Building Substack: Reinventing Culture through Subscriptions

a16z Podcast

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Email, a technology from 1971, is powering one of today’s most disruptive media platforms. In this episode, Substack cofounder and CEO Chris Best joins a16z General Partner Andrew Chen to discuss the origins and evolution of Substack, a platform redefining media and empowering creators to connect directly with their audiences. They dive into how Substack’s early days led to over 3 million paid subscribers, why creators are moving away from traditional platforms to establish direct connections with their audiences, and how the future of media in the AI era is reshaping opportunities for writers, podcasters, and video creators. From Chris’s lessons scaling Kik Messaging to Substack’s profound impact on the creator economy, this conversation shares insights on building platforms, culture, and opportunity in the modern era.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In a world of abundant content, how do I allocate my scarce attention?
0:06.0	We're so used to the internet being this place where you can publish anything and anything can happen.
0:13.0	I think you could make the argument that actually it's a fluke.
0:16.0	The same way that you might write a piece of software and change how a million people do their jobs, you could write
0:21.3	a great essay and change who a million people are.
0:25.1	We're now in an era where you're not going to be able to build a billion active user ad
0:30.4	supported thing.
0:31.8	If what I read is what I become, who do I trust for that?
0:37.2	If you're a listener here, you've likely heard of the company, Substack.
0:41.8	And you almost certainly have read something on Substack.
0:45.4	But today, you'll get to hear about the very origins of this company.
0:49.6	Why in 2017 did Chris Best and his co-found's shoes, of all things, to target a technology
0:55.8	originally developed in 1971, over 50 years ago. That is, of course, email.
1:03.3	Sitting down today with Chris is A16Z general partner, Andrew Chen, as they traverse through
1:08.3	the future of media and curation, but also what changes with the latest technological wave?
1:14.1	Artificial intelligence.
1:16.0	Even before AI, we had more content than we could ever want in the whole universe.
1:21.7	Chris, by the way, was also a co-founder of KIC for nearly a decade,
1:25.9	a messaging app that he helped scale to hundreds of millions
1:29.0	of users, so there are plenty of war stories throughout. By the way, this episode was originally
1:34.6	recorded during our last Tech Week in San Francisco. So, as you plan for the new year,
1:39.6	new dates for Tech Week have already been announced. We're going back to New York in June and back to
	...

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