The Pomp Podcast - Austin Rief, Co-Founder of Morning Brew: How The Morning Brew Increased Revenue 5X In One Year

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

Austin Rief is the Co-Founder of Morning Brew, a new media company bringing you informative and digestible business news. In this conversation, Austin and Anthony discuss the founding story of Morning Brew, what media companies he is obsessed with, how his team grew their email list so quickly in college, and why Morning Brew is expanding into other verticals and media formats. CRYPTO.COM-----The only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users and download the Crypto.com app today to earn $50 USD using the code ‘pomp2020’ when you sign up for one of their MCO Visa Cards.  TAXBIT-----Refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial. TRAVALA.COM-----Travala.com is the world’s leading blockchain-based travel booking platform trusted by thousands of customers worldwide as their preferred online travel agency. Book over 2 Million hotels and accommodations and pay with 25 cryptocurrencies or credit and debit cards.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Austin Reif is the co-founder of Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter covering the latest news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. It is an informative, witty, and everything you need to start your day. In this conversation, Austin shares the founding story of Morning Brew, what media companies he is obsessed with, how his team grew their email list so quickly in college, and why Morning Brew is expanding into other verticals and media formats. I learned a ton from this episode and hope you enjoy this one.

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The company was founded by a team of seasoned travel, fintech, and blockchain industry experts. Travelala.com's mission is to bring the travel industry as a whole transparent pricing, innovation, authentic, truth-enhanced security, and efficient stakeholder interaction. Travelala.com's vision is to align travel booking with the ethos of decentralized technology. That being said, promote accessibility to anyone, anywhere, and offer censorship-resistant and peer-to-peer transactions and build open-source technology controlled by software and governed by users. Go check out Travelala.com, that's T-R-A-V-A-L-A.com, and book something today. Now let's get into the episode with Anthony Pompliano, who is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management.

You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Bang, bang. Austin's here. You're the second newsletter king to walk in the door this week. Um, what's up, man? Not too much. How's it going? Good. I'm doing great. You're you're doing better than me. You're fucking killing the game over there. Morning brew. Let's start with what did you do before you became the expert on newsletters? Yeah, so I actually didn't do too much. This was

my first real gig. All right. How old are you? 25. Jesus Christ. All right. You're way more responsible than I was at 25. Go ahead. You probably hear that a lot. Yeah. So I was a Sophomore of college at the University of Michigan, and a guy by the name of Alex Lieberman, who's my co-founder now, was writing this, like to even call it a newsletter, is generous to email newsletters, at least what they are now. It was this crappy PDF attachment. But the way he came up with the idea was he was helping friends that interview prep, and what he realized was that people really struggled to resonate with the business world. So they were reading the journal to prep for interviews, but they felt like they had to. They didn't feel like they wanted to read some of these sources. And it's not to discredit these sources.

They're all great sources. And we actually partner with them or use them all now. But we felt like there had to be a different take or a different spin on traditional business news. And so Alex started writing that. And at the time, there was actually no way to sign up. So you had to email Alex and say, hey, I looked over someone else's shoulders. and I saw what they were reading. Can you sign me up?

So after about 300 people did that, the list got to 300, which is insanely impressive how he did that. He sent an email to the whole list saying, hey, who wants to join? And so I was all in. We came together. We put it on hold for a couple of weeks

and we launched Morning Brew March 15th, 2015. Why did you come up with that name? So it's funny. One of Alex's, well, so we were in the same fraternity, both in AEPI. one of our friends came up with it. Is that a cool one or not a cool one? It's pretty cool. It's not bad. It's like middle of the pack.

Middle of the pack. All right. Middle of the pack is fine. I feel like you don't want to be too fratty. So like, that's good. All right. And what did your friend, why did they come up with this? Or it was just. Yeah. So we knew we were going to send in the morning, obviously morning. That's where that came from. Your friend's a genius. Okay. So, so, you know, we're hitting a home run there. And then we knew that we wanted something that represented waking up, starting your day. And so coffee starts your day. The newsletter starts your day. Morning coffee sounds lame.

Yeah, exactly. And the funny thing is, I feel like it's like every name where you hear it and you're like, oh, that's terrible. I hate that name. And then you're like, oh, that's growing on me. And you text 10 friends and like four, like, oh, that's great. Six are like, eh, it's not that great. And then four of those six come around and we couldn't think of anything better.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I couldn't think of anything better is a very common way that names get adopted. Yeah. I feel like a lot of times you just pick a running name as you – you have a big brainstorm. You can't come up with anything good. You say, all right, this is the worst or the best of all the bad terms. We'll use this as a placeholder until we come up with something better, and then you never come up with it.

And then it's launch day, and you're like, shit, we never thought of anything, so let's just launch with it. I love it. All right, so you guys went from 300 subscribers to now you're closing in on like a million and a half, two million? Yeah, closing in on two. OK. And how the hell do you go from 300 subscribers to almost two million in four years, five years? Yeah. So I join and Alex. That's the answer. Just I joined. No, definitely not. I was a team effort. So I joined and Alex and I are the first brand ambassadors at Michigan.

So we're going to every Econ 101 class, Accounting 101 and just begging professors, you know, can we have three minutes of your time? We'd walk into an Econ 101 lecture, 500 people. We'd pitch them a morning brew. And then we'd pass out a piece of paper with 500 lines. And every person would write their email down. I don't even think half the people knew what they were signing up for because they were on ESPN or they were on Twitter, not paying attention. And immediately after that class, we'd go to the landing page and we'd type in 500 email addresses. I love it.

And we'd just go and go. And we got a few, maybe 5,000 or 6,000 in Michigan. And we're like, oh, we read some entrepreneurship books. Let's do a few podcasts. Do things that don't scale. Let's get our friends to do this at other schools. So, we got our friends to do it. And so, they all did.

And they did a pretty good job. And that got us to 20,000, 25,000 maybe. And then we had readers who also wanted to do that. So, then we scaled the ambassador program to readers. And we had this one ambassador at Notre Dame, one of our first ones, who got almost 2,000 referrals. Wow. Yeah. So, it was a group effort.

Who was that person? She was the business student. She did the same thing. She had a good relationship with three, not even that many, three or four professors. And she just asked them. Just big class size. Yeah, huge classes. Notre Dame, big business school like Michigan.

And if you can get to an Econ 101 class, there's 500 kids there. And so it just scaled from that. And so that was the college days. At the very beginning, we thought this was a product for college students. So we thought, OK, here's a problem. people in college struggle to resonate with the business world and their knowledge base in the business world is completely different than someone who's even a year or two out so therefore let's create a product for college students quickly what we learn after we graduate graduate

or even before is that that's not the case and so we said oh you know people outside of college also need this so let's create this for what we now call the modern business leader so college students are part of the target demographic, but it's not solely demographic. What do you think the breakdown is today? I mean, you guys obviously have so many subscribers. I'm assuming majority are not in college, right? And then the college students are kind of coming into this as their first iteration of how they can learn about business in their voice. Yeah. So we we call the college student the aspirational reader. So some pick it up in freshman or sophomore year through older students.

But I guess most of them go off to an internship, see their analyst, their associate reading it. Or what we've heard a lot now is when these big banks or consulting firms come for career days, they'll do a presentation and they'll say, if you want to stay up to date in the business world, read these sources.

And Morning Brew will be on that list, which is very cool and a bit funny because that's why we started Morning Brew is because there was nothing like that on the list. So to see it on the list now is pretty wild to see Wall Street Journal, Economist, New York Times, Morning Brew. It's a pretty wild feeling. Yeah, absolutely. All right.

So as you guys begin to realize, hey, this is actually like a real business, you and your co-founder both had done stints on Wall Street kind of financial service firms. Most people would kill for those jobs. Like, what are you two psychos doing not doing that and going to do newsletters? Yeah, so I think that's what my parents thought. Like, what is this newsletter thing? and Alex's family was the same way. But- You're going to work on email?

Yeah, exactly. What is this? No, my parents were very supportive as were Alex's family. I mean, they were definitely a bit weary and like a bit concerned, but they trusted us. And that was excellent.

That was great. But basically after my junior year, I interned at an investment bank called Mollus and Alex was- Super legit place. Yeah, it's a fairly good bank. It's a boutique bank. You work a hundred hours a week,

but a lot of people think it's worth it. And who knows? And Alex traded mortgages at Morgan Stanley. And probably eight or nine weeks into my summer, we said, you know, we want to be entrepreneurs. We want to start our own business at some point. Why not now? We have very few obligations. We had no kids, no family, no house, no mortgage, obviously. So let's do it now. And and we had a product. And it's funny, in hindsight, it probably wasn't nearly as far along as we thought. Like, oh, we have 30,000 subscribers. This is sick. That's still pretty good, though. Yeah, it was good until it went to advertisers. Like, hey, we'll pay you 100 bucks for 30,000

subscribers. And we're like, oh, we have to really scale this thing. So that's when we decided to raise a bit of money. So we, 2017, when I graduated, we raised an angel round. So we raised $750,000 convertible note. And that's all we've raised to date. so when you went to raise that money uh walk me through the thought process of why you wanted to raise money versus not and then how did you think about uh pricing the round and convertible debt versus equity like did you guys have an opinion on all this or was it like dude we got no fucking clue what we're doing like let's go ask somebody for advice like how did you navigate that especially since you guys were so young and this was kind of the first thing you guys were gonna

do out of school yeah so to take a step back in 2015 when we first started uh morning brew we thought of the idea. We, you know, we said, you know, if we ever go out and raise money and do this, we're going to raise a ton of money at the time. If you don't, if you remember, that was when Facebook was just, you know, giving everyone all this traffic. And so people were raising hundred million dollar rounds, you know, multiple hundred million, like their media companies literally raising hundreds of millions of dollars. And so we said, oh, we'll follow suit. The luckiest thing that happened to us. And one of the reasons where we are, where we are today is because we had two years from 2015 to 2017 to see what happened. And what we saw is that

that capital was not going to return in the way that these investors or founders thought it was going to. And so in 2017, when we raised, we took a way more conservative approach. Instead of going out and raising a $3 million seed round, we said, let's raise as little as possible that will allow us to run the business. We knew that while we were decent writers, we could envision the tone and the style it went to write in, but we couldn't accomplish that and run the business. So we knew we had to hire a writer, which we knew wasn't going to cost money. We weren't generating revenue. So we knew to raise something. And we just talked to people and convertible notes were hot and we didn't know what to price the round at. So we picked a convertible note. There were some thoughts,

$750, a million, who knows? We got $750 and we stopped. And so that was it. And we haven't raised since, and we're very glad we made that decision. It allows us to be in the driver's seat every day. We're a profitable media company, and we don't have to double every year because that's what our previous investors want us to do. We get to grow at the pace we want to grow at, what we think is the most responsible. We're profitable. I think we're growing very quickly, but we don't have to be irresponsible. We can embrace and consider other decisions that certain companies can. So if you have raised a ton of money,

opportunities may come about that may seem small at first and you have to turn those away because you can only take big bets. If you have to sell for a quarter of a billion or half a billion dollars. For us, we get to evaluate every opportunity and do certain things that aren't scalable

or maybe aren't worth a billion dollars, but that we want to do. It's funny because I tell every entrepreneur, no matter how much money you raise, you're going to spend it in 18 months, right? So like if you raise $750, 50, you're going to try to spend it in 18 months. If you raise $250 million, you're going to spend it in 18 months. And people are always like, no way. And I'm like, let me show you a bunch of

examples. And so what'd you say? They raised hundreds of millions of dollars and two years later, you already knew the outcomes, right? Because they spent all the money in about 18 months. And it makes sense, right? Investors don't want to invest in the company and have that money sit on a balance sheet. Yeah, they can hold it in their own funds. Exactly. Yeah. So that capital has to be spent for the most part, right? Obviously, there's exceptions, but for the most part, an investor doesn't want to invest $100 million for that to sit in their bank account, because why are they doing that? And so, yeah, it makes sense that it gets spent. But that just increases growth projections, increases expectations,

and it limits the range of outcomes. So, when you raise large rounds of funding, or like at media companies, I have this belief that not universally, but for the most part, it's very challenging for media companies in a short period of time to see venture-backed returns. I think media companies are way better off growing slowly. It's all about the brand. So if you grow slow at first, then you can take capital later on. And there's a lot of media companies who have been doing that recently and seeing great success. So Barstool, I mean, take like whatever you want with their content.

From a business perspective, they built that brand for, I don't know, five? 13 years. For such a long time before they raised around. And so they built that brand. And who knows, but my guess is that if they would have raised that same amount of capital as a seed round, they would not have been able to slowly build that brand, which I think that's what it took. And obviously, they had a very successful outcome.

Well, Dave was literally handing out physical free papers in Boston. Like there's zero chance that if you were to get him $7 million in 2003, that he'd still have that money by like 2005. Half of it, who knows where he would have put it. And the other half, he would have wasted printing papers. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of other examples as well. I mean, you know, the infatuation, while they've certainly raised capital, they've been around for for a very long time. And it's funny, I barely knew who they were until a year ago. And now it feels like they're everywhere. And I think they recently raised a huge round. But and they did raise capital before, but they weren't raising multiple double digit million rounds of funding, which they probably could have. But they slowly grew it. And I think they're doing a great job. And now they have all these great business lines. I don't I have no idea how they're doing, but it seems like things are going well. They have a, an awesome events business. They have a subscription business. They have an ads business. So it's a, it appears from the outside, it's a great company. Food 52 is another one,

a slow growth company. Again, they didn't bootstrap the whole thing, but it took a very different approach than some other companies. And it feels like to these media companies, as they start to kind of hit their stride, really what they're doing is they're building brand allegiance and kind of a rabid fan base. Right. And when you have that, you can monetize it to a million different ways. And that literally takes time, right? People have to figure out who you are. They've got to kind of, you earn their trust on a day-to-day basis, day in, day out for months or years at a time. And then you can kind of hit that inflection point. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about with the slow growth. Exactly. Yeah. Not everyone, but for the

most part, again, nothing is universal, but I do believe it is challenging to build a brand in three years. That's not so you can't have great branding, right? You can have great brand. So There was a big conversation on Twitter about this last week. You can have unbelievable branding, but can you actually build true brand affinity with hundreds of thousands or millions of people in a few years? I think it's a huge challenge and it takes time. For sure. And as you guys have grown, you now have the main newsletter.

You've added a bunch of different pieces to it. Maybe talk us through about like what else have you added and what is the thought process for, uh, for kind of, uh, adding to kind of that, that core offering that you have? Yeah. So end of 2018, we, so we finished 2018, 850,000 subscribers, but end of 2018, we were pretty close to there obviously. And, and we took a step back and we said, what do we want to do next? Uh, we're not going to lose focus in the court news letter, but we want to do other things. Uh, and we looked at what every other media company was doing and we decided, you know, we want to do our own thing. And so everyone was still in video, this, that,

And we decided we wanted to focus on more newsletters. We thought that our tone, style, format, email monetization, everything we do in email was unique. And we thought we could take that to areas in which people are either interested in or they work in to better their lives, their career or their interest. And so we decided to launch Emerging Tech Brew, I believe February or March 2019, covers AI, machine learning, blockchain, emerging technologies. That sent out three days a week. We then, mid-summer 2019, launched Retail Brew,

covers the retail industry. So, any emerging news, really anything that happens in the retail industry, we're giving you a newsletter three times a week. And then, I think August or so, we launched Business Casual, which is our first podcast, hosted by Kinsey Grant. And we're really excited about that. And then recently, we launched The Turnout, which is our politics newsletter. So, once a week, but we do politics differently. So it's not pure politics, it's business meets politics. So it's the implications of what's happening in the political world and the election, how that affects the business world. Going forward, we're continuing to launch new newsletters. We see a lot of white space in the newsletter space. And so I believe we'll launch at least one more

this year, if not two, continuing to go down the path of you wake up in the morning, you read morning brew, you're educated in the general business world, but then you're a retail professional. And so at 10 a.m., there's a newsletter at your desk. You're reading at work that's educating you on the retail industry. And then hopefully at lunch, you listen to business casual. And if we can progress our immediate properties throughout your day, we can fill your day with our tone, our style, and we can provide a great experience both to readers, but then also a full funnel approach to advertisers. And so as you're thinking through this. Um, how do you pick like the next vertical to go into and paid versus free, uh, newsletters

kind of like Azure, like actually building the product itself. Like what's the thought process that goes into this? Yeah, it's a really good question. It's something we think a lot about. So let's first tackle. All I do is good questions on this podcast. What the hell let's, uh, let's tackle the first thing. So how do we pick the topic? Uh, it's a simple matrix. It's a combination of, number one, is there enough content to write about? So if the ultimate outcome is a once a week newsletter, right now, not that interesting for us. Just not enough to get us excited. So there has to be enough content. Two, are there enough people in that industry such that we believe we can grow a vertical, not to 2 million, but we want something in the hundreds of thousands

for sure. And then the advertiser pool. How many companies want to get in front of these people. And so we just line up a bunch of topics and then we define a good writer. It's really, really challenging to be a morning brew writer. You have to be knowledgeable about the area in which you're working in. You have to be able to write multiple newsletters a week and you have to be able to write in our tone. And we've interviewed so many people who are excellent journalists and excellent writers who work at other publications, but they just can't write in our witty tone and our style. And so it's a Venn diagram of a bunch of different things. And it's challenging to find that writer. And so it's a combination of those things. So that's how we

decide what vertical to go into. Now, free versus paid is a much bigger conversation. We do plan on launching paid products, but I don't believe for the most part people pay for news or have a high willingness to pay for news. Sure, if it's very niche, that's one thing. I was like, your newsletter, very niche and you're an expert at it. So that makes sense. If- just play an expert on twitter so all you have to do is look like an expert you don't actually have to uh have to be an expert uh black t-shirt exactly um it's funny normally i'm the one wearing black t-shirts so i'm glad we mixed it up uh polina's sitting in the room and she knows uh and most people know this now she gets mad because all i own is black t-shirts because it's much

easier just to wake up and put a black t-shirt on but she also is like hey uh we're going to this event can you like maybe put something else on i'm like well i would if i had something else You want me to wear this athletic shirt? She's like, nah, stick with the black T-shirt. Yeah. So that's me, 80% of days. Perfect. Back to free versus paid.

So again, Wall Street Journal, paper of record, there are exceptions, but we don't have a desire to ever charge for our core newsletter or for news for that matter. I do think when we think about paid, we think about we have this community of 2 million plus modern business leaders, as we call them. So aspirational people out there who are intellectually curious, who want to get better and better themselves. And so how can we bring these people together? How can we educate them in other ways? And that will come with time. But for right now, we see so much opportunity and so much white space in the free ad-based media world that we're playing in. Yeah. And so when you look across

kind of media models today, does a media company need to have these various revenue sources in order to actually not only survive, but actually thrive? We see a lot of the large media companies, they've pushed hard into things like live events or subscription paywalls, all these other things outside of just their core advertising. Is that a, hey, we need to do this, so we do it? Or do you think that's more of just them being super ambitious and innovative? I think it depends on what scale you want to get to. So at our scale, we're 100% ad based and that's fine. If we want to get to a hundred million dollars of revenue, a hundred million plus, I definitely think we'll need to diversify revenue. Is that the goal? At some point. Yeah. I definitely think, you know,

our goal, while we don't have venture money, that doesn't mean we're not looking for venture outcomes. And so we certainly want to get to a hundred million plus in revenue. And so we will diversify revenue. I think it depends. Uh, if you are a, uh, majority ad based company, I do think tacking on other things is good, uh, because ads can be lumpy. Uh, it can be challenging to continue to source ads. Is there, explain that a little bit more, right? So selling ads, I think is people are just like, Oh, I see this ad in this newsletter. Uh, cool, whatever. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad, but I don't think they really understand what goes into the process of selling the ads? How did you guys start selling ads? And then

what does that process look like for you guys today? Yeah. So ads and newsletters are different for everyone. There are some newsletters out there who just put live intent or programmatic ads. We do zero programmatic. So everything we source or they're inbound, but we have account managers who manage the account. We have brand partners who are selling. We've integrated marketing who's coming with full funnel campaigns. And so we are working with partners to understand their goals, to understand their talking points. But we make sure that every ad unit in our newsletter is native in our tone, in our voice, integrated in the newsletter. So we believe editorially, we do a great job and resonate with our readers,

with our tone, our style, our format. And so your ad is going to be in the same exact way. And so our content resonates just like your ad will resonate. But yeah, I mean, some of these ad partners are big deals, right? Six, seven figure deals. With that can come lumpiness or variability to the business. And right now everything's going well, but certainly for us, we definitely think about how can we diversify? Like I said before, we're really confident in it. But if you're an ad-based business, but you have programmatic ads, I am not the most knowledgeable person on the programmatic ad industry, but obviously there's lots going on with third-party cookies and everything. And I think those businesses are going to look to how can I diversify through

putting up a paywall, events. And some of those things, by the way, they're not just small ancillary ad businesses. They can be bigger than the ad business. There are media companies out there that put on multi-million dollar events every year. So it can be a great revenue stream. When you're selling the ads, how do you guys think about the relationship with the advertiser? Do you look for everyone from, Hey, I'll do one advertisement one time to kind of, I'm assuming like an annual contract type relationship, uh, or do you try to focus on a certain type of advertiser? And really what I'm interested in is, uh, you guys have taken a very kind of long-term view of building the relationship with the, uh, the reader or the modern business leader.

Do you do the same thing on the advertising side or is it just the advertiser kind of dictates what the terms that they want and you guys are just trying to fulfill their needs? Like, how do you think about that? Yeah, we like to treat our advertisers as well as we treat our readers uh and so obviously as a media company that's always a balance it's always a challenging balance we say no and turn down we actually just did this we turned down an advertising partner because we felt they weren't a good partner for the brand but and uh is this because they're like a vice type thing you know they're drug related alcohol related something like that or more so they weren't a good fit in terms of they didn't want to do their goals in the campaign were

different than the goals you want for your advertisers the former so it just it didn't fit from a brand perspective we thought it wasn't a good thing to promote in our newsletter and so we didn't want to promote it uh from a a moral standpoint but also we don't want to upset our readers we don't want people leaving because we're advertising things that may be illegal in the future or were just recently legal who knows and so we'd be very careful with that uh so that is what we choose, but ad deals are bespoke given it's not programmatic. But we do like to work on longer deals with partners who have longer time horizons so we can create really compelling great campaigns. And as the ad team has grown, which it has recently, we actually call it the

brand partnership team because we do believe we're building partnerships. We're not just selling ads. we are planning out much longer term campaigns, integrating, uh, everything from content in the newsletter to audio. So podcast ads to more experiential things. So we're gonna be testing that as well. And we want ad partners who are willing to be experimental with us and go along for that ride. And, and what we found is there are a lot of people who like the way our brand resonates with our readers and who are willing to do that. That's awesome. Um, what are the mistakes you guys have made in building the business, right? You guys as first time entrepreneurs, uh, you've had to raise capital, hire people, manage people, build multiple products,

kind of all these different things. Uh, people would be crazy to think that you've never made a mistake. Like, is there anything that sticks out where you're like, man, we made this mistake and then here's how we corrected it. Yeah. We've made every mistake you could possibly make, Twice over. Now I know you're telling the truth. Because by the way, every single person, including myself, should say the same thing. No, we've made every mistake. The most impactful mistakes always come down to people.

So it's always you bring the wrong person on for the wrong position. I've never regretted spending too long to hire someone. So I've never, the only hires we've regret are ones that we made too quickly. So it's never been bad to say, oh, let's interview one more candidate. or let's have one more interview with them. And you always want to balance, oh, we're going to move quickly. We want to make sure that this happens this month

because that was the KPI we set to hire this person. They're going to take another job. Exactly, yeah. But I rather that than bringing on a bad person. I think people don't understand how detrimental it is to bring on someone who is not a good fit to the team. And the higher up they are, the more detrimental it is. And so it's a challenge to bring on the best people.

We've been fortunate that we have an incredible team, but it all comes down to people and bringing the wrong people on, putting them in the wrong position, giving them too much work to do, not focusing them. That's the other big one. For me, everything comes back to focus, right? Everything is focused. And so, you know, ideas are 1%, execution is 99% or whatever the cliche phrase is. And how do you execute is you just focus and you pick, it's better to be good at a few

things than average the bunch of things. And so those are the two big ones. it's focusing people how do you spend your day right so talking about focus here like you and your co-founder both are still relatively small company right 35 employees give or take around there um and that means that you probably have multiple hats versus if you had 200 people like how do you actually spend your day on a day-to-day basis yeah so it depends as as it always does. But Alex is more of the creative. So he's way more integrated in the content team, helping with the podcast, helping with, you know, oversee content, what's next with the brand team,

social media. So he's doing a lot of that. I'm overseeing the growth team and product and tech and sales. Now, obviously we have people running those, but I'm making sure all of those integrate on a day-to-day basis and overseeing more of the day-to-day. But for me personally, what I try to do is put myself in high leverage positions. So things that for whatever reason, normally it's not even because of my skillset. Normally it's because of my position at the company. Someone else would be worse at that job because they don't have executive power to make a decision fast enough, or they can't get in touch with the right people, whatever it may be. I try to put myself in positions that other people wouldn't be able to thrive in that position. If I think someone's

better than me at something i'm the first person to bring them on to replace me i mean that's that's like part of our jobs as co-founders is to scale the team such that we are mission critical and fewer and fewer decisions so make fewer and fewer decisions on a day-to-day basis but feel as if we've scaled ourselves such that we while not literally are in each room making each decision because we've hired the right people and trained them absolutely um who do you look out and admire in the media world that's a good question uh i like the infatuation a lot okay i think bringing them up i know what's so interesting it just it's the interesting thing about brand at least for me uh is that it's hard to articulate when a company has a brand people resonate with but it's very

easy to feel okay you know when you see it yeah thing like no one says hey at least my friends don't go hey i love yelp or i love you know google review i can't even tell you other review sites because i'm just i'm a hundred percent all in on when i need help find your restaurant it's the infatuation just a hundred percent and so i think they're a great one i think with uh roy and jim and mike is on an axios is another really great one uh what do you like about them i think that their ability to find great talent have that talent run each newsletter and and verticalize the business that way and scale it. It's pretty admirable. They have taken on funding, which has helped them do it in a quicker way than we would have been able to. But, you

know, it's a somewhat similar model. Everyone compares us because we're both newsletter companies. Very different target demographic. And I think very different angles. Are you saying that Axios is going after boomers? I would say that Axios' target is boomers. I'm not sure that's what they'd say. I think they would say you know i'm gonna tweet at mike and be like hey man i heard you guys are for boomers i think i'm giving everyone a hard time we do not actually need that i think they would say executives is what they would say but they are definitely i think that again from the brand perspective everything from logos the voice etc there is a very distinct difference between

um while there is some overlap there's a very distinct difference in who you're going after which uh kind of allows people to self-select right hey if you fit one uh group versus another you're more likely to actually gravitate towards the content. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No, absolutely. And another one I like, because I'm picking some of these, you know, smaller, at least

current. I can't wait to tweet that. Axios is going after boomers. Go ahead. Please don't quote me on that. Is I like what BuzzFeed's done. So obviously BuzzFeed was was lumped in with some of these other larger internet first, even Facebook first publishers, perhaps.

But Jonah Peretti just wrote this really great blog post about how they're diversifying revenue. and they're licensing a bunch of content. And I think it's really interesting what they're doing. So I'm not, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart for some of these smaller publishers, but I think a bunch of people

are out there doing a good job. I mean, it's tough, obviously. The media industry has been through a lot recently and I have a lot of respect for also the small, like the ones that are doing it, independents, like what Rafat's doing

at Skift is another one. There's a lot of people out there I like. Explain to me what exactly he's doing there. Yeah. So they've built a B2B travel company. So they are trying to create content. They have subscription. They have events. I think events are a big part of their business and target everyone in the travel industry. Got it. So it's a publication and events business that's focused on a very specific verticalized business or industry. Yeah. And I think while potentially the ceiling is lower, I'm very bullish on B2B publications.

So you pick a target. For him, it's the travel industry. Maybe it's retail. Digiday does media. And they also have modern retails. They've done a few. There are a bunch of these out there. And they just cover it to death.

They keep on covering it. And then they serve very targeted ads at those people for very high CPMs because they're right people. It's all B2B. So people are putting their subscriptions, their company cards. And then they have events that people's companies are paying for. So it's a very high dollar amount. And so, I mean, consumer media is tough. I really do like the B2B space. I think it's, again, it's going to be tough to see those billion dollar exits in the

B2B space, but from an expected value standpoint, I think those are great companies. And those are companies where you can go out and do what we did, raise a million dollars, raise one round and go build a profitable media company. And then at that point, once you've raised a profitable company, then you've all the leverage. If someone wants to come in and then fund the company, at a later date, then sure, go ahead. You're still in control. You're still profitable and you can pick the right investors for your goals. Yeah. Super interesting. When you think about kind of the modern media company, obviously with Morning Brew, Axios, et cetera, there's this weird balance between the brand, the company, and then the individual writers themselves and

people wanting to subscribe to them, right? Polina's here in the room, so we'll pick on her, but she obviously works at fortune writes term sheet. And so some people are going to subscribe for the fortune brand and the term sheet brand. And then some people are going to subscribe because they want to hear from Polina. You guys obviously have very similar things. How do you think about that balance and like how much to promote the business and brand versus like the individual writers also understanding that, Hey, if we just say like, you know, Austin's newsletter and then Austin leaves, we'll like, we're screwed. Yeah. Right. So like, Where's that balance come in?

Yeah. So I'm not going to be able to give you a great answer. This thing we think about all the time. It's a challenge because you look at the person who wrote Polina's newsletter before. She left. He left. Yeah. Or maybe a few before.

He left. And so, yeah, it's tough. Polina's better. Yeah, I agree. I'll tweet that at him too. Please don't tweet that either. I shouldn't have said that. No, I said that.

You didn't say that. But so I think it depends, right? And you have to make sure it aligns with what you're doing. So going back to a company like Barstool, they're all personality. They've gone all in and that's what they do. And so that makes a lot of sense. You look at Morning Brew, right? We're trying to build a brand as a company.

So I don't think it would make sense to launch, to have one name behind Morning Brew for that reason. With that being said, could we create sub-brands such as we have, business casual, where Kinsey Grant is a face of that? Sure. But I do think you have to be careful in how you do that and make sure they are sub-brands. Even term sheet. Sure, it's written by one person.

If that person leaves, people will leave with them. But it's fortune term sheet. It's not whoever is the current writer of term sheet's term sheet. Caveating all that is I believe people resonate more with people than brands. And so I think someone's going to crack this code. And potentially, it is someone like a Substack who has said, we're going to be the faceless publisher and we're going to go out there and we're going to create an infrastructure for these personalities to build their own newsletters. I think it's interesting. It's an interesting model. There's obviously lots of difficulties there.

It's tough. But again, it's a challenge because people do resonate with people more than brands. And I think that will only continue in the future with social first, with Instagram, with Twitter, Substack, etc. So like Barstool is a great example. Barstool essentially has created the WWF, right? Like that's really what they've recreated in a very, very thoughtful way. And I think a lot of people look at it and they're like, that's mass chaos going on over there. It's not at all.

It's not chaos at all. They're super, super on top of what they're doing and have been very strategic and it's worked very well. but do you think that they can pull off the personality first type content because of the type of content that they're creating meaning that it's more comedy based it's more entertainment than it is like actual news right meaning uh if you listen to some of their podcasts whatever they're actually you're not going there to read like the astros beat the yank well actually no fuck the astros the yankees beat the astros because the astros are cheaters uh but you're not going there for the score of the game yeah right instead of what you're doing is you're

going to hear the personal opinions of these individuals, right? Like the content or brand promise is different than say ESPN, which I just want to go in here. You know, what was the score? What are the stats, et cetera? Could the ESPNs of the world transition or is that just too hard for them to do at this point? So I think what, what we're seeing is people don't really care about as much about this, at least from an engagement standpoint, don't care as much about the scores don't care as much about even the the longer highlights right i follow house of highlights i just want the amazing incredible crushed it well yeah he crushed it yeah and yeah it's uh it's interesting that he left and and we'll see how that plays out but even so he

went to espn right but did he is it oh i didn't even know that yeah i believe i could be right i believe went to sports center and i think if you go to sports center's twitter he it says this as omar um wow yeah yeah so he left that's like the free agency of the year right i didn't know that yeah it was big and so they're going more personality driven out joe we got to find out how much they paid that dude they they espn and sports center were like our business sucks house of highlights is crushing us pay that kid whatever he wants yeah and so we'll see i do think i'm a dm omar on instagram but yeah dude how much they pay you i'm sure it's a lot um how much do you think how much do you think if you're espn how much would they pay i don't know uh i have no

idea over under two million dollars a year i'd say under but not i'm going over wow you know why if you're espn and you lose on social in today's day and age you accelerate your demise and two million dollars or more is nothing to espn to stay the leader in sports yeah i had two million You know, there's a lot of money to a kid posting memes and videos on the Internet, but he's probably the best in the sports. He's good. He's good. It'll be interesting to see how House of Highlights continues. I'm sure they'll be fine. But anyway, back to your question, I think it's tough, right? It's got to be in the DNA. And I'm sure even a barstool, right? Everyone, I assume anyone who let's not call them barstool sports, let's call them barstool because it's not sports, it's entertainment.

right? And I think that's where people get so angry is people don't realize they're not a news company. It's, it's, it's entertainment. It's fun. It's, it's not chaos. It's manufactured chaos. So my whole thing was in March of 16, I think is when they took the money from churning. I wrote a thing on medium. They were valued at $15 million. And I said, Dave Portnoy and his secret plan to build a billion dollar media company. And I was like, look, it's going to to be a billion dollar company. And literally people were like, you are the biggest fucking idiot in the world. And my whole point was, no, you guys are missing the fact that the future of media has nothing to do with the quality of the content. It has everything to do with the

audience. And if people are paying attention and there's eyeballs there and they're that fanatical, they'll be able to do all kinds of stuff. And the thing that I missed in the analysis was I actually thought that they were going to go faster outside of the entertaining sports content. So I was like, Oh, you could see a barstool news. You could see this, like all these different things. They tested some of it, but I think what happened is like when they tried it, it didn't really resonate as much as just like, no, just double and triple down on like sports related type content or kind of culture related content. And so what – that begs the question of is it sports and culture like the ringer, barstool, et cetera? It's just that type of industry is open to that type of content? Or could you build a barstool-like media company for politics, for example? Or is it just doesn't work because there's no way to rebuild that type of DNA and that manufactured chaos, et cetera, in the politics industry?

Yeah, I think it's got to be done in its own way. I mean, one could argue that Pod Save America or the Crooked guys have done that, right? It's just different. It's not going to be as vulgar or whatever word you use. Zillion beers, man. Zillion beers will go down as the greatest campaign of all time. But I think what you said before about your billion-dollar analysis of Barstool, I don't think that's just media. I think that's consumer in general.

For sure. I think there is this huge convergence of content and commerce. And I don't know if you know David Perel, but David and I co-wrote this piece nine months ago. I was actually talking to someone today. I would double down on that. On which part? So, commerce, you know, these direct-to-consumer brands, they're commodities. Most of these companies are just have commoditized products.

A mattress is a mattress, right? Don't tell Casper. Sorry. A, you know, most of these are commodities. And everyone launched and they said, OK, we're going to use this unique little – this little – we're going to get Facebook ads or whatever it may be. Or this little hack. But at the end of the day, it's so easy to spin up one of these. And this is not to discredit any of these companies, right?

Some of these have built really great companies. But for the most part, it's very, very – the consumer space is so challenging. And so, I do think this idea of media companies and media company can be a very, very broad statement. And you're a media company, right? So – I'm more comedic than a media company. But you're media. And I think everyone now to some extent is media.

You have an Instagram following. You have a Twitter following. And so, you walk into the liquor store now. Casamigos. That's Clooney, right? um ryan reynolds right he launched his thing right proper 12 with mcgregor fuck jerry launched haha uh fat jewish who's actually coming on business casual shameless plug i think next week uh launched babe rose sold it yeah sold it a couple hundred million bucks i think i don't

know how much it was but abm bet i'm sure it wasn't cheap like so here here's you ready for this the fat jew fuck jerry and dave portnoy are worth more money individually than almost everyone listen to this podcast how's your life going no it's it's true think about that for a second it's true it also shows uh the the the perils or or how uh in jeopardy news is or i think a lot of the the media industry is because again media is just so broad and and people want to connect with people and then buy their zillion beers is a great example i didn't even follow it that much but it's it's dave and this guy going back and forth and they sold a million and a half dollars of swag. That's insane. That literally just said zillion beers in a bunch of different

ways. And the way that he marketed it was he would basically turn on the selfie video camera in his apartment, chug beers and scream, buy, buy, buy, and then smash the beer can on his head. And they sold a million and a half dollars in nine days. You know, it's another one I actually really like is Complex, right? Because Complex, what they've done is other media companies out there say, hey, we're bullish on podcasts. We're going to get into the podcast industry. I don't believe, unless you're Spotify, you can be bullish on podcasts, right? Why? Because what Complex has said is we are bullish on building brands and these brands,

the best way to do it, well, for them is video, right? So they're saying, okay, for us, video is the best way to do it. And they're going to do, you know, Joe LaPuma's thing, or I don't even know the guy's name, but I've watched 10 of these hot ones. I say video is the best way. We're going to build that brand. And then what do they do? they sell that hot sauce, right? You know, Barstool was bullish on podcasts, but they weren't bullish on podcasts as a medium per se. They were bullish on podcast ability to build a brand. And so there are all these companies out there. A lot of companies out there are saying, hey, we're bullish on product X, video, podcast, but those get saturated. What's not saturated is

a brand. And so leveraging a brand, and to your point before, leveraging as many ways as possible, Complex builds a brand. They monetize it on YouTube. They have other native sponsorship deals in addition to the YouTube sponsorship. They license that content. They sell hot sauce. They make money off each brand in 10 different ways. So it's not just, hey, we're going to launch video. It's no, we're launching a brand and it's a video first brand. So Business Insider sold 88% stake for $343 million. I just looked it up to confirm, which means that barstool sports when they had their look uh had the recent sale is worth more money than business insider yeah it's wild to think about yeah but i can almost guarantee you

if you go and ask somebody under the age of i don't know 35 32 right uh which one they read more they'll say barstool they actually can they actually consume more content yeah of barstool And also they resonate with more Barstool personalities. They know more Barstool brand. They've bought more Barstool merch. They've they've interact with the brand in more ways. I will also I think Barstool, you know, they were doing great. But then the sports. I don't know if you read the blog post that Erica Nardini put out, who's the CEO of Barstool, put out titled I have 450 million reasons to to be a token CEO or something like that. uh people fucking hated on them for bringing in this the female ceo and she completely savaged everybody yeah she's amazing and uh what what uh yeah i mean what they've done there is is just incredible but i do think there was a a bit of luck there with the sports gambling thing and that was just such a perfect fit but okay so this is a good example is it luck that they got the sports gambling to be start become legalized and that opened up that path or is it

more of they would have been successful in any manner because they have that audience and then when they saw this opportunity they just kind of navigated that way because they realized that that was huge yeah so i actually when i first started morning brew someone uh told me a saying and it was do everything you can to increase your luck surface area which is a great saying uh and that's what Barstool did. They increased their luck surface area. Now, did they potentially hit a very high end of that luck surface area with the sports gambling thing? Maybe. But yeah, you're 100% right. They put themselves in that position to succeed. I think a lot of other brands are going to do the same thing, where who knows what the next big thing is. But also with marijuana

becoming legalized in more and more states, could Barstool have capitalized on that? 100%. I'm sure they could have had plans. They do have plans. Who knows what's next or what opportunity is coming about. But the people who are building, if they didn't build a brand and they didn't build personalities, they certainly wouldn't have been able to capitalize. So taking nothing away from them, they built the brand, they built personalities and it's allowed them to succeed. Does it change the way, like as these brands become more popular, personalities become more popular, does it change the way that content's created? But can we still live in a world where we have unbiased news or content, given that the rewards in digital are more around personalities, more around opinions, kind of salacious hot takes, et cetera?

It's a good question. I don't know. But what I do know is I think this is actually going to help the New York Times, the world. Why? Because you look at people trust the New York Times. And so if the more and more people start to not trust other people, well, I'll take a step back. A certain subset of people trust the New York Times. And the people who trust the New York Times really trust the New York Times.

I think 30% of the New York Times revenues from cooking, their cooking app. Really? Something like that. Yeah. Or maybe cooking and crosswords. Yeah. Right. What does that have to do with news?

Political coverage. It doesn't. But they have the distribution and you trust them. And yeah, they've probably built – I've never used the cooking app. They've probably built an incredible app. So, I'm not taking anything away from them. The app's so good, the food just appears. It's like magic.

That's a billion-dollar brand right there. But so, I think it's such a barbell, right? It's all going to come to the top. The brands that people trust, the brands people resonate with are going to accrue more and more value. And then I do think there's an opportunity for the indie publisher, the Ben Thompson, the person who's doing a really good job to make a great living. I think that's an awesome opportunity. But I think a lot of people are going to get stuck in the middle of the barbell, which is no one really cares about what you're saying. You can't monetize that.

Maybe you've raised too much capital to sell and you're stuck. And I think we're seeing that in consumer, with direct consumer. we're seeing it in media we'll continue to see it in media i am really interested to see what the fallout is uh because there's been some media consolidation and i'm not talking about like disney and i'm talking more about some of the publishers and so there's been some consolidation uh but that feels like it's uh like a a stepping stone to what's actually going to happen and so what's going to happen with those other publishers you know we'll see here's a hot take for you ben Thompson's uh not an indie publisher he's an influencer I would agree right yeah and if you

think about this in the sense of that line is getting very very blurred right because the quote-unquote indie publisher of the past now looks more like an influencer but they're still either monetizing or creating content like the indie publisher used to do and so if you look at like a Kylie Jenner she built a physical product sold it through to an audience like what's the difference between a ben thompson super high quality you know uh analysis of some tech company or strategy versus kylie jenner posting a picture of her ass like actually not that much if both of them are trying to monetize no i i yeah i it's a content kylie jenner ass in there because i wanted to see your reaction and you uh chuckled i'm not gonna comment on that but i'm getting

the head shake from polina as well so that means that was a great comment go ahead um but no it's the cons of the commerce thing, right? People or media companies and Ben Thompson, I pay, I think it's 120 bucks a year. If he built something of higher dollar amount, I would pay for that too. And these staggered media models, Webb Smith, another one, does a great job. It's staggering, right? And so- I got to get Webb in here, man. You do. He's legit. He's great. And so, but what he's done is, and he should, he could speak to it much better than I can, is he's built a paid newsletter, which is, I think, 100, 200 bucks, whatever. And that has

a pretty high top of funnel. And then he has some executive forum, which is, you know, maybe 10x that or maybe not exactly. $1,000 a year. Yeah, yeah. So $1,000. Or $999. Yeah. And so, you know, for people with that willingness to pay, they join that. And then I'm sure he's doing other things for people's willingness to pay is $10,000 or $50,000. And maybe, I don't know, maybe that is consulting. You know, so, and it's not just him, it's all these people. And so, I think these models there is if you are unbelievable there are endless opportunities for you to monetize yourself monetize your content monetize your network uh if you're not i think things will be very very challenging for the other uh 98 of people but this is true not only in the media

world this is also true and i think kind of what you're getting at here is like this influencer world where uh you know the rock is probably the best example of this right now he's the most recognized actor in the world he still does the wrestling stuff he now uh has a production company he's uh produced things like some gladiator show or whatever he's got going on he's got to do i don't know three to five movies a year that are all pretty big productions uh then he's got his tequila company that he's launching and you just go down the line you're like dude this dude what was the jay-z line like i'm not a businessman i'm a businessman exactly yeah like that's essentially what we're seeing. But again, if you compare Ben Thompson, Kylie Jenner, and The Rock,

they all look very different, but the strategy is the exact same. Yeah. And potentially, not potentially, The Rock has a higher total addressable market and he can launch more products. But I'm not sure if that's what it's about, right? To some extent, it's about living the life you want, about doing the work you want to do, and the tools are out there. I can strongly guess that this is exactly what Ben Thompson wants to do. And I think a lot of- He could have a way bigger business if he wanted to do other things, but he probably doesn't want to do other things.

Yeah. And that's so many people on Substack or with these communities. It's, you have the flexibility and the freedom to do whatever you want. I mean, it's not a revolutionary concept, right? It goes back to even Tim Ferriss' four-hour work week and all of that. But But all these tools, Shopify, Substack, Stripe, they've all made it incredibly easy. Now, potentially too easy to become a billion-dollar brand like some of these direct-to-consumers, right? The push of direct-to-consumer, a lot of that was helped by logistics and Shopify and Stripe and Facebook ads and all of this, right? And so people thought, okay, that allows you to create these direct-to-consumer companies. Maybe not, right?

Maybe these companies aren't meant to be billion-dollar brands because there's so much opportunity for it. Maybe it's gotten too democratized. Now everyone can do it, right? You can make your own candle company and start selling candles tomorrow, probably. You know, it's not that hard. And my big thesis around this is it lends itself to niches. And so if you can find a deep niche like Ben has, like Webb has, like you have in crypto, you will succeed. And I think niches are way deeper than people think.

And you can provide endless value to people. And go up that staggering willingness to pay and launch the low AOV, the middle, the high, and really extract as much value as you want to from your niche. Now, certainly some niches are larger than others, but they are way, way deeper. And the internet and all these platforms are showing us just how deep these niches are and just how much people can monetize. How do you think about physical products, right? we saw like publishers like quote and put that in air quotes kylie jenner lip kit uh the rock the tequila uh buzzfeed had a whole labs thing right i think they sold candles or calendars yeah but tasty all kinds of stuff right yeah all this stuff um how do you guys think about

physical products is that something that you've looked at would go into or kind of how do you think about that yeah so our our team's gonna make fun of me because i've been talking about launching a sock brand for a while a sock yeah so so not we haven't actually uh thought about it I'm just a big sock fan. Let's think about it right now. All right. What kind of socks you have on? Bombas.

Bombas? You're like a high-end sock guy. I'm a low-end sock guy. I always wear Nikes. Usually, you know why? Why? Because somebody might want to get dunked on. All right.

So what about the sock brand? Why socks? High margin. uh i don't think anyone's built a brand in the business sock space that resonates with millennials okay uh so you wear to work uh they are while it's not doesn't replenish in the same way that toothpaste or shaving cream does you do want to refresh your socks you can't wear holes in your socks yeah um again i think it's a high margin um and these are like dress socks or like everyday socks so both i love people are gonna give me my every morning i'm gonna double down

on this now uh wait but so is the idea that you build a brand and everyone like kind of like so take polo for example like polo is hey we put our little horse you know guy on here and now all of a sudden it's a polo shirt it's a shirt just like anything else but we put the brand that people want to buy because the polo shirt versus let's say a shirt that has like really cool designs on it i buy because the design not because of the brand which bucket do the socks go into is it more the brand or the actual design of the sock we get we'd have to test it but we want to do fun socks right morning brews fun witty i think we could do like a business casual sock right yeah what goes on the sock what give me one i know you thought about this well give me one

i can't give away my all my ideas oh my god someone's gonna come in and take it um what's the worst idea you had so no one will take it but it'll give us an idea of the type of sock you're talking about i i can't give away i can't give it away all right when he launches a billion dollar sock brand. I want credit for pushing them to do this. But odds are the paid product we will launch will not be socks. Get that on the record. Is that clear? I've been overruled. That will be a solid project at some point, a sock brand for myself because I do love socks. If all of a sudden Morning Brew launches like pocket protectors or something stupid and not socks, I'm going to be so mad. No, no. I think what we launch when we think about paid products, it has to further

people's career. It has to continue education, furthering their career. Something that is not news, something that is additive that you feel like after a year's worth of spending, whether it's a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars, you feel as if you've extracted value and you have actionable takeaways. And so that's what we're working towards is what's something we can provide for people that they feel like after consuming the content, obviously content's vague. So whatever that means, people feel like they've gained something out of it professionally, personally, whatever it may be. And actually, one of the general partners at Injuries and Hardwits wrote a great blog

post titled 1,000 Fans vs. 100 Fans. I don't know if you saw that. I saw that, yeah. Yeah. And so when you look at, a lot of media companies are out there thinking in the 1,000 fan vein. Hey, and influencers as well. Hey, you like me a lot. And Twitch was built off this.

I'm not a big esports person, but I believe anyway. you know give me like a dollar two dollars not out of your own self-interest because you like me and support me and you want to see me succeed that's an option i really like the other one which was the hundred true fans model which is we are going to give you true value that you are going to pay for out of self-interest because it is furthering you and bettering your career and that is something that we believe we have the right to play you know to be a part of and and to to make a play there and so we'll see we're not rushing it again we have no timeline we're not going to launch anything until we feel as if we're in the right... We have the ability and we have a great

product, but that's definitely what we're thinking. If we were to launch something paid, how do we get people to pay for something out of their self-interest, not because they support Morning Brew? Bitcoin. What are your thoughts? I was hoping you wouldn't ask me about this. Come on. How are you going to walk in here and I'm not going to ask? I was actually... I play in a poker game with a bunch of the Bitcoin guys, the guys from the block yeah a few of these other you know you know crypto uh etoro and a few other ones and they always they're trying to push yeah i do own some bitcoin okay um because i would have a good diversified portfolio okay um it's good answer i i think it's it's interesting uh i wish

i invested five years ago everyone does um but i i don't have a strong enough stance to take an opinion okay it would it be fair to say at what you said you're 25 yes uh that it is increasing in popularity among kind of your friend group meaning more of like demographically or it is decreasing it's stagnant like what do you see i'm fascinated by the idea that uh there's lots of people talking about like 25 and under i got a brother who's uh i think john's like 23 um and And like, I read all this stuff and I go talk to him and like his opinion is literally the opposite of what the media is writing about. So I have a 25 year old right here and he's going to tell us all the secrets.

So obviously there was that big boom when Bitcoin went to $20,000 a coin. All your friends became degenerate gamblers. Yeah. Which is when I bought Bitcoin. So I'm now 50%. No, it wasn't that bad, but it's also not that good. I would say it's pretty stagnant now. Okay.

It's probably a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's better than 2017 when everyone was buying it at $15,000, $20,000. I would agree. I do think cash is going away. So let's make – I think – Oh, interesting. So you're not necessarily like hardcore Bitcoin believer, but you're a believer in the legacy world will change. Yes. Absolutely. It doesn't necessarily go away, but it just – we go cashless. Exactly. I think we're going to go cashless. Now, who owns that space?

I have not done enough research, whether is it, you know, one of these fintech companies, a credit card company, which coin may it be? I don't know. Everyone's hot on Ethereum before. And I know that had different use cases. But I do think we're heading in that direction. I just don't have enough knowledge or spent the time to be confident that Bitcoin is the right coin. That's fair. I think we should start a morning brew coin.

I was just going to ask if you're ever going to start a crypto newsletter, but Morning Brew Coin, you're like jumping to level 301 or 401. I mean, so at the top of Morning Brew, we have a ticker and we have gold. This is going to be really embarrassing. We have the Dow, we have the S&P, we have NASDAQ, we have gold. I think we have like the 10-year and maybe one other. I can't remember if it's five or six, which I read it every day. I should know. And everyone's like, you got to add crypto.

You got to add crypto. and so we'll see but that'll be a big step if and when we had crypto um to the top that's the first step but we did think about all these ico jokes when everyone's i see it like when all you know the fraud was happening but then all the fraud you know shit at the fan and i'm like all right this isn't fun anymore what it was funny when you when people were like hey man i know that guy that guy literally put up a website and just raised 300 million dollars or like wait somebody just gave him 50 million what the hell are you guys investing yeah and then you're like oh wait that I disappeared with the money.

Never mind. Yeah. So that wasn't very funny. We weren't going to make that joke. But yeah, I think the financial system is evolving. I just, I don't know. I can't say I'm bullish on Bitcoin, but I own it. So I also can't say I'm embarrassed.

I hope it goes to a million. You're going to be the president of the United States for that politically correct answer. Aliens, believer or non-believer? Oh, believer. Why? Fermi paradox. You know, it's, have you read that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I've asked 200 plus people this That's probably the most common answer Yeah And it's also probably the most rational It's math It's just like probability is so high It's also a very similar argument

That we're in a simulation You think so? Yeah Elon Musk says we are And I trust him so How do we break out? That's a good I don't have the answer to that one

Okay alright You just mentioned Elon So we're going to go there Are you like a Tesla fanboy? Okay So I would say He's prepping.

I can see he's like, oh, shit. I got to make sure I answer this one correctly. So, high level, yes. I think Elon is a net positive for the world. He's great. Advent, what's his expression? You know, like basically create a better society through technology. And what I think is most interesting about Elon Musk, people think he is this like unbelievable engineer.

No, it's the business models. The business models are fascinating. What he does is he says, hey, I want to create an electric car future. Everyone has electric cars. And so most people say, all right, well, let's start making electric cars. He realized you can't do that. So instead, let's go out there and let's make the super, what was the- The original, like the super car.

The roadster. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And let's sell that and let's sell it to rich people. And that'll make it sexy and make it cool. And then we'll sell it, we'll do the Model S, which is more affordable. Still not affordable, but 100 grand. So more people can buy it. And then we'll innovate each time.

We'll innovate our battery technology more and more. And then we'll have the Model 3, as the one is now. And then we'll go even further down the line. We'll have an affordable car. Same thing with SpaceX, right? We want to go to Mars, but you can't just raise money to go to Mars. No one's going to pay for that. Well, he probably could raise money to go to Mars out of the gate, but he knew that that would be a bad idea.

Yeah. So instead, you know, satellites and let's innovate on rocket ship technology every single time. Um, and so he's a very first principles. Yeah. Very first principles. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a, and it, this is all, by the way, this is not original thinking.

This is all the, the Tim Urban piece. He's incredible. Um, I've probably read that series, that four part series like seven times, uh, which is longer than the book. So I think Tim Urban's a real person. Um, so supposedly he is supposedly my co-founder sat next to him on an airplane. Um, and I've emailed back and forth them once or twice. We're trying to get him to do something morning.

I'm joking because I know he's a real person. And I think Clint has talked with him, et cetera. But I just feel like a guy named Tib Urban is the exact person who ends up being like an urban legend. And it's just like a whole bunch of people who are writing articles. I've seen him do a TED talk, which is very funny and very good. But we got to get him on Business Casual. We got to get him.

We got to do something with him in Morning Brew. Back to your question. A lot. So net positive. Some of the stuff he's done, obviously shouldn't have done. But huge net positive. If you raise money, will you ever tweet out funding secured? i'm waiting nobody's done this yet i'm waiting for a startup to announce their funding by tweeting

out funding secured we don't plan on raising capital anytime soon however that's not a bad idea we might go out and raise money just to do that like i just think about that's like a layup pr move for a startup and i'm shocked that no one's thought of that one yet yeah i think people are staying away from that but yeah someone's got to embrace that that's good that's a good one There's enough psychos out there. Some of you don't do it. All right. What's your favorite book?

And then you can ask me a question and then we're done. Cool. I'll let you out of the dungeon. That's what I'm going to start calling this place. Look at this. This has got nothing like a prison cell. I'll give you two because one I just read recently and then I'll give you one that I read pretty frequently.

I just read the Bob Iger book. Oh, yeah. Incredible. Really? I try my best to not read books written in the last five, 10 years. Just prefer books that have stood the test of time and you're not reading it because they've had a great PR strategy. But I think Disney is fascinating.

And I read the Iger book and it was incredible. So I would recommend reading that. And the other one's Deep Work, Cal Newport. Wait, why do I know this? It's a pretty famous book. Yeah. What is this about? It's about doing deep work.

Basic idea is that in today's society. Did you just dunk on me? All right, go ahead. Basic idea is that in today's society, the most valuable skill you can have is your ability to learn things quickly. the best way to learn things quick things quickly is getting into deep work as fast as possible oh and so it's it's how can you get into deep work and it goes through some examples of if you're you know it gives the most extreme example if you're a researcher you may disconnect

completely from society for six months or or some people just like don't have social media at all and then there's people like uh jk rowling who she when she was writing harry potter like tweeted like i'm gone i'm gonna go write this book or these seven books however many there are um and so she you know went ahead and did that but then it goes didn't she write them like really fast too i i don't know but i wouldn't she did yeah okay go ahead sorry yeah but uh and then it goes all the way down it's like okay you you work in a normal nine to five how can you find time with that nine to five to carve out deep work uh and and i talk about at morning brew all the time It, we spend so much time doing shallow work, doing low leverage tasks, uh, because you're

inundated with Slack or email, uh, and that's all playing defense. And so you have to force yourself to play offense, to set a schedule, uh, and it's all about going back. It's focus, right? It's what are the most important things. If you don't set yourself up for success, however you want to do it, you're going to end up, uh, being beholden to everyone else besides yourself, doing everyone else's checklist, doing work for everyone else.

You have to be very strict with your time. And I think that may at times come off as off-putting or unfriendly, but you just can't grab coffee with everyone. You can't- Yeah, saying no is okay. Yeah, you have to say no. It's a great thing. I need to be comfortable saying no.

And so Deep Work's great. I've read it two or three times now, and I would recommend everyone to read it. I've never asked somebody this question before. Now I'm interested because you just said all that. uh, what is the way that you communicate internally and externally? Do you use email, text, Slack, Twitter, DMS, Instagram, DMS, uh, paper airplanes, whatever else people are using today? Yeah. So I've started to simplify a lot. So I download Instagram probably one day a week and just like check in and delete it. Just so I'm, I'm really not on Instagram anymore. I deleted my

Facebook. Okay. I just, it's just too much, too many signals. I just don't need all that from a 25 year old the facebook being um twitter dms instagram you re-download it every week it takes 30 seconds yeah but still i just don't want to open the app i'm like yeah if i'm on the subway i just don't want to do it okay um so i go on a sunday night i'll download it check out some videos and i'll be like why do i even have this and delete it again uh twitter twitter dms are a disaster it's so hard and that's why this took so long to book because i take five days you're the only person that's worse than me i'm really bad i i dm'd you and then you like two days i'd be like hey uh and i was like man yes i found somebody worse i'm bad i'm bad i just miss

i'd like if i if i if it goes down i just never scroll back far enough to get it there's no mark is unread the discoverability is terrible same with text though same with text same with slack i hate slack we use slack at work i don't use and i can't stand it the reason why i can't stand it is because well there's a few reasons first people when people write an email you take time you write the email, you proofread it, and it takes time. Therefore, most people can, if that email would have been a Slack, they would just send it. But a lot of times in writing your email, you realize, oh, I actually know the answer to this, or it takes time. And there's a little bit of friction there. And that friction makes you consider other alternatives, such as Googling it or figuring out

yourself. Also in Slack, people talk stream of conscious. So they might say, hey, Austin, next they'll enter uh i have a question enter instead just asking what they want or telling you what they want and then going back to discoverability someone sends me a slack let's say something important but i don't have time to deal with it what do i do do i mark is unread do i like there's no there's no prioritization at all uh there's no way to just like put it in a in like a folder which an email i have i love email and there's no i can't wait for slack to listen to this and then say no they're not advertising on the podcast yeah i'm sorry i'm I'm joking.

Big Stuart Butterfield fan, but I just – I can't get behind – I don't know. But for all the reasons – all those reasons are actually very true, and it's very kind of Bezos-esque in terms of like he says, look, we start out every meeting. You have to write a three- or six-page thing, the person leading the meeting. Everyone there starts the meeting by literally reading what this person wrote. And so like, hey, somebody took – somebody that you're about to meet with took time to write this. You should probably take it pretty seriously. And I bet if they know that everyone at the meeting is going to read it, they're going to take the time to write it really well. Yeah, 100%. You have to add friction to communication. I think the thought for a

while was, oh, as little friction as possible, Slack and all these chatting apps. And for what it's worth, it's also our fault for not building a good set of rules or infrastructure around Slack. But it's just so easy to just like having that Instagram app, my phone is so easy to click on it. Having Slack, it's just so easy to default to, you know, I don't want to go through that friction of opening an email, a subject line. I so much rather just open this thing up and type away. and I will go back and open up my phone and I will have 50 Slack messages and how many will actually be important.

And the problem is the answer will be more than zero. So I need to siphon through those, find the important ones, figure out how do I store that information. It's so, yeah, not a Slack person. So I try to do everything through email. And it's funny how when you force people to send you emails, how many fewer emails you get than Slacks.

And potentially some of those problems aren't being solved. I would guess 99% of those, they're being solved the person just actually solving it themselves versus putting the work on other people somebody needs to create a auto responder for twitter dms that says hey can you please email me yeah i i bet 50 of the dms i get that i respond to that's my response i don't even acknowledge what they said actually hey can you email me here's my email because i'm actually interested in what they're saying but this whole thing of like oh if i start talking to you then i go do something out. Like it's just send it all in one place. If anyone is still listening to this,

please build that or send us if you send us a link or something. Yeah. Somebody. I would love that. I would love. I don't want to shut off Twitter DMs because I love Twitter. I committed to, you know, building a following on Twitter beginning of 2019. And it's the talk about high leverage activities. Nothing is higher leveraged than Twitter. You get to interact with the smartest people on the planet people not on twitter don't understand that people that are on twitter are like duh like like why are you telling me what i already know yeah right it's just the leverage you can create and i've met some of the most incredible people friends co-workers just like really really smart people we recruit using twitter uh for me it's it's brand

marketing it's what do you guys do you just slide in someone's dms you're like want a job no no we just post hey job descriptions yeah and people just retweet or yeah there are people who all see it. I'm like, oh, that person's interesting. DM them, or maybe they won't want to work at Morning Brew, but they'll know someone. Yeah. So, I mean, friends, co-workers, you name it, side business partners, everything has all been done through Twitter. So, I love Twitter, but DMs, it's just terrible. Yeah. They're going to improve it. I got faith. Yeah. All right. We really sidetracked there. What one question you have for me to finish this up? pitch me on bitcoin oh man not a question but in a minute 30 or less i might do it in three

sentences perfect probably 95 plus percent of your wealth is denominated in a single currency if that currency fails you're screwed and any other fiat currency that you store your wealth in is being debased away every single year but i know about one that's not okay that's really it right it's very simple but to your point i think a lot of people make it much more complex than it really is right because it's almost like uh once you know the pitch of bitcoin you're like oh that's it but why bitcoin why not why not popcorn because uh if the u.s dollar failed you would never trust the u.s government with any other currency and we see this in uh countries all the time right so like for example um venezuelan uh boliviar gets hyperinflated away

i don't care what currency they come out with next no one's trusting it yeah right same thing here is when bitcoin was the first to be created um currency is the one thing where first mover advantage or one of the things where first mover advantage really really matters especially once you get the network effect going and so if bitcoin fails my prediction is that no other digital currency that is separated from a sovereign nation will work so it's basically we have bitcoin as the one chance at separation of state and money if it doesn't work i don't care who launches what after that the human species will not trust a software-led non-sovereign currency so it's kind of this like weird first mover advantage network effect brand awareness thing that like here we go

now there's all these other things like stable coins and also other stuff i look at those as like really what they are is they're taking digital currencies and they're kind of like it's an evolution of the fiat currency because ultimately this isn't about technology it's about the monetary policy so that's like the big misconceptions everyone's really worried about um you know what technology am i gonna use well eventually every currency is going to be digital Instead, what you have to do is you have to make a decision on the monetary policy. So U.S. monetary policy is obviously one thing, you know, China, Russia, India, all around the world, but they all have a very similar framework, which is they use inflation and

interest rate cuts in order to drive economic activity. Well, that's great for the top 50% or less. It's really bad for the bottom 50% or less of a population. You can do that for a really long time, like literally decades and decades and decades, but eventually that game ends. uh i don't know if that's like next year or 200 years from now yeah um but literally every global reserve currency in the world has failed other than the u.s dollar so far because they debased away the currency like what is like we're doing the same thing um and so they're like there's

this weird and i still look at it as an experiment right like there's this deflationary thing that has a disinflationary monetary schedule that like is a digital currency it's actually got like pretty big adoption if you think about 11 years in you know more than one percent of the world's population has it access to it or exposure it's got a shot right i don't know what the probability of success is but like it's above zero yeah so it feels like you're you're less bullish on bitcoin than you are bearish on every other currency and therefore if you're bearish every other currency and of every other cryptocurrency not named bitcoin then the default is just you know it may not be bitcoin if it's not bitcoin it's nothing is that what it is yeah so basically

like well it's two things so definitely bearish on fiat currencies in general now that's not like i have some original thought like you said it's like we'll just look at history right like debasing a currency ends up leading to the demise of the currency so like that's i mean literally five plus thousand years of watching that happen um and like if we think that we're smarter than history like we're the idiots in the room um so i think that generally falls in that bucket but then when you look at like what is the solution uh i do think that this um idea of uh two things so one separation of state money and two triple entry accounting like applying those two things together uh in the unique way that bitcoin's done it it's like it has this legitimate shot to scale right

because i think what would be scary is like oh we all know about something but it's not actually built to scale and this is where you get the like my spaces of the world etc right and that's why Facebook can come along or, you know, whatever, 22, 23 search engines before Google, et cetera. Those are tech problems. This isn't a tech problem. This is a monetary policy problem. And so when you see it that way, I think all of a sudden, no, you're fine. The woman who cleans the place just came in.

That means that we're working hard. We should get paid overtime today. No, but I think that the monetary policy part is lost on a lot of people. And it's like a weird subject. Like, how many people actually understand U.S. monetary policy or, like, fiat currency monetary policy? Not many. Literally. Actually, scary thought.

Like, the central bankers might not even understand it, right? I'll leave everyone with one stat. I need to look up how many times. But I think that the Federal Reserve has tried to predict GDP growth in the quarter to come. So, like, the next quarter over 200 times. Like, it's like 250 times or something. they have gone zero for 250 times, right? They've never gotten it right.

Now we're talking about, they may say 1.8% and ends up being 1.7 or something like that, right? So they can be close, but they've never nailed it. And so it just goes back to show like, humans are pretty stupid, right? In terms of some of this stuff. And so they're trying to make predictions

about things in the future that just aren't predictable. So we'll see what happens. Cool. All right, are you a believer? I failed, I failed. I will buy a bit more Bitcoin. Oh, okay, that's fine. just do $10. So you don't get mad if you lose it. All right, man, listen, where can, uh, where can

people get in touch with you and then where can they sign up for the newsletters? Yeah. So I just said, I'm not on Instagram anymore. Uh, so I actually do an Instagram, but Twitter. So Austin underscore reef, R I E F. Uh, so that's me. And then you can go to morning brew.com sign for morning brew. And, uh, you can just Google retail brew, emerging tech brew, business casual, uh, Obviously, Business Casual is everywhere. You can download a podcast, Spotify, Apple, wherever else you want to listen to your podcast. Killed it. Cool.

All right, man. Thanks so much. Sweet. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off The Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars.

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