The Exchanges

Q And Austin, you come aboard, and you're like, hey, you can really do this a lot better, and here's how. So, when did you decide, like, how did you get to the point where the two of you were like, you know what, forget about our jobs, let's just jump into this newsletter thing?

A Yeah, it wasn't an easy decision. So Alex had the job lined up at Morgan Stanley. I was interning at Mollison Company, which is a investment bank in New York City, and very quickly I realized that that wasn't the path for me, and so, you know, we wanted to be entrepreneurs. We had an idea, and so we thought, why not give it a chance, and we saw growth. We saw this grow from Michigan to other Big 10 schools to Ivy League schools to To, I think the big inflection point is when we saw older people reading. We thought this was something for college students, but when we realized this could actually be read by anyone, that was a big moment for us when we thought, wow, this has potential not to be read by tens of thousands, but of millions.

AI assessment note: “the big inflection point is when we saw older people reading.”

Q And initially, was it the two of you writing everything in the first year or so?

A You know, very early on, it was just Alex. Then I joined on Uh, and was writing a bit, but one of the big, uh, ideas we had is that we could articulate the tone, and we could talk about the tone and how we wanted to write, and there were times where, you know, we could do it in a sentence or a paragraph, but we knew very early on we couldn't do it consistently day in and day out across a full newsletter, and so we hired people. We hired people who were much more talented than we were, and they wrote the newsletter, and they took that idea in our heads and To create a really great and consistent tone across the full newsletter.

AI assessment note: “very early on, it was just Alex. Then I joined on... so we hired people.”