Andy Molinsky: [00:00:00] Today's guest is Alex Lieberman. Alex is the Co-Founder and CEO of Morning Brew. Morning Brew's goal is to make millennials experience with the business world more engaging, and digestible, and relatable in their daily product, which you might actually have right now in your inbox. And if you don't, you should. It's a newsletter that is subscribed to by 700,000 people and counting. And the core reader of this newsletter is the aspirational emerging business leader.

Andy Molinsky: [00:00:31] So, prior to Morning Brew, Alex was a fixed income trader at Morgan Stanley. And then, prior to that, he was a student at the University of Michigan, where he studied Real Estate and Financial Markets at the Ross School of Business. Alex, thanks so much for being on.

Alex Lieberman: [00:00:46] Thanks so much for having me.

Andy Molinsky: [00:00:48] Cool. So, let's hear about what you do, what your job is. And what I'd love to do is I'd love to hear about what your job is now. Tell us about Morning Brew, how you started it. Then, maybe we'll rewind back to Michigan in your undergrad in, sort of, where you were at that point, sort of, as a senior. But let's start where you are right now, and what do you do, and tell us about it.

Alex Lieberman: [00:01:08] Yeah, absolutely. So, as you mentioned, Morning Brew's goal is to make our generation's experience with the business world significantly better. We are a fast-growing media startup based out of New York City. We have nine people full-time at Morning Brew with basically three main pods: growth, sales, and content. And as you mentioned, our core product is a daily email newsletter. It gives you all the business news you need in five minutes. It's quick. It's conversational. It covers everything from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.

Alex Lieberman: [00:01:44] And the goal of the newsletter is very simple. We want to help our reader be the smartest person in the room and, also, be cognizant of the fact that our reader is really busy, they don't have a lot of time in their day. So, we want to be that resource to synthesize all of the content that's out there into one little package that arrives in your inbox every morning, and not only tell you what are the most important business stories that you should care about as the young professional or young business leader, but, also, why should you care about them both as a consumer, as well as a young professional.

Alex Lieberman: [00:02:18] As a Co-Founder and CEO of the business, again, as I reflect on what my day-to-day has looked like since working full-time on this for the last, call it, two years but working in some capacity at Morning Brew since starting it at the University of Michigan when I was a senior, my role has evolved in so many different ways. But to your question, what do I do right now? Basically, my focus at the moment has been on the sales side of things. So, working on building really strong brand partnerships with everyone from Discover Card, to JP Morgan, to Allbirds, to Casper, to the University of Michigan.

Alex Lieberman: [00:02:58] And the goal is, obviously, as a for-profit business, we had to figure out how can we monetize. There are two main ways that media companies have traditionally figured out how to be sustainable and profitable. One is the idea of charging your consumer. The other is the idea of charging a brand to get in front of your consumer. Obviously, we monetize through the latter. And so, my focus right now has been as we scale our audience, how can we scale the number of brand partners we're working with? How can we scale our processes, so that when it goes from working with 40 to 400 clients, how can we scale that process in an organized fashion? And, also, how can we scale our sales team to grow with the business as well?

Alex Lieberman: [00:03:47] So, right now, we have my coworker, Sasha, and myself focused on brand partnerships. Ultimately, we're going to need a way larger team to be able to solidify brand partnerships for the business. So, that's been my focus, call it, for the last two to three months at Morning Brew.

Andy Molinsky: [00:04:07] So, how many years have are you out of college?

Alex Lieberman: [00:04:09] So, I graduated Michigan in 2015.

Andy Molinsky: [00:04:12] Wow. Okay. So, you're doing all this basically three years out of college?

Alex Lieberman: [00:04:16] Yeah. And just to get back to, I believe, your second question, which was how this got started-

Andy Molinsky: [00:04:23] Yeah.

Alex Lieberman: [00:04:23] ... it's intertwined with my college experience because my Co-Founder, Austin, and I founded the company when we were students at Michigan. So, just to give you a little bit of the backstory, I was a finance person through and through. My dad and my mom, which, as I told you, went to Brandeis. They also both worked on Wall Street. So, my dad was a trader at Citigroup. My mom was a salesperson at Nomura. My grandma worked at Prudential. So, not only were our dinner conversations when I was 13 years old incredibly riveting, but, also, I kind of just knew or expected of myself that I'll work in finance to start my career because I just very simply thought, "These are my role models. I don't know anything else. I want to emulate my role models."

Alex Lieberman: [00:05:11] And so, chose Michigan as the school that I wanted to go to because I wanted a very different college experience from what my high school experience was like. I went to a very small private high school in New Jersey. Graduating class was like 115 people. So, I wanted just literally be opposite, not because I hated my high school friends, but, again, it was a new chapter, and I really wanted to embrace that.

Alex Lieberman: [00:05:36] The other reason was that, obviously, the business program at Michigan is pretty well-regarded. And, again, I wanted to, hopefully, start my career in finance. So, I did the classic internship after freshman year, internship after sophomore year, internship after junior year thing. I get into my senior year of Michigan, I was lucky enough that I'd received a job offer to work full-time at Morgan Stanley once I graduated. And I only had to take, I think it was two or three classes my entire senior year at Michigan.

Alex Lieberman: [00:06:09] And so, I was just like, "I need to do something to pass the time or my brain is going to spontaneously combust." And so, I started helping students in the business school in Michigan, students in my fraternity, who were re-recruiting during our senior year. I started helping them prepare for job interviews. And before mock interviewing them, I would always ask the question, "How do you keep up with the business world?" And every single student would have the same 10 answers to that question. They would say, "I read The Wall Street Journal, and I read it because I feel that I have to because it's a prerequisite to say, 'I'm well read in business," but it's dense, it's dry, and it's just something that is expected of me to go into business."

Alex Lieberman: [00:06:52] And so, at some point, I was like, "This is crazy. These students are working so incredibly hard to have careers in business; yet, they don't have content that story tells the business world in a fun, relatable, and engaging way." And so, I literally just started writing a daily business roundup, which, at the time, wasn't even called Morning Brew. It's called Market Corner. There was no business intention to it whatsoever. It was literally just, one, I found that it would force me to keep up to date with the business world, so that I would be pretty polished when I started my career after college. And the second was it would allow me to, hopefully, provide a better resource to students, so I didn't have to hear the same answer over, and over, and over.

Alex Lieberman: [00:07:34] And when I started sending this out, it was not in a refined email newsletter. It was literally a Microsoft Word template that I would put together for four hours a day during my first semester of senior year at Michigan. It would be saved as a PDF. And I literally just started by creating a listserv through like Michigan's MCommunity website. It started with 95 people and read an attachment to an email in a PDF document.

Alex Lieberman: [00:08:01] And start sending this out, and I started receiving texts and emails every day thereafter from people saying, "Hey, I heard about this business roundup that you write. I would love to subscribe to your list." And I would literally have to go into the MCommunity website and manually put in these email addresses for people that wanted to subscribe.

Alex Lieberman: [00:08:22] By the end of first semester senior year in Michigan, pretty much, the entire business school was signed up for Market Corner. And, for me, this was the purest form of just like proof of concept because the product aesthetically looked horrible, and there was infinite friction to actually subscribe to it since there was no website, I manually had to do it for you, but it acted as really good proof that there was an appetite for better business news that was conversational, that was digestible, and it was written with the young business person in mind.

Alex Lieberman: [00:08:59] And so, that's when I brought on Austin as a Co-Founder over winter break of my senior year. I brought him on because he was one of the first readers of Market Corner. And what I realized very early on was that people were saying like, "You're doing a great job and keep up what you're doing," it's awesome to hear. And, obviously, it comes from such a great place, but I realized it was the least helpful thing in actually improving a product because I had no form of feedback or constructive criticism to act on.

Alex Lieberman: [00:09:28] Austin was the only person who would read the Market Corner every single day and respond with objective feedback on how to make it better. And I just knew he's someone who was reading it every day. clearly cared about the product, cared about the mission, and had the level-headedness as a -- At the time, he was a 19-year-old to provide that feedback was incredibly valuable. So, brought him on as a Co-Founder, and we launched our core newsletter in its current form as an email newsletter in March of 2015.

Andy Molinsky: [00:09:57] Wow, what a story. Just quick question on that, how did you know how to do this? Not the mechanics of sending it out to the listserv and so on, but how did you -- So, you knew there was a need from your experience doing the prepping people for interviews. You knew that the Wall Street Journal was dry to your generation. How did you know how to create a product that would appeal?

Alex Lieberman: [00:10:22] I mean, the short answer is I didn't. I really didn't at all. One thing I would say that helped me is because, I think, I went into it so naïve. And, I think, there's two components to it. One is Austin and I was so naïve to this because we were finance people. We weren't media people. We, basically, just created a product that we thought we would love, which was a very naïve way to go about it because if we were trained in media, trained in journalism, we probably would have approached it in a more pragmatic fashion or done something similar to how companies had done it in the past. But because we had no reference point, we just did what we thought we would enjoy if we were the consumer of our product.

Alex Lieberman: [00:11:00] And then, I think the second component of it is, yeah, I really didn't know what product to create aside from just using myself as a litmus test. I had no writing background. Especially in the Business School of Michigan, we didn't have to write that frequently. So, now, I would say I'm a pretty solid writer from just having to spend so much time writing over the years since starting the Brew. But before that, I was an incredibly mediocre writer.

Alex Lieberman: [00:11:25] And so, I think, it just came down to because I wasn't thinking about it as a business, I also felt less risk or pressure that like, "Oh, this needs to succeed," or "I have nothing else to do." I think that was one of the benefits that I see of starting this in college is there was so much resource, and there is so much of a buffer for us to take a risk. And the downside was extremely mitigated where we just created what made sense to us, which was there are certain sectors, topics, companies that the college student or the young professional tend to care more about than older generations. So, let's cover those more. And let's not just dive into what the stories are but why are they important in the context of our readers' life. And let's write it in a way like we're speaking right now, like you and I are speaking.

Alex Lieberman: [00:12:17] And then, also, we said to ourselves, "Okay, outside of the bread and butter of business news, what are other things that the business person who lives the business lifestyle cares about?" because, one, it's good to have a diversity of content, so it's not the same thing over, and over, and over. And humans are multifaceted people and beings. There are things that we care about outside of the office, and that's why we start doing, whether it'd be interview questions, or inspirational quotes, or business fashion tips, things that our audience clearly cared about and weren't just traditionally like the down-the-fairway business stories that everyone covers.

Andy Molinsky: [00:12:57] Got it, interesting. So, you've been a college student very recently, and you just did all this, which is pretty amazing. What misconceptions do you think college students have when, I guess, in your case, starting a business, but you can even make it broader in terms of transitioning from college to the professional world?

Alex Lieberman: [00:13:15] Yeah. So, I think there's a few things. I think, we'll talk about it in the context of starting your own business first. I truly believe if you're able to pull it off, starting a business while you are in college, is one of the best things you can do. And the reason I say that is you just have so many resources at your disposal, you have such a large network within your own college, whether it's the alumni-base, whether it's the professors, whether it's your fellow students.

Alex Lieberman: [00:13:44] But then, also, I found that when you ask for things as a college student, it's way easier to get a yes from people than when you've graduated to have significantly more resources. And your downside is mitigated extremely well because when you start a business as a college student, by definition, you're not doing it as a full-time endeavor. You're still getting a degree, you're still taking classes.

Alex Lieberman: [00:14:05] So, again, the downside of that is you will not be able to be a full-time entrepreneur while you're in college. but even for people who end up, say, starting their businesses once they're in the professional world, very few people just quit their job, and start a business. Oftentimes, they'll start as a side hustle. They'll work on it on the side after they get home from work every day. And then, when they see enough traction, then they'll quit their job, and go do it full-time. In my mind, that is no different from doing it while you're a college student in classes and working on your business on the side. You just have way more cushion when you're a college student. The risk just increases significantly once you graduated.

Alex Lieberman: [00:14:43] So, I think, there's that component of it. And I think the second component is people assume that you need to be an expert in your domain of what your business is related to, to launch the business. People don't actually know how to launch the business. They see it as there has to be a perfect product. I think, I was shielded to it because I wasn't thinking about it as a business in the beginning. So, if I was to do this over, and if I was starting a business in college that I actually thought like, "Oh, this is a business. This isn't just a hobby," I would try to trick myself into thinking like, "This is a hobby, and I just need to get something going. And it's not going to be perfect, but I need to get something out there. And if I don't get something out there, then it doesn't matter."

Andy Molinsky: [00:15:31] Yeah, interesting. I love that idea of the cushion and using the college experience to your advantage. Let's hear from a college student. So, I told you earlier, we have a student question. I'm going to play it for you. Let's hear what they have to say. And then, we'll have a quick chat about it. Here's the question.

Jenna: [00:15:52] Hi. I am Jenna. And I'm a college student. I come from China. So, the question I want to ask is, What kind of quality and characteristic will help a student to become well competitive in the workplace?

Andy Molinsky: [00:16:07] Wow. So, I think, this question's asking maybe about personal qualities, whether maybe what's going to enable someone to succeed jumping from college to the professional world, maybe get hired, maybe whatever, however you want to take it.

Alex Lieberman: [00:16:22] Yeah, absolutely. The biggest thing that Austin and I have learned, and we made this -- I think, we learned it through making this mistake early on is from the perspective of an employer, which I think will help answer this question, is when we were first hiring for Morning Brew, it specifically was for a writer role. We, basically, made all of these criteria like, "What would the perfect writer at our company look like from just a background perspective?" So, we said, like, "This person has to have a journalism background. They have to have worked at a business media company, know how a newsroom works.".

Alex Lieberman: [00:16:57] And we hired someone that fit all of those criteria. And what we realized three months after when that person ended up leaving the company is we had made a horrible miscalculation. The things we should have been focused on or, at least, should have been most priority were (A), is this tech person an incredibly passionate person? And what I mean by that is not, "Are they most passionate about Morning Brew on day one?" because that's not feasible. No one is going to be, first of all, as passionate about the company as Austin and I, but, also, on anyone's first day, they're not going to be the most passionate person in the business, but more, "Is this person a passionate person?" Meaning, can we find points in their life where they got interested in something. And once, they were interested, they got incredibly interested. They obsessed over it. They thought about it constantly. They were always on thinking about the thing that they were passionate about.

Alex Lieberman: [00:17:48] The second was, "Is this person deeply intellectually curious?" A lot of people say they're curious, a lot of people say they like becoming experts on things. And what we've found is very few people truly know what it means to go down the rabbit hole. I think most people kind of stop at what would be like 70% of the way of learning about something. And so, something we should have also considered is if someone gets interested in something and they're passionate about it, will they truly keep going down the rabbit hole to be in the 99 percentile of knowledge on that topic that they care most about.

Alex Lieberman: [00:18:26] And, I think, the final component is really just work ethic. Like, is this someone who, first of all, understands the concept of not just working for the sake of working, which I think is potentially a habit that a lot of people get through the years of education is, do they work in a purposeful manner where every minute they spend working isn't for the sake of just saying, "I spent 12 hours on this." It's working towards a goal, and everything is value-added work to push towards that goal. Work ethic is something that's really, really difficult to teach. And so, we look for people that already have that.

Alex Lieberman: [00:19:04] And so, those three things. Passion, deep intellectual curiosity, and work ethic were three things that we didn't focus on for this first hire. And, now, in anyone we hire, whether it's in writing, sales, growth, strategy, et cetera, we need to check all those boxes before we consider any of the other criteria that are specific to that role.

Andy Molinsky: [00:19:23] That's really good. And what I really like about that is that, I think, a lot of students leave college and think, "Oh my gosh. Who am I? I'm such an imposter. I'm entering this big, scary, professional world." But what you just said are things exactly that pretty much anyone could have. In fact, these are things you can hone in college, your intellectual curiosity, and passion, your immersion and ability to kind of go deep, really deep.

Alex Lieberman: [00:19:47] Totally.

Andy Molinsky: [00:19:49] And then, the work ethic. So, that's cool. That's actually quite inspiring.

Alex Lieberman: [00:19:52] Yeah, absolutely. And, I think, to that point, I think there's a few things there. One is, I think, that, one, people assume they need a background in the field that they're going into, which I just don't think is correct. I think, again, if you have those three things - intellectual curiosity, passion and, strong work ethic - you can really go into any career you want to because you have the structure it takes to become an expert in anything.

Alex Lieberman: [00:20:20] I mean, if you look at Austin and I, we had zero experience in media, and we're running a media company now. And maybe one would argue we shouldn't be running a media company, but, I think, what has allowed us to be successful up to this point is because we truly believe we embody those three characteristics. If there's something we want to learn, we know that we're not always going to have the answer, but we have the network and the resourcefulness to find that answer. And we will work as hard as we can, for as long as we can, to continue to not only find the answers but become as much of an expert on the topic as we can.

Alex Lieberman: [00:20:57] And, I think, also, as I reflect on college, to me, my most valuable experience is in college. First of all, were not just the academics, not just my classes, but the extracurriculars that I was involved in. And I, also, just think that, in retrospect, college really - if done properly - it's not, at least, in my mind, where specific classes taught very actionable things that you can apply into your job necessarily. If they can, that's great. But, I think, more broadly, you should be focusing on something that teaches you the right way of thinking, that helps inspire that work ethic, that helps inspire that curiosity because that can be applied to any line of work in any industry.

Andy Molinsky: [00:21:38] Super useful. So, we're kind of nearing the end of our chat here. Let me just ask you a couple of quick questions. This is sort of like our quick tips for college students section. How about a productivity tip? People are always interested in productivity hacks. People have different ways of being productive. Do you have any tips for young professionals?

Alex Lieberman: [00:21:58] Yeah. So, I mean, this one probably sounds pretty crazy, but I just know myself. I know that given I, naturally, am creative, and I get distracted very easily, and I think I'm naturally an extrovert, I like having conversations with people. People, I can get sidetracked very easily. So, for me, when I work, I need to put myself in the right environment to work well. And what that includes is during the day, I turn off my phone. Between the hours of 9:00 to 5:00, my phone is off. And if I'm taking phone calls, I actually have my Apple Watch with cell service connected to my air pods, and I take calls on there. My phone does not turn on.

Alex Lieberman: [00:22:37] And then, I'm not going on Facebook throughout the day. And the way that I've avoided using Facebook a lot is on my phone, I don't have the Facebook app. So, if I want to go to Facebook, I have to go to Safari, then go to Facebook, and then put in my username and password every time. I purposely don't have it save it because it turns a one-step process into a four-step process. And I've seen that it has taken down my use of Facebook during the day significantly.

Andy Molinsky: [00:23:07] Excellent. I love that. How about any advice that you got early in your career, which, I guess, is pretty recently, that you didn't take, but you wish you had? Did you get any advice at Michigan that, in retrospect, was like, "Huh, that was really good advice"?

Alex Lieberman: [00:23:20] So, I mean, I think I'm not sure if this was Michigan or right after. I probably heard this in a number of places, but I really think we, as people, have such a finite amount of time in our day. We think about curating so many things in life like curating the books we're going to read, curating the emails that come into our inbox every day. Like all these different things, we're very tactical and purposeful with curating.

Alex Lieberman: [00:23:47] The thing that I think people don't think a lot about is curating the people they surround themselves with. So, really, taking stock of periodically, who are the people in your life? One, are you personally adding value to them, or are you driving the relationship with them? Can you do more to be a better friend, to be better coworker, to add more value to them personally and professionally? But on the other side, taking stock of, who are the 10 to 15 people that you spend the majority of your time with? And are these people that give good energy? Are these people that you find to be passionate, curious, and hardworking people? Are these people that if you knew that all them rub off on you in some way, you would be happy with what they rub off on you with?

Andy Molinsky: [00:24:31] Interesting. I love that. How about mentoring? A lot of young people are curious about mentors. How do you find a mentor? Do I need a mentor? Have you had any mentors? You've done something pretty impressive pretty quickly. Any role of mentoring? And are you a mentor?

Alex Lieberman: [00:24:47] So, few things on that. One is, I think, mentorship is way more fluid than it's made out to be. So, I think, people assume like you get a mentor, they're your mentor for life, and that's it. I have found that there are people in my life who were kind of like moving in and out of mentorship positions, or the relationship I have with them is mentor-mentee; whereas, in certain times, it fluctuates, and it's not. So, what I found is whether it's a friend who started a business, there will be periods of time where I'm leaning on him a lot because he has expertise in a certain area that he can clearly mentor me on; whereas, at other times, because the business is in a different part of the cycle, there just are not things that I initially need to lean on him for, and it's just like our conversation is way more just driven by our friendship, not in a mentorship-mentee capacity.

Alex Lieberman: [00:25:37] So, I think, one is if you asked me how many mentors do I have, really, my answer would be somewhere between 30 and 40. And I think it's because I just realized that the same way that Austin and I knew nothing about media and had to figure it all out, on a constant basis, there are things we need to do that we know that we are not the smartest or best in. But if we surround ourselves with people that are, we can lean on them to gain their expertise in the same way that they can lean on us about, I don't know, I guess, how to run an email newsletter.

Alex Lieberman: [00:26:10] And so, my view is it's not about one, or two, or three mentors. It's to think about, "What are the needs? What are the things that you can help people with, and the things that people can help you with?" And leaning on people for the things that they are experts in, that they are clearly better than you at that you can lean on them for. And, also, just not feeling so structured by the idea of mentors and mentees that you're locked into one. After that, it's like a matching process where you can never go back and never get rid of this mentor. It's way more fluid than that.

Andy Molinsky: [00:26:42] Excellent advice. I totally agree with you, by the way. I really love that so. So, at the end of our chat, just let me thank you so much for being our guest. I know -- I mean, what you said was super insightful and interesting to me. And I know it's going to be for our audience as well. I usually ask people how they can find out more about you and your work. I think this one would be pretty obvious. How can they subscribe to Morning Brew?

Alex Lieberman: [00:27:05] Yeah. It is just www.morningbrew.com. And I would love for anyone and everyone to subscribe. We read and respond to every email that readers send to our team, whether it's me, alex@morningbrew.com, or Neal and Kinsey, who are our two writers. So, we're always looking for new readers. And, more importantly, we're always looking for feedback to make the product better. So, we'd love to hear from anyone listening to this podcast. And definitely mentioned that you found out about the Brew and found out about the story through this podcast just to hear what type of people are tuning into this.

Andy Molinsky: [00:27:43] Awesome. Thanks. And I can tell you right now, I'm going to subscribe to Morning Brew right after our conversation. So, I'm psyched to start becoming a reader.

Alex Lieberman: [00:27:50] Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

Andy Molinsky: [00:27:52] Awesome. Thanks so much for being on.

Alex Lieberman: [00:27:55] Absolutely. Thanks for the time, Andy.