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. First, I want to give a huge shout out to all of the workers out there

enjoying a very well-deserved Labor Day, and I want to give a special shout out to the amazing

community of Founders Journal listeners and workers, and the more than 120 employees of Morning Brew.

Now, on the topic of employees, I want to talk about the unfortunate but very real experience

of losing great workers and employees. Every founder, leader, and manager goes through it,

and it never gets easier, but I want to give you some perspective to help you think about it

moving forward. Let's hop into it. With Morning Brew at more than 120 employees now,

we have lost several employees, and it doesn't matter how great of a business you've built,

how strong your culture is, or how well you retain talent, you just simply can't retain 100%.

And it stings every time you experience it. I've personally found that for me,

it stings because I personalize it, and I found a lot of other leaders personalize the experience

of someone else leaving as well. We tell ourselves it's a failure on our part that we could have

done something different to keep these people, these great workers from leaving. So I want to say

something that will hopefully release some of this undue pressure and anxiety that you likely

put on yourself. First, losing an employee isn't necessarily a bad thing. Second, losing an

employee does not mean you did something wrong. While it is important and good to be critical of

yourself, that is how you grow as a leader, you need to realize how important context is, given

there are literally dozens of ways and reasons that employees choose to leave a company.

And so as you go forward as a leader, I just push you to focus on the why, rather than the why,

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