How I Built Resilience: Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief of Morning Brew

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Six years ago, Morning Brew started out as a fun business newsletter Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief wrote for their classmates out of their University of Michigan dorm room. The company now has over 2.5 million subscribers with multiple newsletters and a podcast, and last year Business Insider paid about 75 million dollars for a majority stake in Morning Brew. Alex and Austin talk to Guy about the organic unpaid marketing they relied on in college to build up their readership, and they predict shifts in how we will consume news in the next five years. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:31.0	Hello everyone and welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. I'm Guy Ross.
0:37.0	Each week, on Thursdays, we invite entrepreneurs and other business leaders to come out of the show live to talk about how they've been building resilience into their businesses this year.
0:47.0	And you can join us every Thursday at 9am Pacific 12 Eastern on how I built this Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn pages or on NPR's YouTube page to hear the live conversation and maybe even ask a question.
1:00.0	And today, my conversation with Alex Lieberman and Austin Reef, co-founders of Morning Brew.
1:07.0	Morning Brew is a podcast and a series of newsletters that focus on business in quick, digestible bites with more than two and a half million subscribers.
1:17.0	Last October, business insider paid about $75 million for a majority stake in Morning Brew.
1:24.0	But just six years ago, Alex and Austin founded the company from their dorm rooms as a side project to stay sharp on business before graduating.
1:34.0	The long story short is that Austin and I both come from finance backgrounds or wanted to work and finance our whole lives.
1:42.0	So I was in the undergrad business program at Michigan and I did all the motions that someone who wants to work in banking or sales and trading does.
1:52.0	I got into my senior year at Michigan. I had my job offer in hand to work at Morgan Stanley and just for context. That was like peak for me. That was the dream job.
2:00.0	I grew up in a family where my dad worked in sales and trading, my mom worked in sales and trading, my grandpa did.
2:07.0	I had a whiteboard growing up where being the best trader on planet earth was on my whiteboard.
2:14.0	It gives you a sense of whiteboard growing up.
2:17.0	It was on board. I had like basketball players and the guys friends.
2:21.0	It gives you a sense of what our dinner time conversations were like.
2:25.0	So Morgan Stanley, this was like the dream.
	...

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