The a16z Show - Writers Writing, Readers Reading, Creators Creating

Episode Date: January 27, 2020

We've been financing good writing with bad advertising -- and "attention monsters" (to quote Craig Mod) for way too long. So what happens when the technology for creators finally falls into place? We're finally starting to see shift in power away from publications as the sole gatekeepers of talent, towards individual writers. Especially when the best possible predictor of the value of a piece of writing is, well, the writer. The publication's brand is no longer the guarantee of quality, or the only entity we should be paying and be loyal to, when a new ecosystem is forming around the direct relationship between consumers, content creators, and the tools and business models to facilitate all this.So where do readers come in... how do they find signal in the noisy world of drive-by billboard advertising, "attention-monster" feeds, and the death of Google Reader? Particularly as machine learning-based translation, summarization, and other mediums beyond text increasingly enter our information diets, for better and for worse?This episode of the a16z Podcast features Robert Cottrell, formerly of The Economist and Financial Times and now editor of The Browser (which selects 5 pieces of writing worth reading delivered daily); Chris Best, formerly CTO of Kik and now co-founder and CEO of Substack (a full-stack platform for independent writers to publish newsletters, podcasts, and more); and Andrew Chen, formerly independent blogger/ newsletter publisher, now also an a16z general partner investing in consumer -- all in conversation with Sonal Chokshi. The discussion is all about writing and reading... but we're not just seeing this phenomenon in newsletters and podcasting, but also in people setting up e-commerce shops, video streaming, and more. Is it possible that the stars, the incentives, are finally aligning between creators and consumers? What happens next, what happens when you get more than -- and even less than -- "1000 true fans"? image: Thad Zajdowicz/ Flickr Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. I'm excited because this episode is about one of my favorite topics. It's all about reading and writing and much more. Our special guests are Robert Cottrell, the founder and editor of the browser, which is a very popular newsletter that shares five pieces of writing worth reading every day and which we discuss as an example of the changing web today. Our other special guest is Chris Best, the CEO of Substack, which makes it simple for writers to start an email newsletter or podcast that makes money from subscriptions if they like, but more broadly is really a platform for voices and audiences to connect with each other. And finally, we have general partner Andrew Chen, who's been leading a lot of investments on our consumer team into new media,

gaming, and marketplaces. In this hallway style jam, which took place over an informal meetup in person recently, we cover writers and writing, readers and reading, including all the forms that may now take today, business models for creators, and where new delivery mechanisms and tools come in. I also ask Andrew and Robert to quickly share their stories of how they built their content outlets, but we begin by going around the table Ron Robin style to share a quick pulse check on where publishing is today, how we got here and where we're going. Nils Bohr said that science advances one funeral at a time, and I say that publishing advance is one bankruptcy at a time. I think we've known for some years that you can't really finance good writing with bad advertising.

it seemed inevitable to me that as and when the technology falls into place that we're going to see a shift in market power away from publications towards writers. Now, I've been looking at a thousand pieces of writing a day. That sums to somewhere between three and five million pieces of writing. So one thing that I've deduced from all that time reading is that the best possible predictor of the value of a piece, of writing is the writer. Now, that might seem like an absurdly obvious thing to say, but the whole strategy of the publishing industry up until now is to persuade you that the value lies in the publication, the brand, that's the guarantee of quality, that's what you should pay, that's what you should be loyal to. The quality of writing varies far more

within any one publication than does the quality of a given writer's writing across publications. So if I want to read Susan Orlean, I don't care whether she's writing in Harper's or the New Yorker or the Financial Times. So the ideal for me would be in some way to be able to subscribe directly to Susan Orlean or Tanehesey Coates or any good to great writer. stay with them, pay them, feel a relationship with them. I think what really got me excited is all of a sudden seeing folks like you and Ben Thompson from Straterey and other kind of individuals really figure out how to build a whole business model behind it and do it really full time. Wow, like that is actually like a complete alternative to the ad-supported media model that really has been with us for like hundreds of years at this point.

you know, in the early days, people would just, you know, as soon as they had steam-powered printing presses, this was like in the, you know, early 1800s. At first, you had a bunch of folks that were charging, you know, nine cents per issue. And then actually the predecessor to the penny presses would basically sell advertising, sell the actual issues for one cent. And then all of a sudden, that was like, holy shit, you're actually giving it away basically. Yeah. And it was very powerful to have this ad-supported model. You know, you fast forward hundreds of years later. And now we are seeing, some of the tools to actually like build from a brand new foundation, a new ecosystem that's based on people writing, primarily based on like their passion. We're seeing this in writing and newsletters, but we're obviously also seeing that in the way that people are setting up e-commerce shops and Shopify.

There's a lot happening in video streaming. There's a lot happening in video games. There's a lot happening in podcasting. And the list goes on and on that there's this new ecosystem that's really based on the direct relationship between consumers. and the content creators and these tools that sort of facilitate that. And I'm very bullish that there can be an ecosystem that's as big as the media ecosystem, but completely based on these new technologies enabled by the internet, et cetera, et cetera. I think what you said about the bad incentive structures of ad-supported media is interesting.

Craig Maud calls them attention monsters, which is a very colorful term that I love. And I think that you do track this progression where ad-supported media has been with us for a long time. But I think we're sort of hitting a turning point where attention monsters, ad support media has eaten up enough of people's attention that there's just no more to go. Like with the smartphone, things are demanding all of your attention all the time. And so the next frontier as somebody who wants to sort of regain control of their mind is to be thoughtful about what you want to put in there, what you want to be reading. That's one of the things that people love about the browser is it's a way to sort of regain some signal in the noise of what I'm going to read,

what I'm going to focus my attention on and not let it be dictated by an algorithm, but selected by somebody that I greatly trust. I love that you're saying that because when I think of the evolution of the internet, you know, Chris Anderson coined the long tail and how there's like going to be this inevitable shift from like the big head to the long tail. And so people would not only go to a blockbuster to find like the hits, but that they would find like the niche movies that they love. You have infinite shelf space on the internet.

But then the funny thing happened after that, which is that we had a little of too much long tail. And so I think it became kind of cluttered in the first wave of Web 2.0. And now we're seeing the shift to a more curated kind of artisanal thing. And so what I think is really interesting about what all three of you are saying is it's an intersection, as you're saying, Robert, of people now finding people, not just brands. As Chris is saying, the incentive structure is being aligned. And as Andrew is saying that we are now entering a world where people can find the right business model. to do this. And that's what was lacking in that first wave. Yeah. As a reader, there's no possible way you can keep abreast of everything that's happening

and sort of make some sort of rational choice about what you spend your time on. You're choosing, at best, you're kind of choosing which filters you want to see the world through. And if you choose to see the world through, you know, algorithmic-driven feeds who make their money by keeping you maximally addicted, there's going to be some predictable result to that on your life, whereas if you choose to put your faith in people who you have some sort of relationship in, some sort of trust in, who have some sort of motivation, either to serve you well or just beyond caring about you at all that just care about quality and care about interesting things, you'll get different results. I think it's fair enough to say that any platform or publication

that proposes to personalize your experience is going to game. you one way or another. I try to accept that the browser is simply my choice, my sensibility, and to stay firm with that, to avoid as far as possible analytics, which will tell me what, because I'm otherwise in danger of giving people what they want. If I may say, you recently had us hide, how many links people clicked, you had us hide it from the UI for you so that you could more effectively live by that. There was a bit of me that felt, shouldn't we be kind of jollying up a bigger click-through rate somehow, which would mean popularization.

But then I thought, no, because I don't think of myself as a curator. That's what happens in museums. I think of myself as a critic and like a theatre critic or a music critic. So I'm pointing to a piece of writing and I'm saying, I think this is worthy of your attention. and here's why I think it's worthy of your attention and then giving you enough of a flavour of it for you to make the decision

as to whether or not you go and read it. So actually if people are happy to pay for the browser as a newsletter, I've started to think of that as a measure of success. But yes, seeing which articles provoked click-throughs and which didn't, it was seductive, it was alluring. When you go to any publication, any website, whether it's the BBC or the FD,

or I've known out the New England Journal of Medicine, you'll find that the outlying most read stories are always the lobster that spoke Italian or the hamster that ate my baby or something. You know, it's always the sensational things, even within the most distinguished of places. Can I take the opposite side of that, though, because coming on the other side of media on the writing side,

I would say that right now it's sad how little information writers have about their work. I've actually sent a lot of my friends to Substack because they get very limited data streams, their audiences are sprinkled all across the board, especially if you're a freelancer across like 20 different outlets. If you're trying to follow a person, it's kind of a bummer because what's missing right now in the ecosystem

is this matchmaking between this amazing curatorial or critical ability to your phrase, Robert, with the ability to actually market and put your ideas out there in a way that reaches the audience. And so you have this divide where there's a lot of writers who are really talented, who don't know how to connect with it, their audiences, don't have the tools to do it.

One of the really common threads when I hear about folks who've kind of built their own audiences that, you know, resonated with what you just said is I find that there ends up being this huge focus on the quality of the work as opposed to purely the metrics and the audience around the work. I think it's actually common for really two reasons. One is you end up needing to be motivated intrinsically as opposed to extrinsically. I think the second thing, though, as well is if you end up creating a business model around your work that is based on the interest and the passion of

your audience to consume your stuff, then what ends up happening is the quality of your audience actually matters. Whether or not you really engage people deeply and your building relationships over a long period of time actually matters because those are the folks that are actually most likely to open their wallets, as opposed to something like the traditional advertising model that really incentivizes like a lot of people driving past a billboard, right? And that's a very different kind of strategy. What's really interesting about you said, Andrew, is that when you think about this is partly about selling and matching and creating this audience that you want, I think what that means is not about the writers. It puts the reader back at the center. Kevin Kelly in his book,

The Inevitable, talks about this future, which he thinks is inevitable, where we'll be able to invert our attention. And this goes to your point about broken incentives, where instead of people selling our attention, we as audiences will be able to sell our audience chip to people. It's like negative interest rates of the attention economy. Oh, I love that. I'm very optimistic about the future of reading. We've been doing it for upwards of 3,000 years and we're not going to stop now. I'm very, very curious to see what kind of a revolution, really good machine translation is going to wreak upon our reading universes when that becomes free. I've been doing quite a lot of work with a computer science startup in London, and I've been so massively impressed by the quality

of machine translation. I'm talking here about paid cloud-based neural network-driven machine translation, which at the moment is quite expensive. But to me, the results that it delivers are stunning. You can read a large chunk of German into English or Spanish into English without knowing that you're reading a translation. The best news magazine in the world right now is Desh Beagle. It's as good as time and news we were in the golden age. I get a lot of my daily news now from Gazette Viborcha, which I thought was going to tell me sort of lots of little things about Poland, but it's actually a really good newspaper. That's only going to get better. And because all five majors and then some are all competing at that same high level for machine translation.

It's going to get commoditized. It's going to be free. So really good, almost invisible machine translation will simply drop silently into Google News, Apple News level of reading and suddenly we'll be reading the whole world without even knowing it. So I love that vision, but to me, that sounds like a crazy explosion, which brings us back to this web where this looking for seeking the signal and the noise. And I want to think about centering it and the reader's experience. This is one of the big motivations for why I was interested in starting substack. It's not, I'm not a writer. It's as a reader. As a reader, I am fed up with this feeling

that there's a million, you know, water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink. There's a million things that I could be. There's a million things that I could be reading. And yet, I find myself in these dark patterns where I'm sort of obsessively checking my Twitter feed against my better judgment. And I just want there to be a better way for me to see the world through the written word and to pay for the people that are creating something better. We think of this thing as having two sides to it. There's the writer side being able to, you know, speak directly to your audience, not being mediated by an algorithm, getting funded directly by your audience because they trust you. And so you have sort of aligned incentives. That's all really great. But the other side of

this is you have to have willing readers. You have to have readers who subscribe directly to voices they trust. Today, for a lot of people that's happening in their email app or in their, you know, RSS reader if you're a little bit old school. I think the RSS is the most undervalued thing in the entire universe. But lately, I've been taking more newsletters. I'm generally frightened of my email. My inbox is full of claims on my time and I hate to go there. But newsletters are actually a very efficient way of getting the greatest hits from producers. When I think about why I like email in that way, I think the answer is that it comes to me. Yes, exactly. And I think the same is true about audio. It comes to me. Two or three years ago, I thought of listening to a book as being lower status than

reading the book. But now I don't. Reading the book is every bit as good. I'm equally, if not more happy, listening to things as I am reading them. AirPods may be the most consequential Apple product since the iPhone. You used to talk about always on and now we can talk about always in. So we can be permanently in a world of listening. And as a matter of fact, you know, when I hear Elon Musk talking about neural implants, that actually strikes me as a relatively small practical leap. You're just moving the metal and other inch up your ear canal. And that kind of, in a funny way, that meshes with what I like about substep, because I live on my RSS reader. I would argue that the borders between the newsletter, email, audio, podcasting is all just going to blur up. I actually believe

that people will start distributing written articles in audio form in podcasting, because it's about having earshare, which is basically the best form of mind share because you're essentially in people's heads quite physically. And if you get your neural implant future, you will really be in people's heads. And so I think that's a big part of it. I would also argue when you think about that this is a golden age of reading. I think that's absolutely true of TV and entertainment as visual literature these days. I think of games as like immersive books. There's no different. I think it's actually a short blip in our human history that we've had to arbitrarily divide these media when in fact they are really fame at the core. Yeah. If you kind of imagine stack of authoring, publishing,

community and monetization that should exist for almost any kind of new modality, whether that is audio and podcast. Even something like video, it should be that for whatever is your like jam, whatever is the kind of content that you're into building, there's going to be these stacks that end up being built. I think we'll see those kinds of tools for almost every media type. But how do we monetize? I think we've already dismissed bad advertising. We've had a real research of science publishing thanks to foundation money. Oh, right, like Quanta, magazine, Nautilus, EonMag, Bridget Haynes. So individual and institutional philanthropy.

But if you think in terms of selling directly, then your orders of magnitude are going to be somewhere between the hundreds and the million readers. I mean, the economist has a circulation of a million, the New Yorker likewise. So they may not be the same million, but that's roughly the number you can hope to hit at the very, very top of your game. Now, a lot of the things that have happened so far, at least at the fundable end of the internet,

the numbers have always had to begin with a B. So it's possible to have meaningful changes in the architecture of writing and monetizing and reading, even for that up to one million scale of readers. that I think the universe accommodates. You're basically saying that people now today, given the right tools, can actually make a good living

without having to be the size of, like, a major traditional media outlet. Oh, from the writer's point of view, the economics are transformationally better. If you measure the writer's footprint, let's say, by their following on Twitter, any good byline journalist in a major publication can have a Twitter following

in the tens of thousands, and if they work at it, they can push it up to the hundreds and the millions. So some tiny fractional conversion of that footprint into paying readers, let us say that hypothetically, Susan Orlean publishes an original piece of writing and offers it for sale at $5. Well, this seems to me to be a wholly reasonable price, And then the question becomes, are there a thousand people who would read that? Are there 10,000 people who would want it? And at that point, you're getting returns to the writer in this thought experiment of $50,000 for one piece to which they still own all of the rights.

I think there's one subtle point there, which is it's certainly true that if you have a dedicated audience that loves the work, you can have a relatively small number of people paying you cash, whether it's a subscription, whatever, and the economics work out very well, right? You have your 1,000 true fans or a couple thousand people paying 50, 100 bucks a year. That adds up really quickly. And the thing that is subtle there to me is that the kind of work you do if that's the outcome you want is different than the kind of work you do if you have to get a million clicks. And so it's not just a question of I have one piece of writing,

and either I could go and monetize it by putting it on clickbait, or I could go and sell it to a bunch of really thoughtful people who might pay me for it. When you choose the funding model of people who actually deeply value the work, the kinds of things you can create are fundamentally different. I love that. And you can fund work that otherwise would not exist. One of the most motivating things that I hear is I'm getting to do work that I want to do that I think is valuable for the world that's valuable for my readers,

that my readers tell me that they love, that would have been impossible at my last job. that unlocks entirely new types of things that we're not even seeing from the talents and the voices and the people that we want to follow by having finally a business model that people can monetize these things. And I think of it as a market failure that that doesn't already exist. If there's 10,000 people out there that want to read some writer and that writer really wants to write the kind of work that those people would love to have, and yet it's not happening because we have a bad business model, that's a huge just net loss for the world that's totally. be unnecessary. Just to add to Chris's point, well, I think one of the sort of starkest differences in this is the way that you apply business metrics to the traditional media model versus one where it's based on subscribers. In the traditional media model, almost everybody ends up measuring their monetization based on, you know, a CPM or an RPM, you know, whatever you want to call it, basically. Cost per meal. Exactly. A cost per meal. So basically the idea is like,

how much money are you making per thousand impressions of the ad? It's, not like you're developing a relationship. It's not about the people. It's literally an impression. It's literally, again, driving past the billboard. And I think that's very interesting in contrast to a world of subscription where you're really thinking about it as, well, what percentage of my audience are subscribers? How many subscribers do they have? And I think, you know, interestingly, like with that terminology, it really humanizes that the business model actually matches, you know, what you're really trying to do, which is to develop this ongoing audience and relationships. with individuals, because it's about people as opposed to, you know, just the fact that they looked at something.

I mean, I'm going to use an analogy from the enterprise world. When we think about the days of on-prem computing and then we move to subscription software as a service, aka SaaS, that was a very huge shift because in the olden days of companies, you would do this big million-dollar contract up front. Someone would be fancy in your office installing it and managing the relationship and walking the hallways. And you had a crap, crap product, like 99% of the time. But in the new model of SaaS, it created a model where subscribers, to your point, Andrew, could choose to leave if they didn't like something.

You actually feel vulnerable when you hear the word subscribing because you think that it means people can leave you. And the reality is you don't have them in the first place when you're not subscribed. But secondly, when you do have them, you have more ways to offer them more things. Because as we found in the SaaS model, people had to do better to make sure people stay subscribed. And then on top of it, a majority of subscribers would then pay for more things because they'd just kept wanting more and more. It was like cross-sell, upsell, et cetera. So when you think of the enterprise model of that, I think it's a very interesting analogy for what's actually happening in consumer of this. It aligns incentives, which is the key thing. And if you take Robert's point

that in writing, you care a lot about the individual writer. And if you like one piece they write, you're likely to continue to really want to follow everything they write. In this analogy, I suppose you're a happy SaaS customer. That's not how I would phrase it, but I think the analogy analogy holds there. I think the reason I'm just emphasizing this is that we tend to underestimate how important delivery models are. When you combine the delivery infrastructure with the medium and the ability of the internet and then you have this creation on both sides, creation and consumption unlocked, when you combine those three things, magic can really happen. Where technology can really make an impact on the life of creators is really, you think about an entire media operation.

You have a bazillion people like in a single room. And how do you kind of squeeze that into a really easy-to-use software stack that lets you kind of do all those functions, but empower like a single person working from a coffee shop to just like run an entire media operation on their own. I do think that what is fascinating about having this existing kind of content industry and structure is they're both aggregation points for audiences, but they also become gatekeepers ultimately, right? Exactly. And then on the flip side, if you are a star within the industry. If you are somebody who has really, really built an audience, the chances that you've built a business model that truly allows you to creatively do 100% of what you want to do,

as opposed to, you know, I think we're in a funny place where sometimes like, if you're the top writer, maybe at a publication, you're generating a lot more value than you're actually capturing. You're right. What ends up happening is a lot of that value that's being created is, you know, of course, it's being grabbed to sort of subsidize the rest of the folks that may not be there. So, you know, because we want kind of a level playing field. But what's interesting is, a completely open marketplaces, obviously, for the folks that choose to do that, they can then build and own this audience that they can keep for a lifetime, which is how I feel about my blog audience. The second piece is how does this get to consumers in a way where they're able to

experience it in the best light? You have this layer of interactions with your audience. And then there's the monetization layer and the business models that we've talked about, which, you know, subscription is just one out of many, many, many different options, right? What I often end up seeing and something I've experimented with myself is you have subscription, but then ultimately, you know, you also, you run conferences, you sell premium education, you, you know, you consult for Fortune 500 companies. You know, there's like a list of all these different things. I'm curious for your guys this thought on community. To me, what's amazing is that the browser essentially has a community of people. And what I was noticing is it's like birds of a feather.

Robert, one of the things that you and I were both chuckling about is how you and I have been trying to meet up for ages. And you're like, oh, Sonal, I met with Tyler and he's saying, hey, Sonal, you met with Kevin. We're talking about mutual friends. We haven't tried explicitly to develop more of a community vibe. We also sense that our subscribers want their privacy to be respected. That may be a misjudgment, but that for the time being is our sense. But shared reading habits are a very powerful bond. and I think of present, they're under-exploited. We certainly see this effect in other publications where the people who follow a given writer, a creator,

especially the people who love them enough to sort of pay for them, tend to be birds of a feather and tend to... Yes, exactly. As soon as you give them a space to talk, kind of form a natural community, we've started adding some very basic sort of community discussion forum threads. And the activity we see in there is very strong, but more importantly, the sort of tenor of the discussion that you see is different than other things that tend to happen on the internet.

I bet you they're high quality, right? They're not like crap comments. It's the exact opposite of YouTube comments, basically. You have people that are interested in the same thing, that are actually reading the thing that already feel like they're sort of have a shared sensibility, as you say. And I think there's space to create profoundly positive internet communities around contact creators. I agree. I don't think we should give up on this. The other thing that I think is true about all good. at online communities is there, I suspect you need a benevolent dictator to make them work. Someone that just sets the tone, sets the culture. And you have a natural person to do that when you have a writer who wants to foster a community. I used to always fight with my colleagues about this at Wired because they would always say, never read the comments. That's like a known thing on the

internet. I had the best comment sections on my pieces. And what I would do is I would go in and tell people when I had trolls and be like, hey, can you please not? The minute I just showed my presence, they immediately settled down and behaved. And then they would go like 300. 400, 400 comments deep. I think we've given up too soon on this. And when you go back to this idea of Kevin Kelly's true fans, the point that people never bring up in his original article about it is he talks about the power of it connecting you to other nodes in that network. And that to me is a really powerful thing. And I think it's still early days. We should not give up on the so-called comment section of the internet. So my variation of this is I really love meeting people offline that are readers, whether it's

events or conferences or dinners. I felt like growing up, it was like you should never meet anybody off the internet. And then I'm like, I exclusively meet people off the internet. And so I think one of the really interesting things there is that in the content that I'm writing, that I really think of it as I'm writing for the group of people. And then what ends up happening is I serendipitously, as a result of doing the writing, it becomes this really scalable, enhanced form of professional networking. And so I think one of the things that's helpful in thinking about it that way is I think it does really hone your authenticity around who is this really full. like your readers, your customers are people that you're going to end up seeing.

And so you're probably not going to push out a bunch of filler, drivel, because then you're going to be embarrassed when you see them in a coffee shop coming up, etc. But I think, you know, what ends up happening in the digital realm that's really powerful is that there's probably enough other weird people now that the internet has like billions of monthly actives that you're going to be able to like find them and, you know, and connect with them. And, you know, one way in which to think about that is your writer and you're interacting with your readers. But I think the other way, which we talk a lot about, you're putting out the bat signal for the people that are the same kind of weird as you. Right. And inevitably,

you're able to pull together a set of real-life relationships where the discovery happens in this kind of digital realm. Yeah. Andrew, actually, tell me about how you got to your blog and your newsletter. How many years has it been around for? Yeah, I've been writing, I think, for 12 years now in the Bay Area. If you go all the way back, I was as a teenager, one of those people that, like, kept a journal. And so the first couple blogs I did were just like for fun. They're just more, you know, kind of here's my day. Back in the day when blogging first came out, it was really a bit more about that. But my favorite format, actually, was like a link blog. And so I would just like find cool links from across the internet and purely like curation, right? Back in the day. But when I moved to the Bay Area in 2007, I decided to make a professional blog. And that's ultimately what I ended up sticking.

I was an entrepreneur in residence working at another firm, and I would just write down interesting conversations I was having, interesting factoids I was learning. And at the time, it was super funny because, again, this is 2007, people would literally ask me, like, why are you writing all of your insights and, like, publishing it? Like, that's your edge. Why are you giving away your edge? Oh, interesting. That seems like so amazing that people would actually think that. Yeah, that's what people thought. Yeah, exactly. And it's funny, of course, because, you know, now a decade later, it's funny how, like, It's completely diametrically shifted. It's also kind of ironic because looking over here at Chris and Substack, if you had done it today,

you would have actually been able to do some of those for free, but also get others to pay for some of the really specialized things if you really wanted to, which you didn't have the ability to do at the time. That's right. That's right. I basically just added my friends from Seattle. I added my mom. I added my sister. And then I just got to tens of thousands of RSS subscribers. And so what ended up happening after that was it's becoming this chore.

or whatever. I actually took a two-year break. And so now I actually, you know, have completely flipped the other way where I basically think that starting a blog was the single most important decision that I made in my 20s. It's the thing that sort of unlocked a lot of other opportunities. And I tell people, you know, instead of spending two hours at a conference or, you know, going out and doing a bazillion, you know, coffee networking, if you just sit down and you take the time to write down some of the really amazing, you know, conversations or articles or whatever that you're reading. Like, that just scales. It lasts forever. I mean, I have people reading articles from like eight or nine years ago that I wrote and finding them useful, which is just fantastic.

I think of it as a little bit like guerrilla warfare, actually. War is a very dangerous thing. This is a positive thing. But the whole point of that type of warfare is that you have this asymmetric power to do things against these big powers. And in this case, we're talking about centralized big gatekeepers. And so you can not only punch above your weight, but you can actually take that leveling ability of the internet and deploy it. You know, as a 24, 25, 26-year-old, I'm not going to be the one that's going to be like keynoting conferences and this and that. But like, can I write something awesome that then ends up on the front page of Hacker News or, you know, ends up in Reddit and a lot of people

forward it around or whatever. I would, you know, look at my different logs from people visiting the blog and people who are subscribing. What I would see is I would often see a whole bunch of people from a single startup all signed up at the same time because they found an article that they liked. And once I talked to them, it was clear that they were forwarding a particular essay around and then people were subscribing as a result of that. So tell me about how you came to newsletters. Like what made you add the newsletter? When I first started, I didn't really, I actually wasn't thinking at all about, you know, how do I sort of keep users over a long time? You know, I just thought of it as like, let's just create a one-time spike of users because I write something

cool and then I'll create another spike and I'll create another spike. And so, you know, one day I remember I crossed 1,000 and I was like, wow, that's amazing. And then I crossed 10,000 and then I crossed 50,000. And at one point, I had almost 100,000 RSS subscribers. That's huge. Which is amazing, except that is literally when Google Reader got shut down. RIP, Google Reader. I know RIP, Google Reader. And what I realized with that was maybe emails actually the right way, you know, because I thought, like, well, should I focus on growing my Twitter following? Should I spend a lot of time on Quora, which I did? But what I realized was like, look, you know, email is this thing that's open and durable.

And so that's my primary focus in terms of building audiences is newsletters and email. And I actually think of my blog, the actual web pages themselves, as like landing pages to grow my email newsletter. That's a fantastic inversion of the conventional wisdom. And what I love about what you said, though, is that both, which I also love personally, is that RSS is the backbone that I'll supervise podcasting ecosystem. And the difference in this case, though, is that Google Reader was a central choke point because that was actually the one mainstream RSS reader that so many people used, which is why that was such an issue. Because otherwise it's an open ecosystem, just like email is.

But in your case, where you can't get your people who are the subscribers out of RSS, your email list is portable. You can take it with you wherever you go. That's right. Yeah. I applaud Andrew's point there about the authoritative writer. because I find that the quality that I come to value most in pieces of writing is honesty. And you can only really be honest about something if you know it absolutely thoroughly. It doesn't mean that you can't write about things simply by investigation, but it means that the best pieces are the writings that come out of your life.

That's actually the thing that I think brought us together, Robert, is that you have a bias for that. And I also did. So when I was at Wired and especially when I came to A6 and Z, the fundamental thesis that I used to shift our editorial model was, why are we diluting the expert's voices through reported stories when you can just hear from the expert on quantum computing or the expert on bio. On podcasting, the authenticity that you get from sharing your raw, unfiltered insights in voice. I would argue that newsletters and podcasting are most exact same thing because they both have this illusion of one-on-one communication, but they're actually. one to many. Robert, tell me the backstory of the browser and how you started the thing. Well, let's wind ourselves back to 2007. It all started on a cold, rainy night. It all started on a hot New York day because I was running the editorial side of Economist.com and it was the time when Internet 2.0 was bedding down and the economist was moving at the center of gravity from the print paper alone, and it was introducing new features, dedicated content,

first blogs, reader comments onto the website. And so I thought, well, it's actually quite hard work doing new things in a large established company. Why don't I cut loose and start something? So together with a friend, we decided we would start Vox 10 years in advance. You were trying to do an explainer type of thing? We were trying to speed up the economist from a weekly to a daily rhythm, I would say. But if you remember the timing of this, I'm afraid we then had the financial crash. Everybody flatlined and the question suddenly became, what can I do with no money sitting in my pajamas?

And the answer to that was I could read. The browser is a daily newsletter recommending five recent pieces of writing of lasting value. The more I did it, the more I realized that it was actually a very valuable service because there was a fantastic amount of good writing being published free online. But there was an even more fantastic amount of dross being published around it, which obscured it. So simply going to find, point to and praise the good writing was really useful. And now, 10 years later, 5 million pieces of reading later, I feel like I feel like I'm. I invented inadvertently the best job on earth. That's fantastic.

Do you mind sharing some quick behind the scene tips or tricks that you use for when you think about what makes a cut for the browser? I look at a thousand things a day, which is to say, I look at the headline and I start to read and it's usually when it loses my interest. That's almost rule number one. If it doesn't start well, the chances are vanishingly small that it will improve later. Turn this are wise to this. They know they've got to get you at the first sentence. So if they don't, then it's not happening. One of the things I did at Wired was I used chartbeat to see where readers dropped off.

And that made me very strongly think about those first three paragraphs and nut graph. I literally thought about getting the reader to get just enough that they would go to the next paragraph and the next paragraph. So at the beginning, what else? And the other question I ask myself is, is this still going to be a good piece to read in six, 12, 24 months tied. So you go for evergreenness? Lasting value. Lasting value. And I also think that we place far too much of a premium on recency in journalism. I mean, you never hear anybody say, I don't want to see that film. It was made last year. But we do train ourselves to think that today's journalism is what we must

have. And yesterday's journalism is kitty litter or wrapping your fish and chips. And I think That is the instinct that were embedded into us by the legacy publishing industry where you had to buy the new thing, the new newspaper, and to make run for it, you had to throw out the old one. But if you've got a good piece by Joan Didion or James Baldwin that was written 40 or 50 or 60 years ago, that's going to be better than 99.999% of the pieces written this year. Okay, so any final parting thoughts for our audience? Yeah, I think in five years, we're going to have a convergence of listening and translation and algorithmic summarization so that I'm going to be listening on my AirPods to summaries of the news from the entire world around all the time. I am actually waiting for the day that we're going to have a one-person media company that is worth a billion dollars.

We saw this with software, right? We saw that you can have these really small teams, you know, that build Instagram, that build Tumblr. And I think it is inevitable that in the very early days of all this, that we're going to end up with like a video streamer or like a podcaster. That's really just like one person. I mean. We already have Joe Rogan making quite a fair amount. That's right. Yeah. Joe Rogan and like, you know, obviously Ben Thompson on the BDB side. And it's going to be like New York Times, Wall Street Journal. And then like the like, you know, amazing newsletter writer. And it's going to be wild. I'm so excited for that world. I just think that we're going to live in a world that's so much better and more truthful, but also kind of weirder and richer. I think the net effect where a greater share of the media we consume and therefore the lens through which people see the world is actually not just going to transform people's reading habits is going to transform society if done right.

That's fantastic. Well, thank you guys for joining the A6 and Z podcast. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. I love the show, and it's a real thrill to be here. Thank you.