What's up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders 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. I have a very simple question. What is the right amount of transparency

that should exist in a company? Today, I'm going to discuss it. Let's hop into the episode.

So the exact question I just asked, what's the right amount of transparency in a company? I asked

that question on Twitter yesterday, and I got around 300 responses, and here was the breakdown.

30% of people said that their company was not transparent at all. 39% said somewhat transparent,

so just shy of 70% of people said either their company was somewhat transparent or not transparent

at all. 20% of people said very transparent, and 11% of people said completely transparent.

And first of all, just my gut reaction to that is it's really interesting at a time where

I think culture and transparency and flow of information is talked about so much that the number

of people who felt like there wasn't transparency in their business was so incredibly high.

But let me tell you why I actually decided to even ask this question on Twitter.

I have thought a lot about the topic of transparency since Morning Brew was acquired by insider

in late 2020. And I've thought a lot about it because when the deal happened and in the months

proceeding the deal, we got a lot of feedback from our employees around specifically the deal

that we weren't being transparent enough as founders as we went through the acquisition. And also

that the company just got less transparent after the acquisition happened and as we got bigger.

And when I heard this feedback, I felt a lot of things. I felt guilty and I felt sad that people

we cared a lot about in the business believed that Austin and I weren't being open enough.

I felt frustrated that it was a no-win scenario because I felt like too much information to anyone

...