I think we're on the way.
Erik Torenberg 00:32:35
Yeah, it's interesting. And even in VC there are sort of, you know, solo capitalists as sort of like the Noah Smith example, but then there are also people who, you know, go on and build, you know, bigger platforms, much bigger than their individual selves.
Chris Best 00:32:48
I think of them as ambitious media founders, right? We have a whole team at Substack who's 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.
00:33:01 - How will media consumption habits change?
Erik Torenberg 00:33:01
Let's talk a little bit about the future of media in a sense of, you know, there's only 24 hours in a day. There's a portion of that people spend, you know, engaging in content, and it all competes with each other. Looking out a few years, do you see the amount that people spend on just that overall content in general increasing? I guess I'm curious, if video is obviously going to increase, are people going to be reading less, or is just more of everything, or how do you view consumption habits changing over time?
Chris Best 00:33:35
I wrote this piece called The Two Futures of Media where I kind of argue—I think inevitably when you ask these questions, you get into sort of like weird philosophical questions. Like what is the purpose of media, and what are we doing here? And I think that one of the purposes of media is to entertain, to have some effect.
The extreme way to say this is people who use media like a drug, right? I'm going to sit there, I'm going to scroll this thing, I'm going to watch this thing, it's going to have some effect on me in the moment that's going to create a pleasant feeling, and that's one of the things that I want from it.
And I think that that side of media is going to get supercharged. We have very sophisticated AI goonbots now. Is that a good thing? I don't know, but it's happening, and we're going to have that across everything, every short-form video, everything that could be like this, you know, it's almost approaching wireheading, the science fiction idea of, like, you plug a wire into your brain, and it stimulates the pleasure centers.
I think that future is, we're well into it. It's only accelerating. The stronger the technology gets, the stronger that thing becomes, and the stronger it's a hazard for people, quite frankly, because there's a mode of consuming media and culture that is like drug addiction, where it is compelling in the moment, where it is something you want, it is something even you'd be willing to pay for, at least spend your time on, but it pulls against your long-term interest. Remember, the media you consume is not just how you spend your time, it's who you become. And so it degrades you. And so it makes your tastes get more base, it makes you want more of the dumb thing. It sort of pulls you in. That's already happening.
It's going to continue to happen. That's a big part of the future. I think that thing is baked in right now. But that's not the only purpose of media. Right, the other purpose of media is culture. The other purpose of media is to like live in a society and become the kind of person you want to become and to figure out how to live and act back on the world, like the intersubjective, multiplayer game of building with other people.
And that is something that people really, really want as well. And I think that the same technologies that are making the first thing much more compelling can make that second thing much more compelling as well. And the thing that I think we can do at Substack is to create a version of that thing that is also fun and is also good and is also empowering. And you don't have to kind of be like—I don't want you to have to be like a monk to use Substack. You're like, "Well, I could scroll TikTok, or I could go to the library and flip through some microfiche." And it's like, yeah, you could do that, but nobody's actually going to do that.
And so if we can take kind of like the good and interesting and culture-laden future of media and make it really good and make it really compelling and have people make money from it when they make something truly great and have people realize that, you know—I aspire that the Substack app could 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. That made me more interesting." And I think that that is possible and that if we—When there are these massive changes, when the world changes, when technology reshapes everything, I think the fact that there's going to be change can become inevitable. But which version of the change happens, which future you go to is contingent. Right, people often ask like, "Is the future determined," or "Is great man theory true," you know, "How does history happen?"
And I think it's just both, right? There are these inexorable changes that are going to happen no matter what, but then in the moments of change, which future emerges is contingent on the choices people make and the accidents of history and individual decisions. And so I think the thing that is possible for us to do is to build a version of that second future of media where people are reading things that make them smarter, or listening to conversations that plug them into the world, in general, acting back on the culture and participating and engaging in ways that they value, and that that creates a ton of economic value and creates—This is why it's an economic engine for culture—creates like a whole world that is intensely valuable and great.
Is that going to be the world that everybody goes to? No. Some people are going to sit on the AI goonbot, but I think we can make a real difference by making that second future as good as possible.
00:38:09 - Disrupting mainstream media
Erik Torenberg 00:38:09
Building upon 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 sort of academia or books or kind of these adjacent industries? Or is that a distraction or you don't think about it super deliberately?
Chris Best 00:38:30
I'm a total crank on the subject of academia, so it might be fun.
This is sort of like ill-considered on my part, but I think a lot of science is totally broken. And I think that the scientific project is incredibly important and one of the most valuable things in history but that the practice of science and the current situation in academia and especially in academic publishing is like pretty far from good and even to the point of like, I think maybe peer review is a huge mistake and doesn't actually work, and, you know, we've got this thing that's supposed to make everything good and there's like this massive crisis of huge bodies of fake science that nobody believes because it's all LARPing. And I'm very interested in the idea of like, what if you apply some of these same principles? What if you give people an alternative? One way you could do science, if you want to, is to go on the internet and publish it. I think that's actually pretty radical and pretty interesting, and I see some early shoots of people doing that. It's a topic that I am excited about and think that there's more that we could do, but hasn't been kind of like central to our efforts so far.
Andrew Chen 00:39:51
I was just going to say something about books, right, because I think the process of why people decide to write books today is in itself a really interesting decision. Because like, first, you have to spend, you know, it's a multi-year project to actually, you know, write a book.
And I worked with HarperCollins to do the Cold Start Problem. I think it's like been three or four years ago, but it takes like three years or something like that to actually write a book. And then many of you guys know that if you literally just get enough pre-orders that you can get 10,000 units sold, that's like a bestseller.
I mean, it's like people are not reading books right now, which is insane. There's literally, I think, like one book printer left in the US. And so if Michelle Obama decides to write a book around the same time as you, they're like, "Oh, the printer is booked for the next, you know, X months." It's all down to one set of printers, which is itself insane. And so Chris, when you 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, you know, a hundred thousand people's inboxes each day, it's a completely different thing. Now, it is fascinating that there's certainly a cultural prestige in the fact that books have been around forever, but I have to imagine that it just changes over time. I imagine that, you know, it's like when people were playwrights, and film gets created, they're like, "Oh, wow, people love film, but it's not as prestigious as, you know, plays."
And then TV is the same. It's like, "Oh, people are watching a lot of TV. It's not as prestigious as being in a film." And then we're going to go down the same thing with like, YouTube stars and streamers or whatever. I think a lot of this stuff is obviously very much lagging.
And the ability to just reach, you know, hundreds of thousands of people with something that you write over a cup of coffee is like itself just so powerful, when you really think about it from an ROI basis of like writing a book or a Substack. And of course they're not mutually exclusive. If I were to have redone my whole thing again, I probably would've like, written it all on Substack and then taken it and put it into a book, as opposed to thinking about it like, "Oh, I'm going to lock myself into hotel rooms during my vacations and try to crank out all these pages and then kind of do it all as one big thing."
Katherine Boyle 00:42:19
I agree with that. I think there's this like cyclical moral panic that happens, and it certainly happened in media, where it's like "People are writing on the internet without an editor. Oh my God. No one's editing the writing on the internet. What are we gonna do," right? Like that was like the media's version of this.
It's the same thing happening with books. "People are reading, but it's not in a book. Like they're reading things on the internet. The book process is—" It's incredible to me, and it happens all the time. It's always like legacy industries realizing that the internet actually is a thing, that it becomes easier to produce the same thing you were going to produce in a book format, or the same thing you were going to write for a print paper can be put on the internet, and it's the same content.
And so I think there's always these like moral panics that we're somehow getting dumber or people aren't reading enough, and that's a huge problem. And I just don't think people are looking at it holistically, that people are reading, they're reading in different ways. Yes, you could say something, there is a huge problem if young people, you know, grow up never having read an actual physical book that was written before the current times. That's a different discussion. But the moral panics about the actual medium I think are something that are very cyclical, have been happening since the birth of the internet.
And it hasn't necessarily affected—it's affected the freedom of what we can actually say and the freedom of what we can get our hands on, but it hasn't necessarily affected our ability to read. And certainly, I would argue it actually hasn't affected our ability to make arguments either, which I know would be controversial in some domains.
But I think it's more the moral panic of industries realizing that things are changing, and they have to adapt.
Erik Torenberg 00:43:54
Yeah. And there's an interesting question about what is the source of intellectual culture these days? Is it more streamers, is it more Twitter anons?
Is it more professors, more journalists? I think, you know, Alex Danco wrote this really interesting case for why it's long-form writing. And one of the reasons he said was, 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 kind of a different format, and then the masses read, or sort of engage with that content.
And I think just having a more sophisticated understanding of the supply chain gives us a greater appreciation for long-form writing as a source.
Andrew Chen 00:44:37
Yeah. And Erik, to your point there, it's like, what that means is everything that you read in printed-out pieces of paper in traditional press is like delayed by a huge amount compared to the actual discourse that's happening on the internet.
And long form of course is like you're actually able to generate really original thoughts. And then of course all the meme wars are where the real discussion happens in real time. So you kind of have both flows like generating cultural knowledge over time.
00:45:15 - Why Substack raised $100 million
Erik Torenberg 00:45:15
So Chris, we're here partially to celebrate your big round. 100 million, is that right?
Chris Best 00:45:21
100 million. Yeah.
Erik Torenberg 00:45:22
So talk about, why raise a hundred million? You're already crushing it as a business. There's already a lot of cash. What are the big plans here?
Chris Best 00:45:30
So I think the big story of this to me is we've had this long-term ambition for, what are the pieces of Substack? I literally put this meme in my pitch deck, which was the handshake meme. And one hand is a model that supports independence. And the other hand is an internet-scale network.
And to me this is the core of what Substack is always meant to be is hey, this model that supports independence, but also this, like this place, this part of the internet that's a first-class destination that has this like thriving scene that feeds it. And I think after years and years and years of working to kind of make that into a reality, we have that fledgling network alive now, and it's growing. And I see the next phase of Substack as feeding that machine and helping it grow and throw off all of this value and like economic value for the creators and cultural value for the world. And it's kind of going to mean rebuilding the company to match that scale and ambition.
And this fundraise was really just a way to unlock that kind of transformation. And so we are sort of like in an exciting period of reimagining, you know, the product, the company, and what this thing can become now.
Erik Torenberg 00:46:49
Well, that's a great place to wrap. Chris, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Chris Best 00:46:52
Thanks.
Stay Updated:
If you enjoy the show, please follow and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Find a16z on Twitter: https://x.com/a16z
Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z
Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/
Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg
Please note that 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. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.
