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. You're listening to episode 5 of our How to Start Building Mini Series.

This week, we're dropping double the episodes focused on developing entrepreneurial skills

and turning your thoughts and ideas into a real business. In this classic episode,

I'm talking about how we raised money for Morning Brew and how you should think about funding

your side hustle or your business.

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,

...