Who are the three founders of Substack and how did they meet?
Substack was founded by Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi. The three met while working at mobile messaging startup Kik Interactive in Waterloo, Ontario, and San Francisco: Best was co-founder and CTO, Sethi was lead platform engineer, and McKenzie was head of communications.
What was Chris Best's life before founding Substack?
Chris Best was born in Canada and studied systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo. He co-founded Kik Interactive in 2009, helping scale the messaging app to hundreds of millions of users before resigning in 2017 to solve the broader crisis in media and public discourse.
What was Hamish McKenzie's background as a journalist?
Hamish McKenzie grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand, and studied English literature and journalism. He worked as an investigative reporter in New Zealand and Hong Kong, covered the Silicon Valley startup boom for tech blog PandoDaily, wrote a book on Tesla, and saw firsthand how pageview metrics degraded journalistic integrity.
What was Jairaj Sethi's role in building the early platform?
Jairaj Sethi was the technical builder who wrote the original Substack code. Sethi designed the ultra-clean publishing editor, the one-click subscriber database, and the seamless integration with Stripe Connect that made publishing and billing effortless for writers.
What was the central argument in Chris Best's founding essay "A Better Future for the News"?
Best argued that the business model of internet journalism was fundamentally broken: "If you get paid for clicks, you will optimize for outrage. If you want a better internet, you have to change who pays. When readers pay writers directly, writers optimize for quality and trust."
How did the founders convince Bill Bishop to be their first guinea pig?
Hamish McKenzie reached out to Bill Bishop, author of the popular free Sinocism newsletter. The founders flew to Washington, D.C., sat down with Bishop, and promised that if he launched a paid tier on their prototype, they would handle all billing, customer support, and technology. Bishop agreed, and the launch was an instant triumph.
How did the founders get into Y Combinator?
With the early traction from Sinocism and a handful of other writers, the founders applied to Y Combinator and were accepted into the Winter 2018 (W18) batch, gaining mentorship from startup leaders and securing their initial $2 million seed funding round.
What personal risks did the founders take to launch Substack?
The founders left lucrative, comfortable corporate tech careers to build an unproven subscription platform at a time when most venture capitalists believed that "nobody pays for content on the internet anymore."
How did the founders' contrasting personalities complement each other?
Chris Best brought long-term architectural vision and corporate engineering rigor; Hamish McKenzie brought deep journalistic empathy, storytelling flair, and relationships with the media industry; and Jairaj Sethi brought relentless execution speed and product minimalism.
Why did the founders insist on refusing advertising on Substack?
The founders believed that introducing banner ads or programmatic sponsors would immediately corrupt the product: engineering would focus on tracking ad clicks rather than reader experience, and writers would feel pressure from brand advertisers.
What is the founders' stance on the future of traditional newsrooms?
The founders do not view Substack as an enemy of traditional newsrooms, but as an alternative ecosystem where individual beat reporters, independent commentators, and niche analysts can make a better living while retaining full ownership of their work.
What is the lasting legacy of the Substack founders in digital media?
Best, McKenzie, and Sethi sparked the modern subscription newsletter revolution, empowering thousands of independent writers worldwide to earn a dignified living and transforming media consumption from passive algorithmic feeds to active patronage.