The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 319 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lieberman: The QSBS tax exemption saved me millions of dollars
“QSBS has saved me millions of dollars in taxes”
Sanchez: Avoids investing without securing unfair deal terms
“I try to not do deals where I don't have some unfair term.”
Lieberman treats his $150k annual angel budget as an expensive education
“I almost look at say the hundred to 150 K I allocate a year as Hopefully the shit goes up, but it is also an expensive version of education to get better at picking and to accumulate better deal flow.”
Sanchez: Contrarian Thinking has spent zero dollars on paid advertising
“When I grew, started to grow country and thinking, and to this day, like zero dollars in paid.”
Codie Sanchez secured performance-based warrants for increasing PostPilot's audience size
“So I asked for that and I asked for some warrants and options if I was actually able to increase their audience size. Cause I think my audience size can increase theirs. And they said, yes.”
Sanchez wants to invest in creator-led slime businesses to scale production
“And so I would like to invest in one of these people's businesses because like, how hard could this be to scale and make where you don't sell out of them every single week and you make millions a week instead of a couple hundred K?”
Sanchez targets 2x to 3x cash flow multiples for small business acquisitions
“I mean, for these types of businesses, I'm cheap. I like to buy businesses at anywhere from two to six X. I really try for the two to three X, but I typically buy boring businesses that don't have a lot of profit.”
Lieberman was not passionate about Morning Brew in its early days
“I wasn't obsessed with working on Morning Brew in the early days. I didn't have a deep passion for writing a newsletter and making it more digestible for millennials.”
Lieberman Bought Bitcoin at $35,800 in Mid-2021
“So a few days ago, I bought Bitcoin. The price was 35,000 dollars. I actually was 35,800 dollars”
Lieberman targets an 8 out of 10 transparency level for Morning Brew
“I'd probably say that I want Morning Brew to be an eight out of 10, zero being the least transparent in the world, 10 being the most transparent in the world.”
Morning Brew shares revenue, profit, and cash burn with all employees
“In State of the Brunian, we review the company's quarterly goals, We talk about financial performance, literally sharing revenue, profit, cash burn numbers, and we talk about the game plan to hit our specific goals in the upcoming quarter.”
Lieberman: StoryArb's One-Year Plan Targets $10M ARR and 120 Clients
“Just to give you an example, the one-year plan for StoryArb is having a ten million dollar annual run rate business with a 120 clients and average client retention of 24 months.”
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…”
Reeves: Gusto initially ran payroll via in-person visits on a co-founder's laptop
“So the first set of companies that onboarded to Gusto, and we had a different name at the time than Payroll what that meant was we would go to your house and You would type into, it was typically Tomer one of my co-founders, and we love to say you can't spell …”
Reeves: Gusto's first cohort was restricted to salaried California first-time employers
“So there was a really clear scoping here to companies in California that had never used payroll before, were paying employees for the first time. They were all salaried employees.”
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…”
Alex Lieberman pitches his new AI startup Distro as 'Canva for content'
“The vision for Distro is to be Canva for content.
It's your
AI content co
pilot that helps you with every part of the content journey from thinking of content ideas, to creating content, to editing content, scheduling and distributing content, to seeing how co…”
Alex Lieberman is raising a $1.1 million funding round for Distro
“We're raising 1.1 million dollars for the company.”
Lieberman plans to raise Distro's round from one VC and angels
“You know, approach to this round will be raising from one VC who's open to the idea of us being totally free to choose what our path is, then raising the rest of the round from angels.”
Lieberman: Distro's thesis is building an AI-native OS for internet creators
“So for our whole thesis, which is we want to build the end-to-end operating system for Internet creators globally, and ideation is our wedge into that, but we want this whole business to sit on a foundation of AI and truly be an AI native content platform.”
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…”
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.”
Lieberman: StoryArb offers $5,000 top prize for internal LinkedIn competition
“The person with the most social impressions on LinkedIn after 10 weeks will win 5000 dollars. Second and third place will also get rewarded with a thousand dollars and 500 dollars respectively.”
Morning Brew raised $750K on a $5M valuation cap via convertible note
“If you're interested, we raised 750 K at Morning Brew in the form of a convertible note with a five million dollar cap.”
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.”
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…”
Lieberman targets 5,000 free and 150 paid Distro accounts in 30 days
“Our goal is to five X in the next 30 days with 5000 free distro accounts and get to a 150 paid customers.”
Lieberman: Distro's long-term vision is to become the Cursor for content
“Our long-term vision for distro is to create cursor for content”
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…”
Alex Lieberman only attends business conferences if given green room access
“Which is why now when I go to events, since I am not the sales savage, I typically will only go if I get green room rights.”
Lieberman spent three years too long personally handling Morning Brew's media sales
“I spent two to three years too long doing media sales at The Brew. This included LinkedIn DMing, email follow-ups, going on every sales call, and sending campaign reports to clients.”
Lieberman: StoryArb is at $130K run rate, targeting $240K for Q2
“Just to give you a sense of the business right now, it's like a 130 K top line right now, and the goal is end of this quarter to be at 240 K top line.”
Sadeghi: Call Early Work Research Rather Than a Company to Reduce Pressure
“I actually had a rule to myself. The rule was I would not say anything about a company. It's a project. It's, I, I'm just doing research.”
Pujji: Gateway X hires complete a Conscious Leadership worksheet during onboarding
“The first thing I do with every new person who works at GatewayX and any of the companies is, We go through that worksheet and we start to build that self-awareness and that's kind of the starting part of the journey.”
Parr was building a NewsPicks clone for The Hustle before its acquisition
“Newspix, I was going to launch this product, but we got acquired. I was right in the middle of making it for the hustle.”
Parr spent $10,000 to build service directory SamsList using no-code platform Bubble
“And then I spent 10,000 dollars
and I built a website called samslist.co.
We used bubble and I listed all the people there.”
Lieberman plans to hire CEO co-founders so new ventures operate without him
“Whatever I launch first, I want to bring on a co-founder who's going to be the CEO of this business. So that the business, if we do it the right way, can operate without me.”
Lieberman received 20 DMs from founders willing to pay $5k-$10k monthly
“I ended up getting like, 20 DMs from founders, which was sick because then I was like, okay, I have customers, and clearly they're qualified because I indicated in the tweet that you'd have to pay five to 10,000 dollars.”
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…”
Lieberman increased StoryArb pricing to $5,000 monthly, netting $2,000 per client
“I started bringing on more clients. And as I did that, I started charging those clients, 5000 dollars instead of 3000. So I would make 2000 dollars per month per client.”
Morning Brew rejected multiple acquisition offers in 2018 and 2019
“Before we were approached by Axel Springer, In, at the end of 2019, we had probably been approached by four or five different businesses or funds in the year and a half prior. We were approached by a few media holding companies that own a portfolio of differen…”
Morning Brew had 1.5M subscribers when sold to Axel Springer
“At the time in which we sold the company, Morning Brew, the newsletter had gotten to over a million subscribers. It was probably at, like, 1.5 million now.”
Morning Brew spent $250K to $500K monthly on paid subscriber acquisition
“At the time we probably were spending anywhere between 250 to 500,000 dollars per month on paid acquisition, right?”
Morning Brew's Highest Quality Subscribers Always Came From Reader Referrals
“For the entirety of Morning Brew's history, our highest quality customers have been people who were referred by other Morning Brew subscribers.”
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 sold Morning Brew to secure lifelong family financial independence
“An acquisition at the price that was being discussed would take me across the freedom line that Jason talks about and put myself and my family in a place of financial independence for the rest of our lives.”
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…”
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…”