Alex Lieberman On Selling Morning Brew and Finding Purpose Post Exit

Episode Transcript
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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 pumped 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 3 (01:30):
And I feel bad that you have to be in
close proximity to me right now after definitely sweating a lot.
I'm a bit of a hot mess right now.

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

Speaker 3 (01:37):
I was.

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

Speaker 3 (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 3 (02:00):
Yeah, you go 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. 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. So I grew up in Livingston, New Jersey,
a small suburb outside of New York. I grew up
in a Wall Street 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 a very young age. I have one sister, she's

(02:57):
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 end of college, there were just

(03:19):
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 eight years, little Alex not

(03:40):
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, I I don't know
that I had that strong of a sense of self.

(04:02):
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 junior year of college, my

(04:24):
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 running through your system for

(04:46):
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 3 (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 on wood pretty easy.
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

(06:11):
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
losing my dad again in my grief journey, there was
for sure a part of that journey, especially early on,

(06:31):
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
so much quality time with my dad for the twenty
years that he was in my life. And I also

(06:54):
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
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 3 (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? And

(08:04):
like it always comes off 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

(08:25):
way is not because someone 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 3 (08:53):
Totally for whatever reason in my head right now, I
like hear like in a deep Jersey accent, soon going
Wall Street. Yeah, no, one hundred percent. 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

(09:16):
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 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

(09:38):
Michigan with the full intent of working on Wall Street,
spending my whole career in finance. Like my parents. 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,

(09:59):
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,
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 world, Like what do you read? And I
would get the same answer over and over and over

(10:21):
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. I don't get through the whole thing. 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

(10:42):
that they enjoy reading that gets some excited about the
work they're doing. Like why is that? And so I
started 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 3 (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. And so I just started
writing this thing. 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

(11:34):
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 in history. And I would get take
that doc, I would export it as a PDF. I

(11:55):
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 back from readers saying, Hey, so and
so wants to get added to your list Serve, Can

(12:16):
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 to take it a little bit
more seriously. 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

(12:38):
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. Do
you want to meet after BPL? BPL was Beer Pong League.
We met after Beer Pong League and we just completely
hit it off. And I would say, like, other than

(12:59):
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
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

(13:21):
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,
otherwise it's a mess. Austin is the most focused linear
thinker I've ever met. And what I've realized as like

(13:42):
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 so yeah, it's crazy,
Like everyone talks about like the co founder decision is

(14:02):
the most important decision you make in business. And because
I wasn't 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. We had a great two hour conversation. I
was like, this guy's brain compliments mine, Let's do this
and so in a lot of ways, it was good intuition,

(14:24):
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 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 3 (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. So that was
one of the other 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 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 3 (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 thing that anyone can do.
And this is like a totally separate thing, but I

(17:02):
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. He
got interested in one of my businesses. He ended up
doing a 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

(18:06):
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 3 (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.
So slope means you hire someone 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

(18:54):
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, the curiosity and
the proactivity to get a lot further. And my general

(19:15):
view in life is almost in every role you'll ever
hire for hiring for slope versus the intercept is 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. 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

(20:18):
more that a business or something can start as a
curious hobby, the better. So I totally agree with that.
And to me. 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

(20:39):
work that muscle, you can build it over time. And
so like, there are actual exercises I do to work
the muscle of curiosity. 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,

(21:02):
I will ask the question why about things that I'm observing,
Like why is it that these cameras need to be
on stands? 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.

(21:23):
Is it aesthetic or is it functional? And so Basically
what that exercise does is it takes your brain off
autopilot because 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

(21:45):
my leg working right now? To lift my foot and
then lift my leg like you wouldn't do it. 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 3 (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? And I would say basically anything
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

(22:35):
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. So like that's one thing
that I do. Another thing that I do is I
will And this like sounds obvious, but like I just
talk to people and customers a lot, So like I

(22:57):
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 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

(23:19):
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 1 (23:31):
For even hearing about how you cowork. Sometimes when you
are alone with that.

Speaker 3 (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. And I think the main reason
is 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

(24:16):
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 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

(24:39):
not technical at all. I never took a compside class.
But I've always been curious about software and engineering because
as someone 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.

(25:01):
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
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

(25:23):
engineering that I likely wouldn't know, which is most things.
It'll turn it into a course for me. So the
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 (26:00):
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 3 (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? Like?

Speaker 3 (26:25):
An obvious one is like, 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 3 (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 3 (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. 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? I take pictures of everything. Chatchyp GPT tells
me what are all the outfits I can complete, and

(27:35):
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. The
barrier for using chatchibt now is our own creativity and
our own ability to prompt it. Well. 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.

(28:39):
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 is it vero
vo vo three and that's it, and then Premiere to
stitch everything together. You have to check his stuff out.

(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. Yeah. 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

(29:50):
that they need to know for the day. What if
every human had their presidential brief?

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

Speaker 3 (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? Whatever? So yeah, I
do think that more than ever before, with the right data,

(30:19):
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 3 (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 3 (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 3 (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 3 (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. I
was incredibly lost. I didn't know what I wanted to
do after the Brew. I worried that I was only
successful because I out of luck versus skill. I convinced

(37:47):
myself that my success was a function of having a
great co founder who kind of dragged me along the
whole way. I was worried that I had peaked 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

(38:08):
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, 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

(38:30):
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 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

(38:51):
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 3 (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

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

(40:45):
certain type of brain, like it is now I'm 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 3 (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 people about, but
that this community talks about. 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,

(42:08):
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. 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 3 (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.
Like I'm actually close with the the 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.

(44:19):
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. A lot of people are. 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

(44:42):
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. 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. 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

(45:32):
on the camera and I will go on our mics
and basically 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

(45:54):
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, 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

(46:16):
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, I highly recommend
Focus Mate, And it's like twenty something bucks a month.
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 3 (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 4 (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. 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

(48:44):
we'd use obviously their their channel as distribution to drive
sales for the business. And so what ended up happening
was I was watching a Dude Perfect video.

Speaker 2 (48:55):
I love dude Perfect, and.

Speaker 3 (48:56):
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 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?

(49:19):
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
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 3 (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. 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. And I think part of the
reason I needed to do it is I had this

(50:17):
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

(50:38):
that was my biggest fear, 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.
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, 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

(51:41):
to do. Like basically I got to kind of my
my north star that 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

(52:02):
to what that idea is, creating that idea, putting it
into the world, seeing success 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

(52:24):
just like a person who wants to think more deeply
about yourself, Like the probably the best book I've read
in kind of growth leadership business is Fifteen Commitments of
Conscious Leadership. It's by the Conscious Leadership Group. 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.

(52:46):
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 experiences common themes of
like what are similar types of things you were doing

(53:09):
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. And by the way,
this is a great way that I use chat GPT.
Also is I basically uploaded the exercise into chat GPT
and I said, prompt me to like prompt me through

(53:29):
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
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

(53:50):
of companies. The second thing that became 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

(54:11):
shared with you earlier that are 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

(54:32):
what I shared before to be people who more emulate
that style of person that I'm describing, 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

(54:54):
expectation with them that I'm going to be really involved
in the business for probably 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

(55:15):
roll off to incubate my next business, and I set
that expectation 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,

(55:36):
and I went from being like finally getting to a
place 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

(55:59):
that whole experience, which I'm I'm happy to talk about,
and 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 3 (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 when you

(57:11):
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
have that person.

Speaker 3 (57:22):
And one other interesting learning I had from it is like,
again we're 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 (58:50):
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 am just curious, like what did
you learn?

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

Speaker 3 (59:00):
Yeah, So basically there's like two major scans in a pregnancy.
There's the twelve week scan and then there's the twenty
week scan. The twenty week scan is the 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

(59:26):
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 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

(59:47):
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 what was going to happen with
my wife's pregnancy, so awful, and so we went to
like chop which is 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. And

(01:00:08):
basically the abnormality that was found in our baby. When
we were talking to the doctor, they'd 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

(01:00:29):
of the baby, I ended up going down a rabbit
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. I went down the rabbit hole,

(01:00:49):
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 answer is the unfortunate thing is as
you get into things related to like health and science
is there is so much unknown and so we ended

(01:01:10):
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 (01:01:16):
Oh and five months and it is so heartbreaking because
that's at the point where you're getting excited.

Speaker 2 (01:01:21):
Your bump is totally showing.

Speaker 3 (01:01:22):
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. It was on Instagram.

Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
I was gonna ask you had you done?

Speaker 3 (01:01:34):
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

(01:01:55):
my head what it's going to look like to be
a great dad. And so yeah, it's like it is
ver much. It's it's a death quite literally, but also
like the death of a dream for a period of time.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
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 3 (01:02:14):
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,

(01:02:34):
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 (01:02:52):
It's so true.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
I feel like everything you see online with pregnancies is like, yeah,
people excited about their pregnancy one month, two month, three month, whatever.
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 3 (01:03:06):
It's like, you know, this is why you understand when
people are asked like do you want you know, do
you want a boy or a girl? And people say,
I just want a healthy baby, Like this this is why.

Speaker 1 (01:03:15):
Yeah, yeah, I feel like it's something that you don't
understand until you're at that point. And I think about
that all the time. It's literally in one month, so
we're getting you at the perfect.

Speaker 3 (01:03:24):
Time because it's insane.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
Yeah, Alex is about to go full dad mode.

Speaker 3 (01:03:28):
It is wild, and to be honest, like that's.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
Why perfect timing too. Summer it is, it's going to
be so nice.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
Summer babies are the best. 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,

(01:03:53):
you are going to be the operational leader of this business.
Because I can't predict what my life is going to
like after having a child, and I can't predict how
long I'm going to 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

(01:04:16):
into my work and then I wasn't able to be
present to the moments that only you only get once
in life.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
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 percent And I think that's
so cool. One of the things that I think is
so impressive about you is all while building these incredible

(01:04:42):
brands and businesses, you've also been a content creator yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:04:46):
So I'm curious, was.

Speaker 1 (01:04:46):
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 3 (01:04:55):
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. I can't find it time
to create a single post. And I would just say, like,

(01:05:17):
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 are people who are internal thinkers

(01:05:40):
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 for refining ideas that I've

(01:06:00):
been thinking about, 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 on LinkedIn or posting on Instagram.

(01:06:21):
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 such an important thing. Like I

(01:06:41):
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 effective and so over time, the way I

(01:07:02):
started viewing myself as like, Okay, I'm a media company.
How do I 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

(01:07:24):
heads of marketing, and so every business like in my
portfolio basically is 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 role where eighty
percent of the time I'm adding value twenty percent of
the time is when I'm natively working in the things

(01:07:45):
I'm doing with my businesses. And the best analogy I
could use for that, as other creators think about how
much content 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 and you're driving down
the pch in California and you're looking at the ocean.

(01:08:08):
The way I would describe it is like your content
as a creator, you're really good content is the ocean.
Every time you 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.

(01:08:30):
You may start to think, like, am I going to
still drive down the highway? To me, 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 (01:08:46):
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

(01:09:07):
for creators now that are trying to find their audience.

Speaker 3 (01:09:10):
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,

(01:09:33):
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 (01:09:50):
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 (01:09:59):
And at the end of the you know, I forgot
who wrote this essay. 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 asks people to

(01:10:22):
like opt into a conversation with you. You are just
like getting the 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. They opted into that. Like you're
talking to your not even one thousand true fans, you're
talking to your like one hundred true fans. So that's

(01:10:43):
the first. 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

(01:11:03):
things 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

(01:11:25):
an incredibly targeted and custom DM to them, knowing they
already have some level of interest in what I'm involved in.
The other one is newsletter. 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

(01:11:46):
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 the Brew? What's one idea you
have for us to add? What's your seniority professionally? What
industry are you in? 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

(01:12:09):
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 aren't
don't instually know what to do with the information, Like
once I know that my audience is XYZ, what do
I do with that information? I think a lot of
creators stopped there.

Speaker 1 (01:12:28):
One hundred percent. Yeah, I've been thinking about it a
lot recently. 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 3 (01:12:45):
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 to chat for a second about
the interview and why it was so valuable to them.

Speaker 2 (01:13:03):
Yeah, No, that's such a good idea and I definitely
will do that.

Speaker 3 (01:13:06):
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 have, and.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
It's fun showing people that you're just a human exactly one,
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

(01:13:42):
a lot of creators are launching businesses. Where do you
think the creator industry is going? Yeah, and what do
you think about.

Speaker 3 (01:13:50):
I have a lot of thoughts. I think that so
I think the creator economy UH 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 other reason is

(01:14:14):
there's a number of businesses that raised a lot of
money to serve creators and they haven't done as well.
And I think these hit on two different reasons. 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

(01:14:36):
money in the creator economy is being sucked up by
the platforms. Like the biggest creator economy businesses are TikTok Meta,
you know, ig acts, et cetera. And 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

(01:14:58):
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 products that are just not
truly great products. It's like creators who just like want
kind of quick wins financially. They launch something that's like

(01:15:19):
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. And so I think that's the
first thing that happens with a lot of creator businesses
is 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

(01:15:42):
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 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

(01:16:04):
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 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

(01:16:25):
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. And so you look at like, you
know Avion, which is what's his name, the actor I

(01:16:47):
can't remember from otions eleven, or 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, most alcohol is commodity, Like the product isn't
actually different all that matters is brand and distribution, And

(01:17:07):
so I think a lot of creators assumed, hey, I
can just do the same model in 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 like the most obvious categories. So they started again
with like alcohol. Then it went to like, you know,

(01:17:29):
let's look at like mister Beast 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 (01:17:40):
I tried that and I fail.

Speaker 3 (01:17:41):
It's incredible. I mean I invested in one that like
I invested in something Navy's apparel brands. Oh yeah, it
just it's really hard. 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 creator is Epic Gardening. Epic Gardening

(01:18:02):
is this guy, Kevin Espery too. He has the largest
gardening channel on YouTube, three million subscribers, and they're so
their business I think it does like sixty or seventy
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 (01:18:23):
I do love that. I love a niche thing.

Speaker 1 (01:18:25):
It makes me think of Ballerina Farms, who also is
making niche products that makes so much sense for her
audience exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:18:31):
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. Step two. Talk to my own audience. Understand
what are the products they're using constantly, what are the
pain points they're experiencing with those products? Where is there

(01:18:54):
what is a product they're wishing would be better that
isn't better. Start to form an opinion on a pro
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 novel solution
look like for that audience, come up with like an MVP,
whether it's a physical product or a digital product, an

(01:19:15):
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 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

(01:19:37):
this entire thing. And like, to me, oftentimes people find
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

(01:19:58):
be a lot that won't work. But that doesn't mean
that there isn't a lot of opportunity. Just like if
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,

(01:20:21):
just more than ever before, it just like the other
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

(01:20:41):
don't have a deeply trusting audience, then you don't actually
have influence.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
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 for women, goods for women. Yeah, she was saying
that it wasn't until she reached a certain level of
success that she was comfortable being like the face of

(01:21:07):
the brand totally and that's not to say she went
into hiding with the brand like I mean, her face
is on the about page and all of that, but
she wasn't really outwardsly doing content.

Speaker 2 (01:21:16):
And it's kind of interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:21:17):
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

(01:21:38):
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 (01:21:53):
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 (01:22:02):
I love it. Thank you how often do you film that?

Speaker 3 (01:22:05):
So I took it a little bit of a hiatus
for Okay, I'm going to bring it back.

Speaker 2 (01:22:09):
You have to bring it back.

Speaker 3 (01:22:10):
I'm also you 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. So
if you guys have ideas.

Speaker 1 (01:22:20):
I mean, 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 3 (01:22:27):
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. That's why I created
sixty second Startup. But I always thought there was a
way to take it a step further and I couldn't
figure out how to do it. But I love doing it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:49):
You will, You're going to figure it out. Yeah, I'm
so excited.

Speaker 1 (01:22:52):
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 on to social media in some way, Like my
show was very in a lot of ways was inspired
by carpool Karaoke, totally doing it on the run, and
I love Caleb Simpson's apartment tours.

Speaker 3 (01:23:08):
Yeah. 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,

(01:23:30):
go and look at the programming for like CNBC, CBS, whatever,
and just ask if there was a rebooted version of
this on social platforms, what would that look like.

Speaker 1 (01:23:40):
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 3 (01:23:52):
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
chatgibt to create a nursery. Unbelievable to it.

Speaker 1 (01:24:06):
For that, Also, my favorite thing is uploading a picture
of the room and saying design.

Speaker 3 (01:24:09):
Yeah, exactly, so good at it. 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.

(01:24:31):
I feel like like building 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

(01:24:51):
also be as successful not more successful, of a dad,
a parent, and a family person.

Speaker 1 (01:24:57):
I'm so excited for you. This conversation was amazing, saying
you are amazing. I just can't wait to see what
you continue to.

Speaker 3 (01:25:02):
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:25:03):
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 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

(01:25:26):
your way, so I will see you next time.

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