What's up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team, or a new product. Today, I'm talking about four lessons that we can learn as builders

from looking at the business of the Olympics. The Olympics are a business just like any other

business, which means there are clear things you can take away from the games to help inform how

you build your business. Let's hop into it. So I've had the Olympic Games in Tokyo on in the

background a decent amount over the last several days and I've been watching events when I'm

taking a break or after work when I'm just trying to relax. Actually, yesterday at dinner,

I watched the 200 meter breaststroke finals, a guy from my high school, Nick Fink, competed in

that event. Unfortunately, he didn't finish with a podium spot, but it's pretty remarkable to go

to a high school that had a graduating class of 120 people. One of those people was competing in

the Olympics. So huge shout out to Nick for what I'm sure has been a ton of sacrifice over several

years to even make it to Tokyo. And something that's interesting that I've noticed about how I

watched the games is I have this fascination with non-event content as much as the events themselves.

What I mean by that is I'm fascinated by footage of athletes in their hotels and the stories about

the beds for athletes being made out of cardboard. I wonder to myself how much do the metals cost

that are given to these incredible athletes when they make it to the podium. And as I see all of

the stadiums and the media coverage, I can't help but wonder what's the business behind this thing?

It just seems like there's so much money going in and out of the games. So that's what we're

going to explore together today. This is less like the episodes where I walk through my experiences,

building Morning Brew or the playbooks that I've built up as a professional. And more about letting

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