Chris Best
Co-Founder and CEO, Substack. On 4 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
4shows
5appearances
61statements
11resolved
8supported
2contradicted
73%fully supported
9said about them ↓ Everything Chris Best said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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…”
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…”
Best: Platforms should not decide what is right or who to trust
“I don't think our role as a platform on the internet should be to tell you what's right and what's wrong or who to trust and who not to trust. And it's a seductive idea that it should be that role. And a lot of platforms took that stance and it just didn't wor…”
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?”
Best: Ad-supported podcast market is small compared to paid audio
“I think that the podcast market that can be supported by advertising is small and sad compared to the audio market that could be supported if we had an effective way to pay for it.”
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…”
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…”
Best: Substack was pitched to journalists as a media 'getaway vehicle'
“I had this speech that I would give to people at the time. I was like, think of sub stack as your getaway vehicle. You don't have to get in it right now, but like, Fuel it up, have the engine idling, like create your account, like claim your handle, have this …”
Best: Substack does not change content enforcement based on public pressure
“If something comes to our attention that is against the broadly applicable substack rules, we're going to take action. But we're not changing what we enforce based on pressure.”
Chris Best: Substack does not need to raise outside capital again
“We're not running the company to, like, turn a profit, but the thing that is true, and we've kept true pretty much the whole time, is we don't need to raise money again. We're not on this clock. We have, like, we are in control of our financial destiny.”
Best: The shift away from traditional media will not reverse post-pandemic
“COVID has just accelerated that pre-existing trend. And that's something that's not gonna, you're not gonna turn back time on that after that happens.”
Best: Digital media will bifurcate into global juggernauts and niche publications
“No, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think this is the thing you get when the internet creates kind of a global marketplace for things is you want to be the best in the world at something. And that either means being the best in the world by being reall…”
Best: Micropayments fail because decision fatigue outweighs small transaction amounts
“I think that micropayments, as we sort of traditionally think of them as like, I'm going to quickly decide whether I want to spend 20 cents unlocking this thing, just don't work on sort of a fundamental product level. I think when you decide to pay for somethi…”
Best: Direct subscriptions yield higher quality media than engagement algorithms
“A system where people are paying directly to writers they trust is going to create better, more trustworthy content, more trustworthy relationships, more valuable culture at the end of the day than a system where people are trying to like game the engagement a…”
Best: Consumers pay more for single Substack writers than Netflix subscriptions
“People are willing to pay more to subscribe to one writer on Substack than they'll pay for, like, Netflix, because this sort of relationship that they've built up over time reading somebody has so much value to them.”
Best: Imposed content bundles destroy direct reader-writer relationships
“The trick is that you have to do it intelligently. You can't come in and impose bundles on people, because then it kills that golden goose of the direct relationship between readers and writers.”
Best: Market failure causes society to underinvest in cultural creators
“We think there's basically a market failure where all of society would be richer if there was more efficient mechanisms to like allocate more resources to creative people that are making kind of culture writ large”
Best: Media will see a meteoric rise of individual creators
“So I'm not saying that everything's going to be individuals and there's not going to be any big sort of media things, but I think it's going to look like there's a meteoric rise of individual creation.”
Best: Writers should offer their best content for free
“And the advice we give people is basically take your best, most accessible, most focused stuff and make that free. Right? Like make your sort of like your very thoughtful essay on a specific topic free, because that's how people are going to share it. That's h…”
Best: Consumers now prefer paying for high-quality content
“I think the pendulum's really heavily swinging the other way now. Like people that were sort of like my generation were like the least likely to want to pay for stuff. And we are getting increasingly more likely to want to pay. And then younger generations are…”
Best: Newsletters will replace social feeds for news within five years
“I think the answer is it won't replace the social network aspect of it. The thing that Facebook and the social networks are great at is having the relationship between you and like the people, you know, in real life... The part of it that should absolutely be …”
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.”
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…”
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, …”
The other half of the tape: Chris Best's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 4 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 6Marc Andreessen 1
Statements about Chris Best, by other people (2)
McKenzie: Musk offered to buy Substack and make Chris Best Twitter CEO
“And he responded by getting Chris on a call and saying to him, well, how about Twitter acquire Substack, and you, I'm looking for a CEO to run the company.”
McKenzie: Media succeeds when readers replace advertisers as paying customers
“The core insight he had was that you should make readers the customers instead of advertisers the customers. And if you change that core dynamic, especially if you monetize the relationship over time through enough subscription, then different things are possi…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 6
the a16z Podcast 1
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: The Future of Subscription Media, Why Startups Need To Stop Blaming Facebook and Google & How Founders Should Think Through Customer Acquisition Channel Dependencies with Alex Mather, Founder & CEO @ The Athletic
- 20VC: What Is Founder Narrative Fit and How to Detect and Invest In It, How To Avoid Consensus Thinking When Investing, Price Sensititivity; When To Pay Up vs Stay Disciplined & From New York Times To General Catalyst; Why Venture and Journalism are Not S
- 20VC: Lightspeed Partner, Merci Victoria Grace on The Future of Collaboration Tools, Bundling vs Unbundling, Synchronous vs Asynchronous & What It Means To Productise The S*** Out of Venture
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Chris's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Substack | 1 | 18 | 88% 7/8 | full record on How I Built This → |
| a16zLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Substack | 2 | 17 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Substack | 1 | 13 | 100% 1/1 | full record on 20VC → |
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Substack | 1 | 13 | 0% 0/2 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |