Austin Rief
Co-Founder & Executive Chairman, Morning Brew · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveinvestor@austin_rief ↗LinkedIn ↗austinrief.com ↗
Austin Rief co-founded the business newsletter company Morning Brew, scaling it to millions of subscribers before selling a majority stake to Axel Springer. He transitioned from CEO to Executive Chairman and currently invests through Austin Rief Ventures while co-leading the staffing firm Oceans.
5statements → 0claims → 0claims resolved → 3.6/5average certainty → 2.6/5average debate potential → 277said about them ↓
1 opinion · 3 insights · 1 what if · every statement was checked. none of them is a claim the record can settle: opinions, insights and disclosures never carry an assessment.
Everything Austin Rief said on Founder's Journal that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Rief: Outgrown executives cause worse organizational bloat than outright bad hires
“There's two types of mishiring, and I think people usually think about the first that I'll give you, but it's the second that really kills you. The first is you just mess up. You hire a senior exec, you know within four to six months of the wrong person hopefu…”
Rief: Morning Brew would have failed if started intentionally as a business
“We didn't intend for it to be a business. And if we did, and we thought about it as a business in 2015, I think it would have failed. We would have made long, short term decisions to make a little money here or there, but because of the side project, we didn't…”
Rief: The study claiming happiness caps at a $70k salary is wrong
“I think there's like that whole 70,000 dollar salary you know, study that people are happier at 70,000 dollars. I don't think that's true. I think I am happier”
The other half of the tape: Austin Rief's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 258 times in 59 episodes on Founder's Journal. 19 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Alex Lieberman 241Tyler Denk 5Sam Parr 5Michael Sikand 3Jesse Pujji 3Codie Sanchez 1
Statements about Austin Rief, by other people (19)
Lieberman admits co-founder Austin Rief was a better stage-two CEO
“I believe that Austin was a better stage two CEO at the time than I was.”
Lieberman: Austin Rief took over CEO-level operating duties from 2019 to 2020
“From 2019 to through 20 20, Austin had very much taken on the responsibilities that were necessary for a CEO Who was now in kind of the company building mode and no longer in the startup building mode.”
Top business minds often possess chronically paranoid brains
“I find that some of the most impressive business minds have chronically paranoid brains, and in general, I wouldn't call Justin a paranoid person, but I mean this trait in a good way. When I was talking to Justin about his business, one of the things he mentio…”
Lieberman: Morning Brew Would Have Failed with Four Co-Founders
“If those two people were still part of Morning Brew, I don't think Morning Brew would have succeeded, and it has nothing to do with these two individuals specifically, but I think the complexity created by having every major decision in a business made by four…”
Lieberman: Co-Founder Austin Rief Never Gave Him a Compliment in Seven Years
“Like, I never received a compliment from Austin in seven years of running business together.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew wouldn't have succeeded if started alongside finance jobs
“If we had founded this after college while having to balance it with finance jobs where we're being paid well, it wouldn't have happened. No way.”
Tyler Denk proposed productizing Morning Brew's internal tools before launching beehiiv
“Something I just want to add here that's just a fun anecdote is I remember the first time that Tyler came to Austin and I, because Tyler was employee number three or four at Morning Brew, and he had been building all of our internal tools at the company. So th…”
Morning Brew reached 10,000 subscribers by leveraging a hub-and-spoke model
“When I think about how we got our first 1000, thousand, even 10,000 subscribers for Morning Brew, it was leveraging, as I've said now five times, the hub and spoke model”
Lieberman: Morning Brew founders reached $350k salaries as revenue hit $25M
“Our revenue basically went from zero to 70 K to 750 to three million to 13 to 25, but headcount absolutely did not grow linearly. It grew less than linearly, and so, I think at a certain point, Austin and I got up to 350 K. That we were paying ourselves.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew founders took $60k salaries after raising $750k
“After we raised our round we raised the 750 K, Austin and I took 60,000 dollar salaries.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew Co-Founders Never Held Feedback 1-on-1s
“This is going to sound crazy, but over the course of Morning Brew, Austin and I never once had a one-on-one where we expressed how the other was doing, what we needed more of, and what we were grateful for in the other.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew founders lacked skills to allocate millions in cash flow
“It was the fact that we were bootstrap founders, and as we were starting to cash flow millions of dollars in the business, we didn't have the skill of how to allocate all of that money because we had never dealt with that much money in our lives.”
Alex Lieberman launched Morning Brew in 2015 for under $1,000
“In 2015, my co-founder Austin and I started Morning Brew for less than a thousand dollars. We had a 50 dollar filing fee in Michigan for starting an LLC, a hundred dollars for the domain morningbrewdaily.com, 10 dollars a month for website hosting, and a hundr…”
Morning Brew founders write annual informal job descriptions for mutual accountability
“So at least for the last two years, Austin and I have taken time to basically write out informal job descriptions for ourselves to make sure we're holding ourselves accountable to doing the things we say we're going to do.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew's success stems from co-founders' emotional stability
“I think this is actually one of the strongest connections between poker and entrepreneurship is I attribute so much of morning brews success up to this point to Austin, my co-founder and my ability to stay level headed when shit hits the fan, but also when the…”
Lieberman: Morning Brew Predecessor Market Corner Reached 250 Subscribers in Two Months
“So let's just say by the time that Market Corner, which was around for two-ish months before we turned it into Morning Brew, and I brought on Austin as my co-founder, let's just say Market Corner got to 250 subscribers, so that's zero to two 50.”
Lieberman admits failing to set expectations for grueling early startup reality
“I think Austin and I could have better set expectations to this first employee about how grueling being a first employee and first writer at a media startup was.”
First Morning Brew newsletter went to 1,500 Michigan students in 2015
“March, 1425, the first Morning Brew newsletter was sent out By Austin Reif and myself to 1500 students at the University of Michigan.”
Lieberman: Co-Founding Morning Brew With Austin Rief Was His Best Business Decision
“Co-founding Morning Brew with Austin was probably the best decision I've made in the last six years of running the business, and that is simply because our relationship has been built atop a foundation of just these universal principles that I think any relati…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2025 13 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
2024 51 mentions in 10 episodes 5 per episode
- Why I Stepped Down As CEO
- Growing Morning Brew from 0 to 10,000 Subscribers
- Why We Sold Morning Brew
- How to Reverse Engineer Great Business Ideas (Sam Parr, The Hustle & Hampton)
- Always Be Shipping
- How to Get Your First 1,000 Users
- How to Spend a Startup’s $ Wisely
- Feeling Unskilled, Curing Cancer, and Going All-In on Morning Brew
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 100 mentions in 23 episodes 4 per episode
- 3 Strategies for Choosing the Right Co-Founder
- How Tyler Denk Took Beehiiv from 0 to $750,000/month in 2.5 Years
- How To Get Your Initial Customers
- Why Successful Business Minds Have Paranoid Brains
- Startup Hotline
- How to Use EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) to Run & Scale Your Business
- The Shameless Entrepreneur, Shoptalk 2023, When To Delegate
- How an Entrepreneur Turns Self-Hate into Love
- 15 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 16 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- Why Airlines Are Banks, How to Annual Plan for Your Business & The Biggest Myths About Founders
- How Spirit Halloween Makes $600M in 2 Months, The Journey of a CEO & Is a Recession Coming?
- The Genius of Spotify Wrapped and How to Copy It, and How to Sell Your Business for 9 Figures
- What Generative AI Means for Startups and Are Executive Coaches Worth It?
- The Future of the Creator Economy
- How the Founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK Built His $700M Empire
- What You Need to Know Before Raising Capital, and The Billion-Dollar Media Company You’ve Never Heard of
- Career Therapy: Mastering a Side Hustle & Full-Time Job
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 77 mentions in 12 episodes 6 per episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Co-founders Austin Rief and Alex Lieberman on Building Morning Brew | Jan 3, 2023 | 16m |