What is up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew, and welcome back to Founders Journal. My audio diary made public for the world.

This show gives you the business builder a backstage pass into

building Morning Brew. My goal is to help you think better in order to build better.

And on today's episode I want to talk about what I've learned

about leading a company through crisis, whether that be internal crisis or whether that be

external crisis. Let's hop into it.

So I want to start by being very clear about this.

I am not perfect at managing a company through crisis.

I am a first-time founder who is five years into his career so it's impossible for me to be perfect but I will say that

2020 and now seven days into 2021, there has been enough turbulence that I feel like I have enough

reps under my belt, enough mistakes that I've made, and enough learnings to share with you what my experience has been.

And by the way, I think there's a ton of literature out there about leadership because it isn't grounded in lived experience

and real world examples.

And so my hope is to provide you with a framework

for navigating crisis as a leader,

but also with examples to go along with that framework. So to set the stage, I would say that there have been four examples of crisis that my co-founder and I have had to navigate the company through in the last 12 months.

The first was the arrival of coronavirus to US soil and the immediate move that we had to make

to be fully remote.

The second was the ruthless killing of George Floyd,

Brianna Taylor, and so many others

followed by global protests against systemic racism and violence against

marginalized communities in this country.

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