Tough news.
Well this sucks to write: This. will go offline at the end of the month.
I’m tempted to make the explanation for that complicated, but it’s pretty simple: we worked ourselves to the point of exhaustion, struggled to raise money and just ran out of time. The site, newsletter and app are beloved by tens of thousands of people, including many of the writers and publishers I most admire. But we never got big enough to raise long-term capital or begin to build a sustainable business.
In the last few weeks and days, we’ve entertained a few very flattering conversations with other companies about bringing our work there. But none have come with the scale of commitment that would allow us to attack this huge opportunity with new energy.
And so we’re going to wrap this up in a way that’s best for our community and our team.
In the coming weeks, we’ll offer This. members a tool to export the links they’ve shared to the site. We’ll send around a list of companies and products and people who are building things we think This. fans should keep an eye on.
And I’ll finally give the mobs of people who have tried to poach them from This. the opportunity to snatch up Zeb Young and Mayukh Sen, our brilliant Directors of Engineering and Editorial.
Zeb is a rare find: a full-stack engineer who can go deep on product, and broad on the architecture of an application and engineering team. He’s also one of the most intense workers I’ve ever had the pleasure of collaborating with: the previous night’s GitHub activity was a thing to behold each morning.
You’re going to be spending a lot of time reading Mayukh in the years to come. He’s only 24 and he’s racked up bylines in VICE, Pitchfork, BuzzFeed, Racked, Broadly, The New Inquiry, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Roads & Kingdoms, The Caravan, and a slew of other publications. And his subtle, witty and confident work on the This. 5 daily newsletter made it a must read for some of the most influential editors and writers in journalism.
Don’t sleep on these guys. If your organization needs one or both of their huge talents, get in touch: andrew at this dot cm.
We’ve been honored by some amazing investors. In particular, I’m grateful to the folks at Matter VC, the incredible accelerator that has helped us in so many ways. One of our biggest disappointments in the timing of this is that we won’t be able to finish their extraordinary program and work closely with the impressive companies they do so much work to build. I would highly recommend this program to all media entrepreneurs and just wish the timing worked out better for us to take full advantage of this opportunity.
Beyond that, I won’t bore you with a self-indulgent list of thank-yous, but I will say this: a community like ours is only born out of a huge network or people — friends, advisors, investors, strangers — deciding that your idea is worth spending some social (or actual) capital on. The deficit I’m running is huge, and I’m confident I’ll spend years returning the favor to so many of you.
Andrew
