Michigan Ross alum and Morning Brew founder Alex Lieberman (BBA ‘15) spoke about his entrepreneurial journey and what technology resilience means to him during Tech Week’s closing keynote on Dec. 9th. As part of the virtual event, hosted by Tech Club at Ross, Lieberman responded to audience questions and outlined Morning Brew’s rise from small newsletter to an industry-leading media company with over three million daily readers.
“From project, to side hustle, to business”
During their senior year, Lieberman and co-founder Austin Rief started what would grow to become Morning Brew as a daily business newsletter called Market Corner, a registered Listserv on the umich.edu domain. Market Corner’s purpose was to help students keep up with the business world, and quickly grew from 40 to 500 subscribers in the span of a few months.
In 2015, Lieberman graduated and started a job at Morgan Stanley, but continued working on the newsletter. Its audience kept growing, and in 2016, Lieberman quit his job as a trader to focus on Morning Brew full-time. On the business’s expansion, Lieberman said “Once we went from 10, to 30, to 300 to 3.5 million readers, naturally you ask yourself the question ‘How do we keep serving our audience, how do we make this thing bigger and how do we do so in a way that doesn’t dilute the brand?’” Six-and-a-half years later, Morning Brew consists of ten products, 165 employees, and revenue streams of over $45 million. Lieberman’s goal is to build a billion dollar consumer brand around the modern business leader. He said one of the hardest parts–widening the audience and distribution– has already been done.
Tech resiliency
The pandemic “started out as a huge net negative and turned into a large net positive” for Morning Brew’s business, according to Lieberman. While advertisers initially pulled out due to uncertainty, several months later readership and advertisement began to grow as readers sought new sources of news amid uncertainty. Prior to the pandemic, Morning Brew’s entire staff was in-person, but the company since began hiring remotely as Lieberman realized its mission, to educate and inform the next class of business leaders, was not being disrupted by the shift to a remote work environment.
Entering the tech industry
Lieberman had words of encouragement for students preparing to enter a career in tech, and advised them to recognize their value: “Prospective employees entering tech today have far more leverage than companies themselves,” he said. He also recommended waiting for the right position: “You don’t have to settle and take that first offer because there will be several coming down the line.” Because we are in a golden age of entrepreneurship, the hardest thing for companies to do is recruit and retain talent, Lieberman said, particularly software engineers. He advised students to “Understand the leverage you have and the value you bring.”