How To Grow A $75M Newsletter Business | Morning Brew Co-Founder (#398)

Sam Parr

Alright, so we have Austin here, Austin Reif, founder of Morning Brew. I know how big you guys are, but I don't know what the public numbers are. So I'll let you kind of say, how big is the company now?

Austin Rief

This year, we expect to generate **$70 to $75 million** in revenue, with a **double-digit profit margin** and a team of around **250 people**.

Shaan Puri

and it's kind of a

Sam Parr

that's crazy

Shaan Puri

It's kind of a crazy story. You guys started this while you were at college, right? Is it Michigan where you guys went to school?

Austin Rief

yeah so so we're at the university of michigan I applied to duke didn't get in though unfortunately yeah

Shaan Puri

sorry we didn't and so I

Austin Rief

I went to Michigan. Yeah, I went to a small private college. So, Michigan worked out well. It was a little cold, a bit colder than Duke, but my goal was to go to the biggest school I could get into, other than either an Ivy or Duke. I got into Michigan, had no idea what I wanted to do, and everyone went into finance at Michigan. So, I was like, "Oh, I gotta follow the herd." I was a sheep following the herd straight into the world of corporate finance or investment banking. Then, I stumbled upon this guy, Alex Lieberman, who had what I wouldn't even call a newsletter. It was a PDF attached to an email. He actually made a Word document, converted it to a PDF, and sent it out via email. That was the first newsletter.

Shaan Puri

so he was he was already doing it was it called morning brew

Austin Rief

no it was called market corner it was way more market space way more finance oriented

Sam Parr

was he in college as well or is he had he graduated

Austin Rief

Yeah, so he was two years older than I was, and that's a big part of our success, to be honest. If I was his age, we probably would have gone out and raised venture capital. So, you know, in 2015, you have BuzzFeed raising money, Vice raising money, and the only reason we didn't follow that path was because I was in college. No one's going to fund a sophomore in college. Alice went to work at Morgan Stanley for 14 months. I spent a summer in investment banking and was like, "Holy shit, this is miserable. Get me out of here." So I was like, "Alright, well, I got this Morning Brew thing. I might as well do it for a couple of years. What's the worst thing that happens? I come back here." And that was the start of going full-time.

Sam Parr

What did your nice Jewish parents think about you not becoming a banker and instead working on a newsletter?

Austin Rief

So, my parents were actually okay with it. Except, I told them after my junior year, "I have one more year of college. What if I just don't go back? What if I don't finish?" The idea of them spending $150,000 on three years of college and not finishing my senior year drove them nuts. So, the deal we made is if I graduate, they were cool with me doing Morning Brew for a year or two after.

Sam Parr

And then, fast forward, you guys. It was funny, right? When we were in the process of selling, you announced that you had sold like two months before us. So, you guys sold a portion of the business—I think the majority of the business—for something like a $70,000,000 valuation, in that ballpark, right?

Austin Rief

Yeah, right around there. I think we were actually doing M&A at the same time. We were even talking to some similar partners.

Sam Parr

I think we were... and the reason why Sean and I wanted to have you on is because we want to talk about newsletters. All three of us have a newsletter business, but you and I have an interesting background. On paper, we kind of hated each other the whole time.

Austin Rief

kind of I hated you dude I hated you

Sam Parr

so I didn't entirely hate you I just it was no

Austin Rief

I hated you

Sam Parr

It was like... I... it was like just sports opposing sports teams where I was like, "I have a lot of respect for this person. I don't know anything about their character, but I'm gonna make up the story in my head to motivate me." And the reason why I wanted to do that was because we... So I launched... We technically launched The Hustle in April 2016. Were you before us or after us?

Austin Rief

we were 2015 when we launched the first newsletter but it wasn't it was just a very small thing then

Sam Parr

So, we were going back and forth. It was like the skin was the thing, and then it was you and I, Morning Brew and The Hustle. You guys were this New York, kind of buttoned-up crew, while I was a little bit of a crazier person. It was tech, San Francisco, but everyone kept comparing us. I remember wanting to crush you guys. Then, after we both sold, Alex called me, and you and I became buddies. I was like, "Oh no, I actually love these guys." Now, you and I are great friends, and I have a ton of respect for you. But yeah, I wanted to crush you. I didn't really hate you. What did you feel?

Austin Rief

Yeah, look, I think it's always good for a business to have an enemy. In the early days, our enemy was The Skimm. Very quickly, though, we realized, "You know what? They're not our enemy." I think we both realized pretty quickly that you can't raise $25,000,000 for a newsletter and have a good exit. So, I turned you into the enemy. I was so immature at the time. This was my first thing out of college; I knew nothing. I was like, "Here's this guy. He's so abrasive, he's so aggressive. What the heck?" I wasn't principled; I didn't have real values at the time. I just saw you, who are super valued. You have strong principles—very strong principles—which some people love, and tons of people I'm sure don't like. I was like, "This guy is just so abrasive." I've learned to love that about you, but at the time, it just rubbed me the wrong way. I was like, "We're going to make this guy your enemy, and we're going to crush this guy."

Sam Parr

Dude, I used to get mad because everything that I was bad at, you were good at. And everything that I was good at, I thought you guys were bad at. I'm like, "Shit, they're just stealing all my ideas from my ads that I'm running," or "they're stealing all my content ideas." Then I would see how you guys operate and I'd be like, "No, we gotta have all these salespeople." Just like the... every time I...

Shaan Puri

I was at your office, and you were talking about Morning Brew. You were like, "I thought you would just hate them and be like, 'They suck.'" I feel like that's how we used to talk about most people at most startups. It's just like, "Oh my god, they suck!" Especially one that's doing what you're doing. Then it's like, "Oh, I already want you to suck, so I'm going to say that." Instead, you were like, "God, why does this email look better than ours?" You would just show it to the whole team and say, "Look at this! Why does this look so much better than our email? Look at what they do at the top!" You were just like, "They're so much better at that." You know, like the formatting, the cleanliness, or the brand that they are doing. I remember at the top of the email, I was like, "Wow, he just respects the actual craft so much that he can't even hate them fully." He's like, "They're doing good at these three things."

Austin Rief

Sam, I'll give you a story I don't think I've ever told you. There was a time when I thought our copy was much better than yours, our editorial. Then there was a time when I thought you guys passed us, right? Alex, in particular, was maniacal about this. He would print out Morning Brew and The Hustle every single morning. That's so funny! Line by line, we'd sit down and say, "That line's better." "No, our line's better." We would go line by line. Some of the early Morning Brew employees really hated you because when you wrote a story that we wrote, and yours was better, and Alex thought yours was better, people were miffed. There was a revolt in the Morning Brew office one morning because people were like, "No, ours is better." Ultimately, I think it wasn't better or worse; it was just catered towards different people. We printed out your newsletter every day and read through it for, I don't know, 6 months, 9 months. We were just so focused. I've never been as hyper-focused as I was in 2018 on us writing the best newsletter, growing the best newsletter, and selling it. I woke up every day: "Write, grow, sell. Write, grow, sell." We wrote it on the wall. At 11 AM every single day, we had the "Great Wall of Opens," and we tracked our open rate and wrote it down on the wall. We had that for probably 2 years running, every day, what our open rate was.

Sam Parr

And your strategy was... our strategies diverged and they were different. We were going to launch, we were going to stay in this space, verticalize, and launch subscription services and all this other stuff. You guys launched multiple different newsletters, which meant, from my perspective, you grew your revenue quicker. I personally hate that business because I don't like advertising that much, but you grew your revenue way faster than us. Well, I think you did. If we were one year behind you, I think we were tracking one year behind. So, the year that we sold, I think we could have done $18 or $20 million in revenue, which was around the same year you were. So, we were tracking perfectly, which is really interesting. But you went this horizontal route where you launched multiple newsletters. Looking back, which route do you prefer?

Austin Rief

Look, I mean, it's tough to say we took the wrong route, but I also think it's what we had to do, right? We didn't have the choice you had because our content was more general business. You wrote with an edge, with a tone. You were targeting entrepreneurs or maybe like account executives who want to become entrepreneurs. So you had way more opportunity to launch a trend or to launch a Hustle Con. For us, we thought a general Morning Brew subscription wasn't going to work. A general Morning Brew event wasn't going to work. The tone wasn't specific enough, and the target customer wasn't specific enough. But we fell in love with this B2B business, which I know both of you got a little bit of Twitter criticism when you spoke about the B2B world and, you know, Industry Dive. But I fell in love with that business. I thought, "Wow, if you can get in front of retail professionals and HR professionals," and we have them in our newsletter. It was the craziest business where we'd launch a newsletter and then break even before we even hired the writers because we presold, you know, advertisers—let's call it like a B2B SaaS company—into one of these newsletters. So I don't think there's better or worse. I think our opportunity was easier to get to $100 million in revenue. Yours was easier to get to, let's call it, a $1 billion company, right? Because you could have subscription multi-revenue streams much easier. It just was going to take another, you know, 8 to 10 years.

Sam Parr

that's great I'm happy I'm learning that now after I sold it

Shaan Puri

I'm happy I got to see it because I just got to copy both of your playbooks and do that for the Milk Road. All three of us were able to win with the same playbook. Mine was the easiest path of all because I could just text you guys and be like, "Hey, think about doing your thing but for crypto. What do you think?" And he was like, "Yeah, I think it's gonna work. Let's do it."

Sam Parr

and did did the playbook work perfectly sean you think

Shaan Puri

It has so far, right? We basically, in less than a year, built the number one, like the biggest daily crypto email. It's profitable, it's, you know, seven figures. I don't know, like it worked as well as one could expect. We bootstrapped it, you know, in our spare time. That's like as good as I could have expected that to go.

Sam Parr

Dude, that's why these businesses are awesome. People don't realize that. That's why I always hate when people say, "If you're gonna start it over again, what would you do?" I'm like, "Do the same thing." It works; it consistently works. I know, Austin, you're way more pessimistic. You're like, "I'm pretty paranoid." You're way more paranoid, and I know you say, "Oh, it can't work again." I'm like, "No, man, I think it can."

Shaan Puri

Probably have like a framework around... you have a lot of opinions around email newsletters. Give us that and put us in the context of Milk Road. When I told you I was going to do that, or you saw I was going to do that, what did you think? Did that fit your framework for what you thought might work, or was that maybe an outlier? What was it?

Austin Rief

Yeah, so it perfectly fits the framework. I'm pessimistic about relaunching the next Morning Brew, a general business email with 4,000,000 subscribers. Basically, I split up newsletters into three categories. **Category 1**: Editorial newsletters. You have your Substack writers and your Packy McCormick's full newsletter, which may be 2,000 words or even 10,000 if you're one of these writers. **Category 2**: Aggregation. Sam and I kind of went more general business and aimed for scale. **Category 3**: Let's call it "Morning Brew for X." Here, you still have that aggregation of summaries, but you're more niche. The total addressable market (TAM) may be smaller, but you think that because of your tone and the way you cover it, you can have a larger percentage of that TAM reading your product. I think that's what you're doing, Sean. The third category is more like your classic "Hey, I'm going to give you five links," or "Your five-bullet Friday" type of newsletters. I think the biggest opportunity is what you did, Sean, which is "Morning Brew for X." You find a growing industry, ride that tail wave, and build a brand that is really distinct in one of these niches.

Shaan Puri

And if X is finance, or if X is something that's more B2B, or like, you know, a professional job title, then X works better than if X is, you know, fly fishing or basketball or something like that.

Austin Rief

Yeah, so I think if you're going to go the consumer route, right? Target consumers. It's gotta be high dollar. It's gotta be, you know, the newsletter for Ferrari owners or the newsletter for Rolex owners, right? Something where people spend, you know, hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on this. B2B is great as well. That's the other place I would go. So you were kind of like... I call it maybe "prosumer." That was the best of both worlds. You can hit on both worlds. You've got the consumer-oriented readers and then also the people who work in the crypto industry.

Sam Parr

Did you agree with our... I know that I, and we actually did, or I'll say it myself, I did sound like a douchebag when I was talking about Industry Drive. I didn't mean to phrase it that way, but when we were discussing Industry Drive, you know, they're a $600,000,000 company that mostly operates as a newsletter business. Our criticism towards the B2B industry was that the content's pretty whack. Do you agree with that assessment? Do you still think there's a lot of opportunity to build really big B2B media companies?

Austin Rief

Yeah, I just think you have to do it the way Sean did it, right? Which is to go the complete opposite route. So, they're pretty dry. They have a standardized process; they go into every single vertical. Look, I think their business model is simple, but it's not easy. I don't think what they did was easy at all, but I think it's very simple. The playbook is very well defined. There's no crazy tech. They're not building some AI machine learning thing. They create great content, they resonate, and they sell ads into it. But the way to compete, I think, is to treat B2B like consumer, right? To treat them like people, like you know the Milk Row does.

Sam Parr

why is it not you're saying it's simple but not easy why is it not what do you mean it's not easy

Austin Rief

I mean, I think to scale across all those verticals, right? Your ad businesses are pretty tough. You take on a lot of costs, and you can't mess up. If you go wrong in verticals, you have a bunch of writers and salespeople. The thing about media businesses, even when they're profitable, is that the difference between 20% profit margins and losing 20% is significant. It's easier to flip that because of all your fixed costs. It's not SaaS; you don't have locked-in revenue. If you're a B2B SaaS company, you have locked in 100% or 110% of your revenue the next year because of renewals. With ads, it's another grind. You have to go sell more ads, and so it's not easy. The ad business is... an [ongoing challenge].

Shaan Puri

Absolute grind! We found this guy, and I'm going to give a shout-out here. His name is, I don't know, I think you pronounce it "Volter," and he's from the Netherlands. I think he's at school right now. I don't know what happened, but I did a video. I thought, okay, maybe we'll start doing YouTube content. I did this video when Luna collapsed, and I did this video like, "Oh, I lost a bunch of money on Luna." I did this video, and I thought it was going to be like...

Austin Rief

I remember that

Shaan Puri

Money... I was like, "Oh, micro viral, whatever." We came out late; we came out like three weeks after the news, so that was kind of stupid. It didn't go super viral, but one good thing came of it. This kid on Twitter was like, "Hey, your thumbnail sucks for your YouTube thing. It should be like this, or like this, or like this." He did this thread, and I was like, "Yo, you're great! I don't know if I'm going to do any more YouTube videos, but do you want to just come in our Slack? I just like what you just did; that was helpful and quick." He was like, "Sure, yeah, that'd be amazing! I love the milk ground." So he joins our Slack, and at first, we were like, "What do we do with this guy? What the heck is this guy doing here?" Imagine a two-person meeting, and I just invite this third guy from the Netherlands to a meeting. You'd be like, "Is this guy going to talk? Why is he here?" For two months, no one knew why he was there. But then something amazing happened. We were like, "We need to sell ads for the next month or whatever," and it was like nobody wanted to do it. I was just like, "Do we have to? This is going to be a pain in the ass."

Sam Parr

it just sucks

Shaan Puri

It just sucks to sell ads. I wish I could hire a sales guy, but even hiring a sales guy is kind of a shitty task. Okay, let's procrastinate a little bit. Along the way, this guy had been messaging us nonstop with ideas. He's really into Slack and trying to be productive, so he would just keep sending us ideas of things we could do. It got to the point where Ben was just like, "Dude, this guy is incessant! He won't stop messaging." At first, it was good, but nobody can handle this volume of ideas. It's crazy! Then he said, "You gotta do something about this." I was like, "Okay, I'll talk to him or I'll kick him out of Slack." But then I thought, "What if we just... the machine gun is shooting us with ideas right now. What if we made him sell the ads instead and he just bothered the hell out of everybody else?" So that's what we did. This guy is single-handedly crushing Milk Road's ad sales through the crypto bear market. We are fully sold out for months on end.

Sam Parr

just one guy

Shaan Puri

With this one kid who's not even 20 years old, he's absolutely pillaging the market. The advertisers will privately DM me and be like, "Yo, I shared this guy's name with our sales team because I was like, this is how you sell." Like, this guy is relentless. I was like, "Wow, that was just an incredible... I don't know, like, incredible thing." He is so impressive.

Sam Parr

Dude, let's talk about that real quick: ad sales. Ad sales suck, Austin. They suck! When I learned about getting into the hustle, I sold our first ads. I think I sold like the first maybe $100,000 worth of ads. Then, in order to scale, we had to hire a sales team. They would show me the conversations that they were going to have, and I thought, "This conversation will never work." You're using all this jargon, and you're wearing these button-up plaid shirts and brown leather shoes. You guys look like dweebs! This is never going to work. But it worked perfectly.

Shaan Puri

nobody wants to go skateboarding with you right now

Sam Parr

yeah you are

Shaan Puri

not ready if they wanna skateboard

Sam Parr

Dude, I was like, "You look like your name's Todd or Kyle. This is not gonna work." And it's like, "My name is Todd." It *fucking* works! Yeah, yeah, it works perfectly.

Austin Rief

You're not cut out for the media buying world. Did you do it? Well, no. In the early days, we bought, right? But we sold all direct response ads. It was Casper Mattress, it was Away luggage. It was, you know, "Hey, buy your placement here. You're gonna get 300 clicks, and 3% of them convert, and you're gonna make $1,000, and we'll charge you $800." As we've grown, though, I think there's another difference between us. We were in New York City and opened up this whole world that I had no idea about, which was the world of media buying and these big ad agencies. They have huge budgets. We're not talking about $100 from Casper; we're talking about $5,000,000 from the biggest brands in the entire world. It really is a black box that people who aren't in it can't understand. I think it's one of those things where it's a black box intentionally, so people can't get in. Finance is the same thing. Every year, there's a new term within the ad industry or finance just to keep people on the outside.

Sam Parr

It's crazy. It's crazy, and it's not based in logic or fact; it's based on relationships. It's so weird. It's like, "Oh wait, I have to realize that this person, this lady I'm trying to get to buy ads, she just has to spend this $20,000,000 this quarter." She just wants to find somewhere to place it where she won't get fired. That was such a weird feeling.

Austin Rief

Yeah, I mean the idea of media budgets, right? If they don't use it, they lose it. So, you're incentivized to spend money. It's interesting, and it's something that we learned again by hiring people in New York, which I think was a big difference between us and you. You had a lower-cost, more like inside sales team—a really efficient one, right? You took that route. We didn't take that route; we went for these big brand dollars. I think both routes work; it depends on what you're looking to sell. We just took the route and said, "Hey, we're going to dive right into this black box, and we're going to learn all about it." We got a $1,000,000. I mean, one of our first advertisers, Discover, gave us a $1,000,000. I was in college, a senior in college, living in my frat house, right? Beer cans everywhere. I get an email from the CMO of Discover, like, "Here's an RFP." I'm like, "What in the world is an RFP? What are you talking about?" No clue. I open it up, and it's like, "Hey, give us media plans for like half a million to $1,000,000." For a $1,000,000, she could've owned the company seven times over. The company was not worth $100, and here's this woman asking for a $1,000,000 RFP. We just learned it, but it really is a relationship-driven game.

Shaan Puri

what what are

Sam Parr

Somehow, how did you justify that? Like, how do you... if AMX says, "We're gonna spend $5,000,000 this year," be real. Do you actually think that's gonna help them sell more stuff? Yes.

Austin Rief

So, I do... We do a lot of brand lift studies and things like that. It's different, right? No one's trying to... You know, like Lexus, for example, or a car company. Lexus does this. How?

Shaan Puri

many brand lift studies did you do

Sam Parr

we used to do that but I'd be like what the fuck is a brand lift study like the

Austin Rief

I'm like are you kidding me todd what the hell

Sam Parr

Is a brand lift study? I don't know what the hell this is. Or we would do all this other stuff, like an RFP. We've been doing it for like six months, and I was like, "Hey guys, I'm a little bit too afraid to ask, but what the hell is an RFP?" I don't know what this stuff means. It's so challenging if you don't work in the industry. Then they talk about agencies, and I'm like, "Wait, what the hell is an agency? Why don't we just go straight to the brand?" From a small business owner's perspective, all of this stuff is crazy inefficient and stupid. Now that I've been at a big company like HubSpot, I understand. I'm like, "Okay, I get it. These guys are having to give out a billion dollars in marketing." Now I understand a lot more. But when you're just a ten-person company, you're like, "Do you guys realize this market study stuff doesn't work? This brand study? That's bullshit!" Or like, "You're going to give me $20,000 to write this article? It took me like 20 minutes to do it!" It just doesn't make sense when you're small.

Austin Rief

Yeah, but you know, people are buying the audience. They're buying their relationship with you; they're not buying purchases or things like that. So, I think at scale, when you get to 4,000,000 subscribers, if you can change the perception of half a million or a million people because of a marketing campaign, having 10% of people with a higher perception of credit card X's programs is really valuable. When you're Visa, Mastercard, or American Express and you spend $1,000,000,000, that's so much money. How do you deploy $1,000,000,000 of marketing spend? You go through agencies, and that's how it all happens.

Sam Parr

Sean and I are really good, I think, at starting stuff. We've got pretty good vision; we can spin things up and get them to like $1,000,000 in revenue pretty quickly. The thing that I was always envious of you for, because it's a fairly big shortcoming I think I have, is that you are just so good at... I don't know exactly how to explain it. You've got this almost private equity-like ability to look at numbers and be like, "Oh, the margin here is shitty." I've never used that word "margin" in my life! But you'll talk about the margin here and say, "Well, if you just change that by like 10%, probably by doing this, your outcome is gonna be like this, this, and this." You just have this really good operational ability. You're also really good at saying, "Well, if you just improve this, this, and this, and only focus on that, then in 6 months, I think your outcome will be this." You're really good at that, and you're really good at that at a very young age. How did you figure out how to do that? How did you learn how to do that and have that insight, that ability, and also have that faith in like, "Well, if you just do this, this, and this, the outcome might be this, this, and this in 8 months?"

Austin Rief

Yeah, I mean, I got an undergraduate business degree, and I always used to criticize undergraduate business degrees. I thought, "What a complete waste of time!" Those four years felt so dumb. But as I look back, it really did give me a pretty good overview of what it takes to run a business. Not actually the day-to-day of running a business, but understanding concepts like accounting. I took about seven accounting classes—maybe five—and those were actually really valuable. They allowed me to dive deep into a Profit and Loss statement (P&L). My summer spent in investment banking helped me understand what a financial model is and what drives a model. Those things, within the context of finance, were okay, but in the context of running a business, they were super helpful to understand what levers you need to pull. On the flip side, I looked at you two years ago, before we knew each other, and I thought, "I hate these guys!" because you were so good at going from 0 to 1. You were great at coming up with ideas. I'm the opposite; I'm not an ideas guy. I can't come up with ideas, but I do think it is super cool to see the ideas you have.

Shaan Puri

Cooler and sexier to do what we do, you know? Listen, there's no doubt about that. It's definitely... yeah, yeah.

Sam Parr

Like, dude, what would you... I mean, you know, we all need to partner because going from 0 to 1 is cool, but then going from 1 to 100,000,000 a year is pretty **fucking cool** too.

Austin Rief

Yeah, how about you guys take things, get them off the ground, take them to 3 employees and $1,000,000 of revenue, and I'll take them from 1 to 100? We can just pair up in every company.

Shaan Puri

about his margin and he he thought I said margarine he brought me some butter

Sam Parr

yeah dude like wait like I did

Austin Rief

Not understanding that, for all we know, the hustle was either a $1,000,000,000 company or worthless. Sam just has no idea.

Sam Parr

Yeah, well, I remember when we were negotiating to sell. There were just all these things that people were giving me advice on, and I'm like, "Man, I just didn't even think about that." I actually know a lot of people who are really successful—like, we're talking $1,000,000,000 successful—and they know so little about operations. There are a lot of people like that who are just good at hiring. Richard Branson, I think he famously said, "Dude, I didn't know what a P&L was until we hit like $100 million in revenue. I didn't know how to read it." Sam, I think that's...

Shaan Puri

the. Of thing which is super cool

Sam Parr

so austin you

Shaan Puri

What I like that you said on the operation side, like what Sam's saying, is that when you were talking earlier, you were like, "You know, write gross sell." We wrote that on the wall. We woke up every day and said, "Write gross sell." We had the great...

Sam Parr

wall of both of those so good at that

Shaan Puri

Those are the things that, like, I used to do. It's such a similar experience. Literally, we had the wall, but not with milk road. Actually, this is like kind of my earlier startups at Montego Fredo. I remember, Sam, you probably remember this. When people used to come in, we would always have all this stuff on the walls, like these sayings and these posters.

Sam Parr

and this indoctrination things

Shaan Puri

The indoctrination... I always felt like whenever I would meet founders, one of the highest predictors of success was: do they even know what the main thing is? It sounds like a stupid question, but for a lot of founders, they didn't really understand what the main thing was for their business. They didn't know their business' version of "Rykercell." Even if they understood that, which is kind of generic, what are you going to do with that? They didn't understand how to translate that into the "Great Wall of Opens." It's a number we're going to write down every day. We're going to look at it, and if it's bad, we're going to do something about it. If it's good, we're going to double down on that. That's what daily work is about—around this one number. I remember we had these founders in the office, and I would ask, "Alright, how many new customers do you guys get today?" or "What's the revenue?" They would have to say, "Oh yeah, let me check," and they would go into the database. I'm like, "Bro, you haven't built an easy way to know this number?" Then they finally built that, but they always had to check. I was like, "How do you not know? Why am I asking this question? It's 3 PM; one of you two should have asked this question by 3 PM, like every day. This is crazy!" They just didn't do it, and I thought, "These guys are going to fail because they don't know how to keep the main thing the main thing." Is that something that you see or did consciously? Where did you get that? Because that wasn't obvious to me right out of college, but it sounds like you got it right away.

Austin Rief

I can't find this client info

Hubspot

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform. It shares its data across every application, so every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. **HubSpot: Grow Better.**

Austin Rief

Yeah, that... I mean for us, it's almost an insult, right? People would ask, "Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? Why didn't you run the video?" We were too dumb to do that. We had never... like, how the hell do you make a video? We could barely get our newsletter out. I mean, there were days where we'd finish the newsletter at 2 AM, coding the thing ourselves. So, I think it was partially a little bit of foresight, but also partially a forcing function. We just looked at it and said, "If we do these things, we will get here." We looked at the math and thought, "Everyone's telling us we're crazy, but if we grow subscribers by 50,000 every single month and our costs don't change, we're going to go from $50,000 in monthly revenue to $75,000, to $100,000, to $125,000." By the end of this year, we're going to be at 1,000,000 subscribers, doing $1,000,000 in revenue a month. When I tell that to investors and people, they'd be like, "That doesn't make any sense." I'm like, "I don't know what to tell you. I'm just looking at the Excel." People couldn't... I mean, we spoke to investors and they were like, "What do you mean your business only has $100,000 in costs?" I'm like, "It's people, it's growth marketing, and it's an ESP. That's it. That's all we spend money on."

Sam Parr

what was that last line I don't even know what that last line is

Shaan Puri

email it's like provider

Austin Rief

email service provider we use sell through

Sam Parr

oh esp yeah okay I think you

Austin Rief

said yeah

Sam Parr

I was like sp I was like what the hell is sp okay

Austin Rief

Yeah, but it's one of those things where, when you boil it down to numbers and run it in an Excel model, it's so simple. These investors were like, "Well, you're not accounting for this and that." I'm like, it's all bullshit. None of that means anything. I'm just trying to make money. I'm just trying to make money.

Shaan Puri

Did some scrappy stuff. I remember, like, didn't you get your first, I don't know, a few thousand emails just by standing in a classroom?

Austin Rief

we I I I think we may have we may have broken a couple laws to get our first couple thousand emails walk out

Shaan Puri

and you'd have a piece of paper and be like hey just write your email to me

Austin Rief

No, we wouldn't let him walk out. So, we go in the beginning of a lecture—these Econ 101 lectures with like 1,000 people. I hated public speaking, and I still do. But I thought, "If I'm going to this lecture hall and I'm going to talk in front of 1,000 people, I better get every damn email." So, what I would do is speak in front of these people, and then I would walk around... you'd like the...

Shaan Puri

teacher would let you speak or you would just stand up

Austin Rief

And speak... no, no. The teacher wouldn't let us speak because there's a thing called Michigan time. You actually had 10 minutes in between each class. So if the class started at 10, it actually started at 10:10. At 10:05, I would get up there and pitch them on Morning Brew. Then I would basically print out an Excel document and walk around. I would just stand in front of people and stare them in the eyes until they gave me their email. I'd sit at the back of the class and type every email in. I'd be like, "Shit, Alex, is that an A, or a C, or an E?" He'd be like, "Who cares? Put them all in." We'd chat about every permutation of every single email, and that's how we got to like 10 or 15,000 at Michigan. Then we were like, "Do you have a friend at Penn State?" "I have a friend at Penn State. Let's do this at Penn State. Let's do it at Miami. Let's do it at NYU." Next thing you know, we have like 50,000 college students across the country reading Morning Brew.

Sam Parr

are your parents wealthy did you grow up wealthy

Austin Rief

I'd say middle class, upper middle class. But what's interesting is that I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, and I thought I knew wealth. Then I moved to Michigan and met people from LA and New York. When I moved to New York, I saw people from New York, and I had never seen that kind of wealth before. To me, that was inspiring and exciting because I came from a very well-off background. I had everything I needed, but I met people at school who were flying private planes.

Sam Parr

I

Shaan Puri

You know what a private plane was? You got rich pretty young, right? Like, when did you guys sell it? You're pretty young right now. I think you guys sold it at what, 26?

Austin Rief

or something yeah I think 25

Sam Parr

Well, the reason... but hold on real quick. The reason I asked was because you've got this immigrant hustle. Before I knew you, I stereotyped you as this rich kid, like everything's been given to you. Hearing this story, I'm like, "Oh no, these guys were just as gritty as I was, for sure. Sometimes more."

Austin Rief

I mean, Alex has his own story about, you know, his family and his dad passing away. I learned so much from Alex about hunger. Like, Alex again broke things down the same way I did. Alex would be like, "Hey, you know, I'd be like, Alex, we need 100 advertisers this year." I'd be like, "I don't know how we're gonna do it. We have 0." He goes, "I know exactly how we'll do it. I'm gonna go on LinkedIn and I'm not gonna sleep until I message 1,000 companies. We'll get a 10% reply rate." I'd be like, "You're gonna message 1,000 companies?" He's like, "Well, isn't that what you need to do to get to 100 advertisers?" I'd be like, "Yeah, but that sounds crazy." He goes, "Well, let's start working." We would just, you know, sit there, drink beer, and we would crank out cold DMs. I mean, I must know the head of growth at every New York City direct-to-consumer company because Alex incessantly emailed them. We would laugh at the responses. We would get excited when someone would respond, like, "Hey Alex, this is your 9th email. You gotta stop following up. Number 8 was good, but 9? You passed it." So yeah, I think we both had that hustle.

Sam Parr

What did it feel like? Back to what Sean was saying, you're 25 and I don't know how much you made, but let's just say 8 figures. What's that feel like when you're 25? **Fucking dope!**

Austin Rief

Yeah, I mean, first of all, it was very cool. It's great. So, it's interesting, right? I got the wire. So, the sum of money... it was during COVID. So, listen to this juxtaposition: on one hand, I just made a boatload of money—more money than I thought I'd ever make. On the other hand, I'm living in my childhood bedroom, sitting next to my parents as the wire hits my account. I was like, "What are you gonna do now?" I was like, "I don't know, my mom's cooking like meatloaf."

Sam Parr

yeah yeah tell your mom mom make me breakfast yeah

Austin Rief

It was the most anticlimactic thing ever. It was unbelievably anticlimactic.

Shaan Puri

you should've just moved into the master bedroom

Sam Parr

like move over mom and dad this shit's mine

Austin Rief

No, but I think getting a quick win early in life is so important. Right? Just having that swagger, that confidence, that brand allows me to do so much that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. I can get into any room and get in touch with anyone.

Sam Parr

what other opportunities do you think you get

Austin Rief

I mean, again, getting into any room, right? So, meetings, investing... what are some cool rooms you got into? I mean, again, it's the same things that I think you guys also have wins, right? I don't think anything is that...

Shaan Puri

Well, I don't like to leave my house. Sam's only interested in people that are like, "This guy's the best axe thrower in the country," and he's super pumped about it. I'm like, I don't think you needed to pull your rich guy card to get in touch with him. But I feel like... I don't know. Have you met Leonardo DiCaprio? I feel like he might have just bumped into Leonardo DiCaprio somewhere. That feels more like your vibe in New York.

Austin Rief

Well, so, I bumped into Justin Bieber in the Bahamas, which was pretty cool. But no, I mean like the weekend we had with, what's his name, Mr. Beast and Austin was cool. I spent the weekend with Kid Rock on his ranch.

Sam Parr

yeah tell me

Austin Rief

about that pretty sick

Sam Parr

what was that like

Austin Rief

I mean, he's a unique, unique character. Again, this is all according to him, so I mean, fact-check this, but I'll assume he's telling the truth. He told me he's the only person to play at both President Obama and President Trump's inaugurations. He played at both and he knows both super well. He's close to both, and he lives in this huge ranch outside of Nashville.

Sam Parr

right

Austin Rief

I went there; it was my friend. His name's Shane. He works in tech and is good friends with Kid Rock, who is obviously a music guy. Shane put together 10 people in tech and 10 people in music. We went to Kid Rock's ranch, and I mean, you get there and it's like out of a movie. You walk in, and Kid Rock's back is to me. He's got a cigar sticking out of his mouth and a shotgun, and he's just shooting clay pigeons. The whole weekend felt like it was out of a movie. His studio is unbelievable. We pulled an all-nighter together just telling stories about Eminem. I mean, it was really, really cool.

Sam Parr

He's a lot of people don't realize this, but Kid Rock got famous right before CDs went down. He's one of the best-selling artists of all time, and it wouldn't surprise me if he's probably worth $200 million to $300 million because he was famous when CDs were $18 to $21. It's wild.

Austin Rief

Yeah, so now though, I think he's a new source of wealth. He owns, again, this is what I've been told, he owns the most popular bar in all of Nashville. Whereas most of the other ones, like Luke Bryan has one and a bunch of other country singers, they just license their name to the bar, right? They make a couple percent. I think Kid Rock is like a 50/50 owner.

Sam Parr

probably makes $2,000,000 a month

Austin Rief

No, I've heard more. Really, I learned that it's a project. I've heard, again, I don't know if this is true, but I've heard it's big, big money. You know, high tens of millions.

Sam Parr

you know

Austin Rief

which is crazy

Sam Parr

Dude, one of the best things about our companies and the culture that the three of us have built with our friends is that we got into this media game a little bit early. I don't know about you, Austin, but when the hustle was starting, there weren't that many people we could look at and say, "Let's just do what they do but different." I remember I told this one media guy—who I'll tell you about afterwards—he's the founder of a multibillion-dollar media company now. I said, "Here's what I'm doing," and he goes, "Bro, this will never make more than $2,000,000 a year in revenue." Then, another person, who I'm now good friends with, was like, "Dude, what are you talking about?" I was like, "It didn't matter, just a small screen. Who cares? If you're in an email or on a website, it doesn't matter. The math shows X, Y, and Z." So, we had to hire like 24-year-olds who were promising, but we had to learn about it as we grew. Because of that, both Morning Brew and The Hustle, along with the crew that now Sean has—Sean's great at this as well—we've done a really cool job of finding smart, inexperienced people who have gone on to do a lot of really cool stuff. That makes me really, really proud to see this crew that we've all built. There's the Hustle crew, the Morning Brew crew, and then Sean was like the Hustle thing, and now he's got his own thing. Have you noticed that we all have this little army of people who have been through this self-created training camp? It's kind of neat, right?

Austin Rief

Yeah, 100%. I mean, in the early days, we could not get people to work with us who didn't want to be entrepreneurs. The pitch was simply like, "Hey, we're starting a business. You'll be in on the ground floor, right? You'll see what it's like." And that's all you get. You know, for the first year and a half, I was so cheap. For the first year and a half of Morning Brew, you didn't get a company computer. You had to bring your own computer to work.

Sam Parr

Dude, I was famous because on Facebook I would put, "Hey, I'm buying laptops. Does anyone have a Mac for sale for $500?"

Austin Rief

No, dude, we were not dropping any money on company computers. We didn't have health care in the early days. You got nothing. I mean, we couldn't afford it because I was so against taking venture capital. I was like, "We're gonna make every penny count." One more story: Fridays at 3 o'clock, we'd all go pencils down. We worked with stock because we had a referral program. We'd send out stickers and T-shirts, that whole thing that, you know, I'm sure we've all seen.

Sam Parr

but you had a packet

Austin Rief

We had no packing materials, so we'd sit down and wheel in the WeWork keg into our office. We would convey... you know, we did like an assembly line. The first person would open the envelope, the next person would stick the sticker in there, the next person would lick them, and the next person would put the label on. For like 3 or 4 hours, from 3 PM till 7 PM on Fridays, that's all we did. We just packed envelopes of stuff.

Sam Parr

Well, one of your early guys, Tyler Dank, has gone on to start Beehive, which is a really cool company. He seems like a really good entrepreneur. He's pivoting or iterating really quickly. I've got a couple of people who have done that, and it's just cool to see these people who are young—not dumb, but just young and inexperienced—go on to build cool stuff. Your ex-people are now at other newsletter companies, and then Sean has hired a couple of my ex-people, or probably it seems like a couple of your ex-people. It's like this incestuous thing. At first, I would be jealous, thinking, "Whoa, what the hell? Why are they working with this person?" But now, I'm like, "Oh, this is awesome, man!" We've created this tiny little industry of newsletter nerds, and it's actually quite cool.

Austin Rief

Yeah, I love it! I think it's really cool, and I believe there's going to be so much more value created. I think what Tyler's doing at Beehive is amazing. I've been so impressed with him, especially with the maturation from the Morning Brew days when there were only about six of us. He was a little bit of everything back then. The way he's been able to scale himself and that team is amazing. And it's real! I mean, Trung's the same way; what Trung's done is incredible. There are a ton of examples, and it's really cool to see.

Shaan Puri

do you

Sam Parr

regret selling

Austin Rief

no

Sam Parr

That's... you answered that quickly. Even though, like, no, I didn't. So, you sold part of the business. What do you think the entire business is going to sell for in the future? Hundreds of millions?

Austin Rief

I think we sold many multiples of what we sold the first half for, but we structured the deal in a way that I thought was great. Right? I mean, the ability to have life-changing money—if anyone has the option, I always think it's good to take half your chips off the table. Maybe I'm biased because I did that, and it's worked, but I thought it was really important. I still have enough upside where I'm excited. It's not like a tiny earn-out that people sign where it's like 10% of the deal. It can be really, really meaningful, and that drives me. That keeps me excited; it keeps me on the hunt. I love the company, I love the people we work with, and I love the executive team. But I wouldn't have slept at night during COVID. I just sleep very well at night knowing that I have my nest egg.

Shaan Puri

And so, what did you do with the money? Did you do anything cool with it, or did you touch it right away? What happened to that money when it hit the bank? You're at your parents' house. What happened to that money over the next, I don't know, year or two?

Austin Rief

Yeah, so I haven't... I'd say in terms of everyone's like, "Oh yeah, I do like to make a splurge purchase." There was nothing out there that I was that excited about buying. So, I ended up buying a car, which is expensive. I didn't buy like a Mercedes; I bought an Acura, right? Nothing crazy. I dumped my... or I... I...

Sam Parr

yeah car yeah pre owned acura my dad

Austin Rief

Just owns it. It wasn't pre-owned; it was a brand new 2022 Sports Mode, Sports Edition Atec Air.

Shaan Puri

condition that's air condition

Sam Parr

what why

Shaan Puri

Dude, you really do have that immigrant mentality, man. I think we need to get you like a 23andMe test. I feel like there's something going on here. You’ve got too much immigrant energy. I love it!

Austin Rief

No, but I mean, I increased my rent 4 to 5 times, right? I live in a great apartment. I went on an amazing vacation last summer. You know, I actually love... I know you guys know Ramit Sethi. I'm not pretty sure how to pronounce the last name, but I like that idea of "your rich life."

Sam Parr

just

Austin Rief

Spending on... because, I mean, lifestyle creep is real. Totally, that is real. So, look, I spend money on the things that I find interesting and that I like. I love traveling, staying at really nice hotels, and spending a ton of money on business class flights. I like living in a nice apartment, but I live in New York City. What am I gonna do? Drop another $50,000 on a car that sits in a parking lot 361 days a year? It's a complete waste of money. It's just stupid. You know, Morgan Housel actually tweeted this, and I read this too in Will Smith's book. He has a great quote. He was talking about fame and becoming famous, and the quote was something like, "Becoming famous is awesome. Being famous is cool, and losing any fame is horrible." I feel the same exact way about money. I have no desire to spend money on things I don't actually care about. I don't want to lose my money because I can, you know, change the "A" to an "M" or whatever on a Mercedes. So, I spend money on things I actually care about, so I can make sure I maintain my wealth.

Shaan Puri

So, what do you invest in? Are you conservative or aggressive? Like, what's the pie chart of the 100%? Where did the money go?

Austin Rief

Yeah, so I probably took like 85 to 90% of it and put it into very, very boring stuff, right? S&P 500 or Vanguard, like target date funds, like 2065 or something like that.

Shaan Puri

you did this yourself or you hired like a wealth person no

Austin Rief

I hired a team, and it's a good thing I did because if not, I would have gone off the rails. I put, you know, 5 maybe 7% in crypto, and I put another 5% in venture investing. But the vast, vast majority is in really boring real estate, the S&P 500, and like bonds. Right? But like really boring stuff.

Shaan Puri

Nice! Let's talk about some non-newsletter stuff. You had a bunch of ideas when we were hanging out at Camp MFM. You were telling me about this thing you're doing and that thing you're doing. I was like, "Oh, this guy's way more dynamic and interested in a whole bunch of different things." What are some ideas that you think would be cool to share?

Austin Rief

Yeah, so I'll throw out a bunch of ideas I have. But one general framework I think people should consider is this: when you're in **shitty economic times** like we're going into now, the framework you should use is to look to save companies money or help individuals earn side income. Right before, companies didn't care about saving money; capital was abundant. They were all about just "grow, grow, grow." Now, it's a 180-degree shift. People were trading their money for other people's time; now they're trading time for money. So, if you can help companies preserve money, I think you can build really great side hustles. Here are a few ideas. I think what's old is new again, and there are a bunch of agencies that could be really interesting to start right now. One is **outsourced talent**. I knew nothing about the outsourced talent game until I recently became a co-owner in a business called **Oceans**. They find talent in Sri Lanka—really cool talent. They have U.S. graduates come to tech startups to work there. It's a really interesting model, and I think they have a unique advantage going to Sri Lanka, which we don't really need to talk about. But I think there are companies that were hiring a full-time copywriter, let's say, or a full-time marketer, and they probably only need them for 25 to 30 hours a week. In 2021, they might have thought, "Screw it, we'll need them at some point."

Austin Rief

I think now companies are really questioning FTEs (full-time equivalents), right? Do you need a full-time hire? You can create these niche marketplaces. I'm getting investment opportunities to them all the time, and they're just not venture-scaled. But you can bootstrap a marketplace, let's call it a content marketing agency or content marketing marketplace for B2B companies, right? These stocks are down 90-95%. They're trying to drop FTEs, but they still want content. We all know how valuable owning an audience and content is. Building that marketplace and helping them find people, I think simple services like that are going to come back into vogue and be very, very profitable.

Sam Parr

What's that company where the founder got in trouble for not converting the convertible notes? It was a marketplace for developers, and it practically bootstrapped its way up. It was Toptal. They got in trouble because they only raised like $800,000 or $1,000,000, but they didn't convert the note or whatever. So it was controversial. But they basically have bootstrapped it to over $100,000,000 in net revenue. These marketplaces can be pretty powerful. They seem hard to get off the ground, but they don't seem that hard if you're already working in the industry and it's a super niche topic. People ask me all the time, "Hey, I want to hire writers. Who should I hire?" And I'm like, "I don't know, man. It's hard. I don't know who you should hire."

Austin Rief

Yeah, I mean, the one I'm now a co-owner in has gone from $0 to $7 million in ARR in like 8 months, right? You've picked a very specific target customer and you have access to unique talent.

Sam Parr

gross or is

Austin Rief

That just your take? Margins are no... no, well now both, right? Both are 7 figures of ARR. That's crazy.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and then what's his name? Marshall from Marshall Haas. He did Shepard. What's the URL? It's a Shepard guy.

Shaan Puri

right same same business

Sam Parr

It seems like he's scaled that to high 7 figures in less than a year. This is what it looks like from the outside.

Austin Rief

Yeah, I think they're a bit different, right? Ours is... I think theirs is more strictly East. The one we have is more... you know, you have people in finance, people in operations. What's interesting about Sri Lanka is they have big four accounting firms, right? So you can poach people not just from local businesses but from people who've been trained by Ernst and Young and Deloitte. It's an interesting demographic to go into.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I love that one. I think that's a great idea. What are some other ways to help businesses save money? You mentioned another one: helping individuals earn side money. What's an example of that?

Austin Rief

Yeah, so here’s one I think is interesting. You built Morning Brew for crypto, right? I know a lot of people have spoken about this, but I don’t think anyone’s really built the brand yet. I think Morning Brew or The Hustle for AI is going to be huge.

Sam Parr

dude how's that feel by the way so I think you you're just like calling sean the morning brew of blank

Shaan Puri

It's okay, it's okay. We did kick your ass at crypto. I mean, it's okay that that happened. No, we could just let it go though. We can take a collective deep breath and just let it go if that would help.

Austin Rief

No, no, you guys did a really great job. I thought that was awesome, and I think someone's going to do the same thing in AI, right? So, the bootstrap version of this is to do what you did: the AI newsletter, right down the fairway. Have a unique tone and integrate yourself into the audience. The way I think to take it to the next level is that in the last three months, thousands of entrepreneurs have all started tinkering on little AI side projects. They all have $50,000 to $100,000 of ARR. I've been reaching out to all these founders, you know, different little tools. These are not real big businesses; they're all side hustles. I went home for Thanksgiving and asked all my friends and family, "Hey, have you guys been playing around with ChatGPT? Have you been playing around?" And they're like, "What in the hell are you talking about?" Clearly, it's the same customer for all of these different things. I think there's this opportunity for AI, for Morning Brew, to start a little tiny capital or a little holding company where you can start to invest in and buy these businesses. You could give an off-ramp to these founders who built these $50,000, $100,000, or $150,000 ARR businesses and start cross-promoting them, bundling marketing. You write reviews for your little AI tool, and then you promote it. Instead of having advertising, which again Sam has spoken about how it's difficult, you're just promoting all your products. You have this portfolio of 10, 20, or 30 little AI tools, and maybe each one is half a million or a million of ARR. But altogether, you can get pretty big pretty quickly.

Shaan Puri

That one seems harder to me. I feel like I like the idea, but I'm like, "Okay, realistically, if I did that..." I like ideas where the concept is so good that my execution can be like a 7 out of 10 and I still win. Because, yeah, but...

Sam Parr

this is his thing man this is his thing he he executes some of these things really well

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah yeah

Austin Rief

I don't think it'd be that hard. I'm telling you, I've been talking to a bunch of these founders of these little AISI projects. I've been asking them, "What are you doing with it?" and they're like, "I..."

Shaan Puri

I have no idea. I think it's hard, not because you can't roll them up or buy them. I think it's hard because it's like the Lindy effect, right? When something's been around for three months and it's at $50K MRR, it seems great. However, you don't know if that thing's going to be around three months from now because the next model will come out or the next chat. For example, you know, Stable Diffusion comes out, and then ChatGPT comes out. People were... you know, I've invested in a couple of these AI writing tools. They're getting better, and they're pouring millions into marketing to get customers for their AI writing tool. But everybody's building on the same foundations, the same models, and then they're trying to say how they're going to be differentiated. The reality is they're good at differentiation on, I don't know, customer acquisition. So I think about when I buy something. The Tiny Capital model works because he buys stuff that's kind of been around and forgotten, ignored for a long time.

Shaan Puri

Of time, like he buys, you know, dribble. It's like, "Oh, it's been around for years, and I could buy it. It's going to be around for years, and I can improve it over that time," versus buying things that are really new and quick. I think you have a challenge with the durability of those businesses because, as you know, AI just keeps improving. Either these things become obsolete, or it starts to consolidate into one app that can do four of these things. You don't need one for posting on social media and one for writing emails; it's like the same Chrome extension that's just going to do both. So, I think there's a good chance you can kind of get blown away by the rate of change that's going on in the industry. That's the thing I would be worried about with that. Similar to, I remember telling Andrew Wilkinson about Thrasio. I was like, "Oh, this is super smart! These FBA stores are super cheap, and each one of them is small, but you could go and just scoop up all these." Look at this; they're buying them on this crazy little multiple. He goes, "Yeah, it's like picking pennies up in front of a steamroller." That was his first reaction, and I was like, "Yeah, I could see what you mean." What if the platform changes? He goes, "If anything happens, these aren't real durable brands. They haven't been around for a while. Maybe it's that Amazon changes the algorithm, maybe there's more competition, maybe the multiples go up." There are four or five different ways where you just get steamrolled. That's actually how it played out pretty much in the Amazon aggregator space. For a while, the getting was good, and then those companies went all in on it, and then they kind of got steamrolled. You know, they're getting steamrolled as we speak.

Austin Rief

Yeah, I think you bring up a great point about AI, right? That's why, well, I think the technology is great. I've been very skeptical about investing in these companies that just really build on top of, you know, OpenAI. Because it's like you have a nice wrapper, right? It's nice marketing, it's great, but what do you have long term? What do you actually get?

Shaan Puri

all do that

Austin Rief

what are you

Shaan Puri

Nobody's doing their own AI. Everybody's building off OpenAI or Stable Diffusion.

Austin Rief

And that's why I'm skeptical about investing in that. I think there are so many popping up. It's the next crypto wave, right? There's going to be a huge, huge bubble. They're raising not at crypto prices, but I'm seeing, "Hey, two guys left some recent back company. We're raising $5 on $25." Like, what do you have? They're like, "Oh, well, we have a deck, but since we created the deck, we've already changed our mind. It was this, and now it's this." And it's like, guys, cool, you can't be serious. We've seen this play out before.

Shaan Puri

While you say that, they're like, "We just got another offer for $35. The price has gone down."

Sam Parr

You know, I always felt this way about you. As I've gotten to know you, I feel this way even more. The way that you know someone's an interesting founder is when you talk to them and you're a little fearful of them. You're like, "I don't want to have to go against this person because they're going to be very, very challenging to kill." You totally have that vibe. You've got this weird mixture of neuroticism where you're like, "No, I have to win. We're going to lose; everything's over if I don't win this thing." But then you also have this really good work ethic. I remember I asked you the other day, "Hey, at what point at Morning Brew did you quit grinding?" And you're like, "What? Never! I'm still grinding." I think that's just really fascinating.

Shaan Puri

Were you weirdly good at some random thing? Did you channel that obsession towards something else while growing up?

Austin Rief

with some game

Sam Parr

weed like weed tennis or some bullshit yeah

Austin Rief

I mean, I was obsessed with video games, right? Sports video games, but nothing specific. I wasn't like Travis Kalanick, like number 2 in the world at weed tennis. No, it was that. And now I'm like, it's that for cooking. I've thought about, like, would I go to culinary school and take night classes? Because now I'm obsessed with cooking. I love to cook.

Shaan Puri

wow did not see that coming

Austin Rief

do you gotta come over for a meal you gotta come to me I know you don't leave san francisco but when you do yeah

Shaan Puri

do you

Austin Rief

love to come to

Shaan Puri

new york

Sam Parr

So, what do you think about Ramit and your "rich life"? How old are you now? 28? What’s your rich life going to be at 28? Yeah, 35, 40? Like, what are you working towards?

Austin Rief

Yeah, I think for me it's all about time. To me, wealth is all about having time and spending that time how you want to. Right now, I want to spend that time building this company because I constantly see more growth and more opportunity. Not just like 2x, but 10x. Ultimately, what I would be able to do at 35 is spend my time how I want to on any given day. That means a lot of travel. I love traveling! I want to go, in the not too distant future, hopefully on a 6-month trip: 3 months to Europe and 3 months to Southeast Asia. I never got to do that. A lot of my friends in college, when they graduated, they went to Thailand and wherever else. I drove from Michigan to New York and started working the next day. So for me, it's a lot of traveling. Nothing crazy, just spending time with family and doing fun stuff. Being able to say, "Hey, I'm going to drop $500 and go do something," or "$1,000 and go do some fun activity." Adventurous activities. But it all comes back to just waking up and saying, "Hey, here's how I want to spend my day," and then doing that thing.

Sam Parr

are you able to do that now

Austin Rief

I can, right? But I choose to spend that time on Morning Brew. I am maniacally focused on growing Morning Brew. I think there's a ton of opportunity. But as soon as I don't think that, like, I'll change. I'll say, "Hey, you know, today I want to do something else."

Sam Parr

Do you like having 200+ employees? It sounds like **fucking hell**, particularly in New York, Manhattan. Like, woke employees that are in the New York media scene. Everyone's talking about unionizing. When I think about that, I'm like, "This sounds miserable."

Shaan Puri

blink if blink if it's miserable because I know you can't say anything yeah what were you gonna say

Austin Rief

No, no. I mean, look, I think there are a couple of things. 1. We have a lot of remote employees, so we do have a really good distribution of employees across the country, which I think helps. Having employees everywhere gives different perspectives. Our engineering team lives, you know, in the Midwest, and we have people all across the country, which I think is cool. But to be honest, as the CEO of a 250-person company, I'm not interacting with that many people on a daily basis. What I love is that one of the reasons I stay is because we've built this team of people who report to me. They are just A+ all-stars—absolute rock stars. That's what makes me so happy. I can come to work and say, "Hey, you know, Chief Content Officer, hey, you know, Person X, what are you doing? Tell me more about it. How can I help you?" But also, I'm like a vacuum. I'll hire someone new, a Chief Content Officer, a COO, and I'll be like, "I'm going to learn as much as humanly possible." My goal is to catch up to you in knowledge as fast as possible. So if you're 38 or 40, you know, you're 10 years older than me, I want to vacuum up those 10 years of knowledge you've gained working in these four or five places in the next two months. I'm just going to pester you, sit with you, and learn as much as humanly possible so I can, you know, be better than you and know more than you. It's like this competitive nature.

Sam Parr

That's exactly what I'm saying about being someone that you're... you know, you'd be really hard to compete with. You were hard to compete with. That's a really fascinating mindset. It's very intriguing. I saw Sean smirk; that's always a good sign.

Shaan Puri

you're like yeah I wouldn't wanna compete with you it's like oh you did for like 5 years I did

Sam Parr

Yeah, and like, I mean, it was fun. I think that maybe I'm the same way where someone's like, "I don't know if I want to compete against you." But, you know, I think it's... you're intriguing, you're interesting. I think you have a really good mindset. I think you've got that good inner game.

Austin Rief

Yeah, and I think... I can't remember if I said this before, but I think the thing that really changed my thinking about you so much is that I used to think you were rude. Now, we've been working together on a few side projects, and what I've learned is that your style is not for everyone, but you are what I would call *admirably abrasive*. We were on a call—I don't know if I'm supposed to tell this story—but we're on a call (I won't say names), and this guy gives us like a 3-minute pitch. I just see the look on Sam's face, and I go, "Oh no, this guy's spiel is not good." The guy goes, "Sam, what do you think?" Sam, with no smile and a straight face, goes, "I don't know why I'm even on this call. What are you talking about?" I just start dying... but...

Sam Parr

I'm not trying to

Shaan Puri

be rude

Sam Parr

I'm not trying to be rude

Austin Rief

Exactly, exactly. And it's not for everyone, right? That style is not for everyone. But I can see how you can quickly grow things with the right people. That type of **radical candor**—that like, "Hey, I'm just gonna tell you what I think, and we're not gonna have an ego. We're just gonna work together to solve problems"—is so much better than sitting in the corporate meeting and being like, "Oh yeah, no, that was great," and then sending an email later. You should look this guy straight in the eyes, and you're like, "I don't know why I'm here."

Sam Parr

Yeah, I mean, the person we were speaking with, I think they're great. I was just like, "You're great, but this is stupid though. You know, be different and be better than you are right now and achieve your potential." I think you're great. That's typically the way that I work with people. I don't like hearing when people say that I'm rude. That kind of hurts my feelings because I'm like, "Oh shit, I don't want to be known as a jerk." I'm a pretty kind guy, I thought. So, I hate hearing that, but it is the truth.

Shaan Puri

alright

Austin Rief

sean you work

Shaan Puri

with sam

Austin Rief

what's what what's all in life

Shaan Puri

Dealing with that on your own... Yeah, I think Sam's intimidating to work with. You know, I've seen a bunch of people around the podcast who are intimidated, but it's a good thing. It's a standard. The people who have really high standards for how they want things to go can be intimidating to work with. For me, when we come on here and something's messed up—like the camera, the audio, whatever—I say, "Hey, don't worry, it's going to be a great show." I'm trying to put that person at ease because I know they probably feel like crap. I know they didn't want this to happen. A lot of these things are not intentionally messed up; it's just that something is going wrong or someone is late. Something out of your control is happening. Whereas Sam gets frustrated, I can see that person start to sweat. I don't think that's rude; I just think that's focus. You're like a blunt object. It's like, what are you going to say? This hammer is not very soft. No, it's a hammer! That's why we like it. That's why it has the best spot in the toolset—because it's this really heavy, blunt object. And that's what you need. The podcast would not be successful without Sam. He brings that to the pod, and I love that. Now, with that comes the understanding that not everyone is going to be treated with kid gloves, and that's okay. If you know the guy's intent is good, then you don't really worry about it. So, I don't know, that's my feedback.

Sam Parr

that's good

Austin Rief

Yeah, no, that’s on brand. And then, Sean, let me... I know I'm here for you guys to ask me questions, but I want to ask you a question. You know, like, you obviously are a great storyteller. You're very good on camera. How much of that do you think is natural, like you're born with it, and how much of it do you...?

Shaan Puri

I'll keep going

Sam Parr

keep going keep going let me let me answer it first part keep going

Shaan Puri

the camera enter fit

Austin Rief

I was gonna say, how much of it do you think you're born with, and how much have you studied? What are you doing to get better at it? Because I've listened to podcasts for three years, and you have increasingly upped your game and gotten better. I mean, it's pretty incredible.

Sam Parr

So, let me give my perspective, and then he should answer. From the time I knew Sean, he was always pretty good. We would do these meetings—like the podcast stemmed from me, him, Siava, and a few other guys meeting weekly or monthly to do kind of what we're doing now. Sean was always good at explaining things. I would explain something, and he'd say, "Well, so what you're really saying is this." He had a way of storytelling that made me think, "Oh wow, you've got this inspirational quality about you that's really good." I think he was born with that. Then we started the podcast, and he was a little rough at first. I actually think early on, I was better than him at capturing attention. But then he started learning about copywriting. I remember telling him, "You should learn about this copywriting thing," and he got really good at it. He also refined his storytelling skills. Basically, what happened was because he was born with this innate ability and wanted to learn, he studied it. His trajectory and growth were quicker than mine, and I think he actually surpassed me in terms of storytelling and the ability to capture attention. If you listen to the first couple of episodes, you can clearly see the difference. His tone of voice and everything made him intriguing. Over the course of a year, you could see a huge change. I think part of that was him studying copywriting. He actually went and studied people like Hassan and other comedians. We both like comedians, and I think he studied their techniques. We would tweet at each other or message each other, saying, "Hey, let's look at how he told this joke; it was really interesting." So, I think it was a combination of being born with talent and studying over the course of about two years. Is that accurate?

Shaan Puri

I think some things you said there were accurate, sure. My... and nobody knows, right? Like, it's an impossible question to answer. But I'll give it my best shot. Here's my honest opinion: I don't actually think I'm that good at it in absolute terms. I just think it's relative to the tech business and podcasting in general.

Sam Parr

When I've seen you with professionals, like comedians, I've noticed that they come to you for advice. I've seen it.

Shaan Puri

yeah that okay that happens but I think the I don't know I I grew up in houston and houston's just got like a very high swag factor and like there like are you playing basketball in the locker room there were dudes that like should have been on stage at the apollo or something like that like just the natural charisma of people who are just and and you know that I grew up with were was just really really high so I think that actually has a lot to do with it when you hang out with people who naturally have a lot of swag and charisma and tell funny jokes or stories or are able to to just quickly jump in and have quick wit that just becomes your normal so I think part of it was that some environment stuff my sister for example is way funnier way better storyteller than me and growing up it was always sean's the smart nice one but he's quiet he's shy she's the funny one charismatic if something happened to me they'd be like nisha tell the story about like sean like let nisha tell the story everyone will love it so at every family party it was her doing and and you know so imagine that like the person you admire your your older sibling is really great at this thing and you just constantly see your family and friends are like everybody loves that about them so to me it became like an important thing in my life I was like not in a negative way not like a a jealousy but I was just like it was a thing I valued I was like oh that's a really cool skill I value that I had no idea how to do it and when I was younger I was just super super quiet so I didn't talk that much in my friends group I was just the I was the laugh track I wasn't the the guy making the jokes I was the crowd noise and but I started to I got a couple lucky breaks my cousin was in town and was like hey you know there's a movie audition going on like you wanna come with me and I just like yeah I guess so I don't know and so I went with him and I ended up getting cast in the movie and that like showed me that exposed me to a different thing and the the guy in the movie who was my brother was cal penn who who was the guy from harold and kumar and stuff like that so I got to hang out with him for like weeks at a time so now I'm around somebody else who's very charismatic very good storyteller but he's like a professional actor right so he was somebody I admire that I was hanging out with for weeks he's the only guy I talked to on set because I was intimidated by everybody else and he was super nice to me and so we just hung out every day for like you know 6 weeks so that's like kind of a boot camp in like just being around somebody who's got that charisma okay then fast forward I moved to san francisco and I'm like okay I wanna be like you know I don't know in my mind I was like a ceo should be the leader the leader should be inspiring charismatic clear I'm none of those things so how am I gonna do all that and so I like tried to do things I took you know I went to the sf improv I took classes there all the time right because I was like I don't know it's fun I might meet some people but also I think this I think improv is just like a crazy skill set to have like to be able to on your feet be able to think of something and you know make a crowd laugh that that to me is a actual superpower and it's the superpower I wanted to have same thing with comedians like I like that content but I don't just watch it and let just let drool come out of my mouth that oh wow these people are funny I'm like I wanna be funny I love how funny they are and like what do they do when they tell stories to you know that makes it work and I'll go rewatch it and I'll sort of break it down sometimes I'll I'll try it myself like for example when I did that luna video I did it in the style of like this john oliver or hasan minhaj like skits and mine is like you know 10 times worse and I texted it to hasan he was like cool change these 95 things and I was like dude that's a lot to change I'm just gonna ship it like you know I I don't have time to do all that but like now that you've told me this I now know what I should have done but it's just those reps like it's talent helps but then there's reps and people don't really see the reps and I would say like that combination of the three things I mentioned like being around people who are who are better at it than you and you admire them that plants a little seed inside you right like austin you were talking about that with money like when you met people with more money it was inspiring and you're like oh wow my world opened up I now have like people I can sort of like you know I can try to embody a blueprint that that that maybe they have to to something I want that's how it was with storytelling and sort of like I don't know charisma or something like that for me and so that you know being around people you admire putting yourself in unusual situations that are like kind of intensives like improv or acting in movies and stuff like that most people in business don't have that experience so they shouldn't be as good at it right like if you've never gone through these intense experiences then then you know how would you have developed those skills why are you asking

Sam Parr

that austin are you trying to like get better at talking or what

Austin Rief

Yeah, I want to get better at public speaking. So, my 2023 goal, I guess, is going to New York for improv.

Sam Parr

Dude, I think in New York improv, some people are born better, but I believe everyone can at least get good. However, I do think Sean has this something that will make him great, and it is... it's very special.

Shaan Puri

Well, let me just put it this way, Austin. Have you ever watched back a video of yourself speaking publicly in order to take notes on how you did? No? It's a super uncomfortable feeling, but it's an obvious thing to do if you want to get better. Yeah, right? I just had that moment where I was like, "Oh, I'm saying I want to get better at this," but I've never done any of the obvious things you would do. I've never gone and watched myself and asked, "What the hell am I doing with my hands? Why am I fidgeting so much?" Oh man, I keep saying "um" at the start of these sentences. I should just say the sentence! But I had to go review the game film. Then the second thing was, I had to take it seriously. Did I just walk up there unprepared and not warmed up, or did I warm up and prepare? That added to the game. The third thing is, "Who's the best at this?" I went to a Tony Robbins event, and I was like, "This guy's the best public speaker I've ever seen." Even if I don't listen to any of his content, if I just literally listen to the rhythm of his words, the gestures, and the hooks—how he's getting everyone's attention—that's a master class right there. So, that's how I started stacking up some of these things. I don't consider myself a good public speaker because I don't do a lot of speeches or anything like that anymore, but it's definitely something I tried to build up at one time. It culminated in an epic wedding speech. I gotta say, the best speech I ever gave was at my wedding—unrehearsed, off the dome. It was, I don't know, the perfect speech. I just retired from the game right there.

Austin Rief

at your own wedding

Shaan Puri

at my own wedding yeah

Sam Parr

Is there anything else you want to talk about, Austin? That's pretty cool. You should come on more, by the way. We should talk about newsletter stuff because you're like the only person, or us three are some of the very few people, that I actually want to ask for newsletter advice from. And like, yeah.

Austin Rief

I'm trying to get out of the **newsletter guy** branding, but they just keep bringing me on to be the **newsletter guy**.

Sam Parr

Dude, but it's... I'm not. It is so fun! It's a love-hate relationship. They're really fun to do, but also, they're painful and whatever.

Austin Rief

yeah no I I think that's it I think we we cover most of it

Shaan Puri

What do you think you're going to be doing, like, 10 years from now? Do you think you'll be running businesses, or are you going to be just investing? Or so?

Sam Parr

or maybe business or something like that or what

Austin Rief

So, to me, it's a barbell. I either want to have some passive income and work 20 to 25 hours a week, more casually, or I want to go all in. But if I go all in, it's got to be huge, right? The potential has to be multiple billions. I don't think I'm going to want to run a business where it's like, "It's nice," and it's like a double. If I win, it's a double. I don't want doubles. I either want a home run or I want to sit in the dugout and just be part of the peanut gallery. I don't want to play in that middle game.

Sam Parr

I'm going to look into the future and tell you, it's probably not going to be you sitting in the dugout. That is not going to be it. I think maybe you will for a couple of years, but if I have to make a bet, and I would put my money where my mouth is, it's not going to be that. That's not what you're going to do.

Austin Rief

we'll see

Sam Parr

well thanks for coming on dude this is awesome

Austin Rief

yeah thanks for having me we'll see it again soon