What is up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew.

Coming to you with another episode of The Founders Journal, My Daily Audio Diary made public for the world

where I talk about the most important questions

lessons learnings wins and losses behind the scenes at Morning Brew.

Today's topic is about relevance, the paradox of relevance, and how you stay relevant, not for one year, 10 years, or even 20 years, but decades on end. Let's hop into it.

So why are we talking about relevance today? I've had a number of recent conversations

with incredibly smart and successful people in the world of media, advertising, who have kind of skirted around and even talked about this topic of relevance.

I was talking earlier with the CRO and publisher of a large media organization who was kind of just talking me through how I should be thinking

about Morning Brews relevance over the next several years.

And then I just did my CMO series conversation with Jason Harris, who is the co-founder of Mechanic an award

winning ad agency they've been around for 16 years and another conversation we

had was about relevance and how mechanic for 16 years has stayed relevant, stayed innovative, and kind of the language he used was as a shark continued to swim rather than stopping swimming.

And so it just has me thinking about how do you achieve relevancy in the long term and how do you balance it between

resting on your laurels and not evolving and doing the one thing you've always done into perpetuity.

But then how do you bounce that with pushing too hard and breaking things,

getting disorganized and having the story of the business simply not make sense

or get diluted to people. And so I actually, you know, I was thinking of

what are businesses that were incredible at doing one thing. And then they start trying to do everything

to evolve their story overnight and it backfired.

One thought that came to me was the story of Shynola, which is a brand that's near and dear to my heart as somebody

who went to the University of Michigan. Shyanola is a Detroit-based brand

that a lot of their branding is around

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