What is up everyone this is Alex Lieberman co-founder and CEO 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 new product.

It is time to talk about Austin Reef.

Austin is my co-founder for Morning Brew.

He's been my partner and the COO of the business for the last six years and today I'm going to talk about our relationship.

In some ways we're quite similar. In most ways though we couldn't be more different and that's why I believe we have gotten to where we are today. Let's hop into it.

Most people think Austin and I could be brothers we look relatively similar we talk relatively similar we went to the same school University of Michigan go blue we were in the same fraternity AEPI and we both have interest in business and sports.

But beyond that we couldn't be more different our brains are like mirror images of each other I am a divergent thinker when I solve a problem my default brain is to come up with 10 solutions in my head for how that problem can be solved.

Austin on the other hand is a convergent thinker when he solves a problem he quickly comes to one solution and focuses on solving it in exactly that way.

So quick example and this was actually an example I found online about just divergent and convergent thinking let's say you give Austin and I the same problem and that problem is that we each have a car at our homes that we drive to work.

The car gets 30 miles a gallon and we want to figure out a way to use less fuel during the commute for environmental reasons.

Austin will think about what is a more fuel efficient vehicle that he can take to the office that is the convergent way of thinking about it.

I will think about what are all the options beyond using my car whether that's moving closer to work carpooling walking taking a boosted board taking a boat if I'm close to the water etc that's how I think in a divergent way.

And you know I fundamentally believe that you need both of these types of thinking depending on the problem you're trying to solve within your business, but it's not just the way in which we think that makes us different.

It is also the context that Austin I default to thinking about so there's this book that I've referenced in past founders journal episodes I'm sure I'll reference it in the future.

It's called traction it's by Gina Whitman basically Whitman refers to two types of leaders in business that generally are partners in crime and I actually think it's an eerily similar description to exactly how Austin and I interact.

So these two types of leaders that he refers to are one the visionary and to the integrator so the visionary is the person who has ten new ideas a week.

Nine of them are mediocre but one is usually the idea that keeps the organization growing for this reason visionaries are invaluable in their own creative and crazy way.

They're typically very creative they're great solvers of big and ugly problems not you know the in the weeds ones that keeps the business running and generally they're really good with important clients vendors suppliers they're generally responsible for fundraising and the culture of the organization is really important to them because they usually operate more on emotion rather than on analysis.

And so they generally have a better barometer of how people are feeling I think this describes me to a T my brain goes in a thousand directions I love thinking of new ideas I'm constantly thinking about morning Bruce audience and the needs we can solve for them same thing for our employees I'm thinking about what are the needs of our employees and how can we solve for them and I like spending my time talking to our biggest potential customers in so many ways I am the visionary and that's not a good or a bad thing that is just one.

Roll that is filled within a business according to Wickham the second the visionary's compadre is the integrator the integrator is generally very good at leading very good at managing and really good at holding people accountable they love running the day-to-day aspects of the business they are accountable for PNL plus just the overall business plan for the organization they remove obstacles so that people running the major functions of the business can execute.

And they are great at special projects in some they operate more on logic than feeling an emotion Austin is 100% the integrator and as I said before I think you need both of these types of brains the conversion and divergent thinker the visionary and the integrator in a business the visionary sets the vision the integrator sets the strategy the visionary focuses on people and customer the integrator focuses on

processes and planning. It's so interesting when I reflect on our relationship because Austin and I just didn't realize how different we were when we started working together but also how lucky we were when we became co-founders in 2015 when we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into and morning brew wasn't even a business like to me that is the luckiest thing that happened to us in our business was us meeting each other and becoming co-founders without doing any due diligence before we started working together.

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