Alex Lieberman
527 statements across 157 episodes · 170 bullish · 96 bearish · 5 people on the record · first statement May 27, 2020 by Alex Lieberman · said 3 times in 1 episodes since 2024 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Alex Lieberman's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
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Everything said about Alex Lieberman, oldest first
May 27, 2020 positive
Revenue-share partnerships mitigate risk when testing new business lines
“Good example of a partnership is where you are interested in going into a new line of business, but you don't want to hire a full team yet and assume a lot of cost and risk for it. Partner with someone who already has the team, already has the product. Do a re…”
May 27, 2020 positive
Publishing every day without fail built Morning Brew's audience habit
“When I think back to the early days of morning brew, if I think about the most important decisions we made, it was the decision to default to action and consistency and never miss a day. I think that is what built habit for people.”
May 27, 2020
Reference calls test the referee's caliber more than the candidate's
“I have found that reference calls are generally not incredibly enlightening, but they're almost as much a Barometer of the quality of the reference as the person that you're doing the reference call for. Meaning if you believe that people are a reflection of t…”
Aug 19, 2020 neutral
Aug 19, 2020 positive
Lieberman: Mastering a single channel earns permission to go multi-channel
“By focusing on a single channel brand, it gives you the permission to build a multi-channel franchise because you're kind of, I think in a good way, putting all of your eggs in one basket to build up an audience in a place and then start creating content in ot…”
Aug 19, 2020
Lieberman initially started Founder's Journal as a personal time capsule
“I honestly started the show with you selfishly to document the experience for myself. Now that people are listening to it. And my hope always was that people will get value out of it. But like the primary goal we started was to create a time capsule.”
Dec 28, 2020 neutral
Dec 28, 2020 neutral
Lieberman: Morning Brew raised only a $750,000 friends and family round
“So you have examples of companies like morning brew where we raised, we weren't entirely bootstrapped, meaning we didn't raise anything, but we just raised a friends and family round raised 750,000 dollars and then built the business from there.”
Dec 28, 2020 negative
Dec 28, 2020 positive
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…”
Jan 1, 2021
Jan 1, 2021
Jan 1, 2021 positive
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.”
Jan 6, 2021 positive
Jan 6, 2021
Jan 6, 2021 neutral
Morning Brew starts all-hands meetings with each leader sharing one priority and win
“For context, the way that we typically start our all hands meetings in a normal meeting is with one P and one W from each leader. The P stands for priority and the W stands for a win. And each senior leader shares their one priority and their one win from the …”
Jan 6, 2021
Alex Lieberman outlines five core elements of an effective pump-up speech
“So to sum everything up, there are five aspects to a kick ass pump up speech. The first is a good setup. The second is a specific celebration of the past using specific examples. The third is a believable future. The fourth is showing people that it's all abou…”
Jan 6, 2021
Lieberman: Celebrate top five company successes rather than 25 to preserve impact
“The first thing I would say when celebrating your team and their accomplishments is less is more. Celebrate your top five successes from the past year, not your top 25. If you over-celebrate, each success will lose its impact.”
Jan 11, 2021 positive
Jan 11, 2021 negative
Jan 11, 2021
Jan 20, 2021 positive
Lieberman: Same-channel cross-promotions work best by eliminating behavioral friction
“Morning Brew has done cross promotions with everyone from top 10 business sites in the world to YouTube influencers, but the most effective cross promos have always been same channel partnerships. What that means is Morning Brew cross-promoting with another em…”
Feb 1, 2021
Feb 1, 2021 positive
Feb 5, 2021
Feb 5, 2021
Feb 5, 2021
Feb 8, 2021 positive
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…”
Feb 8, 2021 negative
Lieberman: Most People Are Horrible at Giving Constructive Feedback
“And that lesson was that most people suck at giving feedback, like horrible at it. And feedback is literally the lifeblood of building a business. I think it's generally because either people aren't like super thoughtful when they read something or consume a p…”
Feb 8, 2021
Feb 10, 2021 positive
Feb 10, 2021 positive
Feb 10, 2021 positive
Morning Brew Prioritized Owned Audiences Before Expanding to Social Media
“Morning Brew was founded on the premise of building an owned audience first. We started in the middle of the funnel. No big technology company can take that audience away from us. And now that we have such an intimate one-to-one relationship with our subscribe…”
Feb 22, 2021
Feb 22, 2021
Founders must value thinking and strategizing equally to building and doing
“As I've grown as an entrepreneur, I've noticed that, you know, while I've been able to effectively move from, let's call it doer, someone who's working in the weeds to manager, and then to kind of delegator, even higher level level, my ability to shift my time…”
Feb 22, 2021
Feb 22, 2021 neutral
Feb 22, 2021
Mar 1, 2021 neutral
Lieberman: Founder anxiety stems from tying personal self-worth to Morning Brew
“I think so much of it comes down to the amount of weight that I place in these thoughts. And I think I place so much weight in these thoughts because so much of my identity in my young adult life and so much of my self-worth Has been tied to morning brew.”
Mar 1, 2021 negative
Mar 1, 2021 positive
Mar 1, 2021
Lieberman: OCD fixates on high-importance topics that lack definitive answers
“What I've learned about all of my manifestations of OCD, whether it's around health, whether it's around relationships, whether it's around work, is that my unwanted thoughts latch onto things that are, one, incredibly important to me, and two, don't have yes …”
Mar 1, 2021
Lieberman: Imposter syndrome degrades confidence even in proven strengths
“Imposter syndrome, you know, doesn't just attack specific skills. It attacks your character, attacks your identity. And when I feel like my entire identity is attacked, it will make me feel more anxious, not just about the things that I don't think I'm amazing…”
Mar 1, 2021 negative
Mar 1, 2021
Lieberman: Reframing imposter syndrome as a biological tool prevents complacency
“And so an activity I began doing is actually welcoming the anxiety, welcoming the imposter syndrome, and telling myself, It's this fear of failure, this fear of fraudulence that is actually driving me to get better. And so I've started to kind of like become f…”
Mar 19, 2021 neutral
Mar 19, 2021 neutral
Mar 19, 2021
Mar 19, 2021 negative
First-time managers make unrealistic promises about promotions and pay
“Just like in a first relationship, first-time managers want to make sure that they are the best manager possible, and unfortunately, one of the ways that they do this is by making big, lofty promises about promotions, compensation, and other things like that, …”
Mar 19, 2021
Mar 19, 2021 neutral
Evaluating trade-offs matters more than finding the right decision
“In decision making, right and wrong is far less important than why or why not. In business, you quickly find that there are very few decisions that you make that are so clearly right or so clearly wrong. Most of your existence as a professional sits in this ki…”
Mar 19, 2021 negative
Apr 16, 2021 neutral
May 10, 2021 positive
Lieberman: Reflection is the most important step in learning
“Reflection is the number one
Most important step in learning.
It is the bridge between consuming content and applying content in your life.
If you want to form new ideas, if you want to form new points of view, you have to give yourself the time and space to r…”
May 10, 2021
Lieberman: Foundational understanding adapts to novel problems better than rote memorization
“I fundamentally believe there are two types of students. You have the memorizer and you have the understander. The memorizer is the student who studies past exams and their answers. And the understander is the student who studies the textbook, reflects on the …”
May 10, 2021
Lieberman: Creation Ranges From Derivative Remixing To Inventing New Markets
“Remixing isn't a bad thing, but it is what I would call the simplest form of creation. Then at the other side of the spectrum for creation is like true original creation. Which is more about creating totally new ideas, totally new markets that have never been …”
May 10, 2021
Lieberman: Sharing content recommendations functions as social signaling of knowledge
“People are going to want to do that for two reasons. One is they want to help people that they're connected with. Two, it's an amazing form of social signaling. When people can share content they've consumed, it shows an elevated level of knowledge that they h…”
May 10, 2021
Jun 4, 2021 bullish
Jun 4, 2021 bullish
Jul 16, 2021
Jul 21, 2021
Alex Lieberman's tweet about Amazon shareholder letters got 4,800 likes
“A few months back, I posted on Twitter asking, anyone want to form a learning group to read, reflect, and discuss all of Amazon shareholder letters? That simple question and that simple tweet got 4800 likes and 1100 responses.”
Jul 21, 2021 positive
Aug 2, 2021 positive
Lieberman: Founders must sell FOMO across hiring, ads, and fundraising
“Really, at the end of the day, you want to sell FOMO. You want to sell FOMO where a potential hire says, I can't not join this company because I'm going to be missing out on this incredible train ride. I can't not invest in this company because I think this co…”
Aug 2, 2021
Aug 4, 2021
Aug 4, 2021 negative
Lieberman: The traits that drive career success also prevent unplugging
“What makes us great at work Is what makes us horrible at unplugging from work. We take our careers really seriously, we don't settle for good, we need perfect, and we want to move up the totem pole of our given companies as fast as humanly possible.”
Aug 4, 2021 negative
Lieberman: Late-night extra work provides negligible long-term career gains
“That extra hour or two or three hours at the end of the day, let's say between eight pm and 11 pm, It makes negligible difference over years of working in your job, especially if it's at the end of the day where you're less likely to be effective anyway since …”
Aug 4, 2021
Lieberman: Tying identity to one activity drives severe burnout
“And that is the main reason for burnout for athletes is literally their entire identity is tied up in a single activity that they spend decades doing. But it honestly isn't that different with work for people like you or I that take our jobs so incredibly seri…”
Aug 4, 2021 negative
Lieberman: Professionals must diversify their "purpose portfolio" beyond their careers
“The issue with that, though, is your purpose portfolio won't be filled by your job for your entire life, and you don't want to just start investing in other parts of your life when they're finally relevant. Things like relationships, friendships, your health, …”
Aug 4, 2021 negative
Lieberman: 15-Hour Days in Banking and Consulting Are Driven by Culture, Not Workload
“Does investment banking or consulting have so much more work than other jobs such that unplugging is impossible and working 15 hours a day is necessary? Absolutely not. I wholeheartedly believe that. But the issue is that a culture of work has been set for dec…”
Aug 9, 2021 positive
Aug 23, 2021 positive
Curate New Sectors by Tracking Fast-Growing Companies' Founders
“What I would do is look up the fastest growing companies in the specific space you're interested in. So if you're interested in the future of education, Look up what are the fastest companies in the ed tech or education space, look up the founders, follow the …”
Aug 23, 2021 positive
Aug 25, 2021
Aug 25, 2021 positive
Aug 25, 2021 neutral
Aug 25, 2021
Aug 25, 2021
Aug 27, 2021 negative
Lieberman: Threatening to Leave Rarely Works When Negotiating Promotions
“Finally, something that I've noticed, and people have told me, is that when they negotiate for their promotion or their raise, they get defensive, and they end up positioning the conversation as a threat, where if they aren't given this thing, they will leave.…”
Aug 27, 2021 neutral
Lieberman: Morgan Stanley promotion timelines offer minimal flexibility even for top performers
“Like when I was at Morgan Stanley, it was understood. You spend two years as an analyst, then you spend a few years as an associate, then you go to VP, and there really isn't so much wiggle room, even if you're a top performer.”
Aug 27, 2021
Aug 27, 2021
Lieberman: Promotion conversations should begin three to six months in advance
“If done right, talking about a raise or a promotion should never lead to a surprise. It's a conversation that should start three to six months in advance, and everyone involved in the conversation should be on the same page about you wanting the promotion and …”
Aug 27, 2021
Lieberman: Startup employees routinely share compensation details with one another
“You know, in the early days of Morning Brew, I was always astounded that employees were sharing compensation information, but more and more as I talk to founders, it appears we just live in a world where employees are sharing that information with one another,…”
Aug 27, 2021
Lieberman: Doing great work alone is insufficient for rapid career promotion
“Building genuine relationship is the way to do that. I think a lot of times people just want to be efficient, do great work, not spend time on anything else, and they just expect to escalate, but without genuine relationships and connection, without people adv…”
Sep 6, 2021 neutral
Startups scale by swapping generalist "Swiss army knives" for specialist "kitchen knives"
“As the business gets bigger, And as you go from early stage startup to late stage startup, and there's more clarity around the specific parts of the org and jobs to be done, because there's more of a plan, what you end up needing is not Swiss army knives, it's…”
Sep 6, 2021 negative
Sep 6, 2021 neutral
Lieberman: Morning Brew has grown beyond 120 employees
“With Morning Brew at more than a 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 a hundred percent, and it st…”
Sep 6, 2021
Lieberman: Startup credibility inevitably leads to talent poaching by larger competitors
“As you gain credibility as a business, as you become known as an upstart media business, you're going to lose employees either via them getting poached by other media startups or established media businesses, or the employees simply leverage their brand And th…”
Sep 10, 2021
Lieberman built Morning Brew to give seven-figure checks to his family
“I just had this vision in my head from that point on that one day I would hand seven-figure checks to every member of my family to make sure that they never had to worry about a dollar or about money again. And so no longer was Morning Brew just this opportuni…”
Sep 10, 2021 positive
Lieberman recommends 'When Breath Becomes Air' for perspective on business
“I highly encourage you all to read this book, not because it's a fun book, not because it's going to teach you about entrepreneurship or building a business, but because it's a necessary book to realize how much building a business actually matters in the cont…”
Oct 8, 2021 positive
Lieberman draws Morning Brew's playbook from gaming and low-margin industries.
“One of my favorite ways to build a media company is to look outside of media for inspiration. When thinking about how can we surprise and delight our readers at Morning Brew, I would look to the gaming industry. When thinking about how can we run our business …”
Oct 8, 2021
Lieberman advises managers to abandon the compliment sandwich for direct feedback.
“Don't beat around the bush. Don't deliver a compliment sandwich where you give compliment, feedback, compliment. Be honest and be specific about how someone can improve. It is the best way for you to see results, and it is the best way for team members to be g…”
Oct 27, 2021
Nov 29, 2021 positive
Framing feedback frameworks upfront makes employees receptive to direct challenges
“As you start trying to challenge people directly and you care deeply about them, they are open to receiving that feedback because they understand what place you are coming from. So that's the first exercise is to share the two by two with them, have people sho…”
Nov 29, 2021 negative
Nov 29, 2021 neutral
Nov 29, 2021 negative
Nov 29, 2021 negative
Dec 15, 2021
Dec 15, 2021 neutral
Jan 21, 2022 negative
Jan 21, 2022
Morning Brew co-founders sold a majority stake in an eight-figure deal
“So, my co-founder, Austin Reif, and I have spent the last six years building Morning Brew. That includes raising money, hiring a ton of people, making a ton of mistakes, and ultimately selling a majority stake in the business in an eight-figure deal.”
Jan 21, 2022 positive
Intentionally be an A-minus employee to scale a side hustle
“There's a world in which actually, like, you really think about the trade-offs of your full-time job and your part-time job, and you may actually be an A-minus employee instead of an A-plus employee in order to give yourself the possibility of doing what you r…”
Jan 26, 2022 neutral
Jan 26, 2022 positive
Jan 26, 2022
Lieberman: OCD intrusive thoughts latch onto important, ambiguous topics
“What I've learned about all of my manifestations of OCD, whether it's around health, relationships, or work, is that my unwanted thoughts latch onto things That are incredibly important to me, and things that do not have clear yes and no answers.”
Jan 26, 2022
Jan 26, 2022
Jan 26, 2022 negative
Jan 26, 2022
Lieberman keeps a folder of reader praise to combat entrepreneurial self-doubt
“I have a folder of all of the past emails that Morning Brew readers have sent us, basically explaining why our business means so much to them. And so anytime I'm doubting the impact that I've had as an entrepreneur or doubting my abilities, I always go back to…”
Jan 28, 2022
Alex Lieberman warns that personal passion for a problem risks sloppy thinking
“The reason I think I run the risk of sloppy thinking here is because I'm so passionate and emotional about the problem. Because I have been plagued by anxiety in my life, I'm naturally really excited by the prospect of helping people work through it. But becau…”
Mar 7, 2022 positive
Apr 11, 2022
Apr 11, 2022 positive
Apr 22, 2022 negative
Lieberman: The biggest creator risk is liking business ideas over operational work
“And second, and I think this is the biggest risk, some creators, especially really big ones, they have so much shit going on, and they like the idea of building a business. And making money off that business more than the actual work that it takes to build tha…”
Apr 22, 2022 positive
Apr 25, 2022 negative
Sanchez: $10k angel checks will not yield material financial outcomes
“I would probably say like, you need to get a little bit more in the deals because none of them will have a material outcome. I mean, you'll have to have a thousand X and even then, you know, it'll be really interesting, but that's like unlikely.”
Apr 25, 2022 positive
Lieberman trades free marketing advice for deal flow at top VCs
“I've become close through Twitter with a lot of top tier partners at Andreessen and at tribe and at these different companies. And I basically say, look, I don't know jack shit about SAS. I don't know jack shit about B to B SAS. I don't know jack shit about sp…”
Apr 25, 2022 bearish
Apr 25, 2022
Oct 11, 2022 bearish
Oct 18, 2022
Lieberman: The Snuggie Founder Was an Investor in Morning Brew
“Middle of 20 19, we were probably at, I don't know, a dozen employees, and Austin hit me up one day being like, you know, you have to read this book. One of our investors recommended me this book, and the investor he's amazing. He was the founder of the Snuggi…”
Oct 25, 2022 positive
Oct 25, 2022 bullish
Lieberman: Gas bootstrapped to a massive scale with only part-time staff
“What I'll also say is I bet they are printing money right now because they haven't raised any money. I looked on LinkedIn. There's three co-founders, and then two or three other people working on this, but all part-time, and I think a very high percentage of p…”
Oct 25, 2022 positive
Nov 1, 2022 negative
Lieberman: Settling on backup hires always backfired at Morning Brew
“One of the biggest mistakes we have ever made and continued to make for a while at the brew is rushing hires. Like, when we ended up being down to, say, two people, and we didn't give an offer to one because they weren't our person, we go back, give an offer t…”
Nov 3, 2022 bearish
Nov 8, 2022 neutral
Nov 8, 2022 neutral
Nov 15, 2022 negative
Nov 15, 2022 positive
Lieberman: Startups should hire a strong HR leader early
“Biggest lesson, or one of the biggest lessons I learned is you can't hire HR early enough, or like, you can, but I would just say, like, when we hired HR, it was too late. It's one of those things that you're never gonna feel like it's the right time, but if y…”
Nov 15, 2022 positive
Nov 15, 2022 neutral
Nov 15, 2022 positive
Nov 22, 2022 bearish
Lieberman: Reallocating all angel investing capital to personal side projects
“I've learned in the last year that I hate angel investing. So actually my strategy has changed to, I'm just going to take all the money that I had your mark to put in angel investing. And I'm just going to use it to bet on side projects that I'm building mysel…”
Nov 22, 2022
Dec 6, 2022 positive
Lieberman: Leverage in M&A comes from competing offers and willingness to walk
“Leverage is your best friend in, in the deal process. So having Other offers in hand, not needing to do a deal, like the acquired knowing that you have, you would be very okay with just walking if you're not satisfied, and also performing really well while the…”
Dec 13, 2022 neutral
Lieberman: Passion for Morning Brew followed user momentum, not early excitement
“I was not wildly passionate about writing a newsletter in the early days, but I got passionate because it felt like there was momentum, and I got passionate because people felt like they were getting value, and that's what ultimately gave me kind of, you know,…”
Dec 13, 2022
Lieberman: Scale Companies by Focusing Entirely on One Growth Constraint
“If you want to take revenue from, let's say, two million to four million, You should create constraints where you narrow down all of your focus as a company to the one thing that is preventing you from closing that gap from two to four.”
Dec 20, 2022
Lieberman: Sequencing goals serially prevents ambitious teams from diluting focus
“One of, if I was to reflect on like the mistakes we've made over the years with morning brew, it's, we were really ambitious, which was great, but at times we were ambitious all at once in one point of time versus sequencing. Like, let's do this thing. Once th…”
Dec 20, 2022 positive
Dec 27, 2022
Lieberman: The hardest founder transition is managing completely unstructured calendar time
“The hardest transition that I found when I switched from working at Morgan Stanley to going full time on morning brew. And then the transition I made from running the day to day of morning brew to being the chairman is I went from every minute of my day was di…”
Dec 27, 2022 neutral
Dec 27, 2022 neutral
Jan 3, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Morning Brew Scaled Its Voice Using a Detailed Persona One-Pager
“We had a one-pager that defined the Morning Brew voice as a person. So it would literally be like, Our voice is Sahil. He is thirty-something years old, living outside in New York City. He will drink once or twice a week. His preferred drink is whiskey. Other …”
Jan 3, 2023 negative
Lieberman: Hyper-involved campus leaders make poor brand ambassadors
“So the first time we did it, we had 10 ambassadors. We were super stringent. We went through resumes. We had an interview process, and we're like, we're gonna pick the most impressive people on college campuses who's, like, The student body president in like f…”
Jan 3, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Short News Summaries Are the Best Hiring Test for Writers
“And to this day, A very simple prompt, writing prompt, is like the best proxy for someone getting hired at the brew. You take a big business news story from the last few days, in a 150 to 250 words, you summarize this story in a way that connects with the audi…”
Jan 3, 2023
Jan 3, 2023 negative
Jan 3, 2023 negative
Jan 3, 2023 neutral
Lieberman: Morning Brew Did Not Hire Any Trained Journalists Early On
“In the early days I would say none of our hires were journalists, and we've hired a more, ah, let's call it like traditional, ah, journalist journalistically trained writers over time, as we've gotten a sense of, kind of, what we're looking for, but in the ear…”
Jan 10, 2023 bullish
Lieberman: A Berkshire Hathaway-Style Holding Company for Creators Will Emerge
“So one thesis that I've had for a long time, going back to our creator conversation, is that I believe that there's going to be, like, a Berkshire Hathaway for creator businesses, and what I mean by that is I think that There's going to be someone who sits at …”
Jan 10, 2023 bearish
Lieberman: In 2023 Businesses Will Underperform, Valuations Drop, and Layoffs Continue
“So I just think overall, businesses are not going to perform as well in twenty-twenty-three. Consumers are going to be buying less stuff. Valuations are going to be repriced for higher interest rates. More layoffs are going to continue, I think, across the boa…”
Jan 10, 2023 bullish
Lieberman: Validating New Game 'The Plunge' Via Social-Driven Pre-Orders
“My goal is to launch this business for pre-orders in the next few weeks, and use short-form social content of people playing the game, put it on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and any other short-form platform to drive demand for the product. If I hit enough pre-o…”
Jan 17, 2023 neutral
Lieberman: Anxiety and OCD Hindered Me Before Stepping Down at Morning Brew
“By the time that I transitioned out of the CEO role at Morning Brew in April of 20, 21, very honestly, I was working less hard on the business. I would say part of it was because I was dealing with my own things in life, anxiety, OCD, but also part of it was I…”
Jan 17, 2023
Jan 17, 2023 negative
Lieberman: I Felt Like a Failure Stepping Down From Morning Brew
“Like I said before, I felt like a huge failure after moving out of the CEO role for Morning Brew. I had this story of what it meant to be a great CEO. You have an idea, you create a product, you prove that the product has value in the world, you scale that pro…”
Feb 2, 2023 positive
Feb 7, 2023 neutral
Feb 9, 2023
Lieberman: Founders must keep investor updates under a five-minute read
“And the third rule of thumb, try to keep your investor update under a five minute read. Beyond that, you lose people's attention, and feel free to have an internal version of your update that's more thorough, that just kind of forced you to go through the full…”
Feb 9, 2023
Feb 9, 2023 positive
Alex Lieberman: Writing regular investor updates makes founders better operators
“I believe that founders are better operators when they write investor updates. It is so incredibly easy to get stuck in the weeds just doing, doing, doing when you're running a business, especially in the early days, and the act of writing recurring investor u…”
Feb 9, 2023
Lieberman: Gamifying investor updates exploits their natural competitiveness
“Because just like entrepreneurs,
Investors are competitive.
They like being atop the leaderboard.
And so if you can gamify and create a leaderboard on your monthly or quarterly investor update, they are going to be motivated to add value because they want t…”
Feb 9, 2023
Feb 21, 2023 neutral
Feb 23, 2023 neutral
Imposter syndrome fluctuates cyclically between peak confidence and severe self-doubt
“The first thing you need to know about imposter syndrome is it goes in waves. When it's a zero out of 10, I'm feeling really confident about the work I'm doing, and I just feel like I have my swagger. When it's a 10 out of 10, I'm feeling self-conscious, it's …”
Feb 23, 2023 negative
Imposter syndrome attacks fundamental identity, degrading confidence in actual strengths
“The third effect, and I'd say the most detrimental, is that when I experience imposter syndrome, it makes me lose confidence in doing the things I'm actually really good at. And that's because imposter syndrome doesn't just attack specific skills. It attacks y…”
Feb 23, 2023 negative
Lieberman's fear of never repeating Morning Brew creates a financial scarcity mindset
“And it's this thought that makes me more risk averse than I probably need to be, and view money with a scarcity mindset, because I fear that I'll never have a financial success again, so I better hoard what I do have right now.”
Feb 23, 2023 negative
Benchmarking entrepreneurial skills against other founders perpetuates feelings of fraudulence
“The fact that I use other founders and entrepreneurs as a reference for the skills that I need to build a business and the emotions that I need to have while growing a company, all of those things perpetuate my feelings of fraudulence.”
Feb 23, 2023
Growth-minded individuals naturally face imposter syndrome by choosing challenges exceeding their skills
“If you're competitive, if you're growth-minded, you're going to create difficult challenges for yourself, and you're going to want to gain new skills in life. And when you do that, your challenges will most likely exceed your skills.”
Feb 23, 2023 positive
Feb 23, 2023
Peak imposter syndrome triggers extreme overwork and destroys work-life balance
“I've noticed at points in my career when I'm a 10 out of 10 on the imposter syndrome spectrum, the way that I work changes. First, I lose any semblance of work-life balance. I find myself having to work harder and harder to make up for this feeling that I don'…”
Mar 9, 2023
Mar 9, 2023
Mar 9, 2023
Lieberman: Schedule meetings for two-thirds of estimated duration to prevent tangents
“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 of time to finish a …”
Mar 9, 2023
Mar 13, 2023 neutral
Mar 16, 2023
Lieberman: Hubs provide high-leverage distribution access to groups of target users
“Spokes are your customers or your users. They're your power users. Hubs are the channels, whether they be digital or physical channels, that you can use to get access to many of your spokes at once, to many of your customers or your users at once.”
Mar 16, 2023 negative
Lieberman: Highly connected campus leaders make the worst brand ambassadors
“The people we thought would do best as ambassadors, the people who were most connected in their student body, who were in five different clubs, who were You know, student body president. They were actually the worst ambassadors because they were spread so thin…”
Mar 16, 2023
Mar 16, 2023
Lieberman: Morning Brew grew early by pitching college classes of 75-500 students
“So, for example, for Morning Brew, it was classes and clubs. Like, those were our hubs in the beginning, right? Because we could go into an Econ one on one class, or we could go into an accounting class, And we could get access to between 75 to 500 spokes or c…”
Mar 16, 2023
Mar 21, 2023
Alex Lieberman left Morgan Stanley when Morning Brew reached 70,000 subscribers
“With Morning Brew, just to provide kind of exact numbers, I went and joined Morgan Stanley in 2015, and when I joined, we had 30,000 subscribers. I said that I would leave Morgan Stanley. I promised myself I would leave Morgan Stanley. We get to a 100,000 subs…”
Mar 21, 2023
Mar 23, 2023 neutral
Mar 23, 2023 negative
Mar 23, 2023 negative
Lieberman says excessive scrappiness hindered his growth as Morning Brew CEO
“I do think that scrappiness and busyness got in the way of me being an exceptional CEO, which I think I have the capability of doing. I think for far too long at Morning Brew, I was in the weeds selling advertisements versus growing as the CEO of the business”
Mar 23, 2023 neutral
Mar 23, 2023 positive
Mar 28, 2023
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.”
Mar 28, 2023
Mar 29, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Time Bucketing Optimizes Life Experiences Across Age Stages
“Time buckets are this incredibly good proactive and organized way of forcing you to think about how you want to spend your time over the next several decades, and getting Really good at prioritizing them in terms of when in your life is the best time to experi…”
Mar 29, 2023 positive
Early life experiences yield higher lifetime returns via memory dividends
“Every good experience you have has a return on investment because of the memories associated with the experience, and so the earlier that you have great experiences in life, the longer that these memories will pay dividends over time”
Mar 29, 2023
Money anxiety is higher post-sale than starting Morning Brew
“I actually have more anxiety today than I did before building Morning Brew or selling the business. Like I would say Money anxiety today, on average, is like a six out of 10, seven out of 10, and before, like, when I was just starting Morning Brew, it was prob…”
Mar 29, 2023
Lieberman: Fear of Being a 'One-Trick Pony' Drives Money Hoarding
“After leaving the CEO role of Morning Brew, I kind of had this Ongoing obsessive thought of, am I a one trick pony? How much did I contribute to the business's success? I don't know if I'll be able to replicate my success again. And so, while I think I've come…”
Mar 29, 2023
Mar 30, 2023 bullish
Lieberman: 25 founders responded to $5k-$10k monthly ghostwriting offer in 24 hours
“I tweeted out and I put on LinkedIn the following. I wrote, if the following applies to you, DM me. First, you're a founder and executive. Second, you believe deeply in building personal brand. Third, you don't have the time or skills to create content and gro…”
Mar 30, 2023
Mar 30, 2023 positive
Mar 30, 2023 positive
Mar 30, 2023
Lieberman plans to hire expats, students, and underpaid copywriters for ghostwriting
“The people I'm going to be looking for are offshore English speakers. So people who are kind of expats in other countries where the cost of labor is lower. The second, and I think this is actually where the biggest opportunity is, is copywriters and creatives.…”
Apr 11, 2023 negative
Lieberman: Michigan's Student Venture Fund Refused Morning Brew Over Flyer Spams
“Every day, we did it every day for three weeks. We probably went through 5000 slips of paper every day, and at the end of the day, you'd see them thrown out, and we got an email one day from the venture, the Ross Business School Venture Fund, basically saying,…”
Apr 11, 2023 neutral
Lieberman: The Plunge Needs 400 Weekly Reservations for $300K Kickstarter Goal
“The plunge is going live on Kickstarter in June. I know how many reservations we need in order to have, to raise 300,000 dollars on Kickstarter. It's like, basically, we need, ah, 400 reservations a week. Right now, for context, we're at 45.”
Apr 11, 2023 positive
Lieberman generated 50 qualified agency leads from a single validation tweet
“I basically was like, if you're a founder who's doing more than ten million dollars in revenue, you understand the power of building audience, and you're willing to spend five to 10,000 dollars a month to build up your audience so that you create business oppo…”
Apr 11, 2023
Lieberman: Post-exit motivation shifted from making money to personal learning
“At the highest level when we built Morning Brew, my motivation was, let's call it, 60% money, 40% love for the game. Now I would say it is pretty, there's still money drive there. Like I think for me to say that I wasn't motivated by money would just be false …”
Apr 25, 2023 neutral
Apr 25, 2023
Apr 25, 2023
Apr 25, 2023 negative
Apr 27, 2023 negative
Lieberman Realized He Was Bad at Delegation After Starting New Businesses
“I always thought I was good at delegation. I assumed that I had to be, given Morning Brew's growth over the last eight years. But as I've re-immersed myself in new businesses outside of the brew, I have realized that this assumption was completely wrong.”
Apr 27, 2023
Founders Often Delegate Tasks That Should Simply Be Deleted Entirely
“I would say the biggest issue that
I have that many entrepreneurs have is they are really bad at deleting tasks.
They, even if they're good at delegating, sometimes they'll delegate tasks that actually shouldn't be delegated because the fastest way to do a tas…”
Apr 27, 2023
Lieberman Aims to Complete Only One Important Task Per Day
“I can only get one very important thing done in a day. That's the assumption I have to have, which means that I need to be ruthless about picking what is the one thing that I want to do in my day, and I need to assume that everything else needs to be delegated…”
May 2, 2023 negative
May 2, 2023
May 9, 2023 bullish
Pujji: The Plunge could be a $10M business generating $2M annual profit
“Cause I think it, I still believe what I've said to you every time, which is, is this going to be a hundred million dollar business? I don't know, but do I think it could be a ten million dollar business that made one to two million dollars a year? A hundred p…”
May 9, 2023
Lieberman spent $36k developing The Plunge with zero revenue so far
“Like, I've spent 36,000 dollars on this game. My guess is to truly take it to market. If we run the, we're working with the Kickstarter agency, we run like their paid ad plan that they want to run with us. It's probably gonna be another 20 K. That's 56,000 dol…”
May 9, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Radical Candor applies in reverse when delivering feedback upward
“I also think it's kind of like in some ways the reverse of radical candor from Kim Scott, which like I generally view that as you as a manager, what's the best way to land feedback with your employee. But I think it works in the reverse where it's like give yo…”
May 9, 2023 bullish
May 16, 2023 positive
May 30, 2023
May 30, 2023
Lieberman: Ghostwriting clients pay $4,000 to $8,000 monthly for initial services
“These three clients are paying me between 4008 thousand dollars a month. I give an introductory price to the initial client for 4000 just because I didn't care about profit at all. I passed through the entire cost of the client to the ghostwriter.”
May 30, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Agencies retain talent by providing leverage and handling back-office tasks
“I have to provide enough of a service to these ghostwriters in terms of giving them enough leverage to handle way more clients than they could handle on their own, doing all the account management and the non-creative stuff that they don't enjoy doing, handlin…”
May 30, 2023 bullish
Lieberman: AI and automations can scale ghostwriters from four to 15 clients
“And I would say historically ghost writers could only service maybe three or four clients. And I want to create a more automated process such that ghost writers can service 10 to 15 clients and the quality of the content doesn't change at all. And to me, you d…”
May 30, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Agency vision includes co-founding spin-off companies using clients' audiences
“I want to build up the audiences for the next Nick Huber. And then I want to launch businesses off the back of their audiences. And I want to do it by testing ideas for businesses with their audience before actually launching them. So we mitigate the risk of t…”
May 30, 2023 bullish
Lieberman: Social media content can generate nearly unlimited agency client demand
“I think the first thing is generating demand, meaning I think that just by me creating content on Twitter and LinkedIn, I can generate unlimited or close to unlimited demand from clients such that clients should never be the bottleneck.”
May 30, 2023 neutral
May 30, 2023 positive
Jun 6, 2023 negative
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…”
Jun 6, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Good co-founders beat solo founding, but solo beats bad co-founders
“So to boil Sam and Gary and Matt's view on co-founder, no co-founder, multiple co-founders into kind of one thesis, it's most likely to be successful is having one good co-founder. After that is being a solo founder, and after that is having a bad co-founder.”
Jun 6, 2023 negative
Jun 6, 2023
Jun 12, 2023 neutral
Podcasters must customize 30% of their content when adapting to YouTube
“The rule I use is the seventy-thirty rule. When you're creating a podcast, I would assume 70% of the content can be used in your video form, but 30% has to be changed so that you're publishing something that is built to perform on the specific platform, in thi…”
Jun 12, 2023 positive
Change only one variable when migrating an audience to new platforms
“Lesson number two, only change one variable when you're moving your audience. Four and a half million people, no morning brew for our daily newsletter. By keeping the variable of news constant and only changing the platform, From newsletter to YouTube and podc…”
Jun 12, 2023
Audience growth linearly stretches like a balloon before popping exponentially
“Growth is mostly linear, maybe one day exponential. There is an old Founders Journal episode that I'll try to find and link to in the show notes, but I talk about this concept called the balloon effect. Now, imagine you have a water balloon under a faucet, and…”
Jun 12, 2023 positive
Jun 12, 2023 positive
Cross-promoting across similar platforms converts better than cross-medium migration
“What we've learned over the years is that transferring audiences across like platforms is way more successful than different platforms, and what that means is promoting a new newsletter in your existing newsletter is way easier than promoting a podcast in your…”
Jun 12, 2023
Jun 14, 2023 bullish
Lieberman: StoryArb can become a $10M per year ghostwriting agency
“I believe this agency can be a ten million dollar a year business, and here's the back of the envelope math. We charge clients 7000 dollars per month. To be on pace for ten million dollars, we need a 120 clients. I believe I can find a 120 people on planet ear…”
Jun 14, 2023 neutral
Jun 21, 2023 positive
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…”
Jun 26, 2023 positive
Jun 26, 2023 negative
Jun 26, 2023 neutral
Jun 26, 2023 negative
Lieberman attributes The Plunge's failure to high product-market fit costs
“I understand that the plunge failed because it didn't leverage my unique abilities, because trying to create new consumer behaviors is very hard, and because the cost to possibly find product market fit was greater than the cost I was willing to sink into the …”
Jul 14, 2023 positive
Lieberman: StoryArb launched and acquired paying clients without a website
“StoryArb, my agency, we don't have a website for it yet. We literally do not have a website. And my view is like, it just hasn't been mission critical because we've had enough demand from people where I can record a video of myself explaining this business. I …”
Jul 14, 2023
Lieberman: Morning Brew raised $750K after running on $200 monthly costs
“We went and we raised 750 K in the early days of the business. We raised that money Actually, a year and a half after starting the company, because we were able to run our newsletter at basically, I think, 200 dollars of cost a month that, you know, that's one…”
Jul 14, 2023
Jul 19, 2023 bullish
Lieberman: Semi-private lesson marketplaces offer major opportunity for monetizing teachers
“I think there's an opportunity to have a platform where teachers of, whether it's high schools, colleges, etc., like, subject matter experts can monetize themselves outside of the classroom, and it allows similarly interested people to meet each other and spli…”
Jul 19, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Catch Up app can succeed by warming professional relationships
“So I actually think it's really good for keeping professional relationships warm, but I'm not sure how valuable it will be in a personal setting, but it's a dollar 99, and I do think you can get enough people to pay for that, even to keep one valuable connecti…”
Jul 19, 2023 negative
Lieberman warns ice cream truck businesses face seasonality and refrigeration hurdles
“So I think that's interesting, but this feels like a logistical nightmare to me with the seasonality of the truck outside of the summer. What are you doing with it? And refrigeration seems like a nightmare as well.”
Jul 19, 2023 bearish
Lieberman: Semi-Luxury Bus Transit Lacks Market Size to Justify High Capital Costs
“And so I just don't know that there's a big enough gap between mass affordable and let's call it luxury expensive for this to be a meaningful business. And it has very large cost of capital to start this thing up. So to me, the juice isn't worth the squeeze an…”
Jul 19, 2023 bearish
Lieberman: Vertical climbing playgrounds risk being novelties with poor repeat retention
“My fear is there are so many forms of family entertainment that
This will become a novelty for people, but you won't see kids coming back to this week after week to play on vertical playgrounds because they have so many options.”
Sep 1, 2023 negative
Lieberman quit angel investing because he prefers hands-on advising over writing checks
“After spending a year on angel investing, I ended up deciding I hated angel investing because my desire to partner with founders is not to partner from a monetary perspective. It's to partner from like Yeah, exactly. It's to partner from a knowledge and suppor…”
Sep 1, 2023
Lieberman spent up to $50,000 validating his backyard game company, The Plunge
“Whereas take another business that, you know, I started, which was the plunge, which was my backyard game to be able to get to a point where Where I knew if there was appetite in the market, I had spent 37,000 dollars in the business. I probably had to spend 5…”
Sep 1, 2023
Lieberman validated StoryArb by advertising ghostwriters on Twitter before recruiting any
“I posted on Twitter saying, if you're an executive that wants to build their brand on Twitter or LinkedIn, but doesn't have the time or the skill set, let me know because I know a great executive ghostwriter. And by the way, I didn't know a great executive gho…”
Sep 1, 2023 positive
Lieberman sourced all StoryArb clients, staff, and its CEO via personal socials
“Every single one of our customers for StoryArb thus far have come through my Twitter and LinkedIn, but on top of that, I found the CEO of Story Arb through my Twitter and LinkedIn. Found our first employee through it. Found all of our ghost writers through it.”
Sep 1, 2023 neutral
Sep 4, 2023 positive
Lieberman paused his new business's customer growth to secure product retention
“I think the right thing to do with this business right now is to not grow our customers. It is to make sure, going back to, you know, the first thought I had, it is to make sure we have the right product, we know who the right audience is, and we are serving t…”
Sep 4, 2023
Lieberman: Early customer demand does not equal product-market fit
“Having a lot of demand for a business does not mean you have found product market fit. It simply means there are enough people interested in the problem you are trying to solve that they want to talk more with you about your business.”
Sep 4, 2023 positive
Sep 4, 2023 bearish
Sep 4, 2023 bullish
Sep 4, 2023
Sep 6, 2023 positive
Sep 6, 2023
Convert Rented Audiences to Owned Channels at a Few Thousand Followers
“And the general rule of thumb that I would give you is that you should start with a Funneling your rented audience to an owned email or owned podcast as soon as you hit a point of critical mass, which I would say, you know, roughly is a few thousand followers.”
Sep 6, 2023
Lieberman: Dedicate 75% of Writing Study Time to Mastering Hooks
“And the third tactic is your hook is the most important thing. It is the first sentence of a tweet or the first line of a YouTube video. It allows someone to decide in three seconds to Whether your content is worth their time or not. If you spend one hour stud…”
Sep 6, 2023 positive
The 'Deep Dinner Test' Effectively Generates Content Pillars
“You have this laundry list of all of the professional and personal topics that you either have experience around, expertise around, or personal interest in, and you have all the subtopics, meaning if you could imagine individual posts you would write around th…”
Sep 8, 2023 negative
Lieberman: Settling for 'good enough' hires creates costly long-term pain
“Or when you decide to hire someone who's, quote unquote, good enough because they're your only viable candidate left, all you're doing is embracing the short-term pleasure of checking off the hiring box, but you then open yourself up to the long-term pain of p…”
Sep 8, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Every action trades between short-term pleasure and long-term pain
“Every action you decide to take in life
Is one of two choices, whether you know it or not.
You either are making the choice to embrace short-term pleasure in order to endure long-term pain, or you are enduring short-term pain to embrace long-term pleasure, and…”
Sep 8, 2023 negative
Lieberman favored checklist busywork over strategy early on at Morning Brew
“In the early days of Morning Brew, when I reflect on the early parts of the journey, the pleasure-pain trade-off For me, was doing busy work that felt good because I could cross things off a checklist and say that I was productive, but I actually opened myself…”
Sep 8, 2023
Lieberman defines daily success solely by completing two priority tasks
“Every day in the same journal that I'm marking when I go on social media and if I did my 6:30 in the morning workout, I am listing two things. Every day there are just two things that I must do that are the need to haves that are my only two priorities. If I g…”
Sep 8, 2023 negative
Sep 8, 2023
Lieberman restricts social media use to three 10-minute daily sessions
“The first, for social media, I set a pain slash a goal of three times a day, I can go on social media, I can spend 10 minutes in each of those sittings, I'll have one sitting at 7:30 in the morning when I get up, one sitting in the middle of the day at 12 31 s…”
Sep 11, 2023 positive
Sep 11, 2023
Sep 11, 2023
Lieberman: Reading dense sources creates an edge because people are lazy
“The more work you have to put into reading something or consuming something, the better the odds that other people decided not to do it, because people are generally lazy, and so if you're willing to put in more work, the odds are you're going to learn things …”
Sep 15, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Agency businesses need zero day-one capital due to client upfront funding
“On top of that, this type of business is capital efficient, as in you don't need any money day one because your first customer pays for the cost of whatever talent you're using to set up your automations. It's, you know, that's the beauty of an agency business…”
Sep 15, 2023 negative
Lieberman: Traditional lead gen agencies provide horrible outreach quality
“Managing a sales org is wildly expensive, and SDRs are a relatively commoditized resource, but then if you want to outsource your lead generation to an agency, the quality is typically horrible. Outreach emails are generic, wrong names are used, pipeline lists…”
Sep 15, 2023 negative
Sep 18, 2023 negative
Sep 18, 2023 neutral
Sep 18, 2023 positive
Sep 18, 2023
Sep 20, 2023
Sep 20, 2023 bearish
Lieberman: 99% of creator businesses will fail without product focus
“I also think that 99% of creator businesses will fail, not because I'm bearish on the creator economy or creators. I'm actually hyper bullish on them, but I just think a lot of creators are going to launch businesses as a short term cash grab. They're not goin…”
Sep 20, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Successful creator businesses must be viable without the creator
“So the one percent of creator businesses that work are going to be businesses that creators launch But the business has a good enough product where the business could have succeeded on its own without a creator. And the creator was simply rocket fuel on top of…”
Sep 20, 2023
Sep 20, 2023
Startup Success Is Measured by Product Evolution, Not Revenue Growth
“And that means that my view is, is in the early days of a business, until you've hit true product market fit, you should be measuring success in your business by the speed of your product or service evolving versus the speed of your revenue growth.”
Sep 20, 2023 bullish
Oct 9, 2023 neutral
Lieberman: SMB software startups must lead with a sticky Trojan horse
“So I would try to understand what is the core problem that an SMB faces that is not being solved by their existing software. And I would try to focus on, you know, almost like what is the Trojan horse product that would make a, an SMB super sticky where then y…”
Oct 9, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Pre-sell memberships to validate physical workspaces before securing real estate
“The way I'd actually go about this is I'd pre-sell locations. So I'm in Hoboken before opening the Hoboken coffee shop, I would actually try to sell memberships to the coffee shop. And co-working space ahead of time. Once I hit a certain threshold, then that's…”
Oct 9, 2023 bearish
Nov 8, 2023 negative
Lieberman: Scaling Morning Brew to 300 employees in 18 months forced layoffs
“I remember when I would tell people that Morning Brew post-acquisition, we scaled from 50 employees in October of twenty-twenty to 300 employees in a year and a half. People were like, oh my god, that is the most amazing thing, and then when I give them the pu…”
Nov 10, 2023 neutral
Nov 10, 2023 neutral
Nov 15, 2023 positive
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.”
Nov 15, 2023
Nov 22, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Leadership ladder rungs should dictate candidate seniority when hiring
“Actually by knowing what rung on the ladder you want to hire for, it'll likely dictate how senior or junior of a person you want to hire, because it'll basically dictate how much critical thought you need or not need in this hire.”
Nov 24, 2023 positive
Nov 24, 2023 positive
Nov 24, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Media value comes from saving time and making audiences look smart
“I think that saving people time and making them appear smart to their peers is a huge value add, and so that was just something that made me think back to the early days of morning brew of why I think it provided value for people.”
Dec 4, 2023 neutral
Dec 4, 2023
Dec 4, 2023
Lieberman: Major Project Failures Stem From Compounding Insignificant Errors
“In business, I think of this as death by a thousand paper cuts. It is the project that either ended up being delayed by months or the final product was horrible. Not because there was a single bad decision or a single major delay, but because there were tons o…”
Dec 4, 2023
Dec 4, 2023 negative
Dec 4, 2023 negative
Lieberman: Morning Brew Botched an Executive Hire Due to Contrast Bias
“After letting go of a senior leader at Morning Brew because they had done a great job but had reached their ceiling, we hired a new senior leader who we thought was an absolute veteran compared to the other employee. But what we learned after a while was the n…”
Dec 4, 2023 negative
Dec 4, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Reassess People at the Idea Level to Combat Character Bias
“The best way to combat character multiplication is to force your brain to avoid the character shortcut that I just mentioned and try your best to reassess people at the individual idea level, meaning you treat every new idea they share as a new opportunity to …”
Dec 8, 2023
Lieberman: Leaving a Startup Causes Loss of Motivation, Identity, and Confidence
“And what I've noticed is basically every founder who leaves their business Whether it's successful, not successful, whether they've sold the business or not sold the business, they basically go through the same exact journey, and I'm going to describe the jour…”
Dec 8, 2023 bearish
Lieberman: Small Businesses Are a Bad Customer Base for Agencies
“The fourth is that small businesses are generally a really bad customer base. I think agencies that serve small businesses are the worst type of agency. I think the only companies that do well by serving small businesses are what I would call electricity, mean…”
Dec 8, 2023 bullish
Lieberman: AI and Automation Will Make Agencies Look Like Software Companies
“And I think kind of in a meta way, there are agencies that can absolutely help agencies run their operations better, and they'll do so with a mix of automations, offshoring, and AI, which I think will be a game changer for agency businesses in the future, and …”
Dec 15, 2023 neutral
Dec 15, 2023 positive
Lieberman: Most confident angel investments come from backing former employees
“I would say I'm a highly mediocre angel investor, but the check I feel most confident in is the Morning Brew employee who I watched for five years and literally no due diligence went into my conversation with him. I just gave him a check.”
Dec 15, 2023 neutral
Dec 18, 2023 positive
Dec 20, 2023
Dec 29, 2023 bullish
Dec 29, 2023 negative
Dec 29, 2023 negative
Dec 29, 2023
Jan 5, 2024 neutral
Jan 8, 2024 positive
Cold outreach and public pitches are rare asymmetric bets with zero downside
“I believe there are so few examples in life where you can take riskless bets, meaning when you can do something that has a ton of asymmetric upside, meaning like something really cool could come out of the thing you're doing, but there is zero downside. And fi…”
Jan 8, 2024 bullish
Jan 8, 2024 positive
Content storytelling is one of the best ways to build startup momentum
“One of the best ways to build a company is to create momentum around your company. And one of the best ways to create momentum around your company Is to create content around your company so people feel like they are along for the ride, for the journey, where …”
Jan 8, 2024 neutral
Dude Wipes passed on $35k championship game stunt over timing constraints
“An hour later, the CEO of Dude Wipes followed up, and it was a no-go. He basically said his creative team thought it was a really good idea, but they did not think there was enough time left until the game to actually put something together.”
Jan 8, 2024
HubSpot defined sponsorship success as virality, national TV, or press coverage
“And what they basically said to me was there are three things that if we get any of these things, We've knocked the cover off the ball. We've gone viral on social media. You've been spotted on live national television, or a journalist, especially of like a mar…”
Jan 8, 2024 positive
HubSpot funded 8 50-yard line National Championship seats for a guerrilla stunt
“Eight of us are being sent to this game. We'll be sitting in some of the best seats in the house at the 50 yard line. We will be in these seats for free. We did not pay a dollar for these seats. The reason is HubSpot, a twenty seven billion dollar publicly tra…”
Jan 8, 2024 positive
Live sporting events are perfect distribution hubs to reach millions of viewers
“And I think a sports stadium or a live sporting event
Is the perfect example of a hub, which is, it's a singular place that has access to millions of people.
You have access to the tens of thousands that are in the stadium, and then the tens of millions that a…”
Jan 8, 2024 positive
Jan 8, 2024
A willingness to be cringe and shameless is an entrepreneurial superpower
“Being willing to do things that are cringe and shameless is actually one of the biggest superpowers of an entrepreneur. Because when you're willing to do things that other people won't do because they have fear of embarrassment or rejection, it gives you the o…”
Jan 10, 2024 neutral
Jan 17, 2024 positive
Lieberman: Wildly ambitious missions and rapid growth are the ultimate recruiting tool
“Having an ambitious mission and having crazy momentum and growth is one of the best marketing tools for recruiting great talent. And so, Bootstrap founders like myself love to shit on venture-backed businesses, but this is one of the great assets of venture-ba…”
Jan 17, 2024
Lieberman: Founders and investors must separate present facts from future narrative
“A really good force function for founders or investors or potential employees of startups is to be really good at separating what is story from what is fact. It is important to know both, but fact is what makes a business strong or weak today. Story is a possi…”
Jan 17, 2024
Lieberman: Founders should scare away wrong candidates rather than soften culture expectations
“A huge failure of entrepreneurs in general, especially in the early days of their business, is to set unrealistic expectations of what the work or the culture is like because they are afraid of scaring away employees. Bezos takes the complete opposite approach…”
Jan 17, 2024 positive
Jan 17, 2024
Jan 17, 2024 positive
Lieberman: High-growth cultures require treating business like scientific experiments
“If you want a high growth entrepreneurial culture, you need to treat your business like a science experiment where your employees are like lab workers creating hypotheses and running constant tests, making decisions based on data and results versus having an e…”
Jan 19, 2024
Lieberman: StoryArb funded its first employee with a $7,000 upfront payment
“For StoryR, we never raised a dollar. We used our first client who paid us 7000 dollars up front to, we took the net income of that client to hire our first employee, and we just know that if we never get An investor dollar for story are, which we never plan t…”
Jan 19, 2024 positive
Lieberman: The 'default alive' framework is crucial before product-market fit
“I actually think that this concept of default alive or dead is as valuable in kind of the pre product market fit phases of your business before you know that there's a, they're there as it is in the post product market fit phases.”
Jan 22, 2024 positive
Gumroad turned a $351,000 monthly deficit into net profit within one year
“For the listener, it was June, 2015, this is a few months before Gumroad layoffs, revenue was 89,000 dollars a month net profit was 351,000, -351,000 dollars. They're burning 351,000 dollars. Obviously this was at the point in the business where still venture …”
Jan 24, 2024
Lieberman: Startups out-learn larger competitors through faster hypothesis iteration cycles
“Bigger competition has more money than you, they have more brand than you, they have more resources than you, but you have the ability to out-learn them by testing and learning the With hypotheses at way tighter iterations than is possible for larger companies…”
Jan 24, 2024
Jan 26, 2024 positive
Lieberman: Founders Can Make Fortunes With 1,000 High-Paying True Fans
“I actually think you can make a fortune by only having a thousand true fans, depending on who your super fans are and how much they pay you. I think if you build a niche business where your average customer pays you hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can bu…”
Jan 26, 2024
Lieberman: Early-stage founders should only listen to their top 10% customers
“With finding customers, you're going to acquire customers in the early days of your business, and actually, one of your hardest but most important jobs is say you get your first a hundred customers, maybe only 10 of those first a hundred are going to be truly …”
Jan 26, 2024
Lieberman: Startups defeat corporate incumbents by aggregating ignored small niches
“New players, the way I view them becoming incumbents, whether it's in content creation or whether it's just in any type of business, is through the aggregation of many niches, and it'll be too late when incumbents notice it because it would have never made sen…”
Jan 26, 2024 positive
Lieberman: Going niche is almost always the best starting move for creators
“Said differently here, and this is me, not Kevin, there are literally millions of niche interests or problems that creators can create content around or businesses can create products for. And in an age where consumers and customers have more choice than ever …”
Jan 26, 2024 positive
Lieberman: Superfan referrals drove Morning Brew to 4.5 million subscribers
“We have four and a half million subscribers, but if you were to ask me what has been the number one growth driver for Morning Brew, I wouldn't say it's our paid marketing that we did on Facebook. I wouldn't say that it's cross promotions with other newsletters…”
Jan 31, 2024
Jan 31, 2024
Lieberman: Morning Brew Kept Four Newsletter Employees From 50K to 4.5M Subscribers
“The example of Morning Brew is Morning Brew's newsletter team is four full-time employees at four and a half million subscribers, which is what we have today, and that is the exact number of full-time employees we had on the newsletter four years ago when we h…”
Jan 31, 2024 neutral
Lieberman: Reading founder biographies is only useful after gaining operating experience
“I generally agree with this, but I would say studying the beliefs and behaviors of business greats through biographies, autobiographies, like the writings of proven Entrepreneurs and founders is a worthy activity, but only after you step into the arena yoursel…”
Jan 31, 2024 positive
Copying proven business models in niche markets builds long-term compounding wealth
“My view is there's a three-step thought experiment that I think most people should go through To think about building wealth through a business over the long term. First question, you should ask yourself an answer. What are my one to two unique skill sets that…”
Jan 31, 2024 negative
Jan 31, 2024 bearish
Feb 7, 2024
Feb 7, 2024 neutral
Feb 7, 2024
Housel: Cross-Disciplinary Principles Are More Likely to Drive How the World Works
“If you find something that is true in more than one field, you've probably uncovered something particularly important. The more fields it shows up in, the more likely it is to be a fundamental driver of how the world works.”
Feb 9, 2024
Stepping down as Morning Brew CEO triggered near-depression for Alex Lieberman
“After stepping out of the CEO role for Morning Brew, I felt like shit. I feel lucky that I've never experienced depression in my life. But the six to 12 months post leaving my role were the closest that I have felt to being depressed.”
Feb 14, 2024
Lieberman: The Ideal Entrepreneur Is an Optimist With Low-Grade Paranoia
“It's also why I think the perfect entrepreneur is a default optimist with low-grade paranoia because if you are a cynic or a pessimist, you will find every reason to not start a new business because, frankly, every new business idea has flaws that would give y…”
Feb 14, 2024 positive
Feb 14, 2024 positive
Lieberman: Great founders aren't delusional, they expose society's delusions
“Delusion is defined as a, quote, false belief or judgment about external reality, but I actually think you need the exact opposite of delusion as a founder. I actually think the best founders prove that the rest of the world is delusional, stuck in their ways …”
Feb 19, 2024 positive
Lieberman: Morning Brew succeeded because there was nothing original about it
“If I look back at my one big career win, Morning Brew, there's really nothing original about it. Business news has existed since the 1700 and email has been around since the 19 seventies. And that is exactly why it worked. We did something that we already knew…”
Feb 19, 2024
Feb 19, 2024 negative
Lieberman: The urge for originality prevents customer-centric business building
“Over time, I have learned that originality is driven by my ego because of some story I have that being original is cool and being cool make people like me. But in an effort to be new, first, or inventive, I prevent myself from building things that put customer…”
Feb 19, 2024
Lieberman: Entrepreneurs should focus on truth and customer outcomes over imitation or innovation
“And of course, the great irony of this whole essay, an essay that is focused on imitation and innovation, is that neither of these things should actually be the focus of the entrepreneur. Rather, the focus should be on finding the truth and building the produc…”
Feb 19, 2024 positive
Alex Lieberman: The best innovation comes from far imitation across contexts
“First of all, copying isn't bad, and everyone does copy, but I think the more powerful version of imitation is far imitation, where you can make something unoriginal original and Simply by transporting it across contexts. Foreign imitation can happen cross fie…”
Feb 19, 2024
Lieberman: The Most Original People Never Try to Be Original
“What this means to me is that the most original people are never those that are trying to be original, and in fact, I think there's a core formula of attributes that ironically can be imitated that lead to unintentional earned originality.”
Feb 21, 2024 positive
Feb 21, 2024
Feeling insecure when interviewing someone indicates you should hire them
“It is uncomfortable to hire people that are better than you. Your survival brain kicks in at first, and you worry about your job. You worry that these people won't learn from you. You question your value. In fact, all of these things, all of these worries, are…”
Feb 21, 2024
Feb 21, 2024 neutral
Superstar employees are contextual and often fail in early-stage startups
“What I have found is people can be superstars in one business and not superstars in another business. I, I've seen so many examples of people who absolutely crushed it. Let's say in a late stage company where But they didn't have necessarily the capacity or th…”
Feb 21, 2024
Feb 21, 2024
Ambitious missions are as effective at recruiting as having celebrity founders
“I think big ideas are the greatest recruiters. Smart, ambitious people want to work on big, ambitious ideas. Sure, Elon Musk or Sam Altman can attract any top one percent employee, and especially an engineer, because of their reputation, but I believe just as …”
Feb 21, 2024 positive
Track clarifying questions to measure and improve your workplace communication
“For a single day, keep track of how often people will ask you for follow-up questions or clarifying questions When you're talking with them over Slack, in person, or on calls. And save that number at the end of the day. That's gonna be your baseline. Then, for…”
Feb 21, 2024 positive
Compounding 7% monthly improvements across business vectors creates exponential growth
“Building a business is no different. If you add seven percent more customers each month, improve the product by seven percent each month, improve your people by seven percent each month, your business will be exponentially better in the long term.”
Feb 23, 2024
Morning Brew operated on $20,000 monthly burn after raising $750,000
“Our monthly burn in the first six months was something like 20,000 dollars a month, which was two writers, my co-founder and myself, and then whatever our software stack cost, which was very limited. We had raised 750,000 dollars in the early days of our busin…”
Feb 23, 2024
Feb 23, 2024 negative
Alex Lieberman failed to transition from early-stage founder to late-stage CEO
“As someone who did not make this transition successfully, I so wish that I had this essay earlier in my career, and my hope is that as I read it helps the next Alex who hasn't yet gotten to that moment with their company.”
Feb 23, 2024
First-time founders will likely fail on 50% of their executive hires
“From personal experience, I can tell you that getting 75% of your executive hires right is actually incredible, and it's more likely that you'll bat fifty-fifty if you're a first-time founder Who's building a leadership team for the first time.”
Feb 23, 2024 negative
Feb 23, 2024 positive
Feb 26, 2024 negative
Feb 26, 2024
Feb 26, 2024
Feb 26, 2024 neutral
Feb 26, 2024 negative
Imposter syndrome made Lieberman fear Morning Brew was his only wealth opportunity
“I was afraid that Morning Brew was my one chance at financial freedom. My feeling of imposter syndrome made me think that I had to capture and hoard as much value from my business while I could because the odds that any other major financial outcome would happ…”
Feb 26, 2024 positive
Feb 28, 2024
Lieberman: Acquisition strategies get harder further from a founder's network
“The further out from the center the founder gets, the harder and less likely to succeed these strategies generally are. So in your decision of where to start, start with the easy stuff and migrate outward if nothing is working.”
Feb 28, 2024 positive
Lieberman: MSCHF has 'bottled up virality' with its monthly product drops
“I think one of the best companies At viral content and viral marketing is Mischief, M-S-C-H-F. They do these pretty much like they basically just bottled up virality, where every time they do one of their product drops, which I feel like is on a monthly basis,…”
Feb 28, 2024 positive
Feb 28, 2024
Lieberman: Customer acquisition reduces to either 1-to-1 outreach or 'hub and spoke'
“There's two ways to get customers for any business. You either have to go one by one, or you can leverage what I call the hub and spoke model, meaning you find a hub and that hub can be an influencer. It can be a community in person or online. It can be some s…”
Feb 28, 2024 neutral
Mar 1, 2024 negative
Most leaders fail to demand urgency by prioritizing popularity over performance
“I think the reason that most leaders do not quote unquote amp it up is either because they settle into and get comfortable with a lower than exceptional standard that just becomes the norm for them, so they don't spot what exceptional performance looks like, o…”
Mar 1, 2024
Mar 11, 2024 positive
Lieberman targets Twitter because early-stage founders over-index on the platform
“I create content on Twitter. Because early stage founders over index on using Twitter, I find myself more drawn to the written word than multimedia, and I believe by adding a ton of value to early stage founders, really interesting opportunities like new busin…”
Mar 11, 2024 bullish
Mar 11, 2024 positive
Ali Abdaal built his 5M+ subscriber audience starting with ultra-niche medical content
“That is the level of specificity you want for your initial audience on social, and that's exactly how Ali Abdaal created a strong core for his YouTube audience that gave him the permission to get broader over time and now accumulate over five million subscribe…”
Mar 11, 2024
Creators must niche down their content to an uncomfortable degree initially
“And the TLDR here is that you want to niche down your content an uncomfortable amount. Productivity as your content circle is too broad. Productivity for professionals is too broad. Productivity and test-taking strategies for medical students in the UK is a pe…”
Mar 13, 2024
Resource Scarcity Drives the Best Creative Customer Acquisition Ideas
“And generally the best way to think of creative ideas for acquiring customers is when you feel like your ass is against the wall, when you feel like there's scarcity and you have to do clever, scrappy things to acquire customers.”
Mar 13, 2024 negative
Heavy Marketing Spend Creates Pricing Vulnerabilities Against Word-of-Mouth Competitors
“When you spend a lot on marketing, you have to charge more for your product to account for having enough margin such that you're able to spend on marketing while having a, you know, good profitable product. And so that means when you spend a lot of marketing, …”
Mar 13, 2024 negative
LTV-Driven DTC Startups Like Casper and Away Harmed Late-Stage Investors
“By the way, this essay was written before the DTC boom, but this is the story of so many direct-to-consumer companies, whether it's Away Luggage, Casper, Warby, et cetera. Ton of money was given to these brands early on to spend a ton on paid marketing. The ea…”
Mar 15, 2024 positive
Agency Businesses Provide Paid R&D And Cash Flow Without Upfront Capital
“I think one, because it's basically paid R&D to figure out what you want to build outside of just the agency, and they're great for cash flowing and you don't need money up front, but to Andrew's point, they are extremely difficult. Any client service business…”
Mar 15, 2024
Mar 18, 2024
Mar 18, 2024 negative
Lieberman: External wins bring diminishing happiness due to desensitization
“The feeling of excitement you get when the world rewards you externally for these quote unquote wins, not only is it quickly disappearing, but also every additional win you have after that first win decreases in how much happiness it brings you because you bec…”
Mar 18, 2024 negative
Lieberman: Selling Morning Brew brought no ecstasy compared to early building years
“Everyone thinks that when you sell your company, you feel like you're on top of the world. When you get money wired into your bank account after a sale, you must feel this ecstasy. And I felt none of those things. And when I think about the times that I felt m…”
Mar 22, 2024 bullish
Startups should maintain evergreen job listings for their core competency roles
“Every company has its core competency, and for its core competency, it has one role that Is most important to deliver on that core competency. At Beehive, it's a full stack engineer. At Morning Brew, it is, it was a newsletter writer. Now it's, you know, write…”
Mar 22, 2024
Founders should hire future entrepreneurs for their first 10 startup roles
“The first 10 employees in a startup. You should be able to look at them and say to yourself, I think this person will do incredible work for us for a number of years, but ultimately I could see them starting a company of their own.”
Mar 22, 2024
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…”
Mar 26, 2024 negative
Mar 27, 2024 neutral
Waiting for full clarity before starting a business guarantees failure
“As they think about taking any sort of quote unquote leap of faith into building something is it never feels clear. It never feels clean. It always feels messy. And when you make the decision, whether it's to start a business, whether it's to go all in on a bu…”
Mar 27, 2024
Unmonetized hobbies are the ultimate test of intrinsic work motivation
“And I think a really good reference point to kind of compare your excitement and enjoyment with work to is Is things that are not work-related, things that do not make you money, do not create status for you, because those things you only do because they drive…”
Mar 27, 2024 positive
A personal connection to a problem is a founder's greatest advantage
“First of all, the more you feel a personal connection to a problem, I believe the better you are going to be at solving that problem because I believe you'll always have this, like, fire burning under your ass For a longer period of time. Like, I just think it…”
Mar 27, 2024 positive
Mar 29, 2024 positive
Apr 2, 2024
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.”
Apr 2, 2024 positive
Lieberman: Hub-and-Spoke Marketing Yields Far More Leverage than 1-on-1 Sales
“So a hub is something, a digital channel or an in real life channel that gives you leveraged access to a lot of spokes. Spokes are your, the ideal customer you want to get in front of. Again, we didn't think about it in this way at the time, but it's how I thi…”
Apr 2, 2024
Apr 2, 2024 negative
Lieberman: Elite Student Leaders Make Poor Brand Ambassadors Due to Overcommitment
“The first time we tried an ambassador program, we went for quality over quantity. So we took a bunch of ambassador applications. We only accepted like 10 ambassadors, and they were the people who were like the best students, involved in the most business clubs…”
Apr 2, 2024 positive
Lieberman: The Best Ambassador Programs Automate Entry and Reward Top Performers
“And so ultimately, where we shook out is the best possible ambassador program is this hybrid we did, where we let in
Like, we made it a quantity game, so we let in every ambassador, but a lot of it was automated until they proved that they provided good work a…”
Apr 2, 2024 positive
Apr 9, 2024
Apr 9, 2024
Apr 9, 2024 positive
Alex Lieberman: Gut feeling is an undervalued decision-making tool
“Gut feeling, I think, gets undervalued because we live in a world where you need to put metrics to everything, or everything needs to be, like, quantified, or it has to be, like, super thoughtful, and by definition, your gut is not thoughtful because it is not…”
Apr 16, 2024 positive
Apr 16, 2024
Apr 16, 2024 neutral
Apr 16, 2024 positive
Apr 16, 2024
Apr 16, 2024 positive
Stepping down as Morning Brew CEO was Lieberman's hardest, best decision
“Stepping out of the CEO role of Morning Brew was probably the best decision I could have ever made, but it was also the hardest decision I made. Have probably ever made, but I think it made me grow up and learn more about myself in a way faster period of time …”
Apr 23, 2024 bullish
Apr 23, 2024
Apr 23, 2024
Lieberman took zero profit on StoryArb's first client to study workflow
“What I literally did is I asked the ghost writer, how much would you charge for five posts a week? And how much would you charge for that on a monthly basis? I think originally he said, 3000 dollars. I went back to my first customer. I said, it's gonna be 3000…”
Apr 23, 2024
Apr 23, 2024 neutral
Apr 23, 2024
Apr 23, 2024 negative
Lieberman: 98% of writers on the internet are mediocre
“98% of writers are really bad, are really mediocre, and I would never trust them to create content for our business, for StoryArb, whether it's our website copy, our social copy, you know, articles we write, et cetera, and so then I shouldn't trust them with a…”
Apr 23, 2024
Apr 23, 2024 positive
Lieberman hired StoryArb's CEO through a one-month contract-to-hire trial
“What I decided to do, and I don't think I've ever seen this done, but it just made sense to me, is we basically did a freelance to full-time arrangement, where Abby acted as the freelance or contracted CEO for StoryArb for a month, and I set the expectation up…”
Apr 30, 2024 negative
Apr 30, 2024 positive
Content oversupply creates an increasing premium for online curators and tastemakers
“As more and more content is created online, the cost of searching for what is truly the best content for you as a listener or a reader goes higher and higher, which means that Tastemakers and curators are going to have increasing amounts of premium put on thei…”
Apr 30, 2024 positive
May 7, 2024 positive
May 14, 2024
Lieberman works in his Zone of Genius just 30% of the time
“I would say I probably spend 30% of my time in my genius right now, and so, like, similar to what you were talking about is, like, getting to that place where it's, like, 70% of my time is living in my genius, like, my biggest work in progress.”
May 21, 2024
Rabois: If a founder's mother lacks early examples, they aren't top 1%
“If you're the most tenacious person in the world, if you talk to that person's mother, they can probably give you examples from the time that that person was five years old. And if they can't, it's probably not top 10 basis points. Or if you're the smartest pe…”
May 21, 2024
Rabois: Outlier talent traits manifest early in life without professional experience
“Most of these traits show up early in life. Like you don't have to have a professional experience. You can illustrate through high school experiences, college experiences. Like if you're, you know, better than everybody else in a particular trait, it will show…”
Jun 4, 2024 bullish
Jun 4, 2024 bullish
Mar 3, 2025 neutral
The three reasons executive ghostwriting clients inevitably churn
“They would say that they learned a ton from us, they saw the value of building an audience online, but one of three things wasn't working for them. First, they didn't have the time to show up for interviews so that we could get content from them. Basically, th…”
Mar 3, 2025 positive
StoryArb pivoted from founder ghostwriting to B2B marketing content
“We had to go from focusing on executive social for founders to creating a, what I call, connected content motion that included playbooks, editorial newsletters, and socials Now for heads of marketing instead of founders of companies.”
Mar 3, 2025 negative
Mar 5, 2025
Mar 5, 2025 negative
Mar 5, 2025
Mar 5, 2025
FanDuel founder Nigel Eccles spent 80% of his time on wrong tasks
“When I spoke with him, he said, he is currently running three different businesses, yet he has more free time than he ever did while running just FanDuel. I asked him why that is. He said, on FanDuel, I spent 80% of my time on the wrong things. On these three …”
Mar 10, 2025 bullish
Vibe marketing becomes vital as AI accelerates product shipping velocity
“To put a bow on Vibe Marketing, I think it only gets more important as time goes on, given customers expect speed and immediacy more than ever before, and as AI gives businesses the ability to shorten the distance between customer idea and idea being implement…”
Mar 12, 2025 positive
Lieberman: The best salespeople are introverts who rely on preparation
“The best sellers that I've met in my career are introverts, and they're the best thinkers. They're the clearest thinkers. They're the people who are the most deeply prepared and thoughtful, and so they don't have to use all of kind of like this theater, this s…”
Mar 12, 2025 positive
Lieberman: Agencies face strong incentives to move upmarket to enterprise clients
“I've generally found that every agency feels a general incentive to move up market, because as you move up market, your deal sizes with larger customers are bigger. Larger customers also generally have more budget and more resources. They're more responsive. T…”
Mar 12, 2025 negative
Mar 12, 2025 positive
Mar 12, 2025 positive
Mar 12, 2025 bullish
Mar 17, 2025 bullish
Mar 17, 2025 positive
Lieberman's multipreneur model: co-found all portfolio businesses, act as CEO for none
“My high-level plan with being a multipreneur has always been to build a portfolio of businesses That I am the co-founder of All Of and the CEO of None Of, which allows me to spend the majority of my time in my zone of genius.”
Mar 17, 2025
Mar 26, 2025 negative
Lieberman: Business conferences are usually low ROI and a waste of time
“I usually think conferences are a massive waste of time. You spend hours in transit, hundreds or thousands of dollars on flights and hotels, and instead of working on your business, you spend your time, quote unquote, networking or listening to panels that oft…”
Mar 26, 2025
Mar 31, 2025 positive
Mar 31, 2025
Lieberman took zero profit on StoryArb's first five clients
“During this phase in the process, I also optimized for learning over profit, which is why for the first five Storyarb customers, I was making zero dollars, and I was just passing through all payments From customers to ghostwriters as I tried to learn as much a…”
Mar 31, 2025
Founders should secure paying customers before incorporating or pitching
“And then the third step in the process was to actually secure paying customers before doing anything else. No website, no customer pitch deck. At the time, I hadn't even incorporated the business. All I care about is proving that people are willing to pay for …”
Mar 31, 2025
StoryArb tested its incoming CEO via a one-month freelance contract
“We agreed to a month-long freelancing CEO contract. Basically, the plan was that for a month, Abby would run the business to get a feel for if she'd be excited running StoryArb and working with me, and it would give me clarity on if I think she was right for t…”
Apr 2, 2025 bullish
Apr 2, 2025 neutral
Lieberman: Content workflows should only involve human experts where strictly necessary
“Basically, the vision is to make high quality content creation as low friction as humanly possible, which in my humble opinion means keeping the expert in the equation, but only in the steps of the content supply chain that are absolutely necessary.”
Apr 2, 2025 positive
Lieberman announces Distro, an AI content tool to drive StoryArb leads
“For the last few months, I've been working with a technical partner who has the world's greatest name for a developer. His name is Dev. And Dev and I have been building Distro, which is the first AI content strategist. My goal with Distro has been to build the…”
Apr 2, 2025
Apr 7, 2025
Apr 7, 2025 positive
Apr 9, 2025 positive
Annual job requalification filters out candidates unfit for high growth
“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…”
Apr 14, 2025
Apr 14, 2025 positive
Lieberman: StoryArb's Quarterly Offsite Is 7.5 Hours and Technology-Free
“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.”
Apr 16, 2025
Lieberman builds a company portfolio to hedge against his own distractibility
“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…”
Apr 16, 2025 negative
Lieberman: Stepping down as Morning Brew CEO led to a year-long identity crisis
“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…”
Apr 16, 2025
Lieberman: Limiting beliefs attach to whatever poses the greatest threat to identity
“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 …”
Apr 28, 2025
May 5, 2025
Lieberman: Fear of financial instability was Morning Brew's primary driver
“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 …”
May 5, 2025
May 5, 2025
Lieberman focuses on zero-to-one incubation and brings in operating CEOs
“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.”
May 5, 2025
Lieberman: Only 10% of Morning Brew CEO motivation was intrinsic
“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…”
May 5, 2025 neutral
Lieberman: Extrinsic motivators create stronger immediate drive than intrinsic motivation but fade quickly
“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.”
May 5, 2025 positive
May 12, 2025 bearish
May 12, 2025 bearish
Lieberman: AI Will Create a Massive Oversupply of Niche Software
“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, …”
May 12, 2025 bearish
Lieberman: Software Profit Margins Will Suffer from Rising CAC
“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…”
May 14, 2025
Lieberman: Founders should spend over half their pitch prep on delivery
“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…”
May 14, 2025 positive
May 14, 2025 positive
May 19, 2025 negative
May 19, 2025
Alex Lieberman never considered quitting Morning Brew while building it
“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.”
May 19, 2025
Mark Cuban rejected early Morning Brew pitch: 'I don't get it'
“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 …”
May 19, 2025
Lieberman left an $85k Morgan Stanley job for zero startup salary
“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…”
May 19, 2025
Lieberman: Quitting a hopeless business prevents costly wheel-spinning for founders
“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, …”
May 28, 2025 neutral
May 28, 2025 positive
May 28, 2025 bearish
May 28, 2025
May 28, 2025
Jun 2, 2025 negative
Jun 2, 2025
Alex Lieberman details his personal startup studio of four active companies
“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…”
Jun 2, 2025 positive
Alex Lieberman attributes Morning Brew's success to five years of strict focus
“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…”
Jun 2, 2025 positive
Jun 2, 2025 positive
Jun 9, 2025 neutral
Lieberman: Status updates belong in email, not meetings
“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…”
Jun 9, 2025 neutral
Jun 9, 2025 neutral
Jun 9, 2025 positive
Lieberman: Taking Minutes Acts as a Forcing Function Against Tangents
“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.”
Jun 9, 2025
Lieberman: Asking three specific post-meeting feedback questions improves meeting quality
“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…”
Jun 9, 2025
Lieberman: Schedule meetings for two-thirds of the time you think they need
“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…”
Jun 9, 2025 negative
Jun 9, 2025 negative
Jun 9, 2025 negative
Jun 9, 2025
Jun 9, 2025 positive
Jun 16, 2025 neutral
Lieberman: 100% of StoryArb leads currently come through his social media
“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…”
Jun 16, 2025 positive
Jun 16, 2025 bullish