Chris Abraham 🐝

Introducing The Future of Attention - a conversation series with people shaping how we create, consume, and distribute ideas :) Starting with @hamishmckenzie, co-founder of @Substack (my favorite app) & writer of "How to Save the Media", to chat about: → Who gets to decide what humans pay attention to? → Can independent media build something better than the institutions it's replacing? → What happens to journalism when anyone can become a publisher? And finally: what does it actually mean to save the media? See you on nov 4th at 12pm pt !

Yesterday's earnings call with Reddit's CEO will be referenced for years to come. Reddit, $RDDT, is now down -42% in 8 trading days. AI has disrupted search, and the internet more broadly, forever. Our thoughts on this are included below.

Top 5 learnings growing The Rundown to 3.5M total active subscribers and 55%+ open rate: 1. Email is its own platform, treat it like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter Super readers (open every email, click ads, and stick around for years) genuinely like email as a medium. We have millions of readers who don’t use social media. Best way to acquire them is through other newsletters, referrals, or being the reason they stop using social media. Barely anyone is building for this audience. I’m more bullish on email than any other platform (long-form YouTube is a close second). 2. The newsletter industry lacks innovation Look at mobile apps, ecom, edtech. Custom quiz onboarding, a landing page for every ad, hundreds of new creatives a day. Meanwhile most newsletters, including some of the biggest in the world, have a basic landing page and standard onboarding. We built an onboarding quiz funnel that, at one point, got us close to negative CAC with hundreds of thousands a month in ad spend. That’s what let us scale aggressively and outbid competitors. With AI coding and platforms like beehiiv, there’s no excuse not to build new experiences for your readers. The opportunity here is wide open :) 3. Newsletter sales is mostly an education problem We still run social partnerships at a significantly higher CPM than our newsletters, yet the newsletters convert better and get way more clicks. A lot of advertisers don’t understand newsletters as they do with influencer marketing, so at scale it becomes an education game. Once advertisers get it, they stay. We’ve been booked out at multiple ads a day for the last 3 years, months in advance. 4. Stay lean, fast, aggressive Other newsletters have built large sales and content teams. I think it’s better to stay small and pay high-quality people to do very good work. Revenue can increase with more employees, but the opportunity cost of not moving fast in the AI era is a long-term net negative. For example, we constantly test new growth experiments and new forms of media. Most don’t work and that’s fine. The point is we can pivot the same day because we're lean. 5. Lastly, don’t listen to people who say email is dead or that you shouldn’t run paid ads. That’s ignorance and lowkey skill issue.

Who actually gets rich if Anthropic lists at $2 trillion? The S-1 filed on Monday lets us answer from the filing itself. The reported target is $1.5T to $2T, listing the week of November 16. The filing implies about 16.9B fully diluted shares. So $2T works out to roughly $118 a share. The cap table at $2T: - $199B for the 7 controlling co-founders, about 10% - $28B for Ben Mann, if his stake matches theirs - $100B for the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, 5% - $331B in employee options and RSUs, about 17% , That pool covers about 5,300 employees, an average of $62M each. - But when you joined matters enormously. The S-1 shows how much equity was granted each year, and at what price. [ Headcount went from about 300 to 500 in late 2023, to 940 at end 2024, to 5,300 now. Match the two, and here is roughly how many people made what at $2T: - $110M to $400M each: ~300 to 500 people hired by 2023 - $200M to $300M each: ~440 to 640 hired in 2024 - $70M to $95M each: ~1,360 hired in 2025 - $10M to $20M each: ~3,000 hired in 2026 So about 940 people hired by the end of 2024 average nine figures. Everyone hired since averages eight figures. The 2024 class is the surprise. That year Anthropic granted 1.28B options at $1.30 a share. At $118, that one year of grants is worth about $133B. Then there is the tender. In April, holders could sell at $25.91 a share. Investors lined up $6B, but only $4.7B sold. Weeks later, Series H priced at $58.90 a share. At $2T, the people who held would be up 4.6x. And Dario and Daniela Amodei were among the sellers. The 7 founders have pledged 80% of their equity to charity. That is about $159B at $2T. But the S-1 says the pledges are not legally binding.

Anthropic will make ~1,000 employees worth +$100m at $2 trillion market cap. There's ~11,000 Americans with $100m in investable assets. So something like 1 in 12 Americans with $100m (liquid) will be from Anthropic. If you add in Openai, maybe 1 in 7.

I don't use Figma anymore. Grok bot is our chief design engineer. I didn't hire anyone. I set up a grok bot on @bot and gave it a title: chief design engineer. It doesn't ship for me. I still approve every design, but it does basically everything else. Last week, it dug through our data, found two design flaws, and shipped an update. Since shipping: Our platform engagement grew by +22% Traffic quickly grew by 10%. Here's what it actually does every week: - turns drop-offs in our analytics into one design for me to approve on @paper - studies the best apps to see what's working - writes up every idea in @linear with the problem and the fix - tells me when a design is good enough so i don't overpolish it - waits for my pick before anything ships It's not magic. some designs are meh and I tell it so. I just pick one.

It’s official. @whoop 🤝 @kingjames 23 enters his 24th season. Still a force. Always measured. Keep going.

I don't use Figma anymore. Grok bot is our chief design engineer. I didn't hire anyone. I set up a grok bot on @bot and gave it a title: chief design engineer. It doesn't ship for me. I still approve every design, but it does basically everything else. Last week, it dug through our data, found two design flaws, and shipped an update. Since shipping: Our platform engagement grew by +22% Traffic quickly grew by 10%. Here's what it actually does every week: - turns drop-offs in our analytics into one design for me to approve on @paper - studies the best apps to see what's working - writes up every idea in @linear with the problem and the fix - tells me when a design is good enough so i don't overpolish it - waits for my pick before anything ships It's not magic. some designs are meh and I tell it so. I just pick one.

Neuroplasticity doesn't have an expiry date. Go learn that new thing.