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,

building a team, or building a new product. This week, I'm going to start by changing things up

a little bit. I feel like I've been giving you a lot of frameworks for better building,

whether it's X number of ways to hire, six rules for how to fire, how to navigate working

with friends and family. My hope is those have been valuable, but sometimes I think the best tools

for teaching are just stories themselves. I'm going to kick the week off with a little startup

story time. The story that I'm going to tell is about one of the most important relationships

I've had in 27 years of being alive. That is my relationship with Austin Reef. He's my co-founder

and the CEO of Morning Brew. This is my first startup I've founded, so I'm not sure how startup

founders typically choose their co-founders, but I think it's safe to say after you hear our story

that our partnership formed in a pretty unorthodox way, probably because we didn't even know

Morning Brew was going to be a business when we first started working together, but it's also

safe to say that while I was naive and probably didn't put as much thought as I should have

into bringing him on as a partner, co-founding Morning Brew with Austin was probably the best

decision I've made in the last six years of running the business. That is simply because our

relationship has been built atop a foundation of just these universal principles that I think

any relationship needs, whether it's co-founders, significant others, co-hosts, co-captains in a sport,

I think it's the things that any of these relationships need to grow and succeed together,

and that's trust, respect, support, and it's having complementary abilities to one another.

So without further ado, here comes the story about how Austin and Alex started working together.

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