Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief grew Morning Brew by walking into lecture halls and asking students for their email addresses. They manually typed roughly 500 addresses from paper notes, then spent hours debating whether unclear characters were "I" or "L" to clean the data.
We said, you know what? What if Alex pitches and Austin walks around with a printed out Excel document basically and stares people in the eyes until they give you your email? I would walk around the lecture hall, 500 people, and I kind of just stand there. Give me your email. Give me your email. And then afterwards, we didn't have a way to scan them, so we would manually type in 500 emails.
I'd sit on the floor in the back of the lecture hall. By the way, the amount of time— we have spent hundreds of hours debating whether I's were L's. So we would basically have to put in multiple permutations of people's emails because we didn't know what certain letters
SF startup Eve just raised $103 million led by Spark Capital with backing from a16z and Lightspeed.
