Alex Lieberman built Morning Brew into a $75m revenue company by expanding beyond newsletters into video, audio, and social. He shifted from chasing money to focusing on learning and teaching, and explains how creators can scale and monetize in today's media landscape.
great business content in video, audio, or social form. There's no one who owns that. And I think we can own that. So that is exciting to me, especially in the age of the rise of crypto, the rise of Web3, the rise of the Robinhood trader. There's never been more attention and excitement around business. To be honest with you, I was kind of referring to it before of like you're you're like you're 28 now you're an executive chairman what are you doing and like I've spent a lot of time thinking about that too much time and I haven't gotten to an exact answer but to be honest with you one of the big questions that I've had for myself is like in whatever my future journeys are what are the things that are going to be motivating me right because like The thing that motivated me for building Morning Brew and like working, you know, 14-hour days on it in college and after college was I would say there were 2 things. It was the excitement of building my first business. And it was candidly, I would say like things related to money. Like in a lot of ways, I wanted to get to a place where I felt comfortable. And also I felt like I could take care of my family. As You know, as the business has progressed, as just like life has changed, the things that are going to motivate me today are not the things that motivated me with the first business. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about if I was to build more businesses moving forward, what is going to be the core motivator that gets me to grind in the same way that I did in 2015, 2016, and 2017? And I recently came to at least one hypothesis of what it could be. And the answer is learning. And the reason it's learning is because I love learning, but I love learning by doing. Like, there was a period of time where I was like, I love learning in any way, and I just started consuming a lot of content. Like, I was spending many hours a day consuming, and I didn't feel filled. Like, I felt like I liked it, but I was missing out on, like, building with my bare hands. And what learning by doing allows me to do is One, I like, I feel like I'm learning in this conversation with you right now. I'm learning how to be a better podcast host by seeing your mannerisms and the way you're guiding the conversation. Like every interaction I see there's opportunity to learn, but also it's because like I love to teach. It's one of the reasons I create content. It's one of the ways that you can teach is specifically teach at scale. And my view is like, in order to be an effective teacher at scale, I need to learn by doing. and then leverage those lessons. And so that's kind of like how it all comes full circle for me.
Yeah. I think we're gonna see a lot more teacher entrepreneurs, 'cause I mean, like literally, like what would I want on my grave? Just, you know, I just wanted to say like, this guy was a good teacher, right?
Yeah.
And so that's what it is. You learn and you articulate what you learn by teaching.
Cool.
So I do wanna talk about, so you've worked in media. Again, it's not just a newsletter like I mentioned earlier, but it's way more than that. So what do you think, what are you excited about in terms of the, the future of media and whatever trends you find exciting too?
Yeah, so I mean, look, there's, there's a few big bets that we are making with The Brew. I would say one of the big bets is that there's still a ton of opportunity in business media. There is no CNBC for our generation. And when I say CNBC, I use the phrase really like kind of loosely. I don't just mean like linear cable business, like always-on business news. I literally just mean great business content in video, audio, or social form. There's no one who owns that, and I think we can own that. Um, so that is exciting to me, especially in the age of the rise of crypto, the rise of Web3, the rise of the Robinhood trader. Like, there's never been more attention and excitement around business. Um, and so that's why one of the biggest bets we're making is we know how to do the newsletter thing really well, and it's going to continue to be kind of like the breadwinner of the business. There will be focus. But I would say our biggest bet where we see the most growth is Morning Brew being as good at creating multimedia franchises as we are doing newsletters. So that's the first bet. The second bet is you know, this isn't a new thesis, but like the creator economy, using that phrase, it just like, it means, it kind of doesn't mean anything anymore because it's all-encompassing to the idea that human beings can create content. And what I would say is like, there's so much nuance to that. And our belief around the creator economy is one, that people identify with people. And human beings can build bigger franchises around themselves than ever before because of the leverage created by the internet and social media. We also think that for many creators, many creators don't necessarily want to be entrepreneurs. Like, there, there, there is a life cycle of being a creator. You start as a creator creating content to find content market fit. Once you find content market fit, then you're starting to think about How do I scale? How do I monetize? And once you start getting into those things, scaling and monetization, you have to start thinking about things like team, logistics, legal. Not every creator wants to do that. And so the question is, is for creators who don't want to do that, how are they going to be able to do the things that they love while having the support on the things that they don't love?
