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 you should think about funding your business

or someone else's business, and when it makes sense to take venture capital money. Let's hop into it.

Whether you are working at a business that has raised funding and you want to better understand it,

or you're an entrepreneur thinking about raising more funding or your first around, why do you

raise money at all? Why do you not just literally run the business without money?

Well, first of all, if you're an early company that's pre-revenue, so you're literally not

getting money from customers or advertisers or clients yet, you need money to make money,

right? Because say your product is a peril. How are you going to fund the apparel that you order

to sell to your customers? If your product is a media business, how are you going to fund the people

creating the content that ultimately you're going to monetize through selling it as a subscription

or advertising? You're not going to be able to, and so you have to raise money in some way to be

able to make money. The other reason you may want to raise money is if you need more money,

then you have to get the business to profitability. There are some businesses where you simply need

a lot of money in order to get to a point where your revenue exceeds all of your costs. So let's just

say you have a very capital intensive business where you have either machinery or there's a lot of

supply chain costs. Even if you have money in the bank, you may not have enough to be able to

fund the machinery, the software, the intellectual property that you need to buy to be able to get

your business to a point of driving enough sales to be profitable. Two more reasons that you end up

raising money or why it makes sense to raise money. The next reason is that cash can be a competitive

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