Episode Details

I caught up with Substack co-founders Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie at Substack’s office in San Francisco last week. They’re fresh off raising a community fundraising round and launching their social network Notes.

I wrote in March about my decision to invest $5,000 in Substack’s fundraising round, even though the company revealed that it had negative revenue in 2021:

I’m already compromised when it comes to Substack. They’ve made my job possible. And while I already have plenty of financial exposure to Substack’s performance just by dint of running my business on Substack’s platform, I’m eager to have a chance to show my support.

So this is the rare — hopefully singular — interview where I can’t claim true editorial independence. I’m compromised on this one. Still, I think you’ll find it an informative and entertaining conversation. I’m able to bring my perspective as a Substack writer to the conversation and I can’t help but fish for drama and news.

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In our conversation, I asked McKenzie and Best about Twitter’s one-sided war with Substack. Elon Musk has at times throttled links to Substack. It is impossible to imbed tweets in Substack posts anymore.

Adding some intrigue to the tensions, Andreessen Horowitz, Substack’s largest outside investor, is an investor in Musk’s Twitter.

And, Musk actually long ago hired McKenzie, a former PandoDaily reporter, to write for Tesla.

“I try to think about Elon as little as possible,” McKenzie said in our conversation at Substack’s office. “What we’re trying to do here is not build the anti-Twitter or build the anti-Instagram or anything like that. We’re trying to build the first Substack. The vision for what we think it can become is an amazing, beautiful thing and it’s bigger and more important than social media.”

McKenzie acknowledged that “arguably Twitter is trying to kill Substack.”

I asked about newsletter godfather Ben Thompson’s critique of Substack’s community round in his newsletter.

Thompson wrote in April:

We know that valuation because Substack asked its writers to fund a round at the same $650