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Chris Best

Co-Founder and CEO, Substack · 2 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineer@cjgbest ↗LinkedIn ↗substack.com ↗

Chris Best is the co-founder and CEO of Substack, an online platform providing publishing and subscription monetization tools for independent writers, podcasters, and creators. Before starting Substack in 2017, he co-founded the mobile messaging application Kik Messenger and served as its Chief Technology Officer.

17statements → 5claims → 0claims resolved → 3.76/5average certainty → 2.65/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 1said about them ↓

5 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 2 assertions · 3 opinions · 5 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Chris argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

280 words/min while actually speaking · 7.5 um and uh per 1k words · 17.6 false starts per 1k · 36.8% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Chris Best: only 6 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 6 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 6,525 words across 2 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Chris Best said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Best: Peer review is a mistake driving a crisis of fake science
“I think a lot of science is totally broken. I think that they're like, I think that a lot of the, and I think that the scientific project is incredibly important and one of the most valuable things in history, but that the practice of science and the Current s…”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 38:32 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Best: Liberal media figures bore the brunt of 2020 cancellations
“The people that it really, I think in 20, 20, the thing that surprised me, the people that felt the brunt of that were not conservatives. We're not Republicans necessarily. It was the people in the liberal media. In, you know, in, in, in my telling, I would sa…”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 5:23 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Opinion
Best: TikTok is a Chinese slot machine harmful to democracy
“The elephant in the room is TikTok. It's like this Chinese run slot machine game thing. And the type of people that are attracted to making that thing are not necessarily the ones that are going to Make for the strongest democracy, right?”
Chris Best Feb 6, 2023 ▶ 22:57 The 4th Estate: How Media is Changing in Washington, D.C.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Best: Ousted mainstream journalists boosted Substack's early growth
“The fact that this thing that we were creating this new economic engine for culture that gives you this independence happened to be there at a time where a bunch of the most interesting writers in the world were getting summarily Tossed from their long-time in…”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 5:46 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Insight
Best: Copying legacy social media ad models would break Substack
“And I think there are definitely like the thing that would break Substack is if we just looked at the same way that the legacy social media things built advertising and said, oh, we're just going to copy that. Like that's going to work because And if we did th…”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 22:40 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Disclosure
Best: Free speech is not Substack's primary mission
“I've always seen the free speech thing as sort of an important pillar, but not the main pillar of what Substack is actually setting out to do.”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 3:36 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Insight
Best: Giving users the right to exit forces long-term value creation
“I think the right to exit is really important. People thought that was very dumb. They said, well, if you just let your customers leave, like won't they just leave? And I think in the short run, that might be true, but in the long run, that created the right s…”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 9:23 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Best: Substack plans to build creator sponsorship tools from first principles
“And I think there's a version of unlocking, you know, more economic opportunity, more economic upside that is aligned with the idea of independence, the idea of having differentiated value and quality. And so we're very interested in doing that, but you know, …”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 23:17 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Disclosure
Andreessen: Substack will transform media like VC transformed tech
“This actually reminds me of one of the first things Mark Andreessen ever said to me when we were talking about Substack. He said, you're gonna do to media what the venture capital industry did to software companies or to tech.”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 30:15 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Best: AI and algorithms will supercharge dopamine-driven media
“And I think that that side of media is going to get supercharged. We have very sophisticated AI goon bots now. Is that a good thing? I don't know, but it's happening. And we're going to have that across like, you know, everything, every Short form video, every…”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 34:13 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Opinion
Best: Social media incentive systems pull citizen journalism toward madness
“The sort of social media universe covering, like, this Cambrian explosion of citizen journalism and news, but where the incentive system seemed to create sort of a pull towards madness”
Chris Best Feb 6, 2023 ▶ 5:01 The 4th Estate: How Media is Changing in Washington, D.C.
Insight
Best: Direct audience connections let creators override algorithmic feeds
“And so the direct connection, in addition to being this way, you can bring your audience with you is a way to give humans the power to override the algorithm and say, Hey, I've got this trust relationship with my audience. I want to exercise it and go out on a…”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 10:47 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Insight
Best: Paid Substack publications require a free tier to succeed
“If you want to be successful, if you want to make a successful paid sub stack, you have to have a free sub stack.”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 16:26 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Disclosure
Best: Substack is building a live tool generating multi-format AI media
“We're, we, we're building a live product that basically feels like, you know, I do a, feels like doing a FaceTime call and then magically turns into a highly produced podcast and a YouTube video and a series of short form clips and a transcript. And pretty soo…”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 24:26 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Disclosure
Best: Substack raised $100 million in its recent funding round
“A hundred million.”
Chris Best Sep 2, 2025 ▶ 45:20 Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Best: Media will never return to pre-internet centralized gatekeeping
“We're not gonna not have people able to directly connect with a large audience. That's a change in the world that, you know, put the genie back in that bottle. We're not gonna go to a world where new people can't start their own media empire, start their own c…”
Chris Best Feb 6, 2023 ▶ 13:29 The 4th Estate: How Media is Changing in Washington, D.C.
Insight
Best: Substack aligns monetization with audience trust rather than engagement
“Substack is an attempt to push in the other direction. It's an attempt to say, hey, the way that you win is by earning and keeping the trust of people who deeply value what you do to the point where they might want to pay you.”
Chris Best Feb 6, 2023 ▶ 14:32 The 4th Estate: How Media is Changing in Washington, D.C.

The other half of the tape: Chris Best's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Marc Andreessen 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
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0112026episodes it came up in
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2026 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media Sep 2, 2025 26m
The 4th Estate: How Media is Changing in Washington, D.C. Feb 6, 2023 3m
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