Chris Best

It's easy to look at it and say, ah, things are – there are lots of problems and nobody trusts these things and look at these negative effects.

I think it's also a time of incredible opportunity.

I think it's – we're in a moment where there's going to – we're going to be building the new world.

Yeah.

And there's not going to be, you don't get a choice of whether or not we get change, but we do get a choice in what kind of change we get.

And that's the thing that motivated me to work on Substack in the first place.

I was the technical co-founder, but my co-founder, Ted Livingston, who was the CEO, it was really his kind of his baby.

And I sort of stumbled into that company.

I met Ted when we were both in university and we started working on it.

Anyway, I won't get too deep into that, but we wound up making this messaging app that got really, really big.

Actually, it got really big twice.

It got really big.

And then BlackBerry, who was a big player at the time, tried to kill us and almost succeeded.

And we built it back up from nothing.

got hundreds of millions of users, raised money from Tencent at a billion dollar valuation.

It was a crazy, wild experience.

I learned a lot about building things that matter.

I learned a lot about how much impact you can have making technology if you do it well.

And I also got this abiding belief that there's a lot of power and responsibility in building these kind of virtual places where people increasingly lead their lives online.

You know, you can't change human nature