Chris Best

You know, I like to, I say there are still gatekeepers, but you can't keep the people in anymore.

You can't lock people in.

You can lock people out, but you can't lock people in.

But the problem was that there wasn't, you know, if you are a creative person, if you are a writer, if you're a journalist, there wasn't necessarily a great way to make money doing the work you believe in.

And if you believe that great media, great culture is valuable, you want there to be a way to make money and to have kind of like a social contract that lets you do the work you really believe in.

And in the early days, sometimes people would accuse us.

They'd say to me in an accusatory tone, they'd say, you know, Substack is just blogging with a business model.

And I'm like, you know, that sounds pretty good, right?

Blogging was this really cool – you know, there was a golden age of blogs that was sort of this intellectual infusion.

But the problem with it was there wasn't really a business model to back it up.

It was things got acquired or things kind of stuffed ads in in a way that didn't really work.

And so you were missing – you know, if you were an ambitious young person who wanted to –

had something to give the world and wanted to make this a career or make this a business, it was hard to see a way to do it.

And there was sort of the legacy media, which was in decline.

And there was kind of this, you know, this new world of social media, which you could potentially get a big audience, but wasn't going to give you a way to...

make money doing the work you believe in.

The paywall is maybe not the core of it, but it is the economic bargain.

And it's – look, I think when you – great companies, in my mind, come from the fusion of a really grand, ambitious idea for the world paired with –

modest but achievable first instantiation of that idea.

And the big idea for this is like, look, you can have a different social contract for media and culture.