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 Ethereum. I'm talking about what Ethereum is

and why it's important for every modern business leader to understand it at a basic level. Let's hop

into it. 2017 in the East Village of Manhattan, that is when I first became aware of Ethereum.

I lived in a five bedroom for basically the first five years out of college and one of my roommates

was a few years older than me, living with us, and he worked in emerging technology for PWC.

And so his work required him to go deep into the world of crypto. At the time in 2017, I remember him

saying that he owned Bitcoin, he owned Ethereum, he also owned Litecoin, but I had no idea why or what

any of that actually meant. I hadn't even done research into Bitcoin at that point, so I just knew

that these were cryptocurrencies. Around this time, I started doing some research into Bitcoin because

it was definitely starting to hit an acceleration of hype, like whether you are on Twitter or watching

the news, you were just starting to see more chatter happen about crypto and specifically Bitcoin.

But I didn't know anything else about the other coins, like Ethereum, and I just assumed

that everything was secondary to Bitcoin and crypto was a winner take all space where you have a

bunch of these different coins and they all serve the same purpose and one would win and because

Bitcoin was the one being talked about, Bitcoin would be the one that won. Like that was my juvenile

take because I didn't know a lot about crypto at the time. And that was basically my perception

from 2018 to 2021, so I didn't do much to dig into the space other than learn more about Bitcoin.

I really stayed on the periphery of crypto and watched prices just go absolutely insane for a few

years. But then recently, I would say in the last three months, I started seeing way more about

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