Friends, Romans, countrymen,

Gather round, I have some exciting news.

Pirate Wires is partnering with Substack, and is now available on their platform.

Practically speaking, nothing about your experience will change. Or, it doesn’t have to change. Our site is still our site, our newsletters are still our newsletters, and it all looks and functions the same way (subscribe to the letters you like, ignore the rest, and paying subscribers are granted access to all of our content). The design is the same, though I did decide to upgrade our comments section into something a little more visible and organized. The subscription terms and pricing are the same. And — of course — all that good-ass based content is the same. Hell, even our shitty login process is the same… provided you want it to stay the same. But now that we’re plugged into Substack, you can also log in with a password. If you already have a Substack password, you can use that. If you would like a Substack password, you can set one up here.

While not at all essential, I do recommend downloading the Substack app if you don’t already have it. The app will grant you a lot of new Pirate Wires content. All of our writers will be pretty active on Notes (social posts on Substack) moving forward, and I’ll be going live myself (a kind of video chat, sometimes solo, sometimes with my team, sometimes with other popular writers on Substack) on and off all week. I’ll also be posting my little heart out.

Now, a few thoughts on the macro.

I’ve always loved Substack. I started this whole journey with Substack back in the summer of 2020 with a single newsletter, long before I started hiring people. Today, their team has a great mission of building tools not only for independent writers, but for mature media companies, and I have a goal of connecting our work with the highest quality readers in the country. In this, the choice for me was really obvious. Tens of millions of those readers are concentrated on Substack. From what I can tell, there is no larger group of readers looking for high-quality longform content, which any upstart media founder can access, on the internet. I want to be where the readers are.

I’ve learned a lot about media these past few years. I grew my subscriber base with Substack in the early days as a single writer, and I grew my subscriber base without Substack, on my own, with a full team. The latter was more difficult, as I knew it would be, but I traded the Substack audience for complete creative control of my company. Earlier this year, Chris Best and I grabbed lunch, and he offered me both — my world, his universe. He and his team have always been interested in supporting larger teams and organizations, and Pirate Wires would be a fun experiment in the future of the platform. So I said yes. In fact, I said “fuck yes.”

It was a no brainer decision. Substack tools are incredible. Their CMS alone would be a compelling reason to build with them, but their entire publishing backend is beautiful, and their growth network is unlike anything else in the business. I’ve watched people leave Substack in a huff and immediately die (couldn’t be me). I’ve watched people grow on Substack and somehow not understand the degree to which the Substack growth engine was the reason. And now that I can reenter on precisely my own terms? It’s a new era for the Pirate Nation, tbh.

I remain grateful as ever to all of you assholes out there reading, and to the Substack team for all of the hard work they’ve put in to bring us into the fold.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled content. (new piece from me later today btw)

-SOLANA