Mar 19, 2021 · 16m · founders-journal
6 Years, 6 Lessons
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To mark the six-year anniversary of Morning Brew, co-founder Alex Lieberman shares the six most essential business lessons learned while scaling a dorm-room newsletter into a 90-person media enterprise. He provides practical frameworks covering execution timelines, hiring diligence, expectation setting, trade-off analysis, delegation, and intellectual curiosity.
Statements from this episode (11)
First Morning Brew newsletter went to 1,500 Michigan students in 2015
“March, 1425, the first Morning Brew newsletter was sent out By Austin Reif and myself to 1500 students at the University of Michigan.”
Morning Brew hit 3 million subscribers and 90 employees in 2021
“Fast forward, March 1420 21, Morning Brew is a full-fledged media brand with an audience of 3,000,007 products, and a nearly 90 person team.”
Founders always underestimate how long execution will take
“I'm not sure if it's because we as entrepreneurs overestimate our abilities or underestimate the time it takes to complete something, but everything always takes longer than you want or expect when building a company.”
Morning Brew hadn't finished its 2018 business plan by 2021
“It is literally four years after we made this deck and that we promised this business plan to be executed in 2018, and we still haven't finished The business plan.”
Mishiring is one of the most detrimental mistakes a business makes
“There is little that is more detrimental to a business. Then miss hiring. It is so bad for business. And in some cases that it can actually kill a business.”
Coworkers notice a bad hire long before founders do
“You can always assume that if you start to doubt the fit of someone that you've hired, several other people who worked closer and more frequently with that person have had those doubts for some time.”
Morning Brew lost employees over improperly set expectations
“And to be honest with you, we've had people leave our business because expectations weren't properly set.”
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, …”
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…”