One of Substack's founders is writing on beehiiv.
Good day to be the CEO of beehiiv.
Good morning everyone. Your song of the summer might be Sabrina Carpenter’s Manchild or Morgan Wallen’s What I Want. As of today, mine is Ethel Cain’s Fuck Me Eyes and I’m really looking forward to her full album to come out in August. Upbeat, dance music is usually the summer soundtrack of choice for people but I like wet grass music, sunset drive home music, hot thunderstorm while stoned music. Other summer albums that fit into this category for me include Phoenix’s Ti Amo and Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour.
Today’s letter includes: one of Substack’s co-founders is writing for Breaker, Hailey Bieber’s beach club in Spain (which you can visit), young men in America want to be goth finance guys, Kylie Jenner is making ice cream, WeWork is back in New York, and a movie about the downfall of magazines.
One of Substack’s co-founders,
, is launching a column of “unbridled thoughts and insights on the media industry.” Which is almost a great idea, only it’s for Lachlan Cartwright’s Breaker – a newsletter not hosted on Substack, but on its rival platform, beehiiv. It's called Hamish’s Hot Sauce.Breaker’s latest gossipy media dispatch hit my inbox last night with part of the subject line reading: “Substack joins Breaker.” Inside was a note saying Hamish is now a contributor. Which felt especially odd, considering that just days earlier he wrote on Substack, “If I ever become less involved in Substack, I am going to make and contribute to media products (networks, channels, publications, books) built on Substack.”
If I were rumored to be raising a $50–100mm round for my tech company, you wouldn’t catch me writing for a competitor. Last night on Substack, Jeremiah Johnson compared the move to leadership at Coke drinking Pepsi in public. Hamish responded, “I’m drinking Lachlan not Pepsi.”
I texted Tyler Denk, beehiiv’s CEO about his thoughts on the news. “Who needs to be the founder of a tech company when you can write a newsletter on beehiiv?” he responded.
Taylor Lorenz also texted me this morning when she saw the news on Twitter.
“I think it’s extremely weird that a co-founder of the platform is writing for their biggest competitor. It also makes me very uncomfortable that someone ostensibly in charge of working with writers is going to be contributing to a dubious media gossip newsletter. Hamish’s role gives him unique insight to my and other journalist’s businesses, is that going to be fodder for this newsletter now? I don’t think anyone on the business side of a platform who works with publishers should be engaged in media reporting, they should be focused on their job: helping journalists on their platform grow.”
I got in touch with Hamish this afternoon while I was finishing up this letter. This is what he said: