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 substaffed.

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. I was like, that sounds pretty good. 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. 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 Catherine 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 re-bundling of media, and what the future holds.

Let's get into it.

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?

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 hold 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. 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

...