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 how we raised money in an unconventional way

for Morning Brew to get the business going in the early days.

So, to give the full Morning Brew fundra story, we need to rewind back to 2015 when I was in

college and my co-founder Austin was in college as well. You see, we didn't start Morning Brew

thinking about it as a business. We started Morning Brew thinking about it as a hobby, where

I was writing a daily business newsletter because students were telling me that they didn't like

the Wall Street Journal. I said to myself, there has to be something better. Austin was one of my

first readers. The newsletter originally that I was writing was picking up steam and I had sent an

email out to people saying, hey, I want to take this a little bit more seriously, does anyone want

to help out? Austin emailed me, said, hey, I have ideas for how this could be better. He joined me as

my co-founder. Co-founder is a very loose word because, again, we weren't a business, we weren't

making money, but we did incorporate the company as an LLC in Michigan, thanks to Michigan's law

school that did it for free. But the reason I give that context is because things like raising venture

capital money, taking out debt, even raising a family and friends round. It wasn't on our radar

for several years because this was just a side project, right? It would be like if you were thinking

about starting gardening in your backyard. You wouldn't think about raising money for it, you would

just fund it yourself. And so that's what we did. When we were sending out the original newsletter

in the early days, let's call it end of 2014, beginning of 2015, Austin and I pay for it ourselves,

and then we also applied for grant competitions through the University of Michigan. This was actually

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