Alex Lieberman On Selling Morning Brew and Finding Purpose Post Exit

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
What is up, guys? Welcome back to Post run High.
Today's guest is Alex Lieberman. He's the co founder of
Morning Brew, the daily newsletter he started back in twenty
fourteen while he was still in college, and what started
as a way to help his classmates keep up with
the news turned into a full on media company with
millions of subscribers, and in twenty twenty, Alex sold it
for seventy five million at just twenty eight years old.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
And I actually used to read Morning Brew every morning.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Before work while I was in advertising fresh out of school,
and it was one of the few emails I actually
looked forward to every single day. And since selling the company,
Alex has become a serial entrepreneur focused on storytelling, self awareness,
and building things with intention. We ran three miles through
Brooklyn and then sat down for this conversation. It's all
about the experiences that shaped Alex, how he built his business,

(00:53):
letting go, and what purpose looks like after a major win.
Before we get into it, I just want to say
thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoy
this episode, I would love it if you shared it
with a friend, hosted it to your story and left
us a quick review. All right, let's get our post
run high going. Alex Lieberman, welcome's post run high.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
Thanks for having me pump to do this.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
So guys, for a little bit of context, Alex and
I just ran three miles through Brooklyn.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
We did little Brooklyn Trot.

Speaker 4 (01:30):
And I feel bad that you have to be in
close proximity to me right now after definitely sweating a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
I'm a bit of a hot mess right now.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
You know, you look great.

Speaker 4 (01:37):
I was.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Honestly, a little bit of sweat is natural.

Speaker 4 (01:40):
I've realized when I go to weddings, I tend to
dance a lot, even though I'm not a good dancer,
and so I bring an extra shirt to weddings now
because I just know I'm going to sweat through the
first shirt within the first few hours. I just need
to do the same thing whenever I'm doing a run
into a podcast in the future.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Honestly, that's really smart for everybody going to weddings this summer.
Are guys out there a tux?

Speaker 4 (02:00):
Yeah, you know, to yourself, break it down on the
dance floor and then feel good in your clothing.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
After what is an Alex Lieberman go to dance move
on the dance floor.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
That's a great question.

Speaker 4 (02:09):
I like pulling out the shopping cart and then I'll
be walking down aisle too. Grab some of the Paperika,
then look to the left, grab the rice cakes, put
them in, and just stroll down the aisle.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, let's get into the conversation. So Alex has such
a cool story. I'm so excited for everybody to not
only enjoy watching this video but also learn so much
from you today. Tell us a little bit about young Alex.
Where you grew up and what your childhood was like.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 4 (02:36):
So I grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, a small
suburb outside of New York.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
I grew up in a Wall Street.

Speaker 4 (02:42):
Family, So my mom was on Wall Street for twenty
something years. My dad was a trader on Wall Street.
My grandpa worked on Wall Street. So like Wall Street
and finance was in my blood from.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
A very young age.

Speaker 4 (02:55):
I have one sister, she's four years younger, and I
would say like I had just like vanilla childhood in
the best way. Like I you know, family was the
most important value in our lives. Spend so much time
with my family, but like there's nothing out of the
ordinary about my childhood. But then I would say, I
don't know, from like fourth or fifth grade until the

(03:18):
end of college, there were just a lot of key
milestones in life that really were formative for me, that
had a huge impact on how I think about the world.
So it starts with around fifth grade. I went to
a small private school. I was bullied from basically fifth
grade until twelfth grade. So imagine for a period of

(03:38):
eight years, little Alex not feeling a sense of confidence,
not feeling belonging, you know, at times getting to school
and just walking from one end of the school to
the other other end of the school just to kill
time because he didn't feel comfortable being in it with
a group of people. I think that for a lot
of my life, up until college or even starting my businesses,

(03:59):
I I don't know that I had that strong of
a sense of self. I definitely didn't have self confidence.
I didn't view myself as like kind of really special
or smart or capable. And you know, we'll talk about
it in a few minutes. That definitely changed when I
ended up starting a company and building it and kind
of that momentum created confidence for me. But then the
other big milestone in my life was a week before

(04:22):
junior year of college, my dad passed away completely unexpected.
He was forty six years old, totally healthy, in the
same shape that I'm in, and he died from a stroke,
and you know, we'll never know why it happened. My
story that I have is that he worked in an
incredibly high stress job for twenty something years and cortisol

(04:45):
running through your system for that long has an impact
on you. And so I would say, just like those
two moments, I would say, we're the biggest forms of
adversity in my life, and they really informed kind of
what I chose to do after knowledge, and kind of
what created a fire in me to build a company
once I went all in on entrepreneurship.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Those are two moments that take up such a large
chunk of your life because they're kind of years of
you know, with your dad grieving, and then you know,
when you're getting bullied. It's that's a hard mindset to
come out of. You know, tax your self worth and yeah,
you're self confidence.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
So it's so true.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
It's when you're faced with a little bit of adversity
is when you really do grill though.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
And yeah, I mean it's so cool to see what
you've built.

Speaker 4 (05:29):
You know, it's always the interesting to think about how
much of us is informed by nature versus nurture, because
at least my I would say, I came out the
other side of all this with an immense sense of
like gratitude, which people listening may be like, why would
you have Like why do you have gratitude after being bullied?

(05:50):
Why do you have gratitude after you lost your dad?
But I would say there's a few reasons I feel gratitude.
Like one is, life has felt a lot easier since then, candidly,
like my adult life has felt knock.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
On wood pretty easy.

Speaker 4 (06:03):
But the other part is like when I think about bullying,
one part of it could be like me feeling bad
for myself. The other part of it is like it
created this incredible resilience that I have today as a person,
and it gives me a sense of grounding and confidence
that no matter kind of what is put in front
of me, I have the tools and kind of the
mind to be able to navigate it. And then like

(06:25):
losing my dad again in my grief journey, there was
for sure a part of that journey, especially early on,
where I was I went from like shock to sadness
to anger to ask myself why this didn't happen to
other people who were in way worse shape, Like I
went through all of that. But on the other side
of it, I do feel immense gratitude that I spent

(06:47):
so much quality time with my dad for the twenty
years that he was in my life. And I also
feel so much gratitude for the perspective that it gave
me and how I choose to lead my life today.
And obviously I would do anything to have them back,
but I don't have that choice. But I do have
the choice of you know, what lessons has it instilled

(07:07):
in me that can inform kind of what I do moving.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
Forward going through hard moments in life, Like if you
have it so easy, I often find that those people
have a hard time even maybe connecting with people on
a deeper level, right, Like you've gone through stuff that
is really hard and really challenging to overcome, but when
you do get the other side of it, like, you
can also connect with people in a whole new way.
I mean, I had a similar experience when I was
in high school, I am through college, I had a

(07:31):
really hard time fitting in and finding my people and
finding my place. But it was through going through that
that I've become the person that I am today, and
I would I would not be who I was today
if I hadn't gone through those experiences.

Speaker 4 (07:43):
Again, it's like it's one of those things like you
don't hope that it happens to people. But I think
this one unfortunate truth that I've realized is like there's
such valuable lessons to learn in life, and unfortunately, one
of the best ways to learn them is through experience.
Like I always say to people, like spend like spend
your time as if it is your last day, Like
would you be spending it in the same way?

Speaker 3 (08:04):
And like it always comes off.

Speaker 4 (08:05):
So cliche obviously, And I think what I've realized is
like I can tell people a story of losing my
dad and how like that really has changed the way
I think about how am I going to spend my
time with my family? How do I want to spend
my time in life? But there's also part of me
that's like is it actually going to sink in? Like
is it going to work? Because the only reason I
know to live in this way is not because someone

(08:26):
else told it to me, it's the unfortunate reality that
I experienced it, and experience, unfortunately is sometimes the best
teacher of the most powerful lessons in life.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
And it's wild that you were going through all of
that all while starting your company, right, I mean, when
you were a senior in college is when you started
the Morning Brew, which was originally called Market Corner. So
let's talk about what was going on in your life
when you started Market Corner. I know that you grew
up in a finance family, by the way, so did
I I feel like that was a little bit of
a Jersey experience.

Speaker 4 (08:53):
Totally for whatever reason in my head right now, I
like hear like in a deep Jersey accent, soon going
Wall Street.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, no, one hundred percent.

Speaker 4 (09:03):
So I went to Michigan, and first of all, going
back to like, I didn't feel like I fit in
in middle school or high school. I was the first
person in seven years to go to Michigan. From my
high school. Most of my grade went to either Ivy
League colleges or to like the nezccs, which are like
the Middlebury's Colgates of the world. So it was not

(09:24):
at all like a cool thing for me to go
to Michigan. It was kind of a mediocre thing. Now
I look at Michigan and it's such a hard school
to get into. But when my actually my first choice
was Emery, I didn't get into Emory, and that's how
I ended up deciding to go to Michigan. But anyway,
I went to Michigan with the full intent of working
on Wall Street, spending my whole career in finance.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
Like my parents.

Speaker 4 (09:45):
I did the classic internship thing after freshman year, sophomore
year or junior year, and I get into my senior
year at Michigan and I the way it typically works
like in finance now, I was like, you do your
junior year internship, if it goes well, you get a
job offer, so you don't have to re recruit your
senior year. You just have a job lined up after graduation.
So I had that. So I got into my senior year,

(10:06):
had my job blind up, so I had all this
free time, and I started helping kids prep for job
interviews who are doing re recruiting, and I would always
ask them the question how do you keep up with
the business.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
World, Like what do you read? And I would get.

Speaker 4 (10:19):
The same answer over and over and over which was
I read the Wall Street Journal, and I'd be like, okay,
tell me more, like why do you read the journal?
And people would be like my parents told me, I
have to read it, but it's dense, it's dry.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
I don't get through the whole thing.

Speaker 4 (10:33):
And at some point I was like, this is crazy,
Like every kid is about to spend their career, like
their working life, in a job and they don't have
content that they enjoy reading that gets some excited about
the work they're doing.

Speaker 3 (10:45):
Like why is that? And so I started.

Speaker 4 (10:48):
Writing a daily newsletter that at the time is called
Market Corner. Mind you, I was not a writer at all,
like I was. English was one of my worst subjects
for my entire life.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
That's what I wanted to ask you, because when you
think think about business school and people that work in finance,
you don't immediately think about somebody that also has that
creative background or that writing capability. And I don't want
to single out all finance people, because of course they do.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
Some people do.

Speaker 4 (11:12):
But I think there's a reason that, like you know,
these kind of truisms have truth to them. Is yeah,
I would say, like you think about someone who works
in finance, you consider them to be more quantitative and
analytical nature and less creative.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
And so I just started writing this thing.

Speaker 4 (11:28):
And basically what I would do is I would spend
four hours a day reading all the news on the
internet having to do with business. I would consolidate it
into a word doc template that would be like biggest
business stories of the day that I wrote in these
like one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty
word blurbs. And then there would be kind of like
informational candy at the end, which would be like trivia
question of the day, business game of the day, today

(11:50):
in history. And I would get take that doc, I
would export it as a PDF. I would attach it
to an email, and I sent it to a list serve.
It was the market corner you missdided you, And literally
it just started with fifty people. It was the kids
I was helping prep for job interviews. It was kids
in my fraternity and that was it. And just every
day that I sent it out, I would get emails

(12:12):
back from readers saying, Hey, so and so wants to
get added to your list Serve, Can you add them? So?
I then manually add people to the list serve and
so then after a month or two of doing it,
there were a couple hundred people reading this, and I
was like, Okay, there's enough momentum here that I want.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
To take it a little bit more seriously.

Speaker 4 (12:28):
So I sent an email to my list during winter
break of senior year being like, Hey, I want to
take this more seriously. Does anyone want to help me
with this? My co founder Austin, he was one of
my readers at the time. He was a sophomore at
Michigan in we were in the same fraternity, didn't really
know each other, and I have this email saved to
my desktop or he emailed me being like, Hey, I
have ideas for how to make this better.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
Do you want to meet after BPL? BPL was Beer
Pong League.

Speaker 4 (12:52):
We met after Beer Pong League and we just completely
hit it off. And I would say, like, other than
the choice to marry my wife, the choice of picking
Austin as my co founder from Morning Brew was the
best choice I've ever made because in so many ways,
like we're quite similar people, like we have dry sense

(13:12):
of humor, We're both like these I don't know, like
five ten Jewish guys from the East Coast grew up
in like traditional Jewish families, but in every other way
we're actually so different in terms of the way our
brains work. Like I am a creative, divergent thinker who
is kind of like a bucking bronco that needs to
like be like kept in their like in their zone,

(13:34):
otherwise it's a mess.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
Austin is the.

Speaker 4 (13:37):
Most focused linear thinker I've ever met. And what I've
realized as like i've built more businesses, is like it
wasn't just at the time that I thought he was
an unbelievable like operator linear thinker. He is a better
business operator and like thinker than almost every entrepreneur that
I've ever met. Wow, people like twice my age, and

(13:59):
so yeah, it's crazy, Like everyone talks about like the
co founder decision is the most important decision you make
in business.

Speaker 3 (14:06):
And because I wasn't.

Speaker 4 (14:07):
Thinking of Morning Brew or market Corner at the time
as a business, it was just like this side project
I didn't put in necessarily all of like the time
to figure out if Austin was the right co founder.

Speaker 3 (14:16):
We had a great two hour conversation.

Speaker 4 (14:18):
I was like, this guy's brain compliments mine, Let's do
this and so in a lot of ways, it was
good intuition, but also so lucky that this guy was
such a good co founder for me despite not spending
months together trying to figure out if we were.

Speaker 3 (14:31):
The right pair.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
And I also feel like when it comes to bringing
somebody onto a business, especially in those early years, or
have them help you with an idea, it helps having
somebody that is a fan of what you're currently doing,
which he clearly was. I'm so curious, like and even
this is just like going back to the very beginning
when you had the idea of Wow, i'm reading the
Wall Street Journal. It's pretty hard to digest. These are
some complex topics that.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
We're reading about here.

Speaker 1 (14:55):
When did you decide to not only make those topics
more digestible for yourself, but then also share them with
other people or were you always the type of person
that was like, I don't do anything just for myself.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
I want to help other people too.

Speaker 4 (15:08):
No, I would say there was like there was probably
a what we call like a selfish driven thing and
a self list. Like the self list was like students
told me they did not like business news as it was,
and I was like, how can I make it better
for them. This selfish part was like I knew I
was going to work full time on Wall Street, and
I was like, if I don't stay up to date

(15:28):
with what's happening in the world, like I may not
be prepared for my job after school.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
So that was one of the other.

Speaker 4 (15:34):
Reasons I started this newsletter was I was like, by
creating this newsletter, it's going to force me to stay
on top of what's happening in business so that when
I graduate, I'm actually like ready to.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
Go in my job.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
It's so smart in so many ways because I've interviewed
a few different people that have said, like I've interviewed
this one news anchor Dana Prino, who was the press
secretary for Bush, and she said, growing up, her dad
always said to her, the one thing that you have
to do every day is you have to read the
news headlines.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
Just know what's going on in the news.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
And you know, I think when it comes to business too,
like my dad always said to me growing up, like
you should be familiar with what's going on in the
Wall Street Journal, even if you just read the headlines,
you know. So it really is this you know thing
that I'm sure so many parents tell their kids growing up,
and then you were able to like really take those
articles and make them digestible and conversational and add humor
to them.

Speaker 4 (16:17):
And look, I would say, and every entrepreneur says this
after the fact, but I would say that, like, there
is inherently so much luck that happens in entrepreneurship. But
if you, if if you were to ask me, like,
what what is the non luck? Like what are the
things that caused us to actually be successful? I would
say in the early days of the business, like deep
curiosity and defaulting to action are the things that like

(16:41):
created surface area for luck to happen. Like there's this
concept of creating luck surface area, Like the more seeds
you plant, the greater the chance that one of the
like one of the plants is going to bud. And
so basically, like, I think that like curiosity and defaulting
to action is such a valuable.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
Thing that anyone can do.

Speaker 4 (17:00):
And this is like a totally separate thing, but I
think it just makes it actionable for people who don't
even nationally have a business today. Is something that recently
happened with one of my businesses is we brought on
an intern and One of the reasons I brought on
this intern is they did something that is now called
like permissionless apprenticeship, where one way that most people apply
for internships is they just like drop their resume or

(17:22):
they find like a family member who has a connection
and they have them send it in to me. Permissionless
apprenticeship what it is is someone takes an interest in
your company. They figure out what is work they can
do that's valuable for your company. Without being asked, they
do the work and then they send it to you.
And so this guy Justin who's literally interning for one
of my businesses now shout out Justin. He's a Sophtomare

(17:43):
at UCLA in Beijing for study broad right now.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
He got interested in one of my businesses. He ended
up doing a.

Speaker 4 (17:50):
Full project like about basically how he could help my
business and ideas he had for it. He posted on Twitter.
It went viral on Twitter. That's how I found out
about him. And I'm just like, clearly, he's deeply curious.
Clearly he defaults to action, and I will pick that
ten times out of ten versus someone who just like
went to an amazing school and has an amazing resume absolutely.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
I mean, I've never read somebody's resume in my life.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
When it comes to working for us, I agree like
I think, and obviously this is a much smaller scale,
but yeah, when I'm hiring somebody or looking for people
to work on our team, it's always take initiative, try
to see what it is that you want to do
for us that can make our lives better, make the
work that we're doing quality better, and anyways, it's always
work driven.

Speaker 4 (18:32):
There's this concept of like slope versus intercept, and what
it basically means is like, there's two ways that people
can choose to hire people in businesses. One ways you
hire for experience, the other ways you hire for potential.

Speaker 3 (18:45):
So slope means you hire someone.

Speaker 4 (18:48):
Who maybe is at a lower point in the curve
in terms of their value today, but you think they're
going to have incredible slope because of their curiosity, their
hard work, and their default to action. Intercept refers to
someone who's higher up on the curve, like meaning they
already they have more value today, but you don't instually
think like you think their ceiling is more limited because yes,
they have experience, but they don't instually have the grit,

(19:10):
the curiosity and the proactivity to.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
Get a lot further.

Speaker 4 (19:14):
And my general view in life is almost in every
role you'll ever hire for hiring for slope versus the
intercept is.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
The right way to go, you know.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
And I also think what's so interesting about you guys
with Morning Brew, is I like that you said you
didn't set out to start a company. Yep, you really
set out with this problem to solve and with an
inherent curiosity and to make your life better when you
graduated and started working in the business world, and through
having that curiosity and that work ethic and this drive

(19:54):
to do this passion project, you started a company.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (19:57):
I just think it is a weird thing now because
like now as I start businesses, it's like weird that
for the first time, I'm like having to think of
a business idea and create a like not create a
business plan, but like it just it felt so authentic
at the time, where it's like with Morning Brew, it
was not thought of as a business. It was just
like a curious hobby. And I actually think the more

(20:18):
that a business or something can start as a curious hobby,
the better.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
So I totally agree with that. And to me.

Speaker 4 (20:23):
One of the best ways to actually make that happen
is people are like I think people wonder like how
can they be more curious in life? And either you're
like default, very curious or you're not. But actually think
curiosity is a muscle, and I think, like anything else,
if you have the right exercises to work that muscle,
you can build it over time. And so like, there
are actual exercises I do to work the muscle of curiosity.

(20:46):
And so I'll just use a random example, Like one
example is I will walk, like what while I'm like
walking the streets of Hoboken, I will play this game
called like the why game, and the why game literally
be where as I'm looking around me, I will ask
the question why about things that I'm observing, Like why
is it that these cameras need to be on stands?

(21:08):
Why couldn't they they be hanging from strings? Like why
is it that you need a sandbag to be on
top of the light here? Like why is it that
these cups Like why is it that the design has
these ridges in it? Is there a real There must
be a reason that there's a ridge design. Is it
aesthetic or is it functional? And so Basically what that
exercise does is it takes your brain off autopilot because

(21:29):
like in life, like we wouldn't be able to survive
if we ask questions about everything, would overload our brains.
So ninety nine percent of the time in life, we're
just going to go about life and not question everything
we do. Like imagine if you are running. As you're running,
you're going through the questioning of how is my leg
working right now? To lift my foot and then lift
my leg like you wouldn't do it.

Speaker 3 (21:50):
But to me, if you do these exercises where you
take your brain off autopilot, it actually builds up the
muscle of curiosity.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
I mean, I love thinking about it like that too,
and I think that's so important, especially in my career
as an interviewer, it is so important to keep your
curiosity up and keep wondering about different things and people
doing different things and how things work. What are some
other exercises that you do when it comes to curiosity.

Speaker 4 (22:13):
So another one like this is as I'm like, I'm
thinking about specifically for business ideas, like where do I
get business ideas from?

Speaker 3 (22:23):
And I would say basically anything.

Speaker 4 (22:26):
That I go through in life where I feel emotionally provoked,
I ask myself why am I emotionally provoked? So if
I ever, like if say, our average emotional range as
people is like five to negative five, when I get
from zero to negative five, I ask myself, why am
I feeling this right now? And what is it about
this experience that could be changed that would get me
closer to zero to five.

Speaker 3 (22:45):
So like that's one thing that I do. Another thing
that I do is.

Speaker 4 (22:50):
I will And this like sounds obvious, but like I
just talk to people and customers a lot, So like
I will literally for for my businesses, I'll get on
a call with a customer or a user and I
will have them screen share and I will have them
literally take me through what are like the most mundane

(23:11):
and annoying processes they do every day in life we're
at work, and it will have them literally show me
on their screen as like a show and tell. And
I learned so much through that process as well. So yeah,
like I don't know. I try to root everything in
questioning and getting as close to questioning my experiences or
experiences of people that I want to build things.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
For even hearing about how you cowork. Sometimes when you
are alone with that.

Speaker 4 (23:34):
Yeah, with focus mate, the craziest thing in the world. Yeah,
I just it's funny. I'm listening to the audiobook of
Ben Franklin right now, really interesting kat and he he's
like it's like kind of amazing that he's like, you know,
this guy was like he had a media company, he
invented the lightning rod, he was huge in politics. And

(23:56):
I think one of the reasons is is because he
basically was like this poly who knew a lot about
a lot of things.

Speaker 3 (24:02):
And I think the main reason is.

Speaker 4 (24:03):
Because he was just an absolute sponge for like learning
different things from different parts of the world, and so
that like there's just no excuse not to be curious
if you want to be today, because like you have
so many things at your fingertips, especially with chat GBT
now like chatch ept. To me, the reason it has
been the biggest game changer for me is it it

(24:24):
is just literally my personal tutor and so like just
to give you one example one of my businesses now
which like again it was the one I was describing before,
where we help businesses with AI transformation. Most of the
employees in this business are engineers. I am not technical
at all. I never took a compside class. But I've
always been curious about software and engineering because as someone

(24:47):
who like I identify more as like an inventor than
an entrepreneur, because I love building shit from scratch, and
so I've always been interested, like, how do engineer like,
how do engineers think? How do they build things? Now,
all I will do is I use an amazing called Granola.
I don't know if you've heard of Granola. It's like
there's hundreds of these meeting note takers. I just think
Granola is the best one. It will take notes on

(25:08):
my call. So I will have Granola set up when
we do one on ones with our engineers. It will
take notes of our whole calls. And then I'll feed
Granola automatically into chat Gibt and have Chatchibt create micro
courses for me on any topics or jargon related to
engineering that I likely wouldn't know, which is most things.
It'll turn it into a course for me. So the

(25:29):
amount I've learned about software engineering in the last three weeks,
even though I've never taken a class in it, just
by literally turning meetings into transcripts. Transcripts into prompts and
chatgibt that create little courses. For me, it's just unbelievable
the speed out which you can learn today.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
I mean, that's so smart and for anybody listening where
that can be relevant for them and what they do,
I mean.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Do exactly what else? Why that's anything exactly.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
I love knowing how people use chatch gipt, and I
feel like the most important thing when it comes to
any AI tool like it is knowing how to prompt
it correctly to give you the answers.

Speaker 3 (26:01):
That's everything.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Sometimes chatchipt can be a little bit too of a
yes man for me, I need to retrain my model.

Speaker 4 (26:06):
Another fun one is I was actually asking it this
today is ash chatchipt. What are under the radar or
like not unpopular or unconventional use cases for chatchybt that
few people are talking about. And it just unlocks all
these things you probably haven't done with it that are amazing.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
What were some of them?

Speaker 4 (26:25):
Like?

Speaker 3 (26:25):
An obvious one is like.

Speaker 4 (26:27):
Now what I do is take a picture of my fridge,
take a picture of my pantry, and have it tell
me every recipe that I can create given the food
I have in my home, and then tell me what
I need to order to complete certain recipes.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
Alex, that is so smart.

Speaker 4 (26:42):
Yeah, and so that's the thing is actually, I think
the limit of chatchipt and these tools now is actually
our own creativity, not the technology that we're using.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
Well, I saw the other day a video that this
girl did where she said she put every single article
of clothing in her closet into chatch ept and now
every morning chatchipt makes her a new outfit with the clothes.

Speaker 4 (27:04):
That showed funny because I literally started doing this and
it was taking me too long because I literally was
like pulling all the shit out of my closet taking
pictures of it.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
I have too much.

Speaker 3 (27:13):
Yeah, it's taking too long.

Speaker 4 (27:14):
But yeah, like for me, there's I basically have four
go to outfits that I know are complete outfits. Other
than that, I have no idea what I'm doing in
the closet, and so I'm just like it would be
amazing and it's also a great business if you think
about it, where it might it will?

Speaker 3 (27:29):
I take pictures of everything.

Speaker 4 (27:31):
Chatchyp GPT tells me what are all the outfits I
can complete, and then if there are outfits that I
could complete by buying an article of clothing, it makes
those recommendations and I could buy it straight from the app.
And now you actually can do that because Shopify and
chatchypt have an integration where you can buy stuff straight
from the actual application.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Okay, I did something really niche with chatch ept that's
kind of funny in relation to clothes where I'm getting
married in September and I wanted to buy second dress too,
and I had four different options that I was choosing between.
I uploaded every single outfit that I'm wearing for my
wedding weekend the first day, what I'm getting ready in
my actual wedding dress, and then I uploaded these four

(28:10):
options that I had and I said, based on the
current outfits that I'm already wearing, which one matches the
vibe the most. And it gave me a detailed response
as to why and picked out my shoes.

Speaker 3 (28:19):
It's so good. I mean it is to me.

Speaker 4 (28:22):
The barrier for using chatchibt now is our own creativity
and our own ability to prompt it.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
Well.

Speaker 4 (28:28):
One other just like crazy use case I'll share is
there's a guy who is like a renowned commercial director,
like he used to produce multimillion dollar commercials for healthcare companies,
and he started. He's blown up on Twitter now because
what he does is he creates unbelievable, like world class
quality commercials using just chatchybt Google's new model, which is

(28:52):
is it vero vo vo three and that's it, and
then Premiere to stitch everything together.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
You have to check his stuff out.

Speaker 4 (29:00):
He basically creates like and the caption of his tweets
are now, like I used to create five hundred thousand
dollars budget commercials for pharmaceutical companies. This one I created
with for five hundred dollars. The world is changing fast
and you watch it and you're like, oh yeah, like
this one thousand percent would have cost a million dollars
to produce before and it was unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
Can you imagine if chat ept existed when you were
just starting the morning brew?

Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yeah, I mean it's it would have saved you so
much time it's.

Speaker 3 (29:29):
Crazy to think about.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:30):
It Also, I will say this is a very niche thing,
but it makes me think about, now, is there a
world where every person can have their own custom newsletter
in their life? Like if no newsletter is the same
for each person. Like, there's this concept of the presidential brief,
which is every day the president gets effectively their newsletter,
which is everything that they need to know for the day.

(29:52):
What if every human had their presidential brief?

Speaker 2 (29:54):
Do you think there is a world where that starts happening.

Speaker 4 (29:56):
Well, I think there's also even a question like if
you had your own personal newsletter and you could hand
pick anything to be in it, what would be in it?
And I think that's even an interesting question, like if
I got every day, would it basically be like what's
on deck for the day, Like what's happening at work?
Like you know what's happening at home, Like what's a
meal that I can cook later?

Speaker 3 (30:14):
Whatever?

Speaker 4 (30:15):
So yeah, I do think that more than ever before,
with the right data, people can just have more costum
experiences than ever before.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
Talk about crafting your own reality, yep, exactly.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
Going back to the og days of Morning Brew, I'm
curious when you brought on Austin, how did you guys
initially split up responsibilities like what was he working on
and what were you working on?

Speaker 4 (30:35):
Yeah, so kind of a crazy story is we originally
actually had four co founders for Morning Brew, so there
were two other guys at Michigan who like I think,
also had emailed me like Austin did, they became part
of the project. And what we very quickly realized, Well,
there's two things we realized is like, there's too much
of the similar skill sets for kind of redundant people.

(30:57):
But also, you can't fake passion about entrepreneurship because it
is such a slog and the odds of success are
so low. So it's like you either are going to
be passionate about the work you do and if you aren't,
you'll just like quickly realize it. And so that's what happened.
These two other guys that were involved in the business,
they just weren't as passionate, and so they kind of
just like peeled off in a pretty natural way. But

(31:19):
for Austin and I, I would say like I was
focused on more of like the creative functions more like
I would say like kind of front of house. So
I was focused on content, on marketing, and on sales,
and then Austin was really focused on like tech growth
and like the finances of the business. And that's kind

(31:41):
of how we divided up our work for the first
four years, like basically the way and the way it
changed over time was how much of the work we
were doing versus how much of the work we were
managing versus how many people we were managing that were
managing the work. So like, just even use the example
of content, it's like it started with me writing the content.
At some point I was like, Okay, I'm getting better

(32:03):
at this content thing, but we can find better people.
So then when we ended up hiring a full time writer,
I ended up managing the writer, and I basically acted
as the editor, where I was editing everything the writer wrote.
We ended up hiring another writer they were writing, and
then they were self editing each other. So now I
was just kind of like managing what was our content
strategy broadly. Then at a certain point it was like, okay,

(32:24):
what are we doing beyond just Morning Brew the newsletter?
And so my thinking became like, how do we grow
into a true multiplatform media company and just and not
just a daily newsletter? And so I think as time
went on, what I was thinking about did initially change
in terms of the disciplines. It was just I was
getting further and further from like the nitty gritty of

(32:45):
the product and more focused on just like what is
like the business as a whole look like I will
say though, It's why after a period of time in
the business, my energy towards the business changed because like
the first four years of Morning Brew, it felt like
a ragtag crew of people trying to like prove that
you can build a media company when everyone was saying

(33:06):
we couldn't. And I was like super close to the
product at a certain time. A point in building a company,
your job goes from like your number one job is
like get to product market fit and make sure your
product is excellent to you're a company builder and your
job is like build like a six month, one year,
three year plan, build an executive team, be a people manager.

(33:27):
And I think when things got to that, I just
realized enjoyed it less. And I think that was actually
just a really interesting learning for me, because when I
got into entrepreneurship, I had this certain image of what
it meant to be a successful entrepreneur. My mount Rushmore
of entrepreneurs was like the classic cast of characters like
Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk because they like had

(33:52):
this like epiphany they built stuff, and then like they
kept building their company until they had thousands of employees
went public, and so that was my definition of success,
and so I think it kind of messed with me
at some point where I was like, is this like,
is this bad that I'm basically not enjoying the job anymore.
Once I actually came to terms with the idea that like,
there's certain parts of entrepreneurship I love and there's certain

(34:13):
parts I don't love. I think it took a lot
of pressure off of like what it had, what the
journey had.

Speaker 1 (34:19):
To look like for me, because you sold it after
seven years, right, Yeah, Well I feel like that's also
because you get into the motions of doing the same
thing over and over again. And I think the beautiful
thing about the Morning Brew was it was this really
consistent thing exactly that was in people's inboxes every single morning.
But that can get mundane for you, even though the
stories are changing every day.

Speaker 4 (34:39):
So what ended up happening though, is like we sold
the business in twenty twenty, and I think even though
I technically stepped out of the CEO role in April
of twenty twenty one, so we sold the business in
October of twenty twenty, mid pandemic. I stepped out of
the CEO role in April of twenty twenty one. I
would say that like, probably middle of twenty nineteen is where,
in an unspoken Austin and my roles were shifting, where

(35:02):
he was really moving from COO of the business to
CEO of the business. And I would say, like my
role was kind of starting to look like chief innovation officer,
where like I was just excited about like the new
things we're building. So when we were launching a podcast,
where were launching our new like vertical newsletters, like I
wanted to be deeply involved in those projects. And so
I think that's like I just started my time started

(35:25):
gravitating towards the things that I naturally loved. But what
that also meant at some point was like I actually
wasn't the best person to be the CEO of the business.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
I think the beauty about building a business, from what
I'm hearing from you, is when you build a successful business,
you also get to learn things about yourself that you
can't learn just doing you know, a regular job where
you're doing the same task over and over again, because
you learned that it wasn't doing you know, writing the
newspaper that fueled you up. It was literally growing this business,

(35:54):
and you're a serial entrepreneur because of that, one hundred percent.

Speaker 4 (35:56):
And Yeah, and I think the more you can like
just kind of almost like trick yourself into not focusing
on a specific path, the better, because if you think
about it, like entrepreneurship by definition people the reason because
people become entrepreneurs is so that they don't necessarily have
a defined path, like they're crafting their path. And so
it actually sounds quite ironic when it's like if you

(36:18):
focus on like a certain path, it's like that's the
exact oppos reason of why people become entrepreneurs. So I
think when I started being okay with a different definition
of what success and entrepreneurship looks like. And even as
like my mount rushmore of entrepreneurs has changed a ton
over time, I think the journey felt a lot more
like play. And I've just realized, like the more that
I feel like three year old Alex, the happier that

(36:41):
I am as I'm building my companies.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah, we talked about this during the run, but you
have to gravitate towards what gives you energy. What do
you think was harder building a successful company or.

Speaker 2 (37:01):
Letting it go.

Speaker 4 (37:02):
I would say letting it go for sure, because even
though building the Brew was hard, at no point in
the journey did it like I'm sure it felt hard
at points, but like it never felt like excruciating, Like
there was just like a love for the journey of
building throughout letting it go, which really, in my mind
meant letting go of a big portion of my identity.

(37:26):
That was I think that's one of the hardest things
I've had to ever do. Basically, from April twenty twenty one,
for about a year, I just was incredibly lost.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
I was incredibly lost. I didn't know what I wanted
to do after the Brew.

Speaker 4 (37:41):
I worried that I was only successful because I out
of luck versus skill. I convinced myself that my success
was a function of having a great co founder who
kind of dragged me along the whole way.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
I was worried that I had peaked.

Speaker 4 (37:58):
In life, and how sad of a thing it would
be if I was like twenty eight years old, and like,
what life do I have ahead of me? If I've
peaked already? Right, I have so many reasons for why
this story is not truth. It also like I kind
of have compassion for myself and my kind of the
way I thought then that, like, it makes so much
sense why you get into these kind of like self conscious,

(38:21):
self doubting stories after you leave something that's such a
big part of your identity. My best analogy for it
is like when someone plays a sport for their whole life,
and if someone's a pro athlete, and then they end
up retiring, and you know, for the longest time as
a pro athlete, like they felt at the top of
their sport, they were externally validated for being great at

(38:42):
what they did, and a pro athlete, depending on the
sport you're in, retires at say like their mid thirties,
like you still have your whole life ahead of you,
but it's not going to be with the sport. I
think the kind of almost like the mind fuck of
like refinding purpose on identity is a very similar thing.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
The purpose thing is really interesting, and I think you
learned it so young. And I had a similar experience
when I got injured, and I liked that you brought
up athletes, But when I was as sophomore in college,
I tore my acl again for the second time, and
I had to step away from sports. And I was
fifteen years old, and for those fifteen years of my life,
except for when I was like a baby and toddler,
I was an athlete and that was my identity and
I wanted to go to college for it, just like

(39:21):
my brothers did and all of that totally, and that
felt like my purpose so much. And then when that ended,
it was like I had to figure out, Okay, what
is my purpose without that sport? And I think the
beautiful thing about life is understanding and knowing that there's
going to be different stages of your life and you're
going to find purpose in different ways and kind of
an experience you were going through.

Speaker 4 (39:42):
You know, there's an interesting I forgot who posted it
the other day, but there was like this interesting study
done around how one of the bit the biggest drivers
of positive mental health is working towards something like we
as people, I really think like it's like in our
reptile brains, we are built to work towards things, and

(40:04):
that could be professional, personal or whatever. We're not reptiles,
but I wrote our monkey brain, our reptil brain are reptile.
The reptilians are going to be like, news flash, you're
cold blooded. But I in our reptile brain, so in
deep in our reptile brains, I like I do think.

Speaker 3 (40:24):
We we have a need to work towards things.

Speaker 4 (40:27):
And so I think one of the hardest parts about
stepping out of the Brew is like I did not
know I did. I wasn't working towards anything anymore. I
didn't know what I wanted to work towards. And so,
like I think, when you feel like you are not
moving forward, it is especially for a certain type of mentality,
a certain type of brain, like it is now I'm

(40:48):
saying reptile brain in my mind, it is a really
difficult thing.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
We talked a little bit about life after work and
you know, stepping away from morning Brew. I find it
really interesting that you are in this network of founders.
How did you find you know, becoming friends with other
founders that were in similar positions helped you.

Speaker 4 (41:06):
Yeah, so I would say, actually, probably the most valuable
community that I'm in is it's literally called post Exit Founders,
and it's a group of three thousand founders that sold
their businesses that was started by my buddy Barack a
few years ago and I would say like the telltale
sign of any really quality community is two things that

(41:27):
the founders of the community don't have to be engaged
in discussion for a week, but discussion goes off without
a hitch, Like the community is the driving force of
engagement that happens. And the second is that a very
high percentage of all conversations that happen in the community
feel relevant to you. And that was the thing with
post exit founders, is like eighty percent of all topics

(41:47):
that are discussed in this community feel relevant to me.
And so it's like there just were so many things
after selling a business that I had never thought about
before that I can't talk to most.

Speaker 3 (41:58):
People about, but that this community talks about.

Speaker 4 (42:01):
So it's everything like finding purpose after selling your business.
And also it feels like a really douchey thing to
talk about with other people, like you sol your company,
you make money, Like it feels like, oh, you're going
to complain about the most first world problem of like
not having purpose.

Speaker 3 (42:15):
So it's like, I.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
Don't think it's douchey at all.

Speaker 1 (42:18):
I think any experience that you go through in life,
you deserve to have people around you that have experienced
that too, And was there any perspective that somebody gave
you that really shifted something in your mind that you
were like, Oh, that's a good way to think about it.

Speaker 4 (42:33):
I think after you sell it, this is a very
niche thing. But after you sell a company, like everyone says,
like get a great tax person, you have to like
make sure you optimize every part of your taxes. And
I've seen like founders go to the most extreme lengths
to optimize their taxes, like moving to Dubai where there's
zero taxes. And I just think, like some perspective that

(42:54):
a founder give me at some point is like, look,
at the end of the day, sure you can optimize
your taxes, but like your money is supposed to work
for you to like live your happiest and most fulfilling life.
And if, like you, optimizing your taxes takes you away
halfway around the world to a place where you're not
around your people, then what was the point of it
in the first place. Completely agree, So I would say
I'm like very tax aware, but like not trying to

(43:16):
optimize to the last dollar because to me, like the
marginal benefit of that in my happiness is actually it
creates less happiness. And then I would say the second
thing that I haven't done yet but I've thought a
lot about, is a lot of founders have in this
group have taken sabbaticals where they very explicitly for a

(43:36):
period of time, don't work on companies where they just
take time off there's no end goal in mind. They
live in California, they go surfing every day, they take
their kids to school, they sit at coffee shops that
listen to podcasts, and every founder I've talked to you
got something of value out of their sabbaticals. I can't
bring myself to do it yet, because at least the

(43:57):
story in my head is I'd go crazy, restless. But
it is an interesting thing that I've thought about, Like
at some point I think I'm going to try it out.

Speaker 3 (44:06):
Like I'm actually close with the the.

Speaker 4 (44:09):
Uh founder of a butcher box, and he's like taking
a three month sabbatical while he's the CEO of the
business right now, so you like literally handed over the
business to his exacts. Taking a three month doing I think,
like a silent meditation retreat. And so I do think
there is something really valuable in boredom, Like I think
I'm really bad at boredom.

Speaker 3 (44:31):
A lot of people are.

Speaker 4 (44:32):
But I think in boredom and in kind of like
getting rid of the chatter that's in your head, it
creates space for like really interesting thoughts you'll never have
while you're in kind of like the constant motion of
needing to do things in life, right, I.

Speaker 1 (44:47):
Mean, yeah, there's beauty in silence, and you need to
have those outlets to turn your brain off.

Speaker 3 (44:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (44:52):
I think in a lot of ways we distract ourselves
from like the harder, deeper, more provoking thoughts in life.
And so I think a sabbatical or anything that resemble
that removes the distraction of reconciling these harder conversations in
your head.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Speaking of silence, let's talk about working in silence with
strangers on the internet.

Speaker 3 (45:10):
Great transition.

Speaker 4 (45:12):
So focus mate is probably my favorite productivity hack. It's
basically a website where you get paired with some stranger
around the world to co work with them. And so
like literally what I do is I go to focus Mate,
I start a session. It can be thirty minutes, fifty minutes,
or an hour or ninety minutes. We get on the
camera and I will go on our mics and basically

(45:37):
share what is our goal for our session, set our intention.
Then we mute ourselves and we work in silence for
the entire day of the session. At the end of
the session, we go back on Mike and we say
how the session went and if we accomplished our goals.
And sometimes I and people on Focus may will actually
share screen share so that the other person can see
whether you're actually doing the work you said you would do,

(46:00):
And it just is all this. It follows this concept
of body doubling, which is you're more likely to be
productive and do work if the person across from you
that you see is also doing work and is being productive.
A lot of people call me crazy for it, but
I love doing it, whether it's for staying productive and focused,
or just if you work from home and you love
the feeling of working in an office but you don't
have that feeling anymore, so for anyone as crazy as me,

(46:22):
I highly recommend Focus Mate, And it's like twenty something
bucks a month.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
I'm not affiliated at all, but I love it.

Speaker 1 (46:27):
I think it's great. I feel like you know so
many niche businesses I do.

Speaker 4 (46:31):
Speaking of niche businesses, this morning, I'm walking in Hoboken
and I see one of our friends in Hoboken and
this is a true story. So this dog, Simba, great
name for a dog, So yeah, Simba's a great dog.
And he was recently attacked by a dog at a
dog park. And it's so sad, like there are pictures

(46:51):
of him with stitches in his head, all these things.
Simba's great though, He's a resilient little guy. And we're
talking to the owner of Simba and and the person
was like, wait, we didn't tell you about this, this
thing we recently did, and we're like no, They're like,
we brought Simba to a psychic. And so Simba went

(47:12):
and saw a psychic to see if there was any
unresolved trauma from his attack that he needed to work
through as he came out on the other side of
this attack. And I just thought to myself, one that
is absurd too. But put aside the absurdity, it is
unbelievable how many niches and ways there are to make

(47:33):
money on the Internet. And if someone can convince people
that they will do tarot readings and psychic work on dogs,
there really are endless ways that you can make a
living I.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Mean that is wild. I love that though. Yeah, little Simba.

Speaker 3 (47:48):
People will do anything for their pets.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
Yeah they really will. Yeah, they really really will. I
would do anything for a little Jeanie exactly. What's your
dog name, Rambo? Oh that's a good dog name.

Speaker 5 (47:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
So how long did it take for you post leaving
the Morning Brew? How much time did you take between
starting something new?

Speaker 3 (48:14):
About a year?

Speaker 2 (48:15):
Okay, what did you.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
Do during that year besides like having all these thoughts
and stuff, which is very normal?

Speaker 3 (48:20):
So what I started a plunger game?

Speaker 2 (48:22):
Okay, what is that?

Speaker 3 (48:24):
So this is crazy? Honestly, I'm so glad that I
started it.

Speaker 4 (48:28):
But basically we were talking about creator led businesses before
there was a period of time where I wanted to
build like a holding company of creator co founded businesses
where I would I would basically help big YouTubers launch
a business. I'd be their co founder, and we'd use
obviously their their channel as distribution to drive sales for

(48:48):
the business. And so what ended up happening was I
was watching a Dude Perfect video. I love dude Perfect,
and their second or third most watch video ever is
Plunged trick Shots. That's like one of the most watched
videos ever and basically it's them in their old space
taking toilet plungers and throwing them at plexiglass and getting

(49:10):
them to stick. And so I saw this video and
I was like, holy shit, like that looks like ax throwing.
Is this like a safe way way to build ax throwing?
Like a backdoor a backyard ax throwing game. So I
literally saw this video. I immediately because I had way
too much free time, I immediately drove to home Depot
and I went to the plunger aisle and I started

(49:30):
throwing plungers in Home Depot and that took me on
a this is what, this is.

Speaker 1 (49:35):
What twenty eight year old people that have sold their
companies too for everybody listening.

Speaker 4 (49:40):
And so so I literally spent the next four months
manufacturing a backyard game with a manufacturer in China, and
I built the Plunge like it was ready to go.
We had a Kickstarter campaign set up. I still have
a set in my garage.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
I love this.

Speaker 3 (49:57):
I ended up.

Speaker 4 (49:57):
The long story short is, I ended up hanging up
the Plunger. But it was incredibly fun to do something
that honestly was never really going to be a viable
business to build something with like my bare hands. Like
I think there's just something really satisfying about building something physical.

Speaker 3 (50:14):
And I think part of the reason I needed to do.

Speaker 4 (50:16):
It is I had this fear after selling the Brew
and thinking about what was next, I had this fear
that I was going to be kind of like the
cliche serial entrepreneur that just keeps building businesses forever, trying
to chase the high of making more money or building
a bigger business. They get to be seventy five years old,
they have a shit ton of money, but they're unhappy
and unfulfilled in life. Like that was my biggest fear,

(50:39):
because I did not want that to happen. And so
I think like the Plunge was like me basically moving
the exact opposite direction, building something that felt so silly
and so absurd that of course it wasn't gonna be
a big business, which meant the only reason I was
doing it was out of pure like love for the
game and love for building.

Speaker 3 (50:55):
So that's part of what I.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
Did, which is so cool. You're exploring another side of you.
You know, what I think is so inches saying is
so many things, But I feel like you grew up
in this household that was pushing finance, and you probably
always thought that, like finance was going to be the
thing that you went into and you were going to
be like, you know, you are super analytical, but you
were going to be a numbers guy and you were
going to finance, working on Wall Street doing like the
daily grind of that, and then building the successful company.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
You found out how creative you are.

Speaker 3 (51:20):
And I do think it's like I also think based
on the job you do.

Speaker 4 (51:24):
It like pulls it either pulls creativity out of you
or it like puts it into hibernation for a period
of time. So basically I was working, I did the
plunge for four or five months. Then I ended up
getting married, and then I got to some level of
clarity of like what I wanted to do. Like basically
I got to kind of my my north star that

(51:46):
had like two key pillars that I knew I wanted
to like build towards for the next many years. One
pillar was I realized in kind of examining my whole
journey in Morning Brew and what I loved about it
that I loved like the negative one to one. So
going from not having an idea to what that idea is,
creating that idea, putting it into the world, seeing success

(52:08):
with it, and turning it into a business. Like the
negative one to one of business is where I get
the most joy. And the way I came to that
conclusion was there is this really cool exercise called the
Best Stuff Exercise. It's by the Conscious Leadership Group, which
if you're an entrepreneur honestly just like a person who
wants to think more deeply about yourself, Like the probably

(52:30):
the best book I've read in kind of growth leadership
business is Fifteen Commitments of Conscious Leadership.

Speaker 3 (52:39):
It's by the Conscious Leadership Group.

Speaker 4 (52:40):
But anyway, there's an exercise in the book called the
Best Stuff Exercise, and it helps you understand what your
zone of genius is. And the way it does it
is it has you list out eight experiences from your
life that you felt successful at, that you got a
lot of energy from, and that you like time felt
like it melted away while you were doing it. You
list those eight experiences and then you find in those

(53:04):
experiences common themes of like what are similar types of
things you were doing in all eight that maybe start
to hone in on what is your zone of genius
and basically my zone of genius was like basically invention, storytelling,
and relationship building, Like those are my three things.

Speaker 3 (53:20):
And by the way, this is a great way that
I use chat GPT.

Speaker 4 (53:22):
Also is I basically uploaded the exercise into chat GPT
and I said, prompt me to like prompt me through
the exercise, so I give my experiences. It asked me
for the next one, and then at the end it
outputs what it thinks my zone of geniuses by feeding
it these exercises. But anyway, going through this, going through
this exercise, I came to the realization that I love

(53:43):
the early stage of business, and I asked myself, how
can I set up my life in a way that
I focus most of my time on the early stages
of companies.

Speaker 3 (53:51):
The second thing that became.

Speaker 4 (53:53):
Really important to me was I wanted to prove to
myself that I could be an A plus entrepreneur and
also an A plus family person. And the reason that
became really important is one like, family has always been
my number one value. But also I think there's so
many entrepreneurs that I look up to, Like several of
the entrepreneurs that I shared with you earlier that are

(54:13):
unbelievable business people, but I am not necessarily trying to
emulate them in life. And so kind of my thing
became there need to be more role models of super
successful entrepreneurs who also are as successful with their families.
And so that's like my whole mount rushmore of entrepreneurs
has completely changed from what I shared before to be
people who more emulate that style of person that I'm describing,

(54:37):
who's like killer family person and killer entrepreneur. So those
became my two pillars, and so like I started orienting
my whole life of like, Okay, in order to do this,
I'm going to incubate businesses. I'm going to bring on
a co founder and CEO as early as possible, and
I'm going to set the expectation with them that I'm
going to be really involved in the business for probably

(54:58):
the first twelve to twenty four months. My goal is
to use my distribution, my network, and my knowledge from
morning Brew to increase the odds of success and getting
in a product market fit by a ton. And then
my goal is once we have product market fit, once
we have revenue coming in the door, and once we
have a core team I'm going to roll off to incubate.

Speaker 3 (55:16):
My next business, and I set that expectation.

Speaker 4 (55:18):
From day one, and basically I started building, like building
towards that. And this was probably twenty twenty four. And then,
because life hits you in the face, my wife was
actually pregnant and we had to end a pregnancy, and
I went from being like finally getting to a place

(55:39):
where I was really like professionally clear again to having
no professional clarity because when all of that happened, I
couldn't care less about my work, and so there was
probably like a six to eight month period of work
could not have mattered less. We came out of that
whole experience, which I'm I'm happy to talk about, and

(56:03):
I would say a few things became clear to me.
One is like, it's an obvious thing, but the person
you choose to be your partner in life is the
most important decision, and it's not even close to any
other decision. It's also like how hard moments really reveal
people's character, and it just re solidified for me, like

(56:23):
my north star of being really like having more professional
ambition than ever before, but never doing it at the
expense of being the family person I want to be
is going to be core to me for the rest
of my life.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Yeah, it's so important.

Speaker 1 (56:37):
And for everybody listening, Alex is going to be a
new dad in about a month, which is so exciting.
So congratulations because it's so hard going through a loss
of a pregnancy, but it's such a miracle.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
Now, this is like your miracle, bab tw percent.

Speaker 4 (56:50):
Yeah, no, we're so excited and yeah, like I always say, like,
we didn't need this to happen for me to feel
so rock solid with my wife. But moments like that
just make you realize, like how having kind of like
your ride or die, who is like your center of
gravity in life is It's such a gift.

Speaker 3 (57:11):
When you have it.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
It's the hard moments that make you realize how important
it is to have that person in your life. Whether
it's a partner or a friend or mom, dad, brother, sister,
whatever it is for you, it is so important to.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
Have that person.

Speaker 4 (57:22):
And one other interesting learning I had from it is like,
again we were talking about it on the run, but like,
I've always viewed myself as like a very distracted person.
But what is interesting is when we were going through
everything and we were getting this all this like scary
information from doctors. It's very interesting how quickly because it
was such a priority, I became incredibly focused and for

(57:43):
forty eight hours straight, I did nothing but basically become
world class in understanding genetic abnormalities in babies. And it
just made me realize, like, maybe one of the reasons
that I get distracted with a lot of things is
like maybe one and maybe that's like a feature of
me in my life and not a bug. And maybe

(58:04):
it's just the fact that, like most things are not
that important in life, but when the really important things happen,
if you can get laser focused on those things and
you absolutely grind towards them, that's actually the true measure
of your abilities. And so yeah, it just made it
gave me more grace in realizing that, like I don't
know my distractability. I think I wouldn't be kind of

(58:25):
creative and like this idea machine that I am without it.
And it showed me that like when push comes to
shove and the really important shit presents itself, I can
get laser focused. And so it was just an interesting
learning for myself.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
When you say you became an expert in genetic abterormalities
with birth. I mean, I'm somebody that wants to have
kids soon, so I'm just curious, like what did you learn?

Speaker 2 (58:47):
And if you don't mind us asking, what happened?

Speaker 4 (58:49):
Yeah, So basically, there's like two major scans in a pregnancy.

Speaker 3 (58:55):
There's the twelve week scan and then there's the twenty
week scan.

Speaker 4 (58:59):
The twenty weeks is the anatomy scan, so that's where
you like actually get the first three D picture, and
so at the twenty week scan, basically there were abnormalities
where you know, the doctor who looked at everything was like,
I don't know what this is, but you need to
talk to someone effectively, like a specialist. So I would

(59:22):
say like probably like the most painful period for us
was like the two weeks of not knowing what was
going to happen, because it's not like you have any answers.
You just have doubts, which is like there's something wrong,
we don't know what it is. You need to get
more answers. So for basically two weeks we didn't know

(59:42):
what was going to happen with my wife's pregnancy, so awful,
and so we went to like chop, which is the
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. It's like the best children's hospital
in the world and it's where basically every kind of
crazy case is sent to.

Speaker 3 (59:57):
And basically the.

Speaker 4 (59:59):
Abnormal that was found in our baby. When we were
talking to the doctor, they had only seen that combination
of abnormalities once in their career. But you know, just
as a specific example, like the abnormality that was found,
which was basically just like a deformity in the chest
of the baby, I ended up going down a rabbit

(01:00:22):
hole of reading every piece of scientific research that had
been done in history on this abnormality, so much so
that like I was reciting studies better than the chop
children's doctor was because well, which makes sense, like they're
focusing on so many babies.

Speaker 3 (01:00:37):
I went down the rabbit.

Speaker 4 (01:00:38):
Hole, but I basically learned everything humanly possible about this
abnormality as well as like, because I was just trying
to understand what are the odds that things are okay
versus not okay? And the short answer is the unfortunate
thing is as you get into things related to like
health and science is there is so much unknown, and

(01:00:58):
so we ended up having to make like the heartbreaking
decision to end the pregnancy because the odds that things
were going to be bad was very high.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
Oh and five months and it is so heartbreaking because
that's at the point where you're getting excited.

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
Your bump is totally.

Speaker 4 (01:01:11):
Yeah, my wife's body was changing. You know, we already
had a name in our head. We had done and
this the hardest part is like we had done a
gender reveal.

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
It was on Instagram.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
I was gonna ask you had you done?

Speaker 4 (01:01:23):
So yeah, and so like you know, people still saying
congratulations to my wife, and and then for me, like
I I've always I've always wanted to be a dad
and so like I already in my head was like
taking on this like my this role of like I
can't wait to be a dad and like like planning

(01:01:44):
my head what it's going to look like to be
a great dad.

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
And so yeah, it's like it is very much.

Speaker 4 (01:01:49):
It's it's a death quite literally, but also like the
death of a dream for a period of time.

Speaker 1 (01:01:55):
Absolutely, I mean, pregnancies are so scary and anything can happen.
It really, it really is so freaking It's like one
of I feel like it's every couple's like biggest fear.

Speaker 4 (01:02:03):
It is and I think what I will say is,
and this has talked about a lot, but like there's
unfortunately so much stuff that goes wrong with pregnancies and
they don't get talked about a lot. And so it's like,
after this all happened, we found out about more and
more people who experienced things at the twenty week scan
and but like never knew about it before. And I'd say,

(01:02:23):
on one side, it was like consoling because you know
you're not the only one going through it. But on
the other side, it's like, for this pregnancy of my wife,
we were absolutely like anxiety ridden until getting through the
twenty week scan this time because we had no clarity
on if things were going to be any better.

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
It's so true.

Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
I feel like everything you see online with pregnancies is like, yeah,
people excited about their pregnancy one month, two month, three month, whatever,
And you never hear about the things that go wrong.
It's like you just hear about the perfect pregnancies, but
they're always and.

Speaker 4 (01:02:55):
It's like, you know, this is why you understand when
people are asked like do you want you know, do
you want to boy or a girl, and people say,
I just want a healthy baby, Like this this is why.

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
Yeah, yeah, I feel like it's something that you don't
understand until you're at that point exactly. I think about
that all the time. It's literally in one month, So
we're getting you at the perfect.

Speaker 3 (01:03:13):
Time because it's insane.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
Yeah, Alex is about to go full dad mode.

Speaker 3 (01:03:17):
It is wild. And to be honest, like that's why.

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
Perfect timing too. Summer it is, it's gonna be so nice.

Speaker 3 (01:03:22):
Summer babies are the best.

Speaker 4 (01:03:23):
I'm a July birthday. My grandpa is, my mom is like,
but yeah, I'm super excited. But that's like why I've
set up my life now with like I have these
four businesses, but I have co founders for all of them.
They are the CEOs of these businesses. And why I
set the expectation up of like I, you are going
to my co founders, you are going to be the
operational leader of this business. Because I can't predict what

(01:03:48):
my life is going to look like after having a child,
and I can't predict like how long I'm gonna want
to not focus on work for and so I just
knew I needed to set my life up in a
way where I had the flexibility to make that choice
because I just knew I would have the biggest regret
if I was completely sunk into my work and then
I wasn't able to be present to the moments that

(01:04:09):
only you only get once in life.

Speaker 1 (01:04:11):
Even outside of that, you're doing what makes you happy,
which is being somebody that starts a business and helps
it grow, and then once it's at a certain point,
you can say, Okay, go do your thing, you know.
So it's like learning how to build a successful business
and then let it go. And I think that's so cool.

(01:04:36):
One of the things that I think is so impressive
about you is all while building these incredible brands and businesses,
you've also been a content creator yourself. So I'm curious,
was that something that you always did when you were
working at the Morning Brew, or did becoming a content
creator kind of start afterwards because you are such a
thought leader online.

Speaker 4 (01:04:54):
Yeah, I think it started in the back half of
The Brew, because honestly, in the early days of The Brew,
I just I couldn't find the time to create content.
And so I think that's just like an important thing
to point out because I'm sure like a lot of
early stage founders are like I see, like alex Or
other people creating content, it feels like they have so
much time to do this.

Speaker 3 (01:05:12):
I can't find it time to create a single post.

Speaker 4 (01:05:14):
And I would just say, like, for the first three
or four years of building the Brew, I did not
have a presence online, and then I started building presence
once I had any semblance of time. I mean, for me,
the reason it became important for two reasons. One is
because actually three reasons. One is, it's the best way
for me to refine my ideas. Like I think there

(01:05:37):
are people who are internal thinkers and external thinkers, so
people who process their ideas by thinking to themselves other
people who process ideas by talking things out. I am
an external thinker, and so it's also why I love
chatchivt so much, because I just have conversations with it now.
But like posting on social became my external processing tool

(01:05:57):
for refining ideas that I've been thinking about out and
I just knew I would get better at refining them
by sharing them with the world. The second is is
like I just view the Internet is a magnet for
attracting like minded people who are interested in what you
have to say, and so like the network that I
started having access to through posting on Twitter and posting

(01:06:18):
on LinkedIn or posting on Instagram. It kind of became
addictive because I was like, this is like a CEO
or like an artist or someone I should have no
access to, yet I somehow have access to, Like this
is the coolest thing. And the third is is like
I think, as I thought about where the world is
going and where business is going, having unfair distribution is

(01:06:39):
such an important thing. Like I think as software becomes
more commoditized, as I think, like there's more businesses than
ever before, people have more choice than ever before. One
of the biggest advantages you can have as a business
is having trusted distribution with an audience, because otherwise, if
you don't have that, you're gonna have to spend so
much money on marketing. As marketing channels become less of

(01:07:00):
effective and so over time, the way I started viewing
myself as like, Okay, I'm a media company.

Speaker 3 (01:07:05):
How do I.

Speaker 4 (01:07:06):
Create content that attracts the right end customer? And then
how do I launch businesses that sell really valuable products
to that end customer? And so the way I view
myself as like I have basically two end customers right
now it's entrepreneurs like founders and cmos or heads of marketing,
and so every business like in my portfolio basically is

(01:07:28):
built to solve a problem for either founders or for
heads of marketing, and so then my whole content strategy
is just in service of helping these people. And I
just also generally have a rule where eighty percent of
the time I'm adding value twenty percent of the time
is when I'm natively working in the things I'm doing
with my businesses. And the best analogy I could use
for that, as other creators think about how much content

(01:07:51):
should be about like not about my businesses or about
like things I'm being paid for versus not is my
analogy is like imagine you're driving down the pch in
California and you're looking at the ocean. The way I
would describe it is like your content as a creator,
you're really good content is the ocean. Every time you

(01:08:13):
promote one of your businesses, you're putting a billboard on
the highway and it blocks the view of the ocean.
If you do it once every few miles, it's totally fine.
It's still worth it for the driver to drive down
the highway to see the beautiful view, but all all
of a sudden, every ten seconds you're seeing a billboard
and it's impeding your view of the ocean. You may
start to think, like, am I going to still drive
down the highway?

Speaker 3 (01:08:33):
To me?

Speaker 4 (01:08:33):
That's ultimately how a creator should think about the balance
of truly value add content with asking for nothing in
return versus promoting the things that actually drive revenue or
equity value for the businesses you have.

Speaker 1 (01:08:45):
And I think one of the things too that I
loved what you said is like you know your audience
so well, and I think that's one of the things
that a lot of content creators, you know, have a
hard time figuring out. I think that's the hardest thing
about being an early stage content creator is finding those people,
especially with algorithms now sending your videos out to such
like mass ranges of people. What would be your tips

(01:09:06):
for creators now that are trying to find their audience.

Speaker 4 (01:09:09):
Yeah, I think there's small things and big things you
can do. The small things are like any creator, no
matter what platform you're on, you can have conversations with
your audience, like even say Instagram, where like the analytics
on your audience are relatively broad strokes, like it gives
you age buckets, it gives you gender buckets, it gives
you geo buckets. You could very easily just like post
a story saying you want to get to know your community,

(01:09:32):
and then you hop on fifteen minute calls with ten people,
and like, you will learn a lot in those conversations
who your people are, why they consume your content, and
what they want more of from you. So like, to me,
that's a very actionable things and as simple as it sounds,
I would argue most creators don't do that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:49):
I love that idea.

Speaker 1 (01:09:51):
I mean, it is so true because the people that
respond to that career are the ones that want to
get to know you and are the most passionate about
you exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:09:58):
And at the end of the day, you know, I
forgot who wrote this essay.

Speaker 4 (01:10:02):
I think it's Kevin Kelly, but it's it's basically a
thousand true fans, which is this idea of like, don't
worry about building an audience of a million people, worry
about building an audience of a thousand die hards, and
then learn everything you can about those diehards by posting
a story that ask people to like opt into a

(01:10:23):
conversation with you. You are just like getting like the biggest
diehard of diehards to opt in because it's someone who
saw a story, saw that they have to take time
out of their day to talk with you.

Speaker 3 (01:10:36):
They opted into that.

Speaker 4 (01:10:37):
Like you're talking to your not even one thousand true fans,
you're talking to your like one hundred true fans.

Speaker 3 (01:10:42):
So that's the first.

Speaker 4 (01:10:42):
The second is there's certain platforms that just give you
more information about the people that you're creating for. So
like in my mind, the two that can give you
the most are either newsletter or LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one
of my and I have a lot of thoughts on
LinkedIn as a platform, But one of the beautiful things

(01:11:03):
about LinkedIn is that I can see who views my
profile every single day, so I know, like I know
the exact people who are viewing my profile. It also
makes marketing my companies a lot easier because as an example,
let's just see, say I see a head of marketing
from like a B to B software company viewed my profile,
and I know that my business story ARB is a
perfect offer for them. I can do an incredibly targeted

(01:11:26):
and custom DM to them, knowing they already have some
level of interest in what I'm involved in.

Speaker 3 (01:11:31):
The other one is newsletter.

Speaker 4 (01:11:33):
Like the way we always learned about people at the
Brew through newsletter is we just put out a survey
once a quarter. We'd give away like five hundred bucks
that you like, earn a chance to win if you
complete the survey, and the survey would get to know
people like you know, age Goo, Why do you read

(01:11:54):
the Brew? What's one idea you have for us to add?
What's your seniority professionally?

Speaker 3 (01:11:59):
What industry are you in?

Speaker 4 (01:12:01):
And it's like you also don't need infinite information, like
you can learn a lot about your audience through ten
conversations or from one hundred people filling out a survey.
So I actually think this stuff like is way simpler
than it seems. I just think most people don't end
up pulling the trigger and undoing it, and then once
they do it, I think people are don't necessarily know
what to do with the information, Like once I know

(01:12:22):
that my audience is XYZ, what do I do with
that information?

Speaker 3 (01:12:26):
I think a lot of creators stopped there.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
One hundred percent. Yeah, I've been thinking about it a lot. Recently.

Speaker 1 (01:12:31):
We were talking about this kind of before I started,
but just to give everybody listening a little bit a
context into my brain and how I'm thinking about my
audience is I did a video the other week with
John Gray, and it was one of my most viewed
videos and most engaged videos in a while.

Speaker 4 (01:12:44):
What I'm even curious about with the John Gray episode
is like for people, for people who enjoyed it and
engaged with it, Like, what I'd probably do is like
for people who commented on the video and it's something
of an interesting comment, is like replying to them asking
them if they'd be down to chat for a second
about the interview and why it was so valuable to them.

Speaker 2 (01:13:02):
Yeah, No, that's such a good idea and I definitely
will do that.

Speaker 4 (01:13:05):
Yeah, And you're going to get so many people interested
because again, like it may not feel this, but like
from people's perspective who watch your show like your celebrity
to them, and people are like, wow, I have the
opportunity to talk with someone I idolized, like you will
just you have as many conversations as you want to.

Speaker 1 (01:13:19):
Have, and it's fun showing people that you're just a
human exactly one hundred percent, and that you're always down
to chat. There's this article that just came out in
Forbes and it's called the Rise of the Creator CEO Movement,
and it's about how a lot of creators are launching businesses.
Where do you think the creator industry is going? Yeah,
and what do you think.

Speaker 3 (01:13:38):
About I have a lot of thoughts.

Speaker 4 (01:13:40):
I think that So I think the creator economy as
a like as a business, it has gone through a
rough patch over the last like year to two years
because for a few reasons. One is there a lot
of creator co founded businesses that have not necessarily done
as well as people would have assumed there's all The

(01:14:02):
other reason is there's a number of businesses that raised
a lot of money to serve creators and they haven't
done as well.

Speaker 3 (01:14:08):
And I think these hit on two different reasons.

Speaker 4 (01:14:11):
One is, if you are raising venture capital money and
trying to be a massive startup, you have to build
like a multi billion dollar company. And even though the
creator economy is big and getting bigger, I would argue
that most money in the creator economy is being sucked
up by the platforms. Like the biggest creator economy businesses
are TikTok Meta, you know, ig x et cetera. And

(01:14:36):
so I think the pie is actually way smaller for
businesses outside of these platforms to build really big businesses.
On the side of like creators who have launched businesses,
I think at the end of the day, it is
just really really hard to build a great creator economy business.
And I think there's a few common pitfalls that I see.
One is creators who launch launch product that are just

(01:15:00):
not truly great products. It's like creators who just like
want kind of quick wins financially. They launch something that's
like kind of a commodity, and they wonder why there's
an initial spike in the beginning because they market the product,
but then retention is horrible because people aren't buying the
product over and over. So I think that's the first
thing that happens with a lot of creator businesses is

(01:15:21):
a creator wants to launch a company, but they're more
excited by the idea of building like launching a company
announcing it to their audience than the actual work that
has to go into building a company for a long time.
So that's the first and so like what's the learning there.
The learning is is like a creator should only launch
a business if one, they have an appreciation for the

(01:15:43):
fact that building a business is just like building your
creator career, like it it's going to take seven to
ten years. The second is the humility to know that
being a creator is very different from being an entrepreneur,
and either you as the creator, need to evolve into
entrepreneur or you need to surround yourself with the right
people who are the operators of the business. And the

(01:16:04):
third is you have to build a product that's truly
differentiated that solves a very real need for your audience.
And I think, by the way, the reason that a
lot of creators have launched kind of shitty products is
because they saw what happened in alcohol and assumed you
could do that everywhere else. Like the first big space
that creator businesses were launched was in like tequila and vodka.

(01:16:28):
And so you look at like, you know Avion, which
is what's his name, the actor I can't remember from
Motions eleven, where you look at you know, like the
rock has Terremna tequila, like it became the classic, a
less celebrity thing to launch an alcohol brand, and by definition,

(01:16:50):
most alcohol is commodity, Like the product isn't actually different
all that matters is brand and distribution. And so I
think a lot of creators assumed, hey, I can just
do the same model and like other forms of beverage
or snacks. But it doesn't work the same way. So
that's the first thing I'll share. I think the second
thing is what's interesting is like creator businesses started with

(01:17:12):
like the most obvious categories. So they started again with
like alcohol. Then it went to you know, let's look
at like mister beasts businesses with like food or like
candy CpG. The other next obvious place was like apparel.
Like tons of creators launched apparel brands.

Speaker 2 (01:17:28):
I tried that and I fail.

Speaker 3 (01:17:30):
It's incredible.

Speaker 4 (01:17:30):
I mean I invested in one that like I invested
in something Navy's apparel brands.

Speaker 3 (01:17:35):
Oh yeah, it just it's really hard.

Speaker 4 (01:17:38):
I think there's gonna be I actually think the most
valuable creator businesses to launch, depending on the type of
creator you are, are like way more niche. So I'll
even just give you an example. One of my favorite
creators is Epic Gardening. Epic Gardening, it's this guy, Kevin
Espery too. He has the largest gardening channel on YouTube,
three million subscribers and they're so their business I think

(01:17:58):
it does like sixty or seven million dollars a year.
Half of that is in brand deals, half of it
is they bought a seed company, wow, and now they
sell seeds direct to consumer and through nurseries like they
sell wholesale to nurseries.

Speaker 2 (01:18:11):
I do love that. I love a niche thing.

Speaker 1 (01:18:13):
It makes me think of Ballerina Farms, who also is
making niche products that makes so much sense for her
audience exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:18:19):
And so I actually think like people just I think creators.
And it's possibly because they want a shortcut it or
they don't know the right steps. But to me, like,
if I'm a creator who wants to launch a business,
like my order of operations would be step one, understand
my audience.

Speaker 3 (01:18:33):
Step two. Talk to my own audience.

Speaker 4 (01:18:36):
Understand what are the products they're using constantly, What are
the pain points they're experiencing with those products? Where is
there what what is a product they're wishing would be
better that isn't better. Start to form an opinion on
a product or a need that you've heard over and
over from your audience, and start to think through, whether
by yourself or with a team, what does a really

(01:18:56):
novel solution look like for that audience, come up with
like an MVP, whether it's a physical product or a
digital product, an MVP to solve that problem in a
novel and elegant way. Take kind of like your fifty
die hards, Get them in a WhatsApp group, send them
the product, get their feedback on it, iterate on it.
Once you feel really good about it, launch it to

(01:19:17):
your audience, and like That's how I'd approach things. But
I think oftentimes, like creators end up landing on product
before they go through this entire thing.

Speaker 3 (01:19:27):
And like, to me, oftentimes people find.

Speaker 4 (01:19:29):
Solutions in search of problems and the best way to
build a great business is to find a problem and
then find a solution that elegantly solves the problem. And
So what I guess all this to say is like
I think they're going to be huge creator co founded businesses.
I just think like, well, and the other thing I'll
say is like they just have to be the right one.
They have to be the right ones, and there's gonna
be a lot that won't work. But that doesn't mean
that there isn't a lot of opportunity. Just like if

(01:19:51):
you look at the stats on what percentage of startups fail.
The answer is eighty percent of startups fail. So even
if the stats are similar for the creator economy, that
means eight out of every ten creator businesses is going
to fail because like that's building successful companies is just hard,
but you are going to have huge successes. I also think,
just more than ever before, it just like the other

(01:20:12):
thing that's most important about creator businesses is like, do
you actually have an audience that really gives a shit
and trusts you deeply and is willing to pull out
their wallet it kind of in support of you and
the solution you have. Because again it's like you could
have the greatest product in the world, but if you
don't have a deeply trusting audience, then you don't actually

(01:20:33):
have influence.

Speaker 1 (01:20:44):
I think sometimes there's also benefits into it not being
the public face of the brand and just having the product.
I interviewed a founder recently who just now is and
she has a very successful brand that's like a consumer
good goods for women. Yeah, she was saying that it
wasn't until she had reached a certain level of success
that she was comfortable being like the face of the

(01:21:06):
brand totally and that's not to say she went into
hiding with the brand like I mean, her face was
on the about page and all of that, but she
wasn't really outwardsly doing content.

Speaker 2 (01:21:15):
And it's kind of interesting.

Speaker 4 (01:21:16):
Yeah, And what I would say, it's interesting like in
some ways, having a heart loyal audience is a huge
advantage because you have built in marketing you don't have
to pay for marketing. In other ways, it's a crutch
because if you truly have a deeply trusting audience, you
can promote anything and it'll probably sell for a period
of time. So it takes you longer to learn is
the product. Are you getting revenue because people love the

(01:21:37):
product or because they're just going to say yes to
anything that you promote in the world. So I would
say that's actually one of the tricky parts of being
a creator who has trusting audience is it may take
longer than someone who doesn't have audience to figure out
is the thing actually working for the right reasons.

Speaker 1 (01:21:52):
I think one of the things that you do that
is one of my favorite content series where on LinkedIn
and across platforms, where you have people pitch you their
business in sixty seconds.

Speaker 2 (01:22:01):
I love it. Thank you how often do you film that?

Speaker 4 (01:22:04):
So I took it a little bit of a hiatus
for Okay, I'm going to bring it back.

Speaker 2 (01:22:08):
You have to bring it back.

Speaker 3 (01:22:09):
I'm also you.

Speaker 4 (01:22:10):
Guys will be able to help me with this, but
I'd like, I'm trying to test other formats of founder
type style interviews and like competitions.

Speaker 3 (01:22:18):
So if you guys have ideas, I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
Alex, I feel like everybody listening has this thought in
their head too. But you would be the perfect person
for like a shark tank.

Speaker 4 (01:22:25):
And that was the original idea for sixty second Startup
was I was like, I love Shark Tank. People love
Shark Tank, but there has not been a shark Tank
created for the platforms of today because Shark Tank was
never brought to like social platforms.

Speaker 3 (01:22:39):
That's why I created sixty second Startup.

Speaker 4 (01:22:42):
But I always thought there was a way to like
take it a step further and I couldn't figure out
how to do it.

Speaker 3 (01:22:47):
But I love doing it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:48):
You will, You're going to figure it out. Yeah, I'm
so excited.

Speaker 1 (01:22:51):
I do love when people bring nostalgic shows, and obviously
Shark Tank is still going on, but I love when
people bring those shows that have been around for a
while onto social media in some way. Like my show
was very in a lot of ways was inspired by
Carpoo Karaoke totally doing it on the run, and I
love Caleb Simpson's apartment tours.

Speaker 3 (01:23:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:23:07):
Yeah, I've always thought like, if you bring back MTV
Cribs and you reboot it, it would be sick or like
I just think of like dirty jobs. Like if you
look at what Cody Sanchez does with her content on YouTube,
she basically recreated dirty jobs, and so yeah, I think
one of the best ways to actually think of content
series is to just go literally, if you don't have
a cable TV box, go to someone who does, go

(01:23:29):
and look at the programming for like CNBCCBS, whatever, and
just ask if there was a rebooted version of this
on social platforms, what would.

Speaker 3 (01:23:38):
That look like.

Speaker 1 (01:23:38):
I totally agree, Honestly, I think that's a really good
idea and we might have to do that. Well, you've
got so much going on, You're running four companies, you've
got a baby girl on the way doing a month,
So what are you currently excited about, what are you
focused on and what's next?

Speaker 4 (01:23:51):
Well, I'm very excited about starting a family probably the thing,
not probably definitely the thing I'm most excited about. And
it's been very fun to design a nursery and use
CHATGBT to create a nursery.

Speaker 3 (01:24:04):
Unbelievable to it.

Speaker 1 (01:24:04):
For that, Also, my favorite thing is uploading a picture
of the room and saying design, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:24:08):
Exactly, so good at it.

Speaker 4 (01:24:10):
And honestly, it's like just been really cool to figure
out to finally get into a rhythm where I feel
like I can spend enough time to add a ton
of value to each one of these businesses and just
feel like I'm working with amazing like co founders. And
for me, the most important thing is like I'm just
learning a ton right now. I feel like like building

(01:24:32):
business feels like a game right now, and when building
business feels like I'm playing this like fun internet game,
life just feels like easy and in flow. And so yeah,
I'm just excited to see what's ahead for the four businesses,
and I'm excited to kind of prove to myself and
also the world that you know, you can be really
successful entrepreneur but also be as successful not more successful,

(01:24:53):
of a dad, a parent, and a family person.

Speaker 1 (01:24:56):
I'm so excited for you. This conversation was amazing. You
are amazing. I just can't wait to see what you
continue to Thanks so much for having me. Thank you
guys so much for listening to this episode with Alex.
I learned so much from our conversation and I hope
you guys did too. As a reminder, if you're enjoying
post run high, it really helps if you share this episode,
leave us a quick review and send it to a friend.
And if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to

(01:25:18):
our YouTube channel at kate max, where you can watch
all of the video versions of this podcast. We've got
so many more great conversations coming your way, so I
will see you next time.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Kate Mackz

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

The Joe Rogan Experience

True Crime Tonight

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Alex Lieberman On Selling Morning Brew and Finding Purpose Post Exit