20VC: Substack Founder Chris Best on The Future of Public Journalism, Why The Economics Of Attention Have Been Flipped & Why Micropayments For Content Will Not Work
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2020
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
Chris Best is the Founder & CEO @ Substack, the company that makes it simple for a writer to start a paid newsletter. To date, Chris has raised over $17M in funding from the likes of a16z, Y Combinator, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear and Zynga Co-Founder Justin Waldron to name a few. Prior to founding Substack, Chris was the Co-Founder & CTO @ Kik, letting users connect with friends, groups and the world around them. The company raised over $220M in funding from Spark, Tencent and USV to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Chris made his way into the world of startups and came to found Kik? How his journey with Kik led to his founding Substack?
2.) During COVID, traditional media publications have been hit hard and Substack has taken off, how does Chris see the correlation there? Given the public journal of record has always been free, how does Substack interact with public news? What does Chris
3.) Why does Chris believe that micropayments are a fundamentally bad idea? Structurally why would they not work? Does Chris agree the biggest problem consumers face today in content is one of discovery? Why not?
4.) When designing the Substack product today, how does Chris think about incentive design? Why does Chris believe with incentives, Substack is the opposite of Twitter from a product perspective? Why have the "economics of attention now been flipped?"
5.) How has Chris seen himself evolve and change as a leader over the last 3 years? What advice would Chris give to CTOs making the move into the role of CEO? What does Chris believe his greatest strengths and weaknesses are as a leader? How does Chris find the war for talent today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Chris’ Fave Book: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the 20 minute VC and Founders Friday with me, Harry Stebbings. Now we're going to |
| 0:03.8 | dive straight into the show today and I've been such a fan of this product for a long time now. |
| 0:07.9 | It's changing the very structure and mechanics of an industry, the writing industry. Now, I've |
| 0:12.5 | probably given it away with that, but I'm thrilled to welcome Chris Best, found and CEO at Substack |
| 0:17.5 | to the Hot Seat. Substack makes it simple for a writer to start a paid newsletter. |
| 0:22.1 | To date, Chris has raised over $17 million in funding from the likes of Andresen Horowitz, |
| 0:26.5 | Y Combinator, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Zinger co-founder Justin Waldron, to name a few. |
| 0:31.7 | Prior to founding Substack, Chris was the co-founder and CTO at Kick, |
| 0:35.2 | letting users connect with friends, groups and the world around |
| 0:38.2 | them, and the company raised over $220 million in funding from Spark, 10 cent and USV, |
| 0:43.6 | again, to name a few. I'd also, they want to say a huge thank you to Emmett Shear at Twitch |
| 0:47.6 | and Ted Livingston at Kik for some fantastic questions suggestions today. I really do so appreciate that. |
| 0:53.4 | But before we dive into the show today, |
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| 1:23.7 | when you make money. It's a total no-brainer. And speaking of total no-brainers, |
| 1:27.6 | the team over at Pendo, the product cloud company, just launched a free product performance |
| 1:31.7 | benchmarks micro site where you can see how your product stats up against your peers. |
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