Chris Best

Often this is the thing you want when you're making a new product.

It's like, you don't want it to be kind of good for a lot of people.

You want it to be really good for like one person.

And he was that guy.

He had been already writing an email newsletter.

He already had this audience of dedicated business and government people that loved it and had a ton of value in it.

He'd been thinking about charging for it, but he couldn't.

you know, didn't want to mess around with all of the technical details of doing it.

So when we went to him and said, hey, can we just make that happen for you?

He's like, that sounds great.

I would say there's lots of people who have been, to my mind, copying the output who look and say, oh, it's email newsletter publishing, so send an email and charge money.

We can copy that and for cheaper.

And then we've had a couple of iterations of the old Twitter bought a competitor that was like that and then tried to build the feature into, and then after Elon bought it, they tried to build the feature into X.

Facebook spun up a clone for a while called Bulletin and sort of tried to like cargo cult it from my perspective.

I mean, I'm biased, but there's nobody to me that seems to be doing the exact same thing we're trying to do.

The thing that I set my sights on in the world right now is just YouTube.

Because YouTube of the major networks is the closest to being an economic engine for culture.

It actually does pay people.

It has an opinion about how that should work.

And it is just completely enormous and dominant and is in some ways so good.