Weekly Recap: An Inspirational Entrepreneur, My Convos with Allstate & Activision, and Agency Lessons

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal, my personal diary made public for the world. I'm Alex, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew, and today I'm doing a true journal entry. I gave myself a simple prompt: What went well? What didn't go well? And what are you thinking about? Right before this recording, I wrote down a few bullets. But other than that, this journal entry is being created as I speak it to you. So let's hop into it. What went well? I spoke to this amazing founder, Sadriye. She has an incredible story. In high school, she came over to the US by herself on scholarship. She came from Turkey. She has no family, no friends, nothing here when she came. And first of all, I just want to say I give so much credit to immigrants of this country. It takes a ton of courage and risk to leave everything you know, all of your people in pursuit of the things that you want in the US. Today, Sadriyya is a bootstrap founder running community and ops for Blind Look, which is an incredible mission-driven business that makes content and other digital experiences accessible for the 285 million blind people on planet Earth. Her brand has worked with Toyota, Google, and McDonald's, and ultimately they plan to make technology accessible for many marginalized communities, not just the blind, including those who are deaf as well as the elderly. There is one Last thing I want to mention about Sadriye: she is blind herself, and I include this last detail for an important reason. The fact that Sadriye is blind makes her story of immigration and entrepreneurship even more impressive, given we live in a world that objectively is harder and less accessible for the visually impaired. But I included this fact last because I know that Sadriye doesn't want to be treated differently. I didn't treat her differently when we spoke on the phone. She wants to be treated like any other founder. Being judged on the merit of her work, not on the differences in her sight. So that was probably the highlight of my week, was my conversation with Sadriye. A few days later, after the call with Sadriye, I did a batch of 60 Second Startup recordings at Morning Brew HQ. I typically go into our office once or twice a week, and these recordings are one of the reasons I go into the office. For those of you that don't know what it is, 60 Second Startup is basically a love child between Shark Tank and man-on-the-street social media videos where I have founders pitch their business to me and the videos show up on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. 60 Second Startup has been doing exceptionally well. We have videos that have gotten anywhere between 250,000 views to up to 1 million views, and it's driven a lot of really cool results for founders, ranging from Snoop Dogg finding out about one of the founders' products and trying it out to founders raising entire rounds of funding based off of their video. to seeing a boost in sales that is larger than appearing on TechCrunch or another traditional media site. A few things I want to mention about the 60 Second Startup recordings I did this week. One, I love this experience of doing 60 Second Startup, not actually for the interviews themselves. You know, I like the interviews, but it's a relatively repetitive task, right, where I just introduce the video and then the founder pitches me. But the reason I love it is because I'm put into an environment where I get to talk to early-stage entrepreneurs for six or seven hours straight. So to me, actually, the best time for sixty-second startup is the banter that I get to have with founders right before we start recordings and in between recordings. I also get a lot of joy coaching founders on how to pitch their business. You know what I found is really impressive entrepreneurs who have eight-figure or nine-figure businesses—they're super impressive, but they still are shaky when it comes to storytelling their business. And I love being able to support them in this way because it's something that, you know, I feel very comfortable doing and I know that it's valuable to them when I give them feedback in real time. And then the other thing I love about 60 Second Startup is how active and creative my brain gets when we're doing recordings. As a founder is pitching me, my brain is going wild thinking of new ideas for the show, new ways to up the stakes, you know, new ways to kind of gamify entrepreneurship. And I will say it is a difficulty for me because sometimes I will find it difficult to focus on the person pitching while also having these crazy ideas. But also it's really cool to finish an interview and talk to Jaden, who I work with on 60 Second Startup, to share with her these ideas that we can test in the future. And I'll give you a few examples. These ideas range from having a photo booth looking thing in Madison Square Park that is called the Dream Machine, where people go into the booth, they pitch their business, it records it, we get access to all the recordings, and we pick the founders we want to actually do a full interview and maybe actually give money to fund their idea, all the way to something that is a mix of having a founder pitch their business, but also seeing how they react to adversity, where I hold an air horn while they pitch their business. When they say something I don't like, I blow the air horn and they have to basically keep pitching their business and not be rattled. And I just think, you know, it's something that would both make it fun and also a test for another really important aspect of being a founder, which is being unshakable. By things that inevitably will go wrong in your business. So that is 60 Second Startup. The final thing that went well this week is I had a really cool opportunity to do a workshop with the leadership team in communications and marketing at Activision Blizzard. Activision Blizzard, you know, is the company that's responsible for Call of Duty. They have, I believe, King, the company responsible for Candy Crush, under them as well. And they had me join their leadership offsite to basically talk about my views on content and the future of media. And so I figured I would just share some of the views with you that I shared with the chief communications officer and her team at Activision Blizzard. First thing that I shared is personality-driven media, meaning the creator economy isn't new. It's literally been around forever. Like, it's funny we have this term influencers today because influence, I kind of jokingly say, has existed since, you know, God had influence through the Bible, the Torah, or the Quran. But I will say personality-driven media is more the future than ever before because of a few macro trends. The first is that people are distrustful of mainstream media, meaning legacy media brands, than ever before, largely because there's inherent bias to most institutional media brands, largely because the business model forces them to be biased. And I think the business model is forced that way because humans, whether we say it or not, are looking for more bias, which is actually a very interesting psychological thing that I can talk about in the future. The second thing is it's never been easier to access audience, meaning the creator economy has really grown because social platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok have given individuals unrestricted access to billions of people, which for the longest time institutions were the only ones who had kind of mass access when newspapers were still printing, like they were the owners of distribution through their paper routes. Now distribution has been democratized. And the third is that there's lower cost access to creation than ever before with tools like Beehive or Substack or social media platforms. TikTok, CapCut is another one for short-form video. It's never been easier to create content, which means more people are going to create content than ever before. So that's the first is personality-driven media isn't new, but it is the future. The second is that curation is a superpower. We live in a time where more content is being created than ever before. Also, more mediocre content is being created than ever before. People have to take more time than ever before to look for content. So those people who curate or basically find the best content for people to consume are going to be increasingly valued. A very simple example of this is Chamath, who is one of the hosts of the All-In podcast, founded Social Capital. He writes a newsletter every week where it's literally just what he read that week. That is a great example of someone who is trusted curating for their audience. That provides signal in a very quick way. Another thought I shared with them is that I think there are 4 things that create urgency for people to consume your content. So you need to fall into at least one of these buckets if you want an audience to feel urgency to consume whatever you've created for them. The first is time urgency, meaning the value of your content goes down over a period of time, meaning it's hooked to something going on in the world. So Morning Brew is an example of time-hooked content. There is urgency for people to read it because it'll be less valuable 24 hours from now than it is now. The second grouping is immediate need, meaning you need to get something done in your life and you need the answer to that thing. So I would say SEO-driven content or YouTube-driven content where you're like, how do I build a shelf? That when you create content that solves an immediate problem, that's an example of immediate need. Escape. So at the end of the day, a big reason we consume content is to escape from the reality of our life. Video games are a great example of escape. Books are a great example of escape. And the final is community. When I think of community, I think of things like subreddits, things that make people feel belonging in an ever lonely world. And so those are the 4 ways that you can create urgency for people to consume your content. 3 final thoughts that I shared with the Activision team. The next one is that individual content creators should be the highest paid people in a content org. I believe even though we are in an age of content abundance, the percentage of content that is truly exceptional is not increasing at the same rate. It is really hard to create truly unique content, and I think individual people are exceptional content creators and there's so few of them. And so when you bring them into your company, you basically need to do everything possible to retain them. And so I think you're going to see media companies or non-media companies that put value on media who will end up paying their content creators just as much as they pay their executives or kind of their highest revenue earners in their sales org. The second one is that there are 3 ways to win in news today. So in the news business, there's basically 3 formulas that work. The first is world-class analysis. So it's not about breaking the story, it's about having the best take and point of view on the story. That's something like Ben Thompson, who has the newsletter Stratechery. He does the best analysis on technology and media in the world. The second is verticalized or niche coverage, a.k.a. The Information, which focuses its news coverage on specifically Silicon Valley. And the third grouping, or the third way to win in news, is curation and edutainment. So where you bridge this gap between 100% information and 100% entertainment, that'd be something like what we do at Morning Brew, whether it's with our daily newsletter, whether it's with Morning Brew Daily, our daily video show slash podcast, or whether that's with something like Dan Toomey's YouTube channel called Good Work. And the final thing I shared with the team at Activision Blizzard is that the bar for gaining attention is just way higher, not because there's just so much better content, but because attention is finite. There are only so many hours in a day that we can consume content, but there are just more and more things competing for attention. And so the way I kind of describe it is when people ask me, is there still opportunity in email? I'll say there is. It's just harder. Because the average person, say they're subscribed to 4 email newsletters that they read religiously, likely 3 of those slots are already taken up by something that is going to be very hard for them to replace, which means you're competing with basically tens to hundreds of thousands of other newsletters for that one last slot. And so I think it's just more competitive than ever before. And I think that's partially because it's not like the early days of TikTok or the early days of podcasting where it was like a land grab because they were new platforms. I don't think we're kind of in the early adopter phase of any platforms right now, which means the bar for quality is just higher. Okay. Next up, what didn't go well? 2 things. The first is there's this guy that I'm talking to about a potential business. We both share a passion for pure accountability and goal setting. You know, I've talked a lot recently about this business, Focusmate. And I'm very just interested in building a business around peer accountability because I haven't found a great one, like a business that allows me to be held accountable to hitting a certain calorie goal for the day and documenting what I eat because I have a partner who's holding me accountable to it. I haven't found anything good for that. So anyway, I've been talking to this guy about potentially launching a business together, and I said to them that I would put out a survey on social media to get people in my audience to answer questions that would help guide what our product's going to be. And I had said to the person I'm working with that I would share the survey on— I believe it was Thursday of last week, and I didn't share it on Thursday of last week. And then on Friday they checked in and I said I would share it on Friday of last week and I didn't share it on Friday of last week. Ultimately, I shared the survey on Saturday and it was great. We got like 90 responses, super helpful information from people on how they set goals and feel accountability and what's most important for them to set goals for in their life. But this person and I were catching up earlier this week, and at the end of the call, they, you know, they, they communicated to me basically that they acknowledged that I had committed to putting out the survey twice, didn't do it, ultimately put it out a third day after I had committed twice and not been true to my commitment twice. And they shared how it impacted them, how they got really excited. on Thursday, and then they were let down on Thursday when it didn't go out. Same thing on Friday, got let down again, and how they just want to make sure they communicated to me the way that it impacted them. And I shared with them that I really appreciated their candor, that it's not an easy thing to speak directly to people in this way. And of course, like, my kind of initial reaction was defensiveness, but I actually feel very grateful because the fact that I was called out for this made me realize how the things that I do or don't do have impact on other people, especially at times when, you know, that fact isn't top of mind. And so I just generally, you know, while it didn't go well because I didn't keep my commitment, I think it was such a valuable learning lesson for me. And it just made me realize how much I appreciate people who are willing to be uncomfortable and have uncomfortable conversations directly. Because so few people do it. But also in a weird way, like even though it was uncomfortable and I'm sure there was fear about making me upset, it helps me also. It helps me in my growth. So actually, by not having the uncomfortable conversation, it's depriving me of the ability to grow and be better myself. And so I'm really appreciative of this person for being forthright with me. The second thing that didn't go well is I'm starting to feel a little spread thin. You know, there's probably 6 or 7 different ideas, business ideas that are kind of going through the idea maze right now. And I think that's a great thing because I'm not ultimately going to work on these 6 or 7 things. But I think for me, exploring these 6 or 7 things and testing them, but I am seeing kind of cracks forming because I'm working on 6 or 7 things. I've noticed that things that are dependent on me in each of these different ideas that I'm working on are starting to feel like they're moving too slowly because I'm taking too long to basically deliver on a task that I need to do because I'm working on the other ideas. I'm also starting to notice that I'm losing integrity with my agreements, like what I just described with the person who I'm working on the peer accountability business with. And so I think where I'm at right now is I probably need to cut 2 to 3 ideas that I'm exploring right now so I can still go through the idea maze and test several ideas, only a few of which will actually become real, but also so I don't start to become, you know, low integrity, spread thin, and take too long to push forward the ball on any of these different ideas. Final part. What's on my mind? Okay, there's two things on my mind. First is I spoke to the founder of a large venture-backed direct-to-consumer business—a business that probably all of you have heard of. This person is no longer in the company. They've been out of the company for a little while now, and they asked me to get on the phone just to kind of talk about the journey that I went through after I left Morning Brew, and they wanted to share their story about. The journey they've experienced since leaving their company. And what I've noticed is basically every founder who leaves their business, whether it's successful, not successful, whether they've sold the business or not sold the business, they basically go through the same exact journey. And I'm going to describe the journey to you. You leave your business and you feel 3 things. You've lost motivation. You've lost your identity and you've potentially lost your self-confidence. In my case, I lost all 3. You then ask yourself, what is going to give you these things back moving forward? What's going to give you your motivation back, your identity back, and your self-confidence back? One group of founders to answer that question will say, I need to go take a big swing and build a massive business. This can be a worthy use of their time, but it can also be a trap that is driven by extrinsic motivation. Which is natural because it is the quickest way for them to get back feelings of importance, power, belonging, identity, etc. So that's one group. And in some ways I feel really sad for this group because I think this is the group of founders that basically become serial entrepreneurs for— I don't want to say the wrong reasons, but reasons that ultimately will not drive long-term fulfillment. And when they're 70 years old, they realize they've been playing the wrong game. There's another group of founders that will also say, I want to solve a huge problem, but they want to solve it because they say they're really passionate about that problem themselves. And them trying to solve this problem happens to be a big swing. That is a byproduct versus the goal itself. And this is likely a more worthy use of their time because it is driven by more intrinsic motivators, growth and contribution to something bigger than themselves. And the hardest thing for founders to know in general, and I've thought through this as well, is even if you have great self-awareness, you are not sure which camp you fall into, the first or the second, whether you're being driven by extrinsics as you build a bigger business or whether you're being driven by intrinsics. So those are the first 2 groups. The 3rd group, and I would say this is the largest group, is the group of founders that says, I don't want to be in the first group that is extrinsically driven by power. because that won't give me long-term happiness. And this group also says, I would potentially be interested in the second group, which is solving a really big problem that happens to be a big swing for the purpose of growth and contribution. But I don't have clarity on what that really painful problem is that I feel passionate about solving. Right. So people, a lot of founders will be interested in solving a big problem, but they don't know what it is. I am in that group. And so I find that this group of founders, which I think is the largest group, Unless they choose to retire, which some do, but many don't, they will find ways to busy themselves from investing to building a personal holding company to advising. And they do all of these things to try to focus on staying intellectually stimulated and also generate income or potential sale value down the road, while also kind of keeping their ear to the ground to see if there are any of these paths lead to the big idea that they may hopefully take a swing at one day. And so, you know, my suggestion isn't, isn't that any of these paths is right or wrong. But I have noticed kind of this story that I just played out. That is the story for almost every founder I've talked to who has had an exit or has left their business in some way. The next one is I've been thinking about a conversation I had with the head of social media at Allstate. I told the head of social media at Allstate about my thesis of StoryArb. And for those of you that don't know, StoryArb is my business that helps executives build their brands on social media. And I talked through the thesis and she basically agrees that she agrees on a few different ideas. She agrees that for large companies or just companies in general to build great brands in the future, it is not going to be by focusing attention on building the brand, as in like the company. It is going to be by focusing attention on building up people who are representatives of the brand, meaning executives and employees themselves. And she actually told me, which was really fascinating, that she told me about a top 25 largest company in the world that you very much know this company and you've probably bought something from this company before. This company trains every employee in personal branding and they actually have an internal team at the company that supports every company executive with their social media accounts. And so the way that I think about this is that personal branding within companies for executives, but not just executives, employees, is the future. And, you know, some people will feel like it's a way in which companies are taking advantage of their employees. Like people will say, oh, you know, you're going to train up your employees so they basically do free marketing for you. My view is a little bit different. I believe that training your employees in personal branding is a win-win because First of all, employees don't have to talk about the company they work at just simply by them creating good content online and building an audience. You will— your company will be associated with them whether or not they're talking about your company. So you don't have to force your employee to talk about your company. The second thing, the other reason it's a win-win is when you build a brand, your own personal brand online, it's an asset that you have forever. So sure, if you— let's say you're Stripe and you teach your Stripe product managers how to create content about product management on social media, sure, that's going to be a good reflection of Stripe that will probably help with recruiting other product managers, but you're also giving your product managers a tool to build up their credibility online and have an asset that stays with them whether or not they are working at Stripe in the future. And so I think that's a really powerful thing. The final thing I'm thinking about are my biggest learnings so far from running an agency, which is StoryArc. So I'm going to just run through the list and in the future I can kind of talk about each of these at length. The first is the product you start with is likely not the product you finish with. That's true for any business, and I think it's especially true for an agency. The second is it's so easy to get pulled away from talking to your customers. But I think there is such a strong correlation between ongoing time spent with customers and the odds of success with your business. Said differently, you can never spend too much time talking to your customers and what their needs are. The third is that great service doesn't equal a great product. People focus a lot of time on delivering a great product, but customers stay with your business and recommend your business based off of great service and great service. Is the relationship you build with your customers. The 4th is that small businesses are generally a really bad customer base. I think agencies that serve small businesses are the worst type of agency. I think the only companies that do well by serving small businesses are what I would call electricity, meaning absolute necessities for small businesses. Companies like Stripe, companies like Plaid, companies like QuickBooks. Otherwise, I think small businesses are generally a bad customer base because they're very cost sensitive. They're very volatile in different economic environments. They're generally just very resource constrained in general. So whoever you're working with in a small business probably won't be able to dedicate a lot of time to you. So I generally think if you can move upmarket to bigger companies, you should. And the 5th learning from running an agency so far is that most agencies are really inefficient in how they are run. And I think kind of in a meta way, there are agencies that can absolutely help agencies run their operations better. And they'll do so with a mix of automations, offshoring, and AI, which I think will be a game changer for agency businesses in the future and make agency businesses look a lot more like software businesses than they do now. That is it for today's journal. I hope you enjoyed. And if you have any questions about what I just ran through or you just want to connect and chat over email, shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com. Thank you for listening and I'll catch you next episode.