Most entrepreneurs tell their origin story from a comfortable chair in a studio. Me? I decided to share mine while gasping for air during a 5K run.
What you’re about to read is the unfiltered, slightly oxygen-deprived account of how I went from getting bullied in high school to building Morning Brew into a media empire—complete with the messy parts about Wall Street burnout, identity crises, and why I’d bet on any founder who got picked on as a kid.
Fair warning: I do not recommend doing this. But since I already suffered through it, you might as well learn something.
Here’s My Story
Kate Mackz: Hey Alex, how many miles are we running today?
Alex Lieberman: Okay, let’s do a 5K. What’s up, guys? I’m Alex Lieberman, originally from Livingston, New Jersey, and I’m a serial entrepreneur. The OG company that I had was Morning Brew. I started it while I was a student at the University of Michigan. I sold that business a few years ago. It’s still humming along with an amazing team there.
Kate Mackz: And you started the Morning Brew when you were, what, 21 years old?
Alex Lieberman: When I was, yeah, 21. I was a senior at Michigan. My co-founder, Austin, was a sophomore at the time. He was one of my first readers. He joined me as a co-founder. I quit my job in finance after a year, and we were off to the races in 2016. I sold the business in 2020.
Kate Mackz: When I started out working in corporate America, I would show up to work, drink my coffee, and read the Morning Brew.
Alex Lieberman: Totally. And I would say, like, email is, I guess, somewhat sexy today. When we were working on the Brew, it was anything but sexy. Everyone was telling us, like, go into video, go into audio, do all these things. And we just did the most unsexy thing for five years without being kind of excited by all the shiny objects.
Kate Mackz: Were you working out during those days or not?
Alex Lieberman: So I guess I’m proud to say I’ve basically worked out four or five days a week since I was a freshman in high school. But I will say that when I was working in finance, it was not a sustainable path that I was going down. Just to break down what the average day was, I was waking up at 5:15 in the morning. I would go to the office in Times Square, get a quick workout in, then be at the trading desk from 6:30 until 6:30 at night. Go home, have a quick dinner, be working on Morning Brew for probably three to four hours, fall asleep with my laptop on my lap, and just do the whole thing again. And ultimately I made the choice to go full-time on Morning Brew. And like, when I talk about that choice, it sounds like it was easy and obvious, but I basically spent eight months calling my mom every day being like, what the hell should I do? This job that I did on Wall Street was my dream job my entire life. Do I give this up to take a stab at a newsletter business that wasn’t making money yet?
Kate Mackz: You’re a month away from being a new dad.
Alex Lieberman: Yeah, very exciting. My professional life has changed markedly so that I can be an A-plus dad partner because I know if I give on those first two, being an A-plus entrepreneur does not matter to me when we sold the brew and I stepped out of the CEO role. This transition was so hard for me because a lot of my motivation for Morning Brew was driven by extrinsics, not intrinsics. So I would say the biggest motivators for Morning Brew were one, taking care of my family. The second is I was bullied throughout high school. That was an unbelievable motivator. Like, my fire burned so hot. I will invest in someone who was bullied every day of the week.
Kate Mackz: We’re at about a little over two miles. How are you feeling?
Alex Lieberman: I’m definitely a little tired. I find running painstaking. I think it’s because maybe I have the attention span of a dodo bird.
Kate Mackz: What kind of tactics have you implemented in your life that work for you when it comes to productivity and focusing?
Alex Lieberman: Before I go to sleep, I make a list of everything I need to accomplish tomorrow. I turn off my phone from 9 to 5, and this is the craziest one. It’s called Focusmate. I go onto a video chat with a stranger, and we co-work together in silence.
Kate Mackz: What is a quote or motto that you live by?
Alex Lieberman: People won’t remember what you did. People will remember how you made them feel.
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