Hi everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. I'm excited because this episode is about one of my

favorite topics. It's all about reading and writing and much more. Our special guests are Robert

Cottrell, the founder and editor of the browser, which is a very popular newsletter that shares

five pieces of writing worth reading every day and which we discuss as an example of the changing

web today. Our other special guest is Chris Best, the CEO of Substack, which makes it simple for

writers to start an email newsletter or podcast that makes money from subscriptions if they like,

but more broadly is really a platform for voices and audiences to connect with each other.

And finally, we have general partner

Andrew Chen, who's been leading a lot of investments on our consumer team into new media, gaming,

and marketplaces. In this hallway style jam, which took place over an informal meetup in person

recently, we cover writers and writing, readers and reading, including all the forms that may now

take today, business models for creators

and where new delivery mechanisms and tools come in.

I also ask Andrew and Robert to quickly share their stories of how they built their content outlets,

but we begin by going around the table Ron Robbins style to share a quick pulse check on where

publishing is today, how we got here, and where we're going.

Nils Bohr said that science advances one funeral at a time, and I say that publishing advance

is one bankruptcy at a time. I think we've known for some years that you can't really finance

good writing with bad advertising. It seemed inevitable to me that as and when the

technology falls into place, that we're going to see a shift in market power away from

publications towards writers. Now, I've been looking at a thousand pieces of writing a day.

That sums to somewhere between three and five million pieces of writing. So one thing

...