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. Today, I am talking about two dangerous behaviors every founder should

be aware of. Let's hop into it. So, understanding human behavior is incredibly important when

running a business. It's also just fascinating, and obviously you're in such an incredibly

concentrated microcosm when you're running a company of observing people in all different

environments. And there are a few people more qualified at understanding people and turning

it into leadership lessons than Warren Buffett's right-hand man, Charlie Munger.

Now, it's no secret Munger has an amazing handle on human psychology, and so I've been catching

up on startup essays recently, and there's a specific founder who I've been going deep on old

essays of, and that is Mark Andrewsson. Mark Andrewsson is a successful multi-time entrepreneur,

and he's also the co-founder of Andrewsson Horowitz, which is one of the most successful VCs in the

world. And in this specific essay of Mark's that I'm reading from many years ago, and in this essay

that Mark wrote over 10 years ago, what he basically did is he took lessons from Charlie Munger's book,

which is called Poor Charlie's Almanac. It's named after poor Richard's Almanac, and Mark

analyzed Munger's different lessons or mental models from analyzing humans. He looked at them

through the lens of startups and their founders. And so what I want to do with you is I want to share

two of those lessons or mental models by Munger, how Andrewsson broke them down, and how these

two lessons have resonated with me in my own business and running that business. So let's start with

the first. The first lesson is what I'll call the danger of incentives. Very simply put,

incentives are extremely powerful, and people will do illogical or immoral things based on

...