Explaining a16z's Investment in Substack

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

... See more

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

I think Substack did a lot to pioneer the subscription model of newsletters. But I think those two models (ads or subscription) leave a lot of writers still without a great business model.