Alex Lieberman

“And also you're perversely incentivized because you leveraging AI in your work as you operating faster, but your incentive, just like a lawyer or just like any hour pay based knowledge worker is to rack up as many hours as possible.”

“Today it's human bound, a hundred percent.”

“How do we use that to sign 12 month contracts that is highly retentive, highly recurring, and we use that as the Trojan horse to do transformation work after having that line of business.”

“Half of our clients have come through these free AI diagnostics we do. And so we run these diagnostics. They take two weeks. Most of it's been automated. The only thing that's not automated is basically three hours of stakeholder interviews, but half of those …”

“Ultimately the goal is to build kind of 10 X media on top of 10 X, where there's only one place that executives go to make AI more actionable.”

“EOS says to also have people share their expectations for the meeting, but I've generally not found this to be a great use of time because people say pretty similar or generic things.”

“Just to give you an example, the one-year plan for StoryArb is having a ten million dollar annual run rate business with a 120 clients and average client retention of 24 months.”

“This is a tweak that I've made to the EOS process because I believe tackling key issues is the best way to inform your next quarter rocks,”

“This coming quarter, two of my rocks include, one, closing 18 new clients for StoryArb, and two, developing and deploying an organic marketing strategy such that 25% of our leads don't come through my social media channels, given a hundred percent of our leads…”

“A meeting is a form of communication in a company that has the highest opportunity cost of time.”

“And I find meetings are oftentimes a lazy attempt to get something done. Something needs to be done, and the easiest thing to do is for you to just throw time on a calendar instead of just doing the thing now.”

“Lesson number two, make meetings two thirds as long as you think they need to be. One of the worst practices is when a meeting goes the full time, just because that's what the calendar said. And we all do this in life. When we give ourselves a certain amount o…”

“How you should think about it is if two pizzas can't feed the group, your meeting has too many people, and roughly speaking, this means your meetings shouldn't have more than five to seven people.”

“If as the meeting leader, you have not shared a meeting agenda, meeting goals, meeting roles, and meeting prep with folks prior to the meeting, you should not expect the meeting to go well.”

“Meetings are also not for initial brainstorms. Those should be done independently and then shared over docs or email, and then you can come together to make a joint decision around that brainstorm via a meeting.”

“And finally, meetings are not for status updates. Those should be sent via email. If people have questions on the updates, those can be answered over email as well. And if questions on the updates turn into a debate that leads to an important decision to be ma…”

“A meeting is a product and its customers are its attendees.”

“You should ask them three very simple questions, and these three questions will lead to information that will make your meetings way better over time. You should ask them if they think the meeting was a good use of their time. You should ask them if they think…”

“Memorializing the meeting is just as important as having the meeting itself.”

“Keeping meeting minutes is also a great force function to keep the meeting on topic and not go on tangents, because it will be pretty embarrassing to write a whole bunch of minutes that have nothing to do with the actual purpose of the meeting.”

“Doing what I am doing is likely not the optimal choice for most entrepreneurs.”

“When you look at what I'm doing right now, which is I have this personal startup studio. I have four companies. I have Storyarb. I have Growth Pair. I have distro. I have 10 X. They're all totally different businesses, different business models required differ…”

“I would actually largely attribute Morning Brew's success not only to just our focus on building a great media company, but more specifically on only creating a great newsletter and writing a great newsletter, growing a great newsletter, and selling a great ne…”

“This person's agency has gotten to millions in revenue in less than two years exclusively through a powerful channel partnership”

“And so what I'm aiming to do with all of my businesses now, whether it's Storyarb, whether it's Tenex, whether it's Growth Pair, is to set up channel partnerships.”

“The long-term view of Distro is we want to be Canva for content. We want to be the AI-powered end-to-end content platform that helps you with every step of the content journey.”

“My co-founder from distro is working full time at a company right now. He's just been building distro on nights and weekends.”

“We're raising 1.1 million dollars for the company.”

“The process of talking to angels has reiterated my feeling that you should only raise VC money if you absolutely have to, if you are optimizing for the freedom to pick your path as a business long-term.”

“You know, approach to this round will be raising from one VC who's open to the idea of us being totally free to choose what our path is, then raising the rest of the round from angels.”

“The short answer to that question is no. The slightly longer answer is, even though I never considered quitting, there were so many times that I was questioning whether I was doing the right thing, whether the business was growing fast enough.”

“I don't think that it is inherently a bad thing to think about throwing in the towel on a business, because if you don't do that, and you're working on a business that has no hope of working out, you can end up spinning your wheels way longer than you should, …”

“The first moment actually came two or three weeks into Morning Brew, and actually at the time, it wasn't even called Morning Brew yet, it was called Market Corner, which was like the original product for Morning Brew, where I had emailed Mark Cuban about what …”

“I think I was making 85,000 dollars as a trader at Morgan Stanley. And I, you know, I didn't know when I went full time on morning brew, what the exact change would be, but I definitely wouldn't be making 85 K just, you know fun flash forward. I ended up makin…”

“Me saying to entrepreneurs that You should never consider throwing in the towel on your business is really dangerous advice to give.”

“We've had 10,000 people come to the website, 2000 signups, 660 dollars in monthly recurring revenue, 20% of people are doing repeat sessions”

“And so what I would say is, let's just say you spent 10 hours working on your pitch, working on the story you were going to tell about your startup. I think Probably over half of that time, at least five hours, need to be focused on the way that you deliver th…”

“I actually think the number one way to demonstrate deep thoughtfulness and self-awareness is to basically proactively answer an investor's likely questions.”

“Like the oversupply of content on the internet, you will have an oversupply of software that is, one, more specific and niche than it's ever been, So there's going to be this whole long tail of software products that are created for the first time ever. Some, …”

“This acceleration of competition is going to hurt software margins in two ways, I think. Retention and marketing. Acquiring users will be more difficult than ever before, which means that spending on paid marketing or employees to do organic marketing will bec…”

“And so I think what was typically considered to be a more quality recurring revenue stream in software products is going to be less true than it's ever been.”

“I would say, if I had to put a number to it, 10% of my motivation for the, you know, the first five years, or as long as I was the CEO of Morning Brew, was driven by a love for the game, a love for building, and a love for putting something great into the worl…”

“It is incredible how much motivation can come from the fear of not having enough money, and the fear of, kind of, Your family members or the people that you love deeply, their quote unquote financial safety. And so that was, I would say, the biggest driver of …”

“Being driven from a place of fear is exceptionally effective.”

“We had, you know a 300 person team at one point, business was doing seventy million dollars a year in revenue”

“Now I focus on the zero to one of businesses. So I've set up my whole life where I incubate businesses. I bring on a co-founder and CEO who will operate the day-to-day of the business, especially once we hit product market fit.”

“I would argue that they actually create more of a fire In the moment than intrinsic motivators or play-based motivation, but they are not long-lived because once you get rid of the fear, the motivation goes away.”

“If you're interested, we raised 750 K at Morning Brew in the form of a convertible note with a five million dollar cap.”

“I find that limiting beliefs attach themselves to the things that are most identity-provoking to you. Said differently, a limiting belief is something that, if true, would risk your entire identity, and your identity is how you try to make sense of your value …”

“That all came to a head in 2021, when I stepped out of the CEO role at Morning Brew and got punched in the face by my beliefs. For an entire year, I was stuck. I was unmotivated. I felt directionless. I felt unsuccessful internally, despite being considered su…”

“I am building a portfolio of companies versus just focusing on one. And I am only focusing on the early stages of these companies before I bring on a co-founder and a CEO. Basically, I've created this entire infrastructure around my life as a hedge for my dist…”

“Our quarterly offsite at StoryArb is seven and a half hours long. It is technology-free other than the one person who is airplaying to the conference room TV, and relevant documents are printed in advance for people to look at as we move through the agenda.”

“No amount of money can make someone want a job. They need to want it on their own.”

“Outside of the memo, I just love this idea of having to requalify for a job. It may be scary to some, but for the type of company that wants to grow, 20 to 40% per year, it needs to attract people that are excited by growing that fast, and this requalification…”

“Looking within your business or your own work is one of the best ways to find ideas steeped in real problems.”

“Finding a great idea to build a business around can take years, and it is well worth the wait to pick the right one.”

“The first is we had 28 individual investors. So we had 28 people who wrote checks from 2500 dollars to a 100,000 dollars.”

“We ended at a 100,000 subs. We did 300,000 dollars of revenue. We finally started taking a salary. We were taking 60 K each, but that was the first real year.”

“The standard of your business is what you allow. And so like, if you allow suboptimal content to be written, that is the new standard you set. Like basically you're implicit by saying, not saying anything to something you're implicitly saying that that is okay…”

“And I can't remember the exact amount, but let's just call it like in a period of a few weeks. 30% of all revenue that we had booked vanished.”