Morning Brew Daily - Business Building with Alex Lieberman

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

Episode 95: On this special holiday edition of Morning Brew Daily, Neal and Toby sit down with Morning Brew Co-Founder Alex Lieberman. The guys discuss Alex's journey in building the Brew with now CEO Austin Rief while they were both in college at Michigan and why Alex almost didn't hire Neal as MB's third ever full-time employee. Alex also explains how his mental health took a hit when he shifted from CEO to Executive Chairman in 2021 and how he has navigated a shift in responsibilities over the last few years. As Alex dives back into entrepreneurship and helping founders, he has relaunched his podcast "Founder's Journal" where he gives you an insider’s look into building businesses. Alex explores the founder’s journey, from the painful demands of 0-to-1 to the powerful frameworks that help you scale to millions in revenue and other emotional challenges founders endure. Listen to Founder’s Journal here: https://link.chtbl.com/OV4W93_W Watch Founder’s Journal here: https://www.youtube.com/@FoundersJournal Follow Alex on Twitter: https://twitter.com/businessbarista Follow Alex on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexlieb/ Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning, Brew Daily show. I am Neil Fryman. And I am Toby Howell. Happy 4th of July, everyone. Hope you are having a wonderful day off with friends, family, and potato salad with heaps of mayonnaise. We are off for the holiday, but in true American fashion, the content factory never stops. So we've pre-recorded another special episode for you today. We spoke to one of the co-founders of Morning Brew.

Today we are getting to know Alex Lieberman. Alex started Morning Brew when he was just a student at Michigan alongside current CEO, Austin Reef and has been building the company for the better part of the last 10 years. We're going to talk to Alex about his journey with the brew, how it felt to step down from being CEO of the company he founded, and discuss his own podcast under the brew umbrella Founders Journal. It's Tuesday, July 4th, let's ride. Alex, welcome to the show. It's good to have you. Good to be here. So we've been using these special holiday episodes as a chance to get to know different people from the morning Brew ecosystem, but we're especially excited to talk to you because without you, there is no

Morning Brew ecosystem. You are the founder of Morning Brew. You actually hired both Neil and I, and you currently sit as the executive chairman of this huge multimillion dollar media empire. But before all that, you were just a young, ambitious business major at the University of Michigan. For the people who may have just found the pod but don't have any background on the company that is Morning Brew, can you tell us how Morning Brew kind of started? Yeah, thanks again for having me. And it's good to be here with my golf buddies. So I think to understand my background, you need to like go a little bit even before college when this was started.

I grew up in a Wall Street family. And all I knew was like Wall Street and financial services. My dad was a trader for 20 years. My mom was in sales and trading for 20 years. Grandpa was in sales and trading. So like my entire life, my dream was to be a great trader. And it's interesting because, like, I had no idea what that meant. It was more just, like, my role models did that so that I was going to do it.

So I went to the University of Michigan, was in the business school there. At that point, like freshman, sophomore, junior year, still on that track going after, like, the ideal trading job. I was in the business school, studied finance and sales and trading, had internships at Morgan Stanley, sophomore year, junior year. And basically, I got into my senior year at Michigan. I had my job in hand that I had accepted to join Morgan Stanley for after college at all this free time. And basically it ended up being filled by two things, playing a lot of FIFA. And then the other half was helping other students in the business school prepare for job interviews. And one question I would always ask these students was, how do you keep up with the business world?

And they would always say, you know, I read the Wall Street Journal, but it's dense, it's dry. My parents tell me to do it, but I can't get through the whole thing. And at some point, I was like, this is crazy. Like, all these students are about to spend half of their waking hours for the next 50 years of their life working in business, but they don't have content that gets them excited about their careers. So I started writing a daily business roundup, which was called Market Corner. I would spend five hours a day basically doing what Neil has done for the last six years, reading through, you know, the primary business news sources. and what I call remixing them, like a DJ who remix mixes records,

like remixing them into digestible, approachable, and engaging blurbs that help at the time the college business student keep up to date with what was happening in the business world. And I wrote this by myself for like three months. It was an incredibly...

Can I curse on this or no? We might believe it. This, you know, nothing, no F-bomb. It's a hot episode. It was an incredibly shhty product. It was a PDF that I would attach to an email every day. So it wasn't like an email newsletter with a template. There was no website to sign up. You'd have to literally email me and say, hey, I want to subscribe to your newsletter and I would go into Market Corner at Umish.d.U and manually put

in emails. And for whatever reason, like after a few months of doing it, there are a couple hundred people subscribed. One of those people happened to be Austin Reef, one of the OG subscribers to Market Corner. I'd sent out an email basically saying, I'm thinking about taking this a little bit more seriously. People are reading it. Austin was one of the people that responded. I still have the original email of us corresponding. Framed. Yep. I don't have it framed. I need to frame it at some point, but basically was like, I wrote that email saying I'm interested in people helping. Austin was like, I have ideas for how this could be better, want to chat. I responded, cool, let's meet after BPL, which was beer pong league because we're in the same fraternity at Michigan. Um,

And so we met after Beer Pung League in the winter garden at the business school. And it's so interesting, right? Because, like, normally you spend weeks or months figuring out who your co-founder is for a business. But it was basically like speed dating for us. Like, we basically became co-founders of the business in a few days. And I think my intuition was right, but there's also a lot of luck because it could have gone really wrong. Truly. I have a question.

How many times do you think you've told that story? Like, I actually want to know. It's really interesting. Thousands. At least, I would say maybe 10,000. Because when you were in the early days of morning brew, you were the salesperson, right? You were the public-facing person. And you probably had to tell that four or five times a day for 300 days out of the year over seven years.

Yeah. So you're talking about, you know, 1,500 to 2,000 a year right there. Yeah. How do you motivate yourself to continue, like, telling this. It's a fun story, though. I mean, to be honest, you'll, like, see my eyes gloss over and I just turn into a machine when I do it now. But the interesting thing about this, by the way, and I'm sure other founders have experienced this, is I don't even know if that's the true story anymore. Because when you've told this story so many times, you can't remember the original experience.

So, for example, there's a part of the story that I don't tell, which is, like, you know, part of this was, like, for self-list reasons of helping students. Yeah. But there was 100% a selfish reason. which was I was going to go work at Morgan Stanley. I felt like I wasn't keeping up to speed with the markets, and this was a force function for doing that. So, yeah, I don't even know what the right story is. I have to break it to you, Alex.

You didn't go to the University of Michigan. You went to Wisconsin. Very possible. Ohio State, yeah. Okay, so can you talk a little bit about your decision to leave Morgan Stanley and go work at the brew full time? Because people might think that you just graduated and went to morning brew,

but you didn't. You still pursued your sales and trading career. Yeah. So I graduated in Michigan in May of 2015. I think that is correct. You can fact check me. And so then I went, worked at Morgan Stanley in what was like, for me, the perfect job. Like, this was my dream job, said by no one ever trading agency mortgages at Morgan Stanley.

And so I was doing it. And basically my typical day for the first year. I was basically at Morgan Stanley for a year. And for that year, to paint a picture, basically what it was is the entire time I lived in New York City, which I don't live in anymore, live in Hoboken, which is the greatest city in the world. I've been the biggest cheerleader for Hoboken.

Lived in an apartment on 26 and 3rd, lived in a five bedroom, all five years that I lived in New York City. The five bedroom that I lived in on 26 and 3rd was a true two bedroom, meaning only two of the rooms. There were five complete rooms, like with the complete walls, but it was an illegal apartment because only two of the rooms had windows. Hustle, baby.

My overprotective mom told me that I couldn't have one of the windowed rooms. Like I had the first choice of room. She told me I couldn't take one of those rooms because it was on the second floor and she was worried that someone in the night would climb up the firescape and stab me. So I lived in a windowless room for the whole first year. I'd wake up at 5 a.m. in complete darkness. Go to Morgan Stanley, work out, get to the trading desk at 6.30, work until like 7, come home, work on the brew basically until like 11 or 1130.

And I did that every night for a year. And basically what happened was I realized two things at a certain point. One is like I wasn't that great at trading. The second was I wasn't very excited about it. And so because I wasn't excited about it, I couldn't see myself ever becoming great at it. And so I ultimately made the decision a year in to leave my job at Morgan Stanley. And, you know, when I talk about this decision, it sounds like a very clean process. But like to paint a picture for anyone who's thought about or thinking about leaving their job,

it was eight months of just kind of excruciating discussion with my mom every day, leaving work and being like, I don't know what the hell I'm going to do. How I ended up thinking about it is like, one, I thought about the worst case scenario. Like the worst case scenario if I leave Morgan Stanley and work full time on Morning Brew is the business fails, like statistically speaking. And I was like, okay, say the business fails, then what are my options? And I was like, well, hopefully I've made like good relationships in the New York City startup scene where I could find something else to do.

Or hopefully I haven't burned every bridge at Morgan Stanley where they're like, oh, this is a cool experience he's had. This could actually like help make him an even better trader. Maybe it's a good business school story. So I went like four layers deep of thinking of options. And my view is like, if none of these things are options if the business fails, then it's actually not a morning brew problem. It's like an Alex maintaining optionality and his life problem. So that was one of the

big ways I thought about it. It's a huge step to make. I actually want to jump ahead just a little bit to when morning, you did leave Morgan Stanley, decided to go full time in morning brew. I want to talk about a very pivotal decision. What kind of went into the hiring process of my good friend, Neil Freiman, and what made you want to hire Neil in the first place? So I know Neil remembers this. I don't know if you remember this, but we actually didn't give the job to Neil at first.

I do remember. I don't remember that. So, you know, this, I would say, by the way, like, in the early hires we've made for Morning Brew, one of the best assets you have, but it also is, there's real tradeoffs to it, is so many of your early hires are made through, like, your network, right? Because today, we could have a job for Morning Brew. We could blast it out in our newsletter and we'll get a couple hundred applications. that in the early days, like, we were, like, scratching and clawing for applications.

Not to say that you weren't a good application, but we weren't getting hundreds. We were getting, like, 10. Right. And so, so many of our early hires came from introductions from current employees. The benefit of that is if you think a current employee is good and they recommend someone, you can start to, like, extrapolate, oh, this person probably is good as well. And so Neil was introduced to us through our, not original, but like one of our first few, writers as well who had known Neil like his whole life. And so like that added instant credibility to

Neil. Now the downside of this is you do this too long and you have a very homogeneous organization. And that's what happened to us in the first few years of the business. But with Neil, basically what happened was we actually thought Neil was an incredible candidate. And I remember two specific things that made us feel that way other than just like he was a really quality writer. and I don't even know if this is how we still evaluate writers, but for the longest time, it was a very simple application where it was like write 150 word, long story

about a major business news topic, and basically within one or two lines, I could tell whether the person had the chops to write for Morning Brew. So, like, his writing, like, absolutely hit the mark, but then the two other things were, in the interview, I asked Neil, I don't know if you remember this, I asked him to teach me about something he's really interested in or passionate about,

and he taught me about a battle in U.S. history. And the level of knowledge and passion he had about this obscure, like, U.S. battle was... I turned it to a dad very... Oh, but, like, to me, the type of brain that understands something so eclectic with such specificity is someone who I kind of saw could, like, nerd out on news and information for a long time. and the second is, and I'm sure you've seen this video, Neil used to have a prolific singing career. And we watched a video.

I don't even remember how we got access to it. Maybe it was on YouTube. But from his a cappella group, he wrote a song called Chop It Off, which was about circumcision. And the wit of that song, like his voice was great. But the incredible wit of the song, we were like, oh my God,

like he is an incredible. creative writer. And so that was the experience. Morning Brew Daily listeners are going to go digging for that video now on YouTube. I remember applying to Morning Brew and I did not know anything about business. You're a big news guy. You love the business. But I didn't know why Warren Buffett was famous. I didn't know what an IPO was. Oh yeah. No, you didn't know business well. I'm aware. But again, that's a very learnable skill. Right, right, right. The skill of being like a critical thinker, super curious and writing well, that's way harder to teach. But yeah, for any, um, but, for any, um, but, but, for any, um, MBD listeners, if you end up finding how to chop it off on YouTube, in the comments. Let us know what you

think. Yes, I've retired my singing career. But we're not interviewing me. We're interviewing Alex. So I want to jump ahead. You started this company and you ran it for a couple years. And then you stopped running it. So you made the decision to step down as CEO. And that is a very interesting decision that I think a lot of founders may want to make in the back of their mind, but don't. So can you just maybe? talk about your thought process for saying, you know, I founded this company. I ran it for a few years. I'm not the person who should be leading it going forward. Yeah, totally. So what I'll start by saying is, again, I think I make it sound like a very easy transition. I want to kind of preface by saying

it was actually one of the hardest things I had to do in my life. Because, and I always use the analogy of like a college athlete or a professional athlete, when you've been doing something for a long period of time, your identity is so tied up in it. Sure. And, and, you always use the analogy. And, And so when ultimately I stepped down from the brew, you can imagine like, let's say I was spending 70 hours a week on morning brew for at the time six years. And then I went to basically spending 20 hours a week on the business and now having this remaining 60 hours to think about the fact that I wasn't spending 80 hours on the business.

It was incredibly difficult. Like I would say for me, I was spending, it took me, it's called eight to 12 months to figure out like, who is Alex Lieberman outside of this business that? that he's been working on since college. Honestly, I was very kind of like self-loathing or self-defeatist. After that, I was like, what am I even good at? How much did I contribute to the growth of this business?

Like things I think from the outside, people would be like, what are you talking about? Like these were the thoughts that I had. Like how much was this luck versus skill? How much did I help versus did my co-founder pull me along? Like these were all the questions I had. And, you know, for me, the reason that I got to this place is,

I view it as like there's two very clear stages in the journey of a business. There's what I would call like chapter one of being CEO, which is your number one job is to find product market fit and create a business out of that first product you create. Right. So in the early days, it was write, grow, sell, the best daily business newsletter for millennials, bar none. And that was our entire focus.

At some point, and I want to say it was like middle of 2019 where we really started thinking about this. You want to switch into company building where you create like the infrastructure in order to scale beyond a single product where really the big change you make is going from reactive to proactive. Up to 2019, it was like fires were being put out for that day. Like a success was putting out the newsletter that day. And we wanted to get to a place where we could be thinking about what are our goals three months, six months from now. And what I'd say is like I've realized over time the first chapter, the product market fit chapter is like what I am most energized by, probably because it lends itself best to my skill set. Like I'm naturally creative.

I would say I'm natural. I naturally have an ability to kind of like persuade people to move behind a cause like storytelling and selling like those are my things. And I would say in chapter two of a business, not that those aren't important, but those are less important than chapter one. And chapter two is really about setting strategy, like setting a very clear strategy, staying laser focused on it, setting really intentional goals, sticking to them, building up a leadership team of people who are way better than you in given functions and managing those people well. And I think 100%, like my co-founder, Austin, is way better at those things.

And that's what his skill sets best lend themselves to. And so, you know, it wasn't the type of thing where one day I was just like, hey, you know, I'm throwing in the towel. I'm going to stop being the CEO of the business. Basically what had happened is from like middle of 2019 until April of 2021, which is when like I kind of stepped out of the business. Austin had started doing the jobs of a chapter two CEO, meaning like building a senior leadership team, setting quarterly goals, running our leadership meetings. And so I think in doing those activities, he basically in some ways shifted into the CEO role. So actually when I stepped out of the CEO role, wasn't this very difficult transition because I was still focused on like creating interesting new products, which is what I loved.

But that wasn't the job that needed to be done of the CEO. You just talked a lot about making difficult decisions like over the course of your life. Do you have a process for making decisions? Like do you have a decision matrix that you do have a pro and con list? Like, have you developed some sort of system for making big decisions? I mean, I think, I think there's a few things that come to mind. Like, one is I think about things in terms of regret. Like, that's what I think about a lot.

Like, what would I regret more? So when I was leaving Morgan Stanley to do Morning Brew full-time, I basically put out two scenarios. One scenario is I go full-time on Morning Brew and it fails and then I'm kind of searching for a job after. The second scenario is I stay at Morgan Stanley, shut down Morning Brew and watch someone else build the thing. And I ask myself, what would I regret more? And that second situation where I watched someone else build the thing because they were willing to take a little bit of a leap, that was so much scarier to me. And so that's why one of the reasons I made the decision to go full-time on the brew, I think as it related to the decision of

stepping down to CEO, I basically said, what would I more regret? Would I more regret leaving my CEO role, becoming chairman, having to deal with like kind of reconciling my identity, but watching the business continue to grow because the right person is in the right seat then, or stay within Morning Brew, take back my responsibilities, which would largely be ego-driven, and potentially not be the best person to drive the business moving forward. And it's like that second one is 100% what I would regret more. And I think what that exercise actually does is it tries to separate kind of like my emotions and the stories that I tell myself from like the fact of the matter.

And so that I think that's what I'm constantly trying to do is like I'm 100%, like I 100% at the time felt emotions toward this idea of stepping down to CEO. It was super ego provoking. I worried about becoming irrelevant. So I needed some sort of, like, shortcut to not allow my emotions to make the decision. So you operate under regret minimization. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

You should read a book, Daniel by Daniel Pink, who just, who wrote about the fact that you should lean into regrets, actually. I read it. Like he's saying you should regret things more? Yes. Because it's like, you know, it helps you learn. No, he's saying, not saying you should lean into it. regret, but he's saying don't shy away from it because it actually can help you, uh, you know, become a better person.

That's interesting. Well, let's talk a little bit about what you're doing in the current day, uh, but actually first, I remember when you launched this podcast, little podcast called Founders Journal back during the pandemic, which was basically like an audio diary of what you were thinking about on a daily basis as a founder. You actually sunseted that podcast, had a couple of podcasts in between, but now you're bringing Founders Journal back. Yep.

Can you tell us a little bit about Founders Journal 2.0 and then what you kind of hope to accomplish with that? Yeah, totally. So I would say one of my talking about regrets, one of my biggest regrets is not documenting the journey of building Morning Brew more along the way. Like I would say one of kind of my biggest realizations in life. And I think about this in the context of building Morning Brew and not remembering some of these like amazing memories. Like for every memory of like interviewing Neil, there are nine others that I can't remember. which I hate the feeling of. And I feel this in life also. Like, you know, one of my biggest regrets is not document, like, you know, you guys know,

like I lost my dad when I was in college. And one of my biggest regrets is not having more videos and images to kind of relive some of the experiences that I had with him. And so as I thought about it with Founder's Journal, the original thought was, it was during the pandemic. Things were a little bit slow. And I was just like, I want to start documenting my journey. I haven't been able to force myself into the habit of journaling on pen and paper.

So what can I do to force the habit? And so the idea was if I create a podcast that is a journal, now I am accountable to listeners. And so I'm not going to let them down. I've been letting myself down in the past. I'm not going to let them down. So I started doing that. The crazy thing is Founder's Journal started as five days a week, which is just who would ever do a podcast five days a week?

Which is just the definition of like an over ambitious, over. overextended founder. So I started with that and I would just talk about everything I was learning within the brew, like lessons about everything from like how to fire, how to hire, like how to goal set the decision to step down to CEO, et cetera. And then what happened was I did like 350 episodes of it. I think at its peak it got to like 350,000 downloads of max, sorry, a month. And what happened was I'd moved out of the CEO role. So this was probably like mid, mid, 2021. And I was in that period I was describing before of like eight to 12 months of soul searching and not doing a whole lot. And honestly, like coming up with at the time three episodes of

week where I didn't have like subject matter and experience to talk about felt very forced and inauthentic. So took a break from that for a period of time, did imposters for a while, which I love doing and I still get messages about it. I just think it's a business that there's still potentially behavioral change that needs to happen in society for to be large enough. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, the whole idea of impostors was the intersection of mental health and career. So it was interviewing, you know, really big names like everyone from, you know, Jay Shetty to Mark Cuban, to just other execs like Andy Roddick. Basically, people who have had a wild amount of success talking to them about deep challenges they've experienced

in their career. So like one of my favorite ones with Apollo Ono. And, you know, this guy, the winningest Winter Olympian of all time and he was retired from speed skating by the age of, he was like 22 or something. And so he had to kind of deal with how did he pivot himself after, like when he was basically ending his career

when most people start their careers. And so I thought the whole idea was if you get really successful people to be vulnerable, it'll bring them eye level with everyone else in society where other people will feel the permission to be vulnerable.

And the show did really, like, to me, the most impactful part of the show was the emails we would get of, like, literally these, like, novels about the impact it had. But honestly, I think the economics of the show didn't get nearly big enough to be, let's call it, like, worth the time from a business perspective. So that was imposters, did crazy ones for a little while, which was, like, entrepreneurship talk show. And it was really good. But basically what happened was in the last six months, I've gotten back into kind of, like,

being more active, like, in terms of building businesses, talking. to other entrepreneurs advising companies, so I have a lot to talk about now. And I made the decision that, like, I loved Founders Journal. Like, I really loved the process. It gave me so much energy of documenting the journey. And I think actually there's just, like, more from a business perspective, a competitive opportunity, like, in creating this content. I don't know anyone else who's doing kind of like journal style, 10 to 20 minute episodes in general, let alone, like, the entrepreneurship space. And I also think a lot of my brand is around like vulnerability and like sharing everything about my story, which to me lends itself to a journal. And so I'm super excited to bring it back.

And I'm talking about everything from like an episode. Yeah, go ahead. Quick plug. Yeah, you talked about like the making of Morning Brew Daily. So that was one of the of the revamped Founders Journal episodes. So exactly. Go listen to that. Yeah. And to me, you know, kind of the lens that I look through with every episode I create, I'm like, how can a builder, a first or second time founder, get something from this episode that they, they can apply today or apply in the near future to their business. So for like Morning Brue Daly, basically the headline of the,

the episode was how this show got to around two million downloads in less than 90 days. Kind of like, what are all the lessons from it? And you know, a few of them were everything from, uh, having hosts with really good chemistry is like the most important thing. And I think I made the point I was like,

it's, if you have people who are B plus talented, but A plus chemistry, I'd rather that over A plus talented but B plus chemistry. And then I did go on to say that it is both A plus talent and A plus chemistry. So it was just like a bunch of lessons around that, which you know, you may be wondering why does every entrepreneur need to care about this? But I think like we know the value of building audience and content.

So even if you're not building a media business, these are best practices you should know as an entrepreneur. Speaking of entrepreneurship, I've always wanted to, I've always wanted to ask this question. But you've spoken to so many founders over the past few years for your podcast and in other situations. Are entrepreneurs a different species? Like, are they born with a certain gene or can anyone be one? Um, just because I was watching, it's like Ratatooie. Anyone can cook. Anyone can found a business. Because I just watched you and Austin do your thing, uh, when I came in and I was like, holy hell. Like, yeah, I am not this type of person. So, um, I think, so I think there are base skills that are required to be an entrepreneur. And honestly, I think those

based skills are like some combination of grit, critical thinking, and like an irrational belief that you can do something that probably you aren't qualified to do. I also think there's, like, I've seen this question asked on Twitter before, and I think there's a lot of nuance to it because that question assumes like every startup or business has like the same risk or level of skill needed. And so what I would say is like, I think there are a ton of people that can be entrepreneurs, but let's just use an example. Like someone I interviewed recently was Brett Adcock, who is creating figure, like these humanoid robots that he wants to basically like, almost like he's recreating I robot in

society and life. The percent, the number of founders that I think can go for that bet and the skill you need, like, you have to be born with something there. And like, to me, you can count that on one hand. But if you were to say, like, how many entrepreneurs could, you know, start a, you you know, like an agency business to start, I think that's a way larger number. So I think there's these base skills you need,

either through nature or nurture, but then as you specialize the ambition of the business more and the technical know-how, that number gets whittled down very quickly. Do you think you would have started a business if Morning Brew wasn't that in the picture? Great question. I don't know.

Because I never thought, like entrepreneurship was never the dream for me. Like, you know, Jesse Poogee, who I know well, like he dreamed from day one of being an entrepreneur, He started businesses as early as middle school. He was a DJ in high school, had like a wedding DJ business. And that's because his dad started a travel agency. My parents had like very much kind of like down the fairway careers. So entrepreneurship wasn't on my radar.

So I really, I think it's a question of would I have been exposed to entrepreneurship early enough in life to then feel the need and the interest to go do it? there are absolutely examples of me kind of being a tinker and inventor earlier in life like at sleepway camp i would shine shoes for money uh there you go in kindergarten i created my first invention which was i took a pen uh a pencil i'm sorry a pen and a highlighter i cut them in half and i combine them so you could have one tool for uh writing and highlighting what would you call it a a pilot a pen lighter okay you can erase anything yeah i created the original pylider Yeah, exactly. There was no eraser on it.

So I think the short answer is it actually depends on post-college, how much exposure I would have gotten to doing things outside of the normal path. Okay, final question before we jump into our last segment, what sector of the business or entrepreneurship world most excites you right now, and you cannot say AI? So you've got to pick one outside of AI. Yeah. I think I'll say two very quickly.

the first is kind of like everything that's happening in psychedelics research because and this is by the way as someone who's like never used psychedelics in my life so it's not like i'm like kind of like pro drugs it's more like there's been a lot of research done by really smart people of the impact that these compounds in psychedelics uh can have especially if you take away the psychedelic uh nature and you just like some of these compounds have like anti-inflammatory benefits etc And so the reason I think it's really interesting is there's glimmers of a ton of opportunity. There's money going into it, but it's a kind of like historically bastardized industry where people don't give it the attention it deserves because it's associated with something. So to say that. And I would say like any kind of like really fascinating hard tech or like physical robots, hardware businesses because I think they generally haven't been funded by VCs, the probability of success is wildly low.

And so I have such an appreciation for people who are taking swings. And so as early as called Tesla and SpaceX with Elon, but now things like, you know, figure with Brett Adcock or Varda Space. Like, I don't know, I find people who are willing to take those bets. They have a different risk profile than me as an entrepreneur. And I'm super inspired by that. Maybe if you're building a pickleball shoe or something. Absolutely, maybe.

All right, Alex. Those are all the long-form questions we have. We have one last segment where we're going to hit you with a couple of rapid fire questions, and hopefully you give us a couple of rapid fire answers as well. Yep. So first question is, how do you de-stress or wind down at the end of a day? Exercise. Like, I feel like it's such a boring answer, but when I sweat, it literally makes me feel better.

Also, we have a record player in our apartment and playing records and just, like, sitting back on the couch with my dog laying belly up on me is the best thing. All right. What's the record you play most often? Dave Matthews, man. That's Carly's favorite, so he played Dave Matthews a lot. Easy. All right.

If an entrepreneur walked up to you and said, write me a check, but I'm not going to tell you what the company is, who is the person who could do this and you agree to it? Brett Adcock. Okay. The robot man? Yeah, robot man. Checks out. All right.

What is the characteristic you weigh most heavily when high? hiring. Number one, self-awareness. Number two, critical thinking. If you don't know what you're good at and you don't know what you're bad at, I don't know how to support you to grow as a professional and critical thinking because the only constant is change and what you start with your business is now what's going to end up. And so you have to evolve. And weird niche knowledge of US battles. Exactly. On that same vein, what is your favorite interview question to ask? Damn. Like to a guest or a candidate? I'm going to change this around. It's not a question. It's a new practice that I'm doing that I tweeted about yesterday that I don't know why it's not more commonplace. I send all interview questions to candidates before interviewing now.

I don't know why we're in a world where like catching someone off guard is what people do. like why not be able to prepare your thoughts so that then as an interviewer you can see how deeply someone thinks versus that all you're testing for is the ability to think quickly on your feet, which may be that's something you're testing for, but it's not the only thing. Interesting. Maybe we should have sent you these questions ahead of time. All right. You recently got married. What is one thing that most surprised you about planning a wedding? I can take zero credit for the planning process. But as an observer. I would say at the end of the day, how special and more important the ceremony is than the celebration, like the dancing and the band and the food is great. But to me, the moments I will remember forever is like Carly and I exchanging vows to each other and having our parents around us during that experience. And at the end of the day, with the actual celebration, food and band is all that matters. Don't leave people hungry and don't leave people not dancing.

There you go. All right. Final question. Recommend literally anything. Adult coloring books. Okay. I should have given that as the answer before to how do I de-stress. I've gotten super into adult coloring books.

And they're literally just coloring books. Someone called them adult coloring books to be able to charge more. But I love them. That is a good point. Adult toys is another industry that I would look into. Like non-R-rated adult toys. Yes. You didn't even realize what he did right there.

Yeah. Yes. Coys that are for adults. There you go. I totally agree. In public. Yes. There you go.

What a way to end. Good job. All right. I think we're going to have to end it there. Thanks so much, Alex. So great talking to you. This is fun. Thanks, guys.

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