Firstly - love love love Substack. It's so simple but it's so rapidly become a place where I do so much reading. I have a few questions (mostly not about the app though, I'll have to wait for Android support to try that).
1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing system. That doesn't feel particularly hard to put together, though maybe I totally underestimate that. So what's powering Substack's growth is that you were able to get guys like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander etc on board. How much of your growth do you think is product vs business/dealmaking?
2. You've been strong defenders of free speech, especially in the last two years where there's been a ton of censorship. Really, it's helped a lot, I've felt like Substack was one of the few places I could find rational and logical takes on things like lockdowns at a time when everyone else was losing their minds. Do you have some sort of strong philosophical take on this, or is it a sort of default because censorship takes specific effort and you're busy with growth?
3. Related to that, the pattern of tech firms being open access and supporters of free speech for some years and then later losing that as they hire more and more people (especially, new grads) seems to be a recurring one. Given you're based in San Francisco, do you have a plan to actually keep Substack the way it is, in the face of hiring employees who might demand you constantly cancel the witch-du-jour?
4. There's IMO a ton of potential for innovation with group discussions. To me, Slashdot was actually the peak of innovation in large scale anonymous forum discussions with many clever features, crowdsourced moderation, friends/foes, meta-mods etc. Do you plan to try new things with discussions, or stick to a conventional approach? Right now it's pretty basic.