Explaining a16z's Investment in Substack

Armed with a $15.3 million Series A financing by Andreessen Horowitz and plenty of pre-financing traction, Substack has the potential to leverage one of two opportunities. The likely path forward is an organic approach to local media entreprenuers scaling their own region-based media operations, likely competing with other entrepreneur-journalists ... See more

Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi started Substack in 2017, but their history dates back years before. Chris co-founded the anonymous posting app Kik during his third year at the University of Waterloo (2010). He spent the better part of eight years at the company where he met his soon-to-be co-founders. When Chris left Kik in early 201

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In its early days, Substack primarily catered to a certain set of internet-savvy writers and journalists, lured by the promise of monetizing a direct relationship with their readers. But as it morphs from a niche publishing concern into a heavyweight start-up mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook, its user base is proliferating accor... See more

One reason this is personally interesting to me is that I sense a comparable network happening here at Substack, where a huge amount of the value created is flowing to the creators. Now, it's true Substack authors don't participate in the enterprise value of Substack, Inc, but theoretically that could be part of the package through more traditional... See more

Substack has the potential to serve as the tool that captures and monetizes professional journalism in ways that were unforeseen before the advent of publications like Stratechery. But if Substack chooses to become more than a Shopify-like solution for the re-platforming of local news, they may find that the real long-term value of their platform l... See more