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 → 3claims → 1claims resolved → 3.8/5average certainty → 2.2/5average debate potential →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 2 assertions · 1 insight · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Austin argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Rief: Morning Brew waited until reaching 100K subscribers to begin monetizing

“So it was first sent out March, 1420 15. And I think the first advertisement was summer to end of 20 17 is when we started to monetize. So two and a half years and around a 100,000 subscriber mark is when we started to monetize the newsletter.”

Austin Rief Mar 4, 2021 ▶ 22:37 How I Built Resilience: Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief of Morning Brew

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Austin Rief on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

What they said5 Episodes1

Everything Austin Rief said on How I Built This that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Rief: Media consumption will shift from legacy institutions toward individual creators

“I think there is very much a push towards individuals and away from institutions. We're seeing that as a society as a whole, but also within the media world, and so I think that will also rise, and I think news and media in general will get more and more niche…”

Austin Rief Mar 4, 2021 ▶ 24:41 How I Built Resilience: Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief of Morning Brew

Insight

Rief: New media entrants must target narrow niches to differentiate successfully

“The way to differentiate yourself, if you don't have three million readers, you won't be able to create a general business newsletter. You'll have to create A newsletter that is on bankruptcy you know, law or something really niche, and you'll have to figure o…”

Austin Rief Mar 4, 2021 ▶ 25:01 How I Built Resilience: Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief of Morning Brew

Disclosure

Rief: Morning Brew capped funding at $750K to prioritize early monetization

“So some other media companies decided to raise a lot of funding and push off monetization. We didn't understand that. We thought it makes sense to monetize day one, and so that's all we raised because we fueled it through our revenue and through our profits.”

Austin Rief Mar 4, 2021 ▶ 13:00 How I Built Resilience: Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief of Morning Brew

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Rief: Morning Brew's native newsletter ads see 10x higher click-through rates

“Our click-through rates are 10 or even greater times higher than a banner ad”

Austin Rief Mar 4, 2021 ▶ 19:16 How I Built Resilience: Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief of Morning Brew