AI transcript
0:00:06 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I’m Sonal. I’m excited because this episode is about
0:00:10 one of my favorite topics. It’s all about reading and writing and much more. Our special guests
0:00:15 are Robert Cattrell, the founder and editor of the browser, which is a very popular newsletter that
0:00:21 shares five pieces of writing worth reading every day and which we discuss as an example of the
0:00:26 changing web today. Our other special guest is Chris Best, the CEO of Substack, which makes it
0:00:31 simple for writers to start an email newsletter or podcast that makes money from subscriptions if
0:00:36 they like, but more broadly is really a platform for voices and audiences to connect with each other.
0:00:40 And finally, we have General Partner Andrew Chen, who’s been leading a lot of investments on our
0:00:45 consumer team into new media, gaming, and marketplaces. In this hallway-style jam, which took
0:00:50 place over an informal meetup in person recently, we cover writers and writing, readers and reading,
0:00:55 including all the forms that may now take today, business models for creators, and where new delivery
0:01:00 mechanisms and tools come in. I also ask Andrew and Robert to quickly share their stories of
0:01:05 how they built their content outlets. But we begin by going around the table, Ron Robbins-style,
0:01:10 to share a quick pulse check on where publishing is today, how we got here, and where we’re going.
0:01:17 Nils Bohr said that science advance is one funeral at a time. And I say that publishing
0:01:23 advance is one bankruptcy at a time. I think we’ve known for some years that you can’t really
0:01:28 finance good writing with bad advertising. It seemed inevitable to me that, as and when
0:01:34 the technology falls into place, that we’re going to see a shift in market power away from
0:01:40 publications towards writers. Now, I’ve been looking at a thousand pieces of writing a day.
0:01:46 That sums to somewhere between three and five million pieces of writing. So one thing that I’ve
0:01:55 deduced from all that time reading is that the best possible predictor of the value of a piece
0:02:03 of writing is the writer. Now, that might seem like an absurdly obvious thing to say, but the whole
0:02:09 strategy of the publishing industry up until now is to persuade you that the value lies in the
0:02:15 publication, the brand, that that’s the guarantee of quality. That’s what you should pay. That’s
0:02:24 what you should be loyal to. The quality of writing varies far more within any one publication
0:02:32 than does the quality of a given writer’s writing across publications. So if I want to read
0:02:37 Susan Orlean, I don’t care whether she’s writing in Harper’s or the New Yorker or the Financial
0:02:45 Times. So the ideal for me would be in some way to be able to subscribe directly to
0:02:51 Susan Orlean or Tani Easycoats or any good to great writer, stay with them,
0:02:58 pay them, feel a relationship with them. I think what really got me excited is all of a sudden
0:03:04 seeing folks like you and Ben Thompson from Stratechery and other kind of individuals really
0:03:08 figure out how to build a whole business model behind it and do it really full-time.
0:03:15 Wow, that is actually like a complete alternative to the ad-supported media model that really has
0:03:19 been with us for like hundreds of years at this point. In the early days, people would just,
0:03:24 as soon as they had steam-powered printing presses, this was like in the early 1800s,
0:03:28 at first you had a bunch of folks overcharging nine cents per issue and then actually the
0:03:35 predecessor to the penny presses would basically sell advertising, sell the actual issues for one
0:03:39 cent, and then all of a sudden that was like, “Holy shit, you’re actually giving it away,
0:03:44 basically.” And it was very powerful to have this ad-supported model. You fast forward hundreds
0:03:52 of years later, and now we are seeing some of the tools to actually build from a brand new
0:03:58 foundation, a new ecosystem that’s based on people writing primarily based on their passion.
0:04:02 We’re seeing this in writing and newsletters, but we’re obviously also seeing that in the
0:04:07 way that people are setting up e-commerce shops and Shopify. There’s a lot happening in video
0:04:11 streaming. There’s a lot happening in video games. There’s a lot happening in podcasting,
0:04:15 and the list goes on and on, that there’s this new ecosystem that’s really based on the direct
0:04:21 relationship between consumers and the content creators and these tools that facilitate that.
0:04:26 And I’m very bullish that there can be an ecosystem that’s as big as the media ecosystem,
0:04:29 but completely based on these new technologies enabled by the internet, et cetera, et cetera.
0:04:36 I think what you said about the bad incentive structures of ad-supported media is interesting.
0:04:42 Craig Maude calls them attention monsters, which is a very colorful term that I love.
0:04:47 I think that you do track this progression where ad-supported media has been with us for a long
0:04:53 time, but I think we’re hitting a turning point where attention monsters, ad-supported media has
0:04:59 eaten up enough of people’s attention that there’s just no more to go. With the smartphone,
0:05:04 things are demanding all of your attention all the time. The next frontier as somebody who wants
0:05:10 to regain control of their mind is to be thoughtful about what you want to put in there,
0:05:13 what you want to be reading. That’s one of the things that people love about the browser,
0:05:19 is it’s a way to regain some signal in the noise of what I’m going to read, what I’m going to
0:05:24 focus my attention on, and not let it be dictated by an algorithm that’s selected by somebody that
0:05:29 I greatly trust. I love that you’re saying that, because when I think of the evolution of the
0:05:33 internet, Chris Anderson coined the long tail and how there’s going to be this inevitable
0:05:38 shift from the big head to the long tail. People would not only go to a blockbuster
0:05:43 to find the hits, but that they would find the niche movies that they love. You have infinite
0:05:47 shelf space on the internet. Then the funny thing happened after that, which is that we had a little
0:05:54 of too much long tail. I think it became cluttered in the first wave of Web 2.0. Now we’re seeing
0:05:59 this shift to a more curated, artisanal thing. What I think is really interesting about what all
0:06:03 three of you are saying is it’s an intersection, as you’re saying, Robert, of people now finding
0:06:08 people, not just brands, as Chris is saying, the incentive structures being aligned. As Andrew is
0:06:13 saying, that we are now entering a world where people can find the right business models to
0:06:19 do this. That’s what was lacking in that first wave. As a reader, there’s no possible way you can
0:06:23 keep abreast of everything that’s happening and make some rational choice about what you spend
0:06:29 your time on. At best, you’re choosing which filters you want to see the world through.
0:06:35 If you choose to see the world through algorithmic-driven feeds who make their
0:06:41 money by keeping you maximally addicted, there’s going to be some predictable result to that on
0:06:46 your life. Whereas if you choose to put your faith in people who you have some sort of relationship
0:06:51 in, some sort of trust in, who have some sort of motivation, either to serve you well or just
0:06:56 beyond caring about you at all, that just care about quality and care about interesting things,
0:07:04 you’ll get different results. I think it’s fair enough to say that any platform or publication
0:07:14 that proposes to personalize your experience is going to game you one way or another. I try to
0:07:21 accept that the browser is simply my choice, my sensibility, and to stay firm with that,
0:07:28 to avoid as far as possible analytics, which will tell me what, because I’m otherwise in danger
0:07:32 of giving people what they want. If I may say you recently had us hide, how many links people
0:07:38 clicked, you had us hide it from the UI for you so that you could more effectively live by that.
0:07:45 There was a bit of me that felt, shouldn’t we be kind of like jolly-ing up a bigger click-through
0:07:52 rate somehow, which would mean popularization. But then I thought, no, because I don’t think of
0:07:58 myself as a curator, that’s what happens in museums. I think of myself as a critic and like a
0:08:04 theater critic or a music critic. So I’m pointing to a piece of writing and I’m saying, I think this
0:08:09 is worthy of your attention. And here’s why I think it’s worthy of your attention, and then giving
0:08:15 you enough of a flavor of it for you to make the decision as to whether or not you go and read it.
0:08:21 So actually, if people are happy to pay for the browser as a newsletter, I’ve started to
0:08:27 think of that as a measure of success. But yes, seeing which articles provoked click-throughs
0:08:33 and which didn’t, it was seductive. It was alluring. When you go to any publication, any website,
0:08:39 whether it’s the BBC or the FT or the New England Journal of Medicine, you’ll find that
0:08:48 the outlying most read stories are always the lobster that spoke Italian or the hamster that
0:08:53 ate my baby or something. It’s always the sensational things, even within the most distinguished of
0:08:57 places. Can I take the opposite side of that though, because coming on the other side of media
0:09:02 and the writing side, I would say that right now it’s sad how little information writers have
0:09:07 about their work. I’ve actually sent a lot of my friends to Substack because they get very limited
0:09:11 data streams. Their audiences are sprinkled all across the board, especially if you’re a freelancer
0:09:14 across like 20 different outlets. If you’re trying to follow a person, it’s kind of a bummer
0:09:20 because what’s missing right now in the ecosystem is this matchmaking between this amazing curatorial
0:09:27 or critical ability to your phrase, Robert, with the ability to actually market and put your ideas
0:09:31 out there in a way that reaches the audience. And so you have this divide where there’s a lot of
0:09:36 writers who are really talented, who don’t know how to connect with their audiences, don’t have the
0:09:41 tools to do it. One of the really common threads when I hear about folks who’ve kind of built their
0:09:47 own audiences, you know, resonated with what you just said, is I find that there ends up being
0:09:53 this huge focus on the quality of the work as opposed to purely the metrics and the audience
0:09:58 around the work. I think it’s actually common for really two reasons. One is you end up needing to
0:10:04 be motivated intrinsically as opposed to extrinsically. I think the second thing though as well is
0:10:11 if you end up creating a business model around your work that is based on the interest and
0:10:15 the passion of your audience to consume your stuff, then what ends up happening is the quality of
0:10:20 your audience actually matters. Whether or not you really engage people deeply and your building
0:10:24 relationships over a long period of time actually matters because those are the folks that are
0:10:31 actually most likely to open their wallets as opposed to something like the traditional advertising
0:10:36 model that really incentivizes a lot of people driving past a billboard, right? And that’s a
0:10:41 very different kind of strategy. What’s really interesting about you said, Andrew, is that when
0:10:45 you think about this as part of the about selling and matching and creating this audience that you
0:10:50 want, I think what that means is not about the writer, it puts the reader back at the center.
0:10:55 Kevin Kelly in his book, The Inevitable, talks about this future, which he thinks is inevitable,
0:11:00 where we’ll be able to invert our attention. And this goes to your point about broken incentives,
0:11:07 where instead of people selling our attention, we as audiences will be able to sell our audience,
0:11:13 chip to people. It’s like negative interest rates of the attention economy. Oh, I love that.
0:11:21 I’m very optimistic about the future of reading. We’ve been doing it for upwards of 3,000 years,
0:11:28 and we’re not going to stop now. I’m very, very curious to see what kind of a revolution,
0:11:32 really good machine translation is going to wreak upon our reading universes when
0:11:40 that becomes free. I’ve been doing quite a lot of work with a computer science startup in London,
0:11:46 and I’ve been so massively impressed by the quality of machine translation. I’m talking here
0:11:53 about paid cloud based neural network driven machine translation, which at the moment is
0:11:59 quite expensive. But to me, the results that it delivers are stunning. You can read a large
0:12:03 chunk of German into English or Spanish into English without knowing that you’re reading a
0:12:09 translation. The best news magazine in the world right now is Dash Beagle. It’s as good as time
0:12:15 and news we were in the golden age. I get a lot of my daily news now from Gazette of Aborture,
0:12:19 which I thought was going to tell me sort of lots of little things about Poland, but it’s
0:12:26 actually a really good newspaper. That’s only going to get better. And because all five majors
0:12:31 and then some are all competing at that same high level of machine translation, it’s going to get
0:12:37 commoditized. It’s going to be free. So really good, almost invisible machine translation will
0:12:44 simply drop silently into Google news, Apple news level of reading, and suddenly we’ll be reading
0:12:49 the whole world without even knowing it. So I love that vision, but to me, that sounds like a
0:12:55 crazy explosion, which brings us back to this web where there’s looking for seeking the signal and
0:12:59 the noise. And I want to think about centering it in the reader’s experience. This is one of the
0:13:03 big motivations for why I was interested in starting Substack. It’s not, I’m not a writer.
0:13:10 It’s as a reader. As a reader, I am fed up with this feeling that there’s a mill, you know,
0:13:17 water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. There’s a million things that I could be reading,
0:13:22 and yet I find myself in these dark patterns where I’m sort of obsessively checking my
0:13:29 Twitter feed against my better judgment. And I just want there to be a better way for me to
0:13:35 see the world through the written word and to pay for the people that are creating something better.
0:13:40 We think of this thing as having two sides to it. There’s the writer side being able to
0:13:47 speak directly to your audience, not being mediated by an algorithm, getting funded directly
0:13:51 by your audience because they trust you. And so you have sort of aligned incentives. That’s all
0:13:55 really great. But the other side of this is you have to have willing readers. You have to have
0:14:00 readers who subscribe directly to voices they trust. Today, for a lot of people that’s happening
0:14:05 in their email app or in their RSS reader, if you’re a little bit old school.
0:14:12 I think the RSS is the most undervalued thing in the entire universe. But lately I’ve been
0:14:18 taking more newsletters. I’m generally frightened of my email. My inbox is full of claims on my
0:14:25 time and I hate to go there. But newsletters are actually a very efficient way of getting the
0:14:31 greatest hits from producers. When I think about why I like email in that way, I think the answer is
0:14:40 that it comes to me. And I think the same is true about audio. It comes to me. Two or three years
0:14:46 ago I thought of listening to a book as being lower status than reading the book. But now I
0:14:53 don’t. Reading the book is every bit as good. I’m equally if not more happy listening to things
0:15:02 as I am reading them. Airpods may be the most consequential Apple product since the iPhone.
0:15:09 You used to talk about always on and now we can talk about always in. So we can be permanently
0:15:16 in a world of listening. And as a matter of fact, when I hear Elon Musk talking about neural
0:15:21 implants, that actually strikes me as a relatively small practical leap. You’re just moving the
0:15:27 metal and other inch of your ear canal. And that kind of funny way that meshes with what I like
0:15:34 about Substep is I live on my RSS reader. I would argue that the borders between the newsletter,
0:15:39 email, audio, podcasting is all just going to blur up. I actually believe that people will start
0:15:44 distributing written articles and audio form in podcasting because it’s about having ear share,
0:15:48 which is basically the best form of mind share because you’re essentially in people’s heads
0:15:53 quite physically. And if you get your neural implant feature, you will really be in people’s
0:15:56 heads. And so I think that’s a big part of it. I would also argue when you think about that
0:16:00 this is a golden age of reading, I think that’s absolutely true of TV and entertainment as visual
0:16:04 literature these days. I think of games as like immersive books. There’s no difference. I think
0:16:09 it’s actually a short blip in our human history that we’ve had to arbitrarily divide these media
0:16:13 when in fact they are really fame at the core. Yeah. If you kind of imagine stack of authoring,
0:16:19 publishing, community and monetization that should exist for almost any kind of new modality,
0:16:25 whether that is audio and podcast, even something like video, it should be that for whatever is
0:16:29 your jam, whatever is the kind of content that you’re into building, there’s going to be these
0:16:34 stacks that are end up being built. I think we’ll see those kinds of tools for almost every media
0:16:42 type. But how do we monetize? I think we’ve already dismissed bad advertising. We’ve had a real
0:16:48 resurgence of science publishing thanks to Foundation Money, Simons. Oh, right, like Quanta,
0:16:56 Magazine, Nautilus, Eonmag, Bridgetnames. Exactly. So, individual and institutional
0:17:03 philanthropy. But if you think in terms of selling directly, then your orders of magnitude are going
0:17:10 to be somewhere between the hundreds and the million readers. I mean, the economist has a
0:17:16 circulation of a million, the New Yorker likewise. So, they may not be the same million, but that’s
0:17:23 roughly the number you can hope to hit at the very, very top of your game. Now, a lot of the
0:17:29 things that have happened so far, at least at the fundable end of the internet, the numbers have
0:17:36 always had to begin with a B. So, it’s possible to have meaningful changes in the architecture
0:17:43 of writing and monetizing and reading, even for that up to one million scale of readers that I
0:17:48 think the universe accommodates. You’re basically saying that people now today, given the right
0:17:55 tools, can actually make a good living without having to be the size of a major traditional
0:18:00 media outlet. Oh, from the writer’s point of view, the economics are transformationally better.
0:18:08 If you measure the writer’s footprint, let’s say by their following on Twitter, any good
0:18:13 byline journalist in a major publication can have a Twitter following in the tens of thousands.
0:18:18 And if they work at it, they can push it up to the hundreds and the millions. So, some
0:18:28 tiny fractional conversion of that footprint into paying readers, let us say that hypothetically,
0:18:36 Susan Orlean publishes an original piece of writing and offers it for sale at $5. Well,
0:18:41 this seems to me to be a wholly reasonable price. And then the question becomes, are there
0:18:47 a thousand people who would read that? Are there 10,000 people who would want it? And at that point,
0:18:54 you’re getting returns to the writer in this thought experiment of $50,000 for one piece
0:18:58 to which they still own all of the rights. I think there’s one subtle point there,
0:19:03 which is it’s certainly true that if you have a dedicated audience that loves the work,
0:19:09 you have a relatively small number of people paying you cash, whether it’s a subscription,
0:19:13 whatever, and the economics work out very well, right? You have a thousand true fans or a couple
0:19:20 thousand people paying $50, $100 a year, that adds up really quickly. And the thing that is subtle
0:19:26 there to me is that the kind of work you do, if that’s the outcome you want, is different than
0:19:32 the kind of work you do if you have to get a million clicks. And so it’s not just a question of,
0:19:37 I have one piece of writing and either I could go and monetize it by putting it on clickbait,
0:19:40 or I could go and sell it to a bunch of really thoughtful people who might pay me for it.
0:19:46 When you choose the funding model of people who actually deeply value the work, the kinds of
0:19:51 things you can create are fundamentally different. I love that. And you can fund work that otherwise
0:19:58 would not exist. One of the most motivating things that I hear is I’m getting to do work that I want
0:20:02 to do that I think is valuable for the world, that’s valuable for my readers, that my readers tell me
0:20:09 that they love, that would have been impossible at my last job. That unlocks entirely new types of
0:20:13 things that we’re not even seeing from the talents and the voices and the people that we want to
0:20:18 follow by having find a business model that people can monetize these things. And I think of
0:20:24 it as a market failure that that doesn’t already exist. If there’s 10,000 people out there that
0:20:28 want to read some writer and that writer really wants to write the kind of work that those people
0:20:33 would love to have, and yet it’s not happening because we have a bad business model, that’s a
0:20:39 huge net loss for the world that’s totally unnecessary. Just to add to Chris’s point,
0:20:44 I think one of the sort of starkest differences in this is the way that you apply business metrics
0:20:49 to the traditional media model versus one where it’s based on subscribers. In the traditional
0:20:56 media model, almost everybody ends up measuring their monetization based on a CPM or an RPM,
0:21:00 whatever you want to call it basically. Cost per meal. Exactly, a cost per meal. So basically,
0:21:06 the idea is how much money are you making per thousand impressions of the ad? It’s not like
0:21:10 you’re developing a relationship. It’s not about the people. It’s literally an impression.
0:21:15 It’s literally, again, driving past the billboard. And I think that’s very interesting in contrast
0:21:19 to a world of subscription where you’re really thinking about it as, well, what percentage
0:21:26 of my audience are subscribers? How many subscribers do they have? And I think, interestingly,
0:21:30 with that terminology, it really humanizes that the business model actually matches
0:21:36 what you’re really trying to do, which is to develop this ongoing audience and relationships
0:21:41 with individuals because it’s about people as opposed to just the fact that they looked at
0:21:45 something. I mean, I’m going to use an analogy from the enterprise world when we think about the
0:21:51 days of on-prem computing and then we move to subscription software as a service or aka SaaS.
0:21:54 That was a very huge shift because in the olden days of companies,
0:21:59 you would do this big million-dollar contract upfront. Someone would be fancy in your office
0:22:04 installing it and managing the relationship and walking the hallways and you had a crap,
0:22:09 crap product like 99% of the time. But in the new model of SaaS, it created a model where
0:22:15 subscribers, to your point, Andrew, could choose to leave if they didn’t like something.
0:22:19 You actually feel vulnerable when you hear the word “subscribing” because you think that it means
0:22:23 people can leave you. And the reality is you don’t have them in the first place when you’re not
0:22:27 subscribed. But secondly, when you do have them, you have more ways to offer them more things.
0:22:31 Because as we found in the SaaS model, people who had to do better to make sure people stayed
0:22:35 subscribed and then on top of it, a majority of subscribers would then pay for more things
0:22:39 because they just kept wanting more and more. It was a cross-sell, upsell, etc. So when you
0:22:42 think of the enterprise model of that, I think it’s a very interesting analogy for what’s actually
0:22:47 happening in consumer of this. It aligns incentives, which is the key thing. And if you take Robert’s
0:22:52 point that in writing, you care a lot about the individual writer and if you like one piece they
0:22:56 write, you’re likely to continue to really want to follow everything they write in this analogy.
0:23:00 I suppose you’re a happy SaaS customer and that’s not how I would phrase it, but I think the
0:23:05 analogy holds there. I think the reason I’m just emphasizing this is that we tend to underestimate
0:23:10 how important delivery models are. When you combine the delivery infrastructure with the medium
0:23:14 and the ability of the internet, and then you have this creation on both sides, creation and
0:23:19 consumption unlocked, when you combine those three things, magic can really happen. Where technology
0:23:26 can really make an impact on the life of creators is really, you think about an entire media
0:23:32 operation. You have a bajillion people in a single room and how do you squeeze that into a
0:23:39 really easy to use software stack that lets you do all those functions, but empower a single person
0:23:44 working from a coffee shop to just run an entire media operation on their own. I do think that
0:23:51 what is fascinating about having this existing content industry and structure is they’re both
0:23:57 aggregation points for audiences, but they also become gatekeepers. And then on the flip side,
0:24:02 if you are a star within the industry, if you are somebody who has really, really built an
0:24:08 audience, the chances that you’ve built a business model that truly allows you to creatively do 100%
0:24:13 of what you want to do, as opposed to, I think we’re in a funny place where sometimes if you’re
0:24:18 the top writer, maybe at a publication, you’re generating a lot more value than you’re actually
0:24:22 capturing. What ends up happening is a lot of that value that’s being created is, of course,
0:24:27 it’s being grabbed to subsidize the rest of the folks that may not be there, because we want a
0:24:31 level playing field. But what’s interesting in a completely open marketplace is obviously,
0:24:36 for the folks that choose to do that, they can then build and own this audience that they can
0:24:42 keep for a lifetime, which is how I feel about my blog audience. The second piece is how does this
0:24:47 get to consumers in a way where they’re able to experience it in the best light? You have this
0:24:51 layer of interactions with your audience, and then there’s the monetization layer and the business
0:24:55 models that we’ve talked about, which subscription is just one out of many, many, many different
0:25:00 options. What I often end up seeing and something I’ve experimented with myself is you have subscription,
0:25:09 but then ultimately, you also run conferences, you sell premium education, you consult for Fortune
0:25:13 500 companies, there’s a list of all of these different things. I’m curious for your guys’
0:25:17 thought on community. To me, what’s amazing is that the browser essentially has a community
0:25:23 of people, and what I was noticing is it’s like birds of a feather. Robert, one of the things
0:25:27 that you and I are both chuckling about is how you and I have been trying to meet up for ages,
0:25:31 and you’re like, “Oh, Sonal, I met with Tyler,” and he’s saying, “Hey, Sonal,
0:25:37 you met with Kevin, we’re talking about mutual friends.” We haven’t tried explicitly to develop
0:25:47 more of a community vibe. We also sense that our subscribers want their privacy to be respected.
0:25:52 That may be a misjudgment, but that, for the time being, is our sense. But shared reading habits
0:25:58 are a very powerful bond, and I think at present, they’re underexploited. We certainly see this
0:26:05 effect in other publications where the people who follow a given writer or creator, especially the
0:26:10 people who love them enough to pay for them, tend to be birds of a feather and tend to…
0:26:11 Yes, exactly.
0:26:17 As soon as you give them a space to talk, form a natural community, we’ve started adding some
0:26:23 very basic community discussion forum threads. The activity we see in there is very strong,
0:26:29 but more importantly, the tenor of the discussion that you see is different than other things that
0:26:32 tend to happen on the internet. I bet you they’re high quality, right? They’re not like crap comments.
0:26:37 It’s the exact opposite of YouTube comments, basically. You have people that are interested
0:26:41 in the same thing, that are actually reading the thing, that already feel like they’re sort of
0:26:46 have a shared sensibility, as you say. And I think there’s space to create profoundly positive
0:26:49 internet communities around content creators.
0:26:50 I agree. I don’t think we should give up on this.
0:26:56 The other thing that I think is true about all good online communities is that I suspect you need
0:27:01 a benevolent dictator to make them work. Someone that just sets the tone, sets the culture,
0:27:06 and you have a natural person to do that when you have a writer who wants to foster a community.
0:27:09 I used to always fight with my colleagues about this at Wired, because they would always say,
0:27:12 “Never read the comments. That’s like a known thing on the internet.”
0:27:15 I had the best comment sections on my pieces, and what I would do is I would go in
0:27:18 and tell people when I had trolls and be like, “Hey, can you please…”
0:27:22 The minute I just showed my presence, they immediately settled down and behaved,
0:27:25 and then they would go like 300, 400 comments deep.
0:27:28 I think we’ve given up too soon on this, and when you go back to this idea of Kevin Kelly’s
0:27:32 true fans, the point that people never bring up in his original article about it,
0:27:36 is he talks about the power of it connecting you to other nodes in that network,
0:27:39 and that to me is a really powerful thing, and I think it’s still early days.
0:27:42 We should not give up on the so-called comment section of the internet.
0:27:48 So my variation of this is I really love meeting people offline that are readers,
0:27:51 whether it’s events or conferences or dinners. I felt like growing up,
0:27:53 it was like, “You should never meet anybody off the internet.”
0:27:56 And then I’m like, “I exclusively meet people off the internet.”
0:28:02 So I think one of the really interesting things there is that in the content that I’m writing,
0:28:05 that I really think of it as I’m writing for the group of people,
0:28:08 and then what ends up happening is I serendipitously,
0:28:12 as a result of doing the writing, it becomes this really scalable,
0:28:14 enhanced form of professional networking.
0:28:18 And so I think one of the things that’s helpful in thinking about it that way is,
0:28:23 I think it does really hone your authenticity around who is this really for,
0:28:26 like your readers, your customers, or people that you’re going to end up seeing,
0:28:29 and so you’re probably not going to push out a bunch of filler,
0:28:32 drivel, because then you’re going to be embarrassed when you see them in a coffee
0:28:36 shop coming up, et cetera. But I think what ends up happening in the digital realm,
0:28:41 that’s really powerful, is that there’s probably enough other weird people,
0:28:44 now that the internet has billions of monthly actives,
0:28:48 that you’re going to be able to find them and connect with them.
0:28:52 And one way in which to think about that is you’re a writer and you’re interacting with
0:28:56 your readers, but I think the other way, which we talk a lot about,
0:29:01 you’re putting out the bat signal for the people that are the same kind of weird as you,
0:29:07 right? And inevitably, you’re able to pull together a set of real life relationships
0:29:09 where the discovery happens in this kind of digital realm.
0:29:13 Yeah. Andrey, actually, tell me about how you got to your blog and your newsletter.
0:29:14 How many years has it been around for you?
0:29:17 I’ve been writing, I think, for 12 years now in the Bay Area.
0:29:22 If you go all the way back, I was as a teenager, one of those people that kept a journal.
0:29:24 And so the first couple of blogs I did were just like for fun.
0:29:27 They’re just more, you know, kind of here’s my day.
0:29:30 Back in the day when blogging first came out, it was really a bit more about that.
0:29:34 But my favorite format actually was like a link blog.
0:29:36 And so I would just like find cool links from across the internet,
0:29:38 purely like curation, right? Back in the day.
0:29:40 But when I moved to the Bay Area in 2007,
0:29:43 I decided to make a professional blog.
0:29:45 And that’s ultimately what ended up sticking.
0:29:50 I was an entrepreneur in residence working at another firm and I would just write down
0:29:54 interesting conversations I was having, interesting factoids I was learning.
0:29:57 And at the time it was super funny because again, this is 2007,
0:30:02 people would literally ask me, like, why are you writing all of your insights
0:30:04 and like publishing it? Like that’s your edge.
0:30:05 Why are you giving away your edge?
0:30:08 Oh, interesting. That seems like so amazing that people would actually think that.
0:30:09 That’s what people thought. Yeah, exactly.
0:30:12 And it’s funny, of course, because now a decade later,
0:30:15 it’s funny how like it’s completely diametrically shifted.
0:30:18 It’s also kind of ironic because looking over here at Chris and Substack,
0:30:23 if you had done it today, you would have actually been able to
0:30:26 do some of those for free, but also get others to pay for some of the really
0:30:30 specialized things if you really wanted to, which you didn’t have the ability to do at the time.
0:30:34 That’s right. That’s right. I basically just added my friends from Seattle.
0:30:40 I added my mom, I added my sister, and then I just got to like tens of thousands of RSS subscribers.
0:30:43 And so what ended up happening after that was it’s becoming this chore or whatever.
0:30:45 I actually took a two year break.
0:30:50 And so now I actually have completely flipped the other way where I basically
0:30:56 think that starting a blog was the single most important decision that I made in my 20s.
0:30:59 It’s the thing that sort of unlocked a lot of other opportunities.
0:31:06 And I tell people, instead of spending two hours at a conference or going out and doing a
0:31:12 bazillion coffee networking, if you just sit down and you take the time to write down some of the
0:31:16 really amazing, you know, conversations or articles or whatever that you’re reading,
0:31:19 like that just scales. It lasts forever. I mean, I have people reading articles from
0:31:24 like eight or nine years ago that I wrote and finding them useful, which is just fantastic.
0:31:27 I think of it as a little bit like guerrilla warfare actually. War is a very dangerous thing.
0:31:31 This is a positive thing. But the whole point of that type of warfare is that you have this
0:31:36 asymmetric power to do things against these big powers. And in this case, we’re talking about
0:31:41 centralized big gatekeepers. And so you can not only punch above your weight, but you can actually
0:31:44 take that leveling ability of the internet and deploy it.
0:31:49 You know, as a 24, 25, 26 year old, I’m not going to be the one that’s going to be like
0:31:54 keynoting conferences and this and that. But like, can I write something awesome that then ends
0:31:59 up on the front page of Hacker News or, you know, ends up in Reddit and a lot of people forward
0:32:04 around or whatever. I would, you know, look at my different logs from people visiting the blog
0:32:07 and people who are subscribing. What I would see is I would often see a whole bunch of people
0:32:11 from a single startup all signed up at the same time because they found an article that they
0:32:15 liked. And once I talked to them, it was clear that they were forwarding, you know, a particular
0:32:18 essay around and then people were subscribing as a result of that.
0:32:22 So tell me about how you came to newsletters. Like, what made you add the newsletter?
0:32:26 When I first started, I didn’t really, I actually wasn’t thinking at all about,
0:32:30 you know, how do I sort of keep users over a long time? You know, I just thought of it as like,
0:32:35 let’s just create a one time spike of users because I write something cool and then I’ll
0:32:38 create another spike and I’ll create another spike. And so, you know, one day I remember
0:32:42 I crossed a thousand and I was like, wow, that’s amazing. And then I crossed 10,000 and then I
0:32:49 crossed 50,000. At one point, I had almost 100,000 RSS subscribers, which is amazing,
0:32:57 except that is literally when Google Reader got shut down. I know RIP, Google Reader. And what
0:33:02 I realized with that was maybe emails actually the right way, you know, because I thought like,
0:33:06 well, should I focus on growing my Twitter following? Should I spend a lot of time on
0:33:11 Quora, which I did. But what I realized was like, look, you know, email is this thing that’s open
0:33:16 and durable. And so that’s my primary focus in terms of building an audience is newsletters and
0:33:21 email. And actually think of my blog, the actual web pages themselves as like landing pages to grow
0:33:26 my email newsletter. That’s a fantastic inversion of the conventional wisdom. And what I love about
0:33:30 what you said though is that both, which I also love personally is that RSS is the backbone that
0:33:34 also drives podcasting ecosystem. And the difference in this case, though, is that people,
0:33:39 Google Reader was a central choke point because that was actually the one mainstream RSS reader
0:33:43 that so many people use, which is why that was such an issue, because otherwise it’s an open
0:33:48 ecosystem, just like email is. But in your case, where you can’t get your people who are the
0:33:53 subscribers out of RSS, your email list is portable. You can take it with you wherever you go.
0:34:00 That’s right. Yeah. I applaud Andrew’s point there about the authoritative writer, because I
0:34:08 find that the quality that I come to value most in pieces of writing is honesty. And
0:34:15 you can only really be honest about something if you know it absolutely thoroughly. It doesn’t mean
0:34:21 that you can’t write about things simply by investigation, but it means that the best pieces
0:34:24 are the writings that come out of your life. That’s actually the thing that I think brought
0:34:29 us together, Robert, is that you have a bias for that. And I also did. So when I was at Wired,
0:34:33 and especially when I came to A6 and Z, the fundamental thesis that I used to shift our
0:34:39 editorial model was, why are we diluting the expert’s voices through reported stories when
0:34:44 you can just hear from the expert on quantum computing or the expert on bio, on podcasting,
0:34:50 the authenticity that you get from sharing your raw unfiltered insights and voice.
0:34:53 I would argue that newsletters and podcasting are most the exact same thing because
0:34:58 they’re both have this illusion of one-on-one communication, but they’re actually one to many.
0:35:03 Robert, tell me the backstory of the browser and how you started the thing.
0:35:10 Well, let’s wind ourselves back to 2007. It all started on a cold rainy night.
0:35:18 It all started on the hot New York Dave because I was running the editorial side of Economist.com.
0:35:24 And it was the time when Internet 2.0 was bedding down and the Economist was
0:35:33 moving its center of gravity from the print paper alone. And it was introducing new features,
0:35:40 dedicated content, first blogs, reader comments onto the website. And so I thought, well,
0:35:47 it’s actually quite hard work doing new things in a large established company. Why don’t I cut loose
0:35:54 and start something? So together with a friend, we decided we would start Vox 10 years in advance.
0:35:56 You were trying to do an explainer type of thing?
0:36:02 We were trying to speed up the Economist from a weekly to a daily rhythm, I would say.
0:36:07 But if you remember the timing of this, I’m afraid we then had the financial crack.
0:36:07 Right.
0:36:10 Everybody flatlined and the question suddenly became,
0:36:19 what can I do with no money sitting in my pajamas? And the answer to that was, I could read.
0:36:26 The browser is a daily newsletter recommending five recent pieces of writing of lasting value.
0:36:32 The more I realized that it was actually a very valuable service because there was a
0:36:38 fantastic amount of good writing being published free online. But there was an even more fantastic
0:36:45 amount of dross being published around it, which obscured it. So simply going to find
0:36:53 point to and praise the good writing was really useful. And now, 10 years later, five million
0:36:58 pieces of reading later, I feel like I’ve invented inadvertently the best job on earth.
0:37:04 That’s fantastic. Do you mind sharing some quick behind the scenes tips or tricks that you use
0:37:09 for when you think about what makes a cut for the browser? I look at a thousand things a day,
0:37:14 which is to say, I look at the headline, I start to read and it’s usually when it loses my interest.
0:37:21 That’s almost rule number one. If it doesn’t start well, the chances are vanishingly small
0:37:26 that it will improve later. Turn this a wise to this. They know they’ve got to get it at the
0:37:31 first sentence. So if they don’t, then it’s not happening. One of the things I did at Wired was
0:37:36 I use chart beat to see where readers dropped off. And that made me very strongly think about those
0:37:42 first three paragraphs and nut graph. I literally thought about getting the reader to get just
0:37:46 enough that they would go to the next paragraph and the next paragraph. So the beginning, what else?
0:37:52 And the other question I ask myself is, is this still going to be a good piece to read in six,
0:37:59 12, 24 months time? So you go for evergreenness. Lasting value, right? Lasting value.
0:38:07 And I also think that we place far too much of a premium on recency in journalism. I mean,
0:38:14 you never hear anybody say, I don’t want to see that film. It was made last year. But we do train
0:38:20 ourselves to think that today’s journalism is what we must have. And yesterday’s journalism
0:38:26 is kitty litter or wrapping your fish and chips. And I think that is the instincts that were embedded
0:38:33 into us by the legacy publishing industry, where you had to buy the new thing, the new newspaper,
0:38:39 and to make room for it, you had to throw out the old one. But if you’ve got a good piece by
0:38:46 Joan Didion or James Baldwin that was written 40 or 50 or 60 years ago, that’s going to be better
0:38:55 than 99.9999% of the pieces written this year. Okay. So any final parting thoughts for our audience?
0:39:02 Yeah, I think in five years, we’re going to have a convergence of listening and translation
0:39:09 and algorithmic summarization so that I’m going to be listening on my AirPods to summaries of the
0:39:16 news from the entire world around all the time. I am actually waiting for the day that we’re going
0:39:22 to have a one person media company that is worth a billion dollars. We saw this with software,
0:39:27 right? We saw that you can have these really small teams, you know, that build Instagram,
0:39:31 that build Tumblr. And I think it is inevitable that in the very early days of all this that
0:39:36 we’re going to end up with like a video streamer or like a podcaster that’s really just like one
0:39:40 person. I mean, we already have Joe Rogan making quite a fair amount. Yeah, Joe Rogan and like,
0:39:44 you know, obviously Ben Thompson on the BDB side. And it’s going to be like New York Times,
0:39:50 Walsh Your Journal, and then like the like, you know, amazing newsletter writer, and it’s going
0:39:56 to be wild. I’m so excited for that world. I just think that we’re going to live in a world
0:40:03 that’s so much better and more truthful, but also kind of weirder and richer. I think the like net
0:40:08 effect where a greater share of the media we consume and therefore the lens through which
0:40:13 people see the world is actually not just going to transform people’s reading habits,
0:40:17 it’s going to transform society if done right. That’s fantastic. Well, thank you guys for joining
0:40:23 the A6NZ podcast. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. I love the show and it’s a real
0:40:24 thrill to be here as well. Thank you.
0:00:10 one of my favorite topics. It’s all about reading and writing and much more. Our special guests
0:00:15 are Robert Cattrell, the founder and editor of the browser, which is a very popular newsletter that
0:00:21 shares five pieces of writing worth reading every day and which we discuss as an example of the
0:00:26 changing web today. Our other special guest is Chris Best, the CEO of Substack, which makes it
0:00:31 simple for writers to start an email newsletter or podcast that makes money from subscriptions if
0:00:36 they like, but more broadly is really a platform for voices and audiences to connect with each other.
0:00:40 And finally, we have General Partner Andrew Chen, who’s been leading a lot of investments on our
0:00:45 consumer team into new media, gaming, and marketplaces. In this hallway-style jam, which took
0:00:50 place over an informal meetup in person recently, we cover writers and writing, readers and reading,
0:00:55 including all the forms that may now take today, business models for creators, and where new delivery
0:01:00 mechanisms and tools come in. I also ask Andrew and Robert to quickly share their stories of
0:01:05 how they built their content outlets. But we begin by going around the table, Ron Robbins-style,
0:01:10 to share a quick pulse check on where publishing is today, how we got here, and where we’re going.
0:01:17 Nils Bohr said that science advance is one funeral at a time. And I say that publishing
0:01:23 advance is one bankruptcy at a time. I think we’ve known for some years that you can’t really
0:01:28 finance good writing with bad advertising. It seemed inevitable to me that, as and when
0:01:34 the technology falls into place, that we’re going to see a shift in market power away from
0:01:40 publications towards writers. Now, I’ve been looking at a thousand pieces of writing a day.
0:01:46 That sums to somewhere between three and five million pieces of writing. So one thing that I’ve
0:01:55 deduced from all that time reading is that the best possible predictor of the value of a piece
0:02:03 of writing is the writer. Now, that might seem like an absurdly obvious thing to say, but the whole
0:02:09 strategy of the publishing industry up until now is to persuade you that the value lies in the
0:02:15 publication, the brand, that that’s the guarantee of quality. That’s what you should pay. That’s
0:02:24 what you should be loyal to. The quality of writing varies far more within any one publication
0:02:32 than does the quality of a given writer’s writing across publications. So if I want to read
0:02:37 Susan Orlean, I don’t care whether she’s writing in Harper’s or the New Yorker or the Financial
0:02:45 Times. So the ideal for me would be in some way to be able to subscribe directly to
0:02:51 Susan Orlean or Tani Easycoats or any good to great writer, stay with them,
0:02:58 pay them, feel a relationship with them. I think what really got me excited is all of a sudden
0:03:04 seeing folks like you and Ben Thompson from Stratechery and other kind of individuals really
0:03:08 figure out how to build a whole business model behind it and do it really full-time.
0:03:15 Wow, that is actually like a complete alternative to the ad-supported media model that really has
0:03:19 been with us for like hundreds of years at this point. In the early days, people would just,
0:03:24 as soon as they had steam-powered printing presses, this was like in the early 1800s,
0:03:28 at first you had a bunch of folks overcharging nine cents per issue and then actually the
0:03:35 predecessor to the penny presses would basically sell advertising, sell the actual issues for one
0:03:39 cent, and then all of a sudden that was like, “Holy shit, you’re actually giving it away,
0:03:44 basically.” And it was very powerful to have this ad-supported model. You fast forward hundreds
0:03:52 of years later, and now we are seeing some of the tools to actually build from a brand new
0:03:58 foundation, a new ecosystem that’s based on people writing primarily based on their passion.
0:04:02 We’re seeing this in writing and newsletters, but we’re obviously also seeing that in the
0:04:07 way that people are setting up e-commerce shops and Shopify. There’s a lot happening in video
0:04:11 streaming. There’s a lot happening in video games. There’s a lot happening in podcasting,
0:04:15 and the list goes on and on, that there’s this new ecosystem that’s really based on the direct
0:04:21 relationship between consumers and the content creators and these tools that facilitate that.
0:04:26 And I’m very bullish that there can be an ecosystem that’s as big as the media ecosystem,
0:04:29 but completely based on these new technologies enabled by the internet, et cetera, et cetera.
0:04:36 I think what you said about the bad incentive structures of ad-supported media is interesting.
0:04:42 Craig Maude calls them attention monsters, which is a very colorful term that I love.
0:04:47 I think that you do track this progression where ad-supported media has been with us for a long
0:04:53 time, but I think we’re hitting a turning point where attention monsters, ad-supported media has
0:04:59 eaten up enough of people’s attention that there’s just no more to go. With the smartphone,
0:05:04 things are demanding all of your attention all the time. The next frontier as somebody who wants
0:05:10 to regain control of their mind is to be thoughtful about what you want to put in there,
0:05:13 what you want to be reading. That’s one of the things that people love about the browser,
0:05:19 is it’s a way to regain some signal in the noise of what I’m going to read, what I’m going to
0:05:24 focus my attention on, and not let it be dictated by an algorithm that’s selected by somebody that
0:05:29 I greatly trust. I love that you’re saying that, because when I think of the evolution of the
0:05:33 internet, Chris Anderson coined the long tail and how there’s going to be this inevitable
0:05:38 shift from the big head to the long tail. People would not only go to a blockbuster
0:05:43 to find the hits, but that they would find the niche movies that they love. You have infinite
0:05:47 shelf space on the internet. Then the funny thing happened after that, which is that we had a little
0:05:54 of too much long tail. I think it became cluttered in the first wave of Web 2.0. Now we’re seeing
0:05:59 this shift to a more curated, artisanal thing. What I think is really interesting about what all
0:06:03 three of you are saying is it’s an intersection, as you’re saying, Robert, of people now finding
0:06:08 people, not just brands, as Chris is saying, the incentive structures being aligned. As Andrew is
0:06:13 saying, that we are now entering a world where people can find the right business models to
0:06:19 do this. That’s what was lacking in that first wave. As a reader, there’s no possible way you can
0:06:23 keep abreast of everything that’s happening and make some rational choice about what you spend
0:06:29 your time on. At best, you’re choosing which filters you want to see the world through.
0:06:35 If you choose to see the world through algorithmic-driven feeds who make their
0:06:41 money by keeping you maximally addicted, there’s going to be some predictable result to that on
0:06:46 your life. Whereas if you choose to put your faith in people who you have some sort of relationship
0:06:51 in, some sort of trust in, who have some sort of motivation, either to serve you well or just
0:06:56 beyond caring about you at all, that just care about quality and care about interesting things,
0:07:04 you’ll get different results. I think it’s fair enough to say that any platform or publication
0:07:14 that proposes to personalize your experience is going to game you one way or another. I try to
0:07:21 accept that the browser is simply my choice, my sensibility, and to stay firm with that,
0:07:28 to avoid as far as possible analytics, which will tell me what, because I’m otherwise in danger
0:07:32 of giving people what they want. If I may say you recently had us hide, how many links people
0:07:38 clicked, you had us hide it from the UI for you so that you could more effectively live by that.
0:07:45 There was a bit of me that felt, shouldn’t we be kind of like jolly-ing up a bigger click-through
0:07:52 rate somehow, which would mean popularization. But then I thought, no, because I don’t think of
0:07:58 myself as a curator, that’s what happens in museums. I think of myself as a critic and like a
0:08:04 theater critic or a music critic. So I’m pointing to a piece of writing and I’m saying, I think this
0:08:09 is worthy of your attention. And here’s why I think it’s worthy of your attention, and then giving
0:08:15 you enough of a flavor of it for you to make the decision as to whether or not you go and read it.
0:08:21 So actually, if people are happy to pay for the browser as a newsletter, I’ve started to
0:08:27 think of that as a measure of success. But yes, seeing which articles provoked click-throughs
0:08:33 and which didn’t, it was seductive. It was alluring. When you go to any publication, any website,
0:08:39 whether it’s the BBC or the FT or the New England Journal of Medicine, you’ll find that
0:08:48 the outlying most read stories are always the lobster that spoke Italian or the hamster that
0:08:53 ate my baby or something. It’s always the sensational things, even within the most distinguished of
0:08:57 places. Can I take the opposite side of that though, because coming on the other side of media
0:09:02 and the writing side, I would say that right now it’s sad how little information writers have
0:09:07 about their work. I’ve actually sent a lot of my friends to Substack because they get very limited
0:09:11 data streams. Their audiences are sprinkled all across the board, especially if you’re a freelancer
0:09:14 across like 20 different outlets. If you’re trying to follow a person, it’s kind of a bummer
0:09:20 because what’s missing right now in the ecosystem is this matchmaking between this amazing curatorial
0:09:27 or critical ability to your phrase, Robert, with the ability to actually market and put your ideas
0:09:31 out there in a way that reaches the audience. And so you have this divide where there’s a lot of
0:09:36 writers who are really talented, who don’t know how to connect with their audiences, don’t have the
0:09:41 tools to do it. One of the really common threads when I hear about folks who’ve kind of built their
0:09:47 own audiences, you know, resonated with what you just said, is I find that there ends up being
0:09:53 this huge focus on the quality of the work as opposed to purely the metrics and the audience
0:09:58 around the work. I think it’s actually common for really two reasons. One is you end up needing to
0:10:04 be motivated intrinsically as opposed to extrinsically. I think the second thing though as well is
0:10:11 if you end up creating a business model around your work that is based on the interest and
0:10:15 the passion of your audience to consume your stuff, then what ends up happening is the quality of
0:10:20 your audience actually matters. Whether or not you really engage people deeply and your building
0:10:24 relationships over a long period of time actually matters because those are the folks that are
0:10:31 actually most likely to open their wallets as opposed to something like the traditional advertising
0:10:36 model that really incentivizes a lot of people driving past a billboard, right? And that’s a
0:10:41 very different kind of strategy. What’s really interesting about you said, Andrew, is that when
0:10:45 you think about this as part of the about selling and matching and creating this audience that you
0:10:50 want, I think what that means is not about the writer, it puts the reader back at the center.
0:10:55 Kevin Kelly in his book, The Inevitable, talks about this future, which he thinks is inevitable,
0:11:00 where we’ll be able to invert our attention. And this goes to your point about broken incentives,
0:11:07 where instead of people selling our attention, we as audiences will be able to sell our audience,
0:11:13 chip to people. It’s like negative interest rates of the attention economy. Oh, I love that.
0:11:21 I’m very optimistic about the future of reading. We’ve been doing it for upwards of 3,000 years,
0:11:28 and we’re not going to stop now. I’m very, very curious to see what kind of a revolution,
0:11:32 really good machine translation is going to wreak upon our reading universes when
0:11:40 that becomes free. I’ve been doing quite a lot of work with a computer science startup in London,
0:11:46 and I’ve been so massively impressed by the quality of machine translation. I’m talking here
0:11:53 about paid cloud based neural network driven machine translation, which at the moment is
0:11:59 quite expensive. But to me, the results that it delivers are stunning. You can read a large
0:12:03 chunk of German into English or Spanish into English without knowing that you’re reading a
0:12:09 translation. The best news magazine in the world right now is Dash Beagle. It’s as good as time
0:12:15 and news we were in the golden age. I get a lot of my daily news now from Gazette of Aborture,
0:12:19 which I thought was going to tell me sort of lots of little things about Poland, but it’s
0:12:26 actually a really good newspaper. That’s only going to get better. And because all five majors
0:12:31 and then some are all competing at that same high level of machine translation, it’s going to get
0:12:37 commoditized. It’s going to be free. So really good, almost invisible machine translation will
0:12:44 simply drop silently into Google news, Apple news level of reading, and suddenly we’ll be reading
0:12:49 the whole world without even knowing it. So I love that vision, but to me, that sounds like a
0:12:55 crazy explosion, which brings us back to this web where there’s looking for seeking the signal and
0:12:59 the noise. And I want to think about centering it in the reader’s experience. This is one of the
0:13:03 big motivations for why I was interested in starting Substack. It’s not, I’m not a writer.
0:13:10 It’s as a reader. As a reader, I am fed up with this feeling that there’s a mill, you know,
0:13:17 water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. There’s a million things that I could be reading,
0:13:22 and yet I find myself in these dark patterns where I’m sort of obsessively checking my
0:13:29 Twitter feed against my better judgment. And I just want there to be a better way for me to
0:13:35 see the world through the written word and to pay for the people that are creating something better.
0:13:40 We think of this thing as having two sides to it. There’s the writer side being able to
0:13:47 speak directly to your audience, not being mediated by an algorithm, getting funded directly
0:13:51 by your audience because they trust you. And so you have sort of aligned incentives. That’s all
0:13:55 really great. But the other side of this is you have to have willing readers. You have to have
0:14:00 readers who subscribe directly to voices they trust. Today, for a lot of people that’s happening
0:14:05 in their email app or in their RSS reader, if you’re a little bit old school.
0:14:12 I think the RSS is the most undervalued thing in the entire universe. But lately I’ve been
0:14:18 taking more newsletters. I’m generally frightened of my email. My inbox is full of claims on my
0:14:25 time and I hate to go there. But newsletters are actually a very efficient way of getting the
0:14:31 greatest hits from producers. When I think about why I like email in that way, I think the answer is
0:14:40 that it comes to me. And I think the same is true about audio. It comes to me. Two or three years
0:14:46 ago I thought of listening to a book as being lower status than reading the book. But now I
0:14:53 don’t. Reading the book is every bit as good. I’m equally if not more happy listening to things
0:15:02 as I am reading them. Airpods may be the most consequential Apple product since the iPhone.
0:15:09 You used to talk about always on and now we can talk about always in. So we can be permanently
0:15:16 in a world of listening. And as a matter of fact, when I hear Elon Musk talking about neural
0:15:21 implants, that actually strikes me as a relatively small practical leap. You’re just moving the
0:15:27 metal and other inch of your ear canal. And that kind of funny way that meshes with what I like
0:15:34 about Substep is I live on my RSS reader. I would argue that the borders between the newsletter,
0:15:39 email, audio, podcasting is all just going to blur up. I actually believe that people will start
0:15:44 distributing written articles and audio form in podcasting because it’s about having ear share,
0:15:48 which is basically the best form of mind share because you’re essentially in people’s heads
0:15:53 quite physically. And if you get your neural implant feature, you will really be in people’s
0:15:56 heads. And so I think that’s a big part of it. I would also argue when you think about that
0:16:00 this is a golden age of reading, I think that’s absolutely true of TV and entertainment as visual
0:16:04 literature these days. I think of games as like immersive books. There’s no difference. I think
0:16:09 it’s actually a short blip in our human history that we’ve had to arbitrarily divide these media
0:16:13 when in fact they are really fame at the core. Yeah. If you kind of imagine stack of authoring,
0:16:19 publishing, community and monetization that should exist for almost any kind of new modality,
0:16:25 whether that is audio and podcast, even something like video, it should be that for whatever is
0:16:29 your jam, whatever is the kind of content that you’re into building, there’s going to be these
0:16:34 stacks that are end up being built. I think we’ll see those kinds of tools for almost every media
0:16:42 type. But how do we monetize? I think we’ve already dismissed bad advertising. We’ve had a real
0:16:48 resurgence of science publishing thanks to Foundation Money, Simons. Oh, right, like Quanta,
0:16:56 Magazine, Nautilus, Eonmag, Bridgetnames. Exactly. So, individual and institutional
0:17:03 philanthropy. But if you think in terms of selling directly, then your orders of magnitude are going
0:17:10 to be somewhere between the hundreds and the million readers. I mean, the economist has a
0:17:16 circulation of a million, the New Yorker likewise. So, they may not be the same million, but that’s
0:17:23 roughly the number you can hope to hit at the very, very top of your game. Now, a lot of the
0:17:29 things that have happened so far, at least at the fundable end of the internet, the numbers have
0:17:36 always had to begin with a B. So, it’s possible to have meaningful changes in the architecture
0:17:43 of writing and monetizing and reading, even for that up to one million scale of readers that I
0:17:48 think the universe accommodates. You’re basically saying that people now today, given the right
0:17:55 tools, can actually make a good living without having to be the size of a major traditional
0:18:00 media outlet. Oh, from the writer’s point of view, the economics are transformationally better.
0:18:08 If you measure the writer’s footprint, let’s say by their following on Twitter, any good
0:18:13 byline journalist in a major publication can have a Twitter following in the tens of thousands.
0:18:18 And if they work at it, they can push it up to the hundreds and the millions. So, some
0:18:28 tiny fractional conversion of that footprint into paying readers, let us say that hypothetically,
0:18:36 Susan Orlean publishes an original piece of writing and offers it for sale at $5. Well,
0:18:41 this seems to me to be a wholly reasonable price. And then the question becomes, are there
0:18:47 a thousand people who would read that? Are there 10,000 people who would want it? And at that point,
0:18:54 you’re getting returns to the writer in this thought experiment of $50,000 for one piece
0:18:58 to which they still own all of the rights. I think there’s one subtle point there,
0:19:03 which is it’s certainly true that if you have a dedicated audience that loves the work,
0:19:09 you have a relatively small number of people paying you cash, whether it’s a subscription,
0:19:13 whatever, and the economics work out very well, right? You have a thousand true fans or a couple
0:19:20 thousand people paying $50, $100 a year, that adds up really quickly. And the thing that is subtle
0:19:26 there to me is that the kind of work you do, if that’s the outcome you want, is different than
0:19:32 the kind of work you do if you have to get a million clicks. And so it’s not just a question of,
0:19:37 I have one piece of writing and either I could go and monetize it by putting it on clickbait,
0:19:40 or I could go and sell it to a bunch of really thoughtful people who might pay me for it.
0:19:46 When you choose the funding model of people who actually deeply value the work, the kinds of
0:19:51 things you can create are fundamentally different. I love that. And you can fund work that otherwise
0:19:58 would not exist. One of the most motivating things that I hear is I’m getting to do work that I want
0:20:02 to do that I think is valuable for the world, that’s valuable for my readers, that my readers tell me
0:20:09 that they love, that would have been impossible at my last job. That unlocks entirely new types of
0:20:13 things that we’re not even seeing from the talents and the voices and the people that we want to
0:20:18 follow by having find a business model that people can monetize these things. And I think of
0:20:24 it as a market failure that that doesn’t already exist. If there’s 10,000 people out there that
0:20:28 want to read some writer and that writer really wants to write the kind of work that those people
0:20:33 would love to have, and yet it’s not happening because we have a bad business model, that’s a
0:20:39 huge net loss for the world that’s totally unnecessary. Just to add to Chris’s point,
0:20:44 I think one of the sort of starkest differences in this is the way that you apply business metrics
0:20:49 to the traditional media model versus one where it’s based on subscribers. In the traditional
0:20:56 media model, almost everybody ends up measuring their monetization based on a CPM or an RPM,
0:21:00 whatever you want to call it basically. Cost per meal. Exactly, a cost per meal. So basically,
0:21:06 the idea is how much money are you making per thousand impressions of the ad? It’s not like
0:21:10 you’re developing a relationship. It’s not about the people. It’s literally an impression.
0:21:15 It’s literally, again, driving past the billboard. And I think that’s very interesting in contrast
0:21:19 to a world of subscription where you’re really thinking about it as, well, what percentage
0:21:26 of my audience are subscribers? How many subscribers do they have? And I think, interestingly,
0:21:30 with that terminology, it really humanizes that the business model actually matches
0:21:36 what you’re really trying to do, which is to develop this ongoing audience and relationships
0:21:41 with individuals because it’s about people as opposed to just the fact that they looked at
0:21:45 something. I mean, I’m going to use an analogy from the enterprise world when we think about the
0:21:51 days of on-prem computing and then we move to subscription software as a service or aka SaaS.
0:21:54 That was a very huge shift because in the olden days of companies,
0:21:59 you would do this big million-dollar contract upfront. Someone would be fancy in your office
0:22:04 installing it and managing the relationship and walking the hallways and you had a crap,
0:22:09 crap product like 99% of the time. But in the new model of SaaS, it created a model where
0:22:15 subscribers, to your point, Andrew, could choose to leave if they didn’t like something.
0:22:19 You actually feel vulnerable when you hear the word “subscribing” because you think that it means
0:22:23 people can leave you. And the reality is you don’t have them in the first place when you’re not
0:22:27 subscribed. But secondly, when you do have them, you have more ways to offer them more things.
0:22:31 Because as we found in the SaaS model, people who had to do better to make sure people stayed
0:22:35 subscribed and then on top of it, a majority of subscribers would then pay for more things
0:22:39 because they just kept wanting more and more. It was a cross-sell, upsell, etc. So when you
0:22:42 think of the enterprise model of that, I think it’s a very interesting analogy for what’s actually
0:22:47 happening in consumer of this. It aligns incentives, which is the key thing. And if you take Robert’s
0:22:52 point that in writing, you care a lot about the individual writer and if you like one piece they
0:22:56 write, you’re likely to continue to really want to follow everything they write in this analogy.
0:23:00 I suppose you’re a happy SaaS customer and that’s not how I would phrase it, but I think the
0:23:05 analogy holds there. I think the reason I’m just emphasizing this is that we tend to underestimate
0:23:10 how important delivery models are. When you combine the delivery infrastructure with the medium
0:23:14 and the ability of the internet, and then you have this creation on both sides, creation and
0:23:19 consumption unlocked, when you combine those three things, magic can really happen. Where technology
0:23:26 can really make an impact on the life of creators is really, you think about an entire media
0:23:32 operation. You have a bajillion people in a single room and how do you squeeze that into a
0:23:39 really easy to use software stack that lets you do all those functions, but empower a single person
0:23:44 working from a coffee shop to just run an entire media operation on their own. I do think that
0:23:51 what is fascinating about having this existing content industry and structure is they’re both
0:23:57 aggregation points for audiences, but they also become gatekeepers. And then on the flip side,
0:24:02 if you are a star within the industry, if you are somebody who has really, really built an
0:24:08 audience, the chances that you’ve built a business model that truly allows you to creatively do 100%
0:24:13 of what you want to do, as opposed to, I think we’re in a funny place where sometimes if you’re
0:24:18 the top writer, maybe at a publication, you’re generating a lot more value than you’re actually
0:24:22 capturing. What ends up happening is a lot of that value that’s being created is, of course,
0:24:27 it’s being grabbed to subsidize the rest of the folks that may not be there, because we want a
0:24:31 level playing field. But what’s interesting in a completely open marketplace is obviously,
0:24:36 for the folks that choose to do that, they can then build and own this audience that they can
0:24:42 keep for a lifetime, which is how I feel about my blog audience. The second piece is how does this
0:24:47 get to consumers in a way where they’re able to experience it in the best light? You have this
0:24:51 layer of interactions with your audience, and then there’s the monetization layer and the business
0:24:55 models that we’ve talked about, which subscription is just one out of many, many, many different
0:25:00 options. What I often end up seeing and something I’ve experimented with myself is you have subscription,
0:25:09 but then ultimately, you also run conferences, you sell premium education, you consult for Fortune
0:25:13 500 companies, there’s a list of all of these different things. I’m curious for your guys’
0:25:17 thought on community. To me, what’s amazing is that the browser essentially has a community
0:25:23 of people, and what I was noticing is it’s like birds of a feather. Robert, one of the things
0:25:27 that you and I are both chuckling about is how you and I have been trying to meet up for ages,
0:25:31 and you’re like, “Oh, Sonal, I met with Tyler,” and he’s saying, “Hey, Sonal,
0:25:37 you met with Kevin, we’re talking about mutual friends.” We haven’t tried explicitly to develop
0:25:47 more of a community vibe. We also sense that our subscribers want their privacy to be respected.
0:25:52 That may be a misjudgment, but that, for the time being, is our sense. But shared reading habits
0:25:58 are a very powerful bond, and I think at present, they’re underexploited. We certainly see this
0:26:05 effect in other publications where the people who follow a given writer or creator, especially the
0:26:10 people who love them enough to pay for them, tend to be birds of a feather and tend to…
0:26:11 Yes, exactly.
0:26:17 As soon as you give them a space to talk, form a natural community, we’ve started adding some
0:26:23 very basic community discussion forum threads. The activity we see in there is very strong,
0:26:29 but more importantly, the tenor of the discussion that you see is different than other things that
0:26:32 tend to happen on the internet. I bet you they’re high quality, right? They’re not like crap comments.
0:26:37 It’s the exact opposite of YouTube comments, basically. You have people that are interested
0:26:41 in the same thing, that are actually reading the thing, that already feel like they’re sort of
0:26:46 have a shared sensibility, as you say. And I think there’s space to create profoundly positive
0:26:49 internet communities around content creators.
0:26:50 I agree. I don’t think we should give up on this.
0:26:56 The other thing that I think is true about all good online communities is that I suspect you need
0:27:01 a benevolent dictator to make them work. Someone that just sets the tone, sets the culture,
0:27:06 and you have a natural person to do that when you have a writer who wants to foster a community.
0:27:09 I used to always fight with my colleagues about this at Wired, because they would always say,
0:27:12 “Never read the comments. That’s like a known thing on the internet.”
0:27:15 I had the best comment sections on my pieces, and what I would do is I would go in
0:27:18 and tell people when I had trolls and be like, “Hey, can you please…”
0:27:22 The minute I just showed my presence, they immediately settled down and behaved,
0:27:25 and then they would go like 300, 400 comments deep.
0:27:28 I think we’ve given up too soon on this, and when you go back to this idea of Kevin Kelly’s
0:27:32 true fans, the point that people never bring up in his original article about it,
0:27:36 is he talks about the power of it connecting you to other nodes in that network,
0:27:39 and that to me is a really powerful thing, and I think it’s still early days.
0:27:42 We should not give up on the so-called comment section of the internet.
0:27:48 So my variation of this is I really love meeting people offline that are readers,
0:27:51 whether it’s events or conferences or dinners. I felt like growing up,
0:27:53 it was like, “You should never meet anybody off the internet.”
0:27:56 And then I’m like, “I exclusively meet people off the internet.”
0:28:02 So I think one of the really interesting things there is that in the content that I’m writing,
0:28:05 that I really think of it as I’m writing for the group of people,
0:28:08 and then what ends up happening is I serendipitously,
0:28:12 as a result of doing the writing, it becomes this really scalable,
0:28:14 enhanced form of professional networking.
0:28:18 And so I think one of the things that’s helpful in thinking about it that way is,
0:28:23 I think it does really hone your authenticity around who is this really for,
0:28:26 like your readers, your customers, or people that you’re going to end up seeing,
0:28:29 and so you’re probably not going to push out a bunch of filler,
0:28:32 drivel, because then you’re going to be embarrassed when you see them in a coffee
0:28:36 shop coming up, et cetera. But I think what ends up happening in the digital realm,
0:28:41 that’s really powerful, is that there’s probably enough other weird people,
0:28:44 now that the internet has billions of monthly actives,
0:28:48 that you’re going to be able to find them and connect with them.
0:28:52 And one way in which to think about that is you’re a writer and you’re interacting with
0:28:56 your readers, but I think the other way, which we talk a lot about,
0:29:01 you’re putting out the bat signal for the people that are the same kind of weird as you,
0:29:07 right? And inevitably, you’re able to pull together a set of real life relationships
0:29:09 where the discovery happens in this kind of digital realm.
0:29:13 Yeah. Andrey, actually, tell me about how you got to your blog and your newsletter.
0:29:14 How many years has it been around for you?
0:29:17 I’ve been writing, I think, for 12 years now in the Bay Area.
0:29:22 If you go all the way back, I was as a teenager, one of those people that kept a journal.
0:29:24 And so the first couple of blogs I did were just like for fun.
0:29:27 They’re just more, you know, kind of here’s my day.
0:29:30 Back in the day when blogging first came out, it was really a bit more about that.
0:29:34 But my favorite format actually was like a link blog.
0:29:36 And so I would just like find cool links from across the internet,
0:29:38 purely like curation, right? Back in the day.
0:29:40 But when I moved to the Bay Area in 2007,
0:29:43 I decided to make a professional blog.
0:29:45 And that’s ultimately what ended up sticking.
0:29:50 I was an entrepreneur in residence working at another firm and I would just write down
0:29:54 interesting conversations I was having, interesting factoids I was learning.
0:29:57 And at the time it was super funny because again, this is 2007,
0:30:02 people would literally ask me, like, why are you writing all of your insights
0:30:04 and like publishing it? Like that’s your edge.
0:30:05 Why are you giving away your edge?
0:30:08 Oh, interesting. That seems like so amazing that people would actually think that.
0:30:09 That’s what people thought. Yeah, exactly.
0:30:12 And it’s funny, of course, because now a decade later,
0:30:15 it’s funny how like it’s completely diametrically shifted.
0:30:18 It’s also kind of ironic because looking over here at Chris and Substack,
0:30:23 if you had done it today, you would have actually been able to
0:30:26 do some of those for free, but also get others to pay for some of the really
0:30:30 specialized things if you really wanted to, which you didn’t have the ability to do at the time.
0:30:34 That’s right. That’s right. I basically just added my friends from Seattle.
0:30:40 I added my mom, I added my sister, and then I just got to like tens of thousands of RSS subscribers.
0:30:43 And so what ended up happening after that was it’s becoming this chore or whatever.
0:30:45 I actually took a two year break.
0:30:50 And so now I actually have completely flipped the other way where I basically
0:30:56 think that starting a blog was the single most important decision that I made in my 20s.
0:30:59 It’s the thing that sort of unlocked a lot of other opportunities.
0:31:06 And I tell people, instead of spending two hours at a conference or going out and doing a
0:31:12 bazillion coffee networking, if you just sit down and you take the time to write down some of the
0:31:16 really amazing, you know, conversations or articles or whatever that you’re reading,
0:31:19 like that just scales. It lasts forever. I mean, I have people reading articles from
0:31:24 like eight or nine years ago that I wrote and finding them useful, which is just fantastic.
0:31:27 I think of it as a little bit like guerrilla warfare actually. War is a very dangerous thing.
0:31:31 This is a positive thing. But the whole point of that type of warfare is that you have this
0:31:36 asymmetric power to do things against these big powers. And in this case, we’re talking about
0:31:41 centralized big gatekeepers. And so you can not only punch above your weight, but you can actually
0:31:44 take that leveling ability of the internet and deploy it.
0:31:49 You know, as a 24, 25, 26 year old, I’m not going to be the one that’s going to be like
0:31:54 keynoting conferences and this and that. But like, can I write something awesome that then ends
0:31:59 up on the front page of Hacker News or, you know, ends up in Reddit and a lot of people forward
0:32:04 around or whatever. I would, you know, look at my different logs from people visiting the blog
0:32:07 and people who are subscribing. What I would see is I would often see a whole bunch of people
0:32:11 from a single startup all signed up at the same time because they found an article that they
0:32:15 liked. And once I talked to them, it was clear that they were forwarding, you know, a particular
0:32:18 essay around and then people were subscribing as a result of that.
0:32:22 So tell me about how you came to newsletters. Like, what made you add the newsletter?
0:32:26 When I first started, I didn’t really, I actually wasn’t thinking at all about,
0:32:30 you know, how do I sort of keep users over a long time? You know, I just thought of it as like,
0:32:35 let’s just create a one time spike of users because I write something cool and then I’ll
0:32:38 create another spike and I’ll create another spike. And so, you know, one day I remember
0:32:42 I crossed a thousand and I was like, wow, that’s amazing. And then I crossed 10,000 and then I
0:32:49 crossed 50,000. At one point, I had almost 100,000 RSS subscribers, which is amazing,
0:32:57 except that is literally when Google Reader got shut down. I know RIP, Google Reader. And what
0:33:02 I realized with that was maybe emails actually the right way, you know, because I thought like,
0:33:06 well, should I focus on growing my Twitter following? Should I spend a lot of time on
0:33:11 Quora, which I did. But what I realized was like, look, you know, email is this thing that’s open
0:33:16 and durable. And so that’s my primary focus in terms of building an audience is newsletters and
0:33:21 email. And actually think of my blog, the actual web pages themselves as like landing pages to grow
0:33:26 my email newsletter. That’s a fantastic inversion of the conventional wisdom. And what I love about
0:33:30 what you said though is that both, which I also love personally is that RSS is the backbone that
0:33:34 also drives podcasting ecosystem. And the difference in this case, though, is that people,
0:33:39 Google Reader was a central choke point because that was actually the one mainstream RSS reader
0:33:43 that so many people use, which is why that was such an issue, because otherwise it’s an open
0:33:48 ecosystem, just like email is. But in your case, where you can’t get your people who are the
0:33:53 subscribers out of RSS, your email list is portable. You can take it with you wherever you go.
0:34:00 That’s right. Yeah. I applaud Andrew’s point there about the authoritative writer, because I
0:34:08 find that the quality that I come to value most in pieces of writing is honesty. And
0:34:15 you can only really be honest about something if you know it absolutely thoroughly. It doesn’t mean
0:34:21 that you can’t write about things simply by investigation, but it means that the best pieces
0:34:24 are the writings that come out of your life. That’s actually the thing that I think brought
0:34:29 us together, Robert, is that you have a bias for that. And I also did. So when I was at Wired,
0:34:33 and especially when I came to A6 and Z, the fundamental thesis that I used to shift our
0:34:39 editorial model was, why are we diluting the expert’s voices through reported stories when
0:34:44 you can just hear from the expert on quantum computing or the expert on bio, on podcasting,
0:34:50 the authenticity that you get from sharing your raw unfiltered insights and voice.
0:34:53 I would argue that newsletters and podcasting are most the exact same thing because
0:34:58 they’re both have this illusion of one-on-one communication, but they’re actually one to many.
0:35:03 Robert, tell me the backstory of the browser and how you started the thing.
0:35:10 Well, let’s wind ourselves back to 2007. It all started on a cold rainy night.
0:35:18 It all started on the hot New York Dave because I was running the editorial side of Economist.com.
0:35:24 And it was the time when Internet 2.0 was bedding down and the Economist was
0:35:33 moving its center of gravity from the print paper alone. And it was introducing new features,
0:35:40 dedicated content, first blogs, reader comments onto the website. And so I thought, well,
0:35:47 it’s actually quite hard work doing new things in a large established company. Why don’t I cut loose
0:35:54 and start something? So together with a friend, we decided we would start Vox 10 years in advance.
0:35:56 You were trying to do an explainer type of thing?
0:36:02 We were trying to speed up the Economist from a weekly to a daily rhythm, I would say.
0:36:07 But if you remember the timing of this, I’m afraid we then had the financial crack.
0:36:07 Right.
0:36:10 Everybody flatlined and the question suddenly became,
0:36:19 what can I do with no money sitting in my pajamas? And the answer to that was, I could read.
0:36:26 The browser is a daily newsletter recommending five recent pieces of writing of lasting value.
0:36:32 The more I realized that it was actually a very valuable service because there was a
0:36:38 fantastic amount of good writing being published free online. But there was an even more fantastic
0:36:45 amount of dross being published around it, which obscured it. So simply going to find
0:36:53 point to and praise the good writing was really useful. And now, 10 years later, five million
0:36:58 pieces of reading later, I feel like I’ve invented inadvertently the best job on earth.
0:37:04 That’s fantastic. Do you mind sharing some quick behind the scenes tips or tricks that you use
0:37:09 for when you think about what makes a cut for the browser? I look at a thousand things a day,
0:37:14 which is to say, I look at the headline, I start to read and it’s usually when it loses my interest.
0:37:21 That’s almost rule number one. If it doesn’t start well, the chances are vanishingly small
0:37:26 that it will improve later. Turn this a wise to this. They know they’ve got to get it at the
0:37:31 first sentence. So if they don’t, then it’s not happening. One of the things I did at Wired was
0:37:36 I use chart beat to see where readers dropped off. And that made me very strongly think about those
0:37:42 first three paragraphs and nut graph. I literally thought about getting the reader to get just
0:37:46 enough that they would go to the next paragraph and the next paragraph. So the beginning, what else?
0:37:52 And the other question I ask myself is, is this still going to be a good piece to read in six,
0:37:59 12, 24 months time? So you go for evergreenness. Lasting value, right? Lasting value.
0:38:07 And I also think that we place far too much of a premium on recency in journalism. I mean,
0:38:14 you never hear anybody say, I don’t want to see that film. It was made last year. But we do train
0:38:20 ourselves to think that today’s journalism is what we must have. And yesterday’s journalism
0:38:26 is kitty litter or wrapping your fish and chips. And I think that is the instincts that were embedded
0:38:33 into us by the legacy publishing industry, where you had to buy the new thing, the new newspaper,
0:38:39 and to make room for it, you had to throw out the old one. But if you’ve got a good piece by
0:38:46 Joan Didion or James Baldwin that was written 40 or 50 or 60 years ago, that’s going to be better
0:38:55 than 99.9999% of the pieces written this year. Okay. So any final parting thoughts for our audience?
0:39:02 Yeah, I think in five years, we’re going to have a convergence of listening and translation
0:39:09 and algorithmic summarization so that I’m going to be listening on my AirPods to summaries of the
0:39:16 news from the entire world around all the time. I am actually waiting for the day that we’re going
0:39:22 to have a one person media company that is worth a billion dollars. We saw this with software,
0:39:27 right? We saw that you can have these really small teams, you know, that build Instagram,
0:39:31 that build Tumblr. And I think it is inevitable that in the very early days of all this that
0:39:36 we’re going to end up with like a video streamer or like a podcaster that’s really just like one
0:39:40 person. I mean, we already have Joe Rogan making quite a fair amount. Yeah, Joe Rogan and like,
0:39:44 you know, obviously Ben Thompson on the BDB side. And it’s going to be like New York Times,
0:39:50 Walsh Your Journal, and then like the like, you know, amazing newsletter writer, and it’s going
0:39:56 to be wild. I’m so excited for that world. I just think that we’re going to live in a world
0:40:03 that’s so much better and more truthful, but also kind of weirder and richer. I think the like net
0:40:08 effect where a greater share of the media we consume and therefore the lens through which
0:40:13 people see the world is actually not just going to transform people’s reading habits,
0:40:17 it’s going to transform society if done right. That’s fantastic. Well, thank you guys for joining
0:40:23 the A6NZ podcast. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. I love the show and it’s a real
0:40:24 thrill to be here as well. Thank you.
We’ve been financing good writing with bad advertising — and “attention monsters” (to quote Craig Mod) for way too long. So what happens when the technology for creators finally falls into place? We’re finally starting to see shift in power away from publications as the sole gatekeepers of talent, towards individual writers. Especially when the best possible predictor of the value of a piece of writing is, well, the writer. The publication’s brand is no longer the guarantee of quality, or the only entity we should be paying and be loyal to, when a new ecosystem is forming around the direct relationship between consumers, content creators, and the tools and business models to facilitate all this.
So where do readers come in… how do they find signal in the noisy world of drive-by billboard advertising, “attention-monster” feeds, and the death of Google Reader? Particularly as machine learning-based translation, summarization, and other mediums beyond text increasingly enter our information diets, for better and for worse?
This episode of the a16z Podcast features Robert Cottrell, formerly of The Economist and Financial Times and now editor of The Browser (which selects 5 pieces of writing worth reading delivered daily); Chris Best, formerly CTO of Kik and now co-founder and CEO of Substack (a full-stack platform for independent writers to publish newsletters, podcasts, and more); and Andrew Chen, formerly independent blogger/ newsletter publisher, now also an a16z general partner investing in consumer — all in conversation with Sonal Chokshi. The discussion is all about writing and reading… but we’re not just seeing this phenomenon in newsletters and podcasting, but also in people setting up e-commerce shops, video streaming, and more. Is it possible that the stars, the incentives, are finally aligning between creators and consumers? What happens next, what happens when you get more than — and even less than — “1000 true fans“?
image: Thad Zajdowicz/ Flickr