Chris Best

a really worthwhile idea in technology.

You need to have sort of what I think of as the science fiction vision, sort of a grand, important idea for how the world could be different that actually matters.

And you need to have sort of a humble beginning.

You need to have like a first step that you can actually take soon to be able to

make progress towards that thing.

You don't have to know how it connects, I don't think.

You can have this kind of foggy city on the hill and then you can have this next thing that you do.

You have to have some belief that you're going in the right direction, but you don't have to know where the rest of the path lives.

And as we were arguing, we sort of realized, you know, we were developing this grand science fiction vision, this idea that you could make a new economic engine for culture.

I mean, ultimately to me, it's like, I think you could power a renaissance.

Not as in we would be the ones to do it, but by giving kind of like the tools that the creative class need, you could actually create something that really meaningfully changed the world.

And we had this very simple place to get started, which was this idea of a paid email newsletter.

And there was already people that were doing this in the world.

There was this guy, Ben Thompson, who wrote a thing called Stratechery that was like a tech business newsletter.

You know, he was writing this thing from his bedroom in Taiwan, making millions of dollars a year, sending out this email that people paid for.

And we looked at that and we were like, hey, that's something new and better is getting made and is successful.

Successful in that it makes some money, but also successful in that it's making something that people really value.

And it works today for this person.

And there's no reason it shouldn't work for some more people.

And it is actually a viable kernel of this much larger thing.