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 a new product. And no matter what you're building, you can agree that the way in which we

build has fundamentally changed in the last 12 months. The change was pretty much instant for all of us,

with most companies going from a 100% in-person work environment to a 100% remote work environment

in a matter of days. At Morning Brew, this change not only required us to be flexible in adjusting

to this new reality, but it also forced us to think hard about how we want to run our company

once things return to normal. I want to walk you through our philosophy around Morning Brew's

work environment since founding the company, as well as how we're thinking about the trade-offs

of in-person and remote work, as we think about what work means moving forward. Let's hop into it.

For the first five years of Morning Brew, we never considered the possibility of working in a

fully remote or distributed work environment. As young founders, we wanted to make things as simple

as possible to build our business, and the added complexity of having remote workers

was honestly just daunting to us. We feared having to think about things like managing multiple

offices or maintaining culture when people aren't in the same location as you, or simply just the

cost-benefit analysis of, on one hand, having smaller offices when you're remote, but on the other

hand, having larger travel expenses for bringing remote employees to come to HQ. Not thinking

about these things was easier, and it led us to maintaining a pretty rigid policy. For our first

50 hires, the policy was that all employees were expected to work in-person in New York City

five days a week. We said no to great candidates that weren't open to moving to New York City,

and it also was a huge deal for us to approve our first employee who asked to work from home on Fridays.

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