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

Welcome back to Founder's 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 five profound mistakes leaders have made in business,

and what we can learn from them. Let's hop into it.

So I want to take a walk down memory lane. It's the early years of building Morning Brew,

and one of my fondest memories of those early days is actually nothing that has to do with building the company.

It's a startup event that I went to one day after work.

The startup event was called Startup Graveyard, and basically what it was was a Ted Talk style event

where three different founders gave 15-minute Ted Talks on their businesses and what ultimately led to their businesses demise.

The entire event was mind-blowing, and the people I met there were really cool,

but there's one presentation that I'll never forget.

It was the founder of one of the original hoverboard companies.

As you can imagine, his hoverboard business absolutely crushed it in 2015 as the entire space was on fire,

but then it came crashing down due to two fatal flaws, and just a paint a picture.

Imagine this guy is talking to a whole group of people, and he has one slide up on the screen,

and it basically shows the revenue of his business.

And it looks basically like a hockey stick to a complete cliff, where sales just dropped off from basically tens of millions of dollars to zero in a matter of weeks.

The two fatal flaws in the business that the founder ended up sharing were as follows.

He shared how he didn't build his website with the right credit card security,

and so what ended up happening was hundreds of his hoverboards were fraudulently being bought online,

...