The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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.”
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: 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.”
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 …”
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…”
Rief: Media consumption will shift from legacy institutions toward individual creators
“I think there is very much a push towards individuals and away from institutions. We're seeing that as a society as a whole, but also within the media world, and so I think that will also rise, and I think news and media in general will get more and more niche…”
Best: Substack's direct subscriber model insulated the platform from advertiser boycotts
“I mean, a big part of it is the business model, right? Like the fact that we was paying subscribers, we didn't have Advertisers who were getting spooked and boycotting us, bringing us under pressure.”
McKenzie: Tech sector believed a billion-dollar company for writers was impossible
“2017, writers were not the sexiest customer base in the world. No one thought they were going to build a billion dollar tech company by serving writers. In fact, people were forsaking writers, forsaking the media, turning their back on that, they'd given up on…”
Best: Audiences refuse to pay for internet content, except for favorites
“I devised this like parlor trick where when somebody told me they would never pay for something on the internet, I would say, well, who's your favorite writer? And they'd say, oh, you know, Guy Raz, or whoever. And then I would say, would you pay five bucks a …”
Best: Substack traffic from Twitter had steadily declined for years by 2023
“By the time it went down, the share of Substack traffic that was coming from Twitter had been on a steady decline for years.”
Best: Substack has surpassed 5 million paid subscriptions
“I think we can say there's over five million now.”
Best: First publisher Bill Bishop made six figures on day one
“Bill's launch happened. And we had no, I had no idea what to expect, but he made like six figures his first day through this like duct taped, like stripe setup that I had built in the preceding weeks.”
Best: Writers rarely realize subscription earning potential until shown the math
“It's surprising how much you have to do that multiplication for people. Like, it's not that they can't do it themselves, it's that they won't do it. And the number of times I've had a conversation that's like, you know, so-and-so has 10,000 subscribers paying,…”
McKenzie: Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear became an early Substack investor
“I remember on the first demo day we did, which is the one that's for YC alumni, Emmett Scheer came up to me and he said, Emmett Scheer, founder of, co-founder of Twitch, who was on the show a couple years ago, yep. Yeah, he's like, I look at you guys, I'm real…”
McKenzie: Substack recruited writers with devoted followings over large overall audiences
“We looked for people that we thought weren't being well served by the dominant media structure, but actually had interesting things to say and had a devoted audience. And so it wasn't necessarily the people with the largest audiences. Maybe they'd have a small…”
Best: Substack grew roughly sixfold during the first year of the pandemic
“I mean, we grew something like six X in that first year of the pandemic.”