What Was Quartz?

Zach nails it. He is the reason why I was involved briefly at the start and for where I am today.

It was my first time leading a product team. We tried a lot of things that seemed strange at the time; no homepage, no app, native ads (done well imho), a scrolling stream instead of pages. Some of that broke. Some of it worked. A lot of it stuck around.

RIP Quartz.

the first publication (that I recall) that offered a chatbot for news too, right?

Yeah, you might be right. I was gone by then so not 100%. Sam Williams was behind that app. I’m not a fan of chat apps but that was done really well and I was surprised by it.

I really loved the Quartz chat app. I loved how carefully curated it was, how it didn't waste my time, how it gave me an outlay of just the things I care about. It felt a little like a friend was texting me about the news rather than just a dump of news itself.

And I was a little sad when my friend stopped texting me.

Ditto on loving Quartz and the chat app around 2015 I think it was. After Quartz was gone, I didn't really find what I was looking for until I discovered Axios.

I was an avid reader when it first launched; really stood out from the rest at the time. Kudos.