E1016: Substack CEO & Co-Founder Chris Best empowers writers via his email newsletter platform, shares insights on driving change in the attention economy, raising $15M from a16z, providing value to retain talent & more

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2020

⏱️ 99 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

1:00 Jason intros Chris Best
3:24 What happened to Kik? (Chris' first startup) What did he learn from it?
5:03 What is it about email newsletters that attracted Chris?
9:41 Chris explains the AI alignment problem and how it relates to content consumption
13:58 What bad behaviors have Google & Facebook's ad algorithms created? How is Chris working to fix them?
18:09 Gamification's impact on startups
23:02 What types of writers are best suited for Substack?
29:25 How did Chris secure a $15M Series A from a16z with only 3 FTEs? Plus explaining the benefits of being "default-alive"
34:33 Are we approaching a flipping of the attention economy?
43:20 How does Substack make money?
49:46 Benefits of writer collaboration & cross-promotion
50:57 How the Deadspin situation relates to Substack
56:01 Most interesting newsletter content so far?
58:19 Dealing with offensive speech & explicit content
1:05:32 When will major publications start losing writers to Substack?
1:10:00 Plans to add audio or video?
1:11:34 What are the top-performing newsletters and what are the price ranges?
1:17:29 Ad-model vs. Paid-model at Inside & Substack
1:30:16 Chris explains the Substack fellowship
1:32:23 Thoughts on "hustle culture"

Transcript

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1:00.5	everybody welcome back it's twenty twenty and I'm ready to rock and roll it's
1:03.9	Jason Calicannis your boy is in the building with Nick on the ones in the twos today
1:08.9	Sir Charles still on vacation I don't know where he is but wow I guess he earned it.
1:14.6	Everybody knows the media is completely screwed everything is shutting down because
1:18.5	Google and Facebook have a duopoly on advertising anybody trying to sell
1:22.4	ads in the world is screwed if they're
1:24.8	going up against two companies that have billions of users data. You just can't compete. And you
1:31.2	see that with buzzfeed, growing single digits still a big number 300 million
1:35.8	Congratulations to the team over there, but it's not growing. Why is it not growing?
	...

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