What would you do with $100 million?*
*If you were Substack.
Good morning everyone.
If 151 West 42nd Street burned down last night, then New York’s media industry would be done. Peter Lattman, Joe Kahn, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Stella Bugbee,
, Jon Caramanica, Mark Guiducci, , Sue Chan, , , Risa Heller, Ben Smith, Oliver Darcy, Audrey Gelman, Willa Bennett, , and Graydon Carter gathered in the former Conde Nast cafeteria to celebrate Michael M. Grynbaum’s wonderful new book.Nobody ate anything, but I was impressed by the amount of wine people took down during the two-hour celebration.
Today’s letter includes: Substack’s fundraise (there are about to be a lot of ads on here), New York’s drink of the summer according to Jon Neidich, Dave Portnoy might be getting a new job at Fox, Keith McNally updated me on Minetta Tavern’s bone marrow sales, and if you are a Moelis intern I will buy you a free spritz today.
I actually want your response in the comments.
This morning, Substack announced it had raised a fresh $100 million from Chernin Group, BOND (a technology investment firm), Rich Paul, the founder of the agency Klutch Sports Group, Andreessen Horowitz, and SKIMS co-founder Jens Grede. Two people close to the deal told The New York Times that the funding round valued Substack at $1.1B. Unicorn status!
What I’m thinking about:
If I gave Substack that much money, I’d expect them to continue to lean into the feed and challenge Twitter as a text-based social network. The line “The tools we hoped would uplift and enrich us have too often degraded or dehumanized us instead” in a newsletter from Substack’s co-founders this morning feels like a direct reference to this.
Despite publicly resisting ads for the last few years, Substack is planning to get deeper into the advertising business. I think they will be all over this place by Christmastime.
Tweets are forever. I reached out to Mike Kerns, a co-founder of the Chernin Group, this morning to learn what he’s most excited about from this investment. He emailed back:
