One of the many joys of going independent and writing on Substack is that I work at the eye of a trend piece. There’s a storm circling around me with fights about Substack’s politics and its promise as a media disruptor. But at the center of that vortex, I’m far more focused on my own business than the broader maelstrom around me. I’m very fortunate to say that my paid subscriber count has now grown beyond 1,500 and more than 22,000 people now receive my free emails. I’ve been enjoying a steeper growth curve lately.This week on the Dead Cat podcast, Katie Benner, Tom Dotan, and I talk to technology Substack writer Casey Newton. On the podcast, I reminisce about how I phoned Newton during the depths of the pandemic to tell him that I was going to leave Bloomberg to start a Substack only to learn he was about to launch one as well. Newton founded Platformer, a go-to destination for news and analysis about what’s happening in the technology industry — especially at social media companies. Newton and I are part of a group of writers that formed the Discord community Sidechannel together. (Paying Newcomer subscribers get access to the community, though I’ll confess that my channels are fairly dormant.)Our discussion was sparked by a news story about what’s not happening. Substack apparently isn’t raising a new round of financing, according to the New York Times. Unlike fellow Andreessen Horowitz portfolio company Clubhouse, which raised at a $4 billion valuation in April 2021, Substack hasn’t earned a unicorn valuation. Substack reportedly generated about $9 million in revenue in 2021. Given the turbulent financial markets, Substack abandoned its fundraising effort, according to the report.Newton celebrated Substack’s failure to fundraise in his newsletter:One, it reduces the pressure on Substack to financialize every facet of its newsletter, podcast and app ecosystem. In March, when the company introduced an app, I noted here that Substack shut off emails from your subscribed publications by default — a worrying step, I thought, toward building a centralized platform that the company could monetize more aggressively. To its credit, Substack changed the default to preserve email subscriptions within 24 hours. But giving up more equity to VCs will bring more “suggestions” from the company’s board to move in this direction. The more Substack can rely on its own cash flow, the more easily it can chart its own future.Two, having less cash on hand can enforce a useful kind of discipline on a company. Having giant piles of cash on hand can be great for making splashy acquisitions or experimenting with new products. But Substack is still figuring out just how many people can sustainably enter this line of work — solo creators, operating mostly without a safety net, selling media for a monthly fee.(On the podcast, we also talk about Elon Musk’s Twitter bid and Snap’s tumbling stock price.)Give it a listen.Read the automated transcript.The State of NewcomerGiven that we’re already talking about Substack — and since I’ve gained a bunch of new readers lately — I wanted to give a brief tour of the Newcomer newsletter to help you all navigate what I’m publishing and get a sense for the rhythms around here.Dead CatI publish Dead Cat — the podcast with my friends and fellow reporters Tom Dotan and Katie Benner — toward the end of the workday every Tuesday. (We usually record on Fridays.)The podcast is free and is meant to be a little looser than the newsletter. Dead Cat, while still pretty fixated on Silicon Valley inside baseball, is more oriented toward the culture of tech and less focused on money than my newsletter articles.Dotan is a reporter for Insider. He writes about the gig economy after spending years covering companies like Snap and Disney. Benner writes about the U.S. Justice Department for the New York Times after many years writing about Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The three of us worked together as reporters at The Information