Austin Rief
Co-Founder & Executive Chairman, Morning Brew. On 4 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@austin_rief ↗LinkedIn ↗austinrief.com ↗
Austin Rief co-founded the business newsletter company Morning Brew, scaling it to millions of subscribers before selling a majority stake to Axel Springer. He transitioned from CEO to Executive Chairman and currently invests through Austin Rief Ventures while co-leading the staffing firm Oceans.
4shows
5appearances
54statements
5resolved
4supported
1contradicted
80%fully supported
317said about them ↓ Everything Austin Rief said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Morning Brew CEO: No More Alpha Left in the Newsletter Game
“I think there's no more alpha in the newsletter game. Everyone talks about everything.”
Eventually Every Retail Brand Will Have a Creator Face Attached
“I still think ultimately you're going to walk into a liquor store. You're going to walk into target and every brand is going to have a face and association because why wouldn't it, right?”
Rief: Outgrown executives cause worse organizational bloat than outright bad hires
“There's two types of mishiring, and I think people usually think about the first that I'll give you, but it's the second that really kills you. The first is you just mess up. You hire a senior exec, you know within four to six months of the wrong person hopefu…”
Rief: Feastables might become a billion-dollar brand within a year
“So that right there in a year might be a billion dollar brand alone.”
Rief: Morning Brew has 4.5M daily subscribers and no newsletter will match it
“We have four and a half million subscribers to our daily, and I don't think anyone will get there.”
Rief: Media companies easily hit $30M revenue but rarely reach $100M
“Yeah, so, I mean, so many media companies, it's easy to get to 10, 20, 30, relatively, to get to 10, 20, thirty million, to get to a hundred million of revenue is incredibly hard.”
Rief: Media companies must target B2B or high-income earners
“It's very hard to build a media company if you're not building B to B or you're not building for high income earners.”
BuzzFeed's media business model was never worth a $1B valuation
“And, you know, even in 2015, 20 17, we were like, yeah, PuzzFeed, it just doesn't make sense. It's not worth a billion dollars.”
Sam Bankman-Fried Only Mastered Details That Directly Benefited FTX
“Sam was a genius when it came to the things he had to know for FTX and crypto. So for example, Tom Brady was a like sponsored by FTX, right? Sam could have told you every single thing. About Tom Brady. Could have told you his stat line, everything about him, b…”
Rief: Morning Brew would have failed if started intentionally as a business
“We didn't intend for it to be a business. And if we did, and we thought about it as a business in 2015, I think it would have failed. We would have made long, short term decisions to make a little money here or there, but because of the side project, we didn't…”
Rief: The study claiming happiness caps at a $70k salary is wrong
“I think there's like that whole 70,000 dollar salary you know, study that people are happier at 70,000 dollars. I don't think that's true. I think I am happier”
Rief: Email usage will remain the same in 20 years
“I think the same, right? I mean, I probably heard seven years ago at this point, maybe five years ago, Slack was going to take over email. I think if anything, Slack is just incremental. And if anything, it actually clears your inbox for email, right? Because …”
Austin Rief: MrBeast plans to launch software businesses alongside consumer brands
“I met him a few months ago. And he has plans to build software businesses and other things.”
Rief: MrBeast's spin-off ventures will surpass $1B in cumulative value
“I think the cumulative enterprise value of what he creates will be well above a billion dollars.”
Austin Rief: Paid Solo Newsletter Growth Will Slow Dramatically as Churn Increases
“I think the growth rates of these things are going to slow down dramatically and churns and increase over time.”
Rief: Newsletter bundles struggle because top creators realize the bundle adds little value
“The person who adds the most value to the bundle is always going to be curious why they're in the bundle to begin with and why the bundle's not adding them value. And I think it's very much a game of who adds the value and, you know, you're not bundling it wit…”
Rief: Multi-million subscriber general news newsletters are unlikely to emerge
“And of course I say this and there will be, but I don't think there will be many more multimillion person reader general News, general business news, email newsletters that, you know, are standalone companies, whether they're bootstrapped or VC backed. I just,…”
Rief: Curated Link Roundups Are Part of a Stack, Not Standalone Businesses
“The third is the curation of links, the marketing email, the, you know, the Greg's Corner, here's five interesting, interesting things I found today. I think that is a great bang for your buck, because if you can curate well, curation is valuable, right? And s…”
Rief: Replacing the Founders as Daily Writers Was Morning Brew's Best Decision
“I think that was the best decision we made, which is, was to replace ourselves. We realized we could speak in the tone. We can converse in the tone. We could write a couple of sentences in the tone, but day in, day out, we couldn't write that tone across a ful…”
Rief: Media cannot charge for general content, only community and career mobility
“I said, no, I think it's really tough to charge people unless you have a serious level of expertise or you're going very niche. Or your, the New York Times, the Washington Post, you have a hundred or 200 year old brands. I said, but I would charge people for c…”
Rief: Sam Parr's Abrasive Directness Drives His 0-to-1 Success
“There are so many people just yes each other to death in the corporate world. And Sam does not do that. Sam is, is again, just a little bit abrasive, I think in a great way. And I learned a lot from that one interaction, just the way he carries himself. And I …”
Rief: Media consumption will shift from legacy institutions toward individual creators
“I think there is very much a push towards individuals and away from institutions. We're seeing that as a society as a whole, but also within the media world, and so I think that will also rise, and I think news and media in general will get more and more niche…”
Rief: New media entrants must target narrow niches to differentiate successfully
“The way to differentiate yourself, if you don't have three million readers, you won't be able to create a general business newsletter. You'll have to create A newsletter that is on bankruptcy you know, law or something really niche, and you'll have to figure o…”
Pitching acquisitions to CMOs fails because it threatens their marketing competence
“Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, we were telling the marketing team of a company, we can market your product better than you can. You know, what CMO, what head of marketing is going to buy a company, unless they have a ton of humility, if they believe that…”
The other half of the tape: Austin Rief's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 297 times in 74 episodes across the shows. 20 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Alex Lieberman 241Sam Parr 24Nick Huber 6Tyler Denk 5Shaan Puri 4Michael Sikand 3Jesse Pujji 3Jason Yanowitz 2
Statements about Austin Rief, by other people (20)
Lieberman admits co-founder Austin Rief was a better stage-two CEO
“I believe that Austin was a better stage two CEO at the time than I was.”
Lieberman: Austin Rief took over CEO-level operating duties from 2019 to 2020
“From 2019 to through 20 20, Austin had very much taken on the responsibilities that were necessary for a CEO Who was now in kind of the company building mode and no longer in the startup building mode.”
Huber: Proven 'boring' agency models can scale to $100M+ revenue
“From Sam to Austin, to you, to me, to Sean, all the businesses that we're going after, there's examples of massive companies. There's examples of companies that do, you know, 25, 50, a hundred plus million dollars a year of revenue. So we're not talking, we're…”
Top business minds often possess chronically paranoid brains
“I find that some of the most impressive business minds have chronically paranoid brains, and in general, I wouldn't call Justin a paranoid person, but I mean this trait in a good way. When I was talking to Justin about his business, one of the things he mentio…”
Lieberman: Morning Brew Would Have Failed with Four Co-Founders
“If those two people were still part of Morning Brew, I don't think Morning Brew would have succeeded, and it has nothing to do with these two individuals specifically, but I think the complexity created by having every major decision in a business made by four…”
Lieberman: Co-Founder Austin Rief Never Gave Him a Compliment in Seven Years
“Like, I never received a compliment from Austin in seven years of running business together.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew wouldn't have succeeded if started alongside finance jobs
“If we had founded this after college while having to balance it with finance jobs where we're being paid well, it wouldn't have happened. No way.”
Tyler Denk proposed productizing Morning Brew's internal tools before launching beehiiv
“Something I just want to add here that's just a fun anecdote is I remember the first time that Tyler came to Austin and I, because Tyler was employee number three or four at Morning Brew, and he had been building all of our internal tools at the company. So th…”
Morning Brew reached 10,000 subscribers by leveraging a hub-and-spoke model
“When I think about how we got our first 1000, thousand, even 10,000 subscribers for Morning Brew, it was leveraging, as I've said now five times, the hub and spoke model”
Lieberman: Morning Brew founders reached $350k salaries as revenue hit $25M
“Our revenue basically went from zero to 70 K to 750 to three million to 13 to 25, but headcount absolutely did not grow linearly. It grew less than linearly, and so, I think at a certain point, Austin and I got up to 350 K. That we were paying ourselves.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew founders took $60k salaries after raising $750k
“After we raised our round we raised the 750 K, Austin and I took 60,000 dollar salaries.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew Co-Founders Never Held Feedback 1-on-1s
“This is going to sound crazy, but over the course of Morning Brew, Austin and I never once had a one-on-one where we expressed how the other was doing, what we needed more of, and what we were grateful for in the other.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew founders lacked skills to allocate millions in cash flow
“It was the fact that we were bootstrap founders, and as we were starting to cash flow millions of dollars in the business, we didn't have the skill of how to allocate all of that money because we had never dealt with that much money in our lives.”
Alex Lieberman launched Morning Brew in 2015 for under $1,000
“In 2015, my co-founder Austin and I started Morning Brew for less than a thousand dollars. We had a 50 dollar filing fee in Michigan for starting an LLC, a hundred dollars for the domain morningbrewdaily.com, 10 dollars a month for website hosting, and a hundr…”
Morning Brew founders write annual informal job descriptions for mutual accountability
“So at least for the last two years, Austin and I have taken time to basically write out informal job descriptions for ourselves to make sure we're holding ourselves accountable to doing the things we say we're going to do.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew's success stems from co-founders' emotional stability
“I think this is actually one of the strongest connections between poker and entrepreneurship is I attribute so much of morning brews success up to this point to Austin, my co-founder and my ability to stay level headed when shit hits the fan, but also when the…”
Lieberman: Morning Brew Predecessor Market Corner Reached 250 Subscribers in Two Months
“So let's just say by the time that Market Corner, which was around for two-ish months before we turned it into Morning Brew, and I brought on Austin as my co-founder, let's just say Market Corner got to 250 subscribers, so that's zero to two 50.”
Lieberman admits failing to set expectations for grueling early startup reality
“I think Austin and I could have better set expectations to this first employee about how grueling being a first employee and first writer at a media startup was.”
First Morning Brew newsletter went to 1,500 Michigan students in 2015
“March, 1425, the first Morning Brew newsletter was sent out By Austin Reif and myself to 1500 students at the University of Michigan.”
Lieberman: Co-Founding Morning Brew With Austin Rief Was His Best Business Decision
“Co-founding Morning Brew with Austin was probably the best decision I've made in the last six years of running the business, and that is simply because our relationship has been built atop a foundation of just these universal principles that I think any relati…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Founder's Journal 258
My First Million 26
the Startup Ideas Podcast 13
2025 21 mentions in 8 episodes 3 per episode
- This guy made Millions by inventing the $1 Menu
- Should I quit?
- Facing your limiting beliefs
- 7 tactics for non-cringy sales
- How NOT to Make $1,000,000 (I Tried 17 Ways)
- How to go from founder to CEO (without imploding)
- How to Crush a Quarterly Offsite
- Becoming a multipreneur
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 56 mentions in 14 episodes 4 per episode
- Why I Stepped Down As CEO
- Growing Morning Brew from 0 to 10,000 Subscribers
- Why We Sold Morning Brew
- How to Reverse Engineer Great Business Ideas (Sam Parr, The Hustle & Hampton)
- This $20M/year Founder shares his 3 top business ideas with me
- Always Be Shipping
- How to Get Your First 1,000 Users
- How to Spend a Startup’s $ Wisely
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 118 mentions in 28 episodes 4 per episode
- 3 Strategies for Choosing the Right Co-Founder
- How Tyler Denk Took Beehiiv from 0 to $750,000/month in 2.5 Years
- How To Get Your Initial Customers
- Why Successful Business Minds Have Paranoid Brains
- The 2023 Milly Awards (#531)
- Personal Holding Companies: Build vs. Buy?
- Startup Hotline
- How to Use EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) to Run & Scale Your Business
- 20 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 20 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode
- Why Airlines Are Banks, How to Annual Plan for Your Business & The Biggest Myths About Founders
- Is The Rock Going to Make $1B+ From Tequila? + Placebo Water, STR Update, and More
- How Spirit Halloween Makes $600M in 2 Months, The Journey of a CEO & Is a Recession Coming?
- The Genius of Spotify Wrapped and How to Copy It, and How to Sell Your Business for 9 Figures
- What Generative AI Means for Startups and Are Executive Coaches Worth It?
- The Future of the Creator Economy
- How the Founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK Built His $700M Empire
- What You Need to Know Before Raising Capital, and The Billion-Dollar Media Company You’ve Never Heard of
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 81 mentions in 14 episodes 6 per episode
- Picking a Cofounder
- How We Grew From 0 to 2.5 million
- Fight for Your Customers
- 6 Years, 6 Lessons
- Thoughts on Employees Leaving
- MFM #164: BitClout Explained & How To Successfully Angel Invest
- The Cauliflower of Business
- Why I'm Rewriting My Job Description
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Austin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Co-Founder & Executive Chairman, Morning Brew | 1 | 27 | 67% 2/3 | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |
| MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | Co-Founder & Executive Chairman, Morning Brew | 2 | 17 | 100% 1/1 | full record on My First Million → |
| FOUNDER'S JOURNALLEDGER | Co-Founder & Executive Chairman, Morning Brew | 1 | 5 | — | full record on Founder's Journal → |
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-Founder & Executive Chairman, Morning Brew | 1 | 5 | 100% 1/1 | full record on How I Built This → |