Feeling Unskilled, Curing Cancer, and Going All-In on Morning Brew

Alex: What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founder’s Journal. I'm your host, Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Founder’s Journal typically is where I act as your startup sherpa, finding the best content on the internet and then summarizing it, synthesizing it, and sharing the biggest lessons so that you can apply them to whatever you are building. But for whatever reason, the last few days, my energy has been pulling me more towards the OG Founder’s Journal format where I just riff about the biggest and most important things I'm thinking about in my life and my work right now. So we're gonna just keep this ball rolling and see what you think about it. Feel free to let me know at alex@morningbrew.com. Today I am gonna be talking about everything from why my content has felt shitty lately to my experience doing a full body MRI to scan for cancer to my decision to go all in on Morning Brew, how I'm finding joy in things outside of work, and some learnings from a podcast between Shaan Puri and David Perell. So let's hop into it. 

So something I wanna make very clear is that no matter how long you are a content creator for, no matter how much your motivation for creating content is driven by intrinsics, like I talked about last episode, it is always going to feel shitty when you feel like your content is not performing well. I do not care what people say that they don't focus on impressions, focus on engagement. That is bullshit. Everyone who creates content on the internet wants more people to see their content, otherwise they would just be creating content anonymously, pseudonymously, or not publishing it at all. And also, as you continue to create content and grow as a creator, you will go through ebbs and flows of high engagement content, low engagement content, feeling energized about your content, feeling burnt out from your content. Like this is all part of the natural cycle of putting content online, but it doesn't feel, I would say, any less shitty when you're in kind of the downswing of a cycle. 

So just to share my perspective, recently on Twitter, everything I've posted has seemingly fell flat. I have felt maybe a little bit insecure about, am I losing my content chops or was I even a good storyteller in the first place? At the same time, there are kind of regular people I follow in my feed who have a similar number of followers to me. So I think I have like 250,000 followers on Twitter. There are people that I follow who have, let's call it somewhere between 250,000 to 300,000. And seemingly every time I see their content, it's popping off. It feels like they have super high engagement rates that they've built, super loyal audiences. Whether or not all of that is true, this is the story that I've created. And so I just wanna kind of share where I'm at, because I think it's really important for people who are looking to be content creators or build audience online or really do anything where they worry that they're the only one that is kind of searching for external validation and feels shitty if they don't get it, that it is not just a you thing. Everyone feels this. And I would say this kind of malaise that I'm feeling right now around kind of my content and my storytelling is very real and I'm just trying to do my best to work myself out of it. And I would say the way I'm approaching working myself out of it is really just going back to one, not just creating content for the sake of creating content. So if I don't have an idea, don't force putting content into the world just because I feel like I have to, you know, take as many at bats as possible. And two, really trying to think about what is content that I would genuinely enjoy creating. Because I do believe if I feel a lot of energy towards an idea, I will create better content. So that is where I'm at as it relates to at least creating text content online right now. And I hope it resonates with you, not just in the content creation game, but just in anything where you feel like you're going through a slump. It is so natural. And guess what? It will continue to happen throughout your career, and how you react to it is the most important part. 

Second thing, so I'm actually gonna be going live with a new YouTube video in a few days, I believe, about my experience interviewing a founder who I think if they are right about what they're building and they succeed, they can change the world. The founder, his name is Emi Gal, he runs a business called Ezra. Ezra is a company that offers full body MRI scans for $1,300 is the 60 minute scan. They also offer a flash MRI, which I think is 30 minutes for less money. And their whole thesis is the best way to fight cancer and you know, contribute to curing cancer, is through early detection. Basically their whole approach is when cancer is caught in stage one or stage two, the survival rate is 80%. When cancer is caught in stage three or stage four, the survival rate is 20%. So if annual full body MRIs for cancer in your body can be done on an annual basis, then the odds you catch cancer in stage one or two is way higher. That is their whole thesis. And so I just wanna share a few of my big learnings from talking to Emi because I thought it was an amazing conversation. 

First of all, something that I realized after talking to Emi is there's like two sides of me as an entrepreneur. There's the side of me that wants to keep like spinning up businesses because I wanna keep sharpening my toolkit as an entrepreneur and just like learn how to be a better builder. And also it feels good to create cash-flowing businesses as quickly as possible. Like whoever says they're not motivated by money at all in building business is also lying. Like making money with businesses feels good, and I'm kind of addicted to that feeling, in a way. On the other side, there's a part of me that says, Alex, you're in such a fortunate position that you know, you sold your first company young, you're 30 years old, you have so much time to make an impact. And when I talk to founders like Emi from Ezra, there is a part of me that does want to kind of like constantly have my nose to the ground and like be going deep in different really big societal problems until there's one that I feel very called to and see if there's a way that I can have a large impact.

So I'd say like there's this barbell feeling I have as an entrepreneur where on one side I wanna keep just spinning up businesses, sharpening my tools, making money, and then there's the other one, which is maybe at some point in the future if I find the right idea, the right problem, and I have the right level of energy around it, maybe I do want to take a big swing to actually have a large impact on society and do something that is bigger than just myself. So that's the first thing. 

The second thing is the really cool part about Emi is Emi is a second time founder. He founded an ad tech company, I can't remember what year it was. He sold it for life-changing money to Teads, which is a large advertising company. And right after selling it to Teads, he started Ezra. And the reason he started Ezra is first of all, he is at high risk for skin cancer because supposedly he has a lot of moles and freckles on his body, so he has higher odds of developing skin cancer. Second, he lost his mom to cancer, specifically because her cancer was caught late stage. And I think there's a few really important takeaways we can take from Emi's story. First of all, the more you feel a personal connection to a problem, I believe the better you are going to be at solving that problem. Because I believe you'll always have this like fire burning under your ass for a longer period of time. Like I just think it's such a long-term propellant if you feel a personal connection to a problem.

The second thing is, the amazing part about Emi is he is not a doctor. He has no medical experience, he's never built a healthcare company before. And right now he's one of the leaders in full body MRIs leveraging AI to fight cancer. And so I think for me it was an amazing reminder, because I've thought before about maybe I should build a healthcare company because there are certain things that I'm really passionate about figuring out how to solve. One is anxiety, one is OCD, given my own personal experience. And the third is strokes and stroke detection, stroke prevention, et cetera. Because my dad passed away from a stroke very young. And if there were better ways to detect warning signs years in advance, potentially things could have gone differently.

And I think I've always basically had those ideas and been like, no, but Alex, you can't build this business, like you do not have any qualifications to build this business. You have no medical experience. Like there are other founders who are way more well-suited to build a healthcare or mental health company than you. And I think what Emi has reminded me is actually his biggest asset is being naive to this industry and coming in with clear eyes, because if he was a doctor, he probably wouldn't have even started with full body MRIs in the first place because a lot of the medical community frowns upon full body MRIs because there's fears of false positives. It's also, historically they've been super expensive. So I think a 60 minute full body MRI five years ago would've been like $10,000. But because he didn't have these preconceived notions of how things are done in healthcare, he kind of thought from first principles about what's the best way to cure cancer? The best way to cure cancer is to find cancer early. What's the best way to find cancer early? It's through MRIs, but MRIs are really expensive. How do I make them less expensive? And so I think being naive to an industry is actually a huge advantage. And he gave me reassurance that I could enter an industry that I am quote unquote “unqualified” to enter. 

The other big learning from this conversation I had with Emi is that their business uses AI and the way it uses AI, my understanding is the reason full body MRIs are so expensive is because when they take an image of your body, it is very noisy. There's a lot of noise. And so to remove noise in an MRI, the machine has to go over your body over and over and over. Imagine if it was like, you have a scanner that's scanning a piece of paper in your printer and in order to get exactly what's on whatever you're scanning, imagine if the printer had to scan like 50 times, right? It would take a while, there would be a lot of effort from the printer, et cetera. And so the reason that MRIs cost so much is because they take so long to scan. And so what he basically said is, how can we leverage AI such that an MRI only has to do, say, a fraction of the passes over a body to get as high quality of an image? And so that's what he's done. And so they've gotten an MRI, a full body MRI, down to 60 minutes, one that doesn't include your spine down to 30 minutes. And his ultimate goal is, how do we get an MRI that's 15 to 30 minutes and only costs $500? And so actually in a lot of ways this feels like the one of the more applicable uses of AI, and it's refreshing to hear because again, we're living in what feels like peak AI right now. It's probably not peak, it's probably gonna continue for the next several years. But there's so many times where I hear about a company leveraging AI and it doesn't actually make sense to me how in practice AI is being used, like functionally what's happening. And it was really refreshing to hear him explain how it's being used. And it made me wonder, is it that a lot of companies aren't actually using ai? Is it that a lot of founders and entrepreneurs don't actually understand how the technology works? Or is it that Emi is just really good at dumbing down what is a very complex technology into words that anyone off the street can understand? And so I really respected that about our conversation. 

Okay, so I just told you about how this Ezra video is a YouTube video that's coming out in a few days, but I actually just had a YouTube video come out yesterday and I did a kind of like vlog style. I took a page out of the Casey Neistat book, if any of you are familiar with Casey. He's like an OG YouTuber, I think he's one of the best storytellers in the world, and he always does his videos vlog style, like he tells his stories kind of just in the daily flow of his life. And so with help from the Morning Brew team, I did that with my most recent YouTube video, which you can check out on the Founder’s Journal channel. But I just want to synthesize for you kind of what the crux of this episode was. Basically, while I was commuting from my apartment in Hoboken to Morning Brew's office, I told the story of how I decided to go all in on Morning Brew and kind of what this process was like. And the long story short is when I tell the story of going all in on Morning Brew, I think I make it sound very clean and clear and like it was like an easy decision. And I think something that is really important for people to understand as they think about taking any sort of quote unquote “leap of faith” into building something is it never feels clear. It never feels clean, it always feels messy. And when you make the decision, whether it's to start a business, whether it's to go all in on a business, whether it's to quit your job, you never know in that moment if you're making the right decision; you never have full clarity. And so if you wait to find full clarity, it'll likely be too late because you'll never get there. 

And so, you know, just to kind of summarize the process, it took me basically eight months of soul searching while I was working at Morgan Stanley to decide to ultimately go full-time on Morning Brew. And there were basically three tools that I used to make the decision easier over those eight months. Again, not to know that I was making the right decision, but to make it easier and also make the decision feel like it wasn't a leap of faith, but it was actually like a calculated risk that I was taking. So the first way that I thought about this decision is, it's kind of similar to Tim Ferriss has this thing called the fear setting exercise. And so I went through my own version of fear setting without knowing about the Tim Ferriss process. Basically I asked myself the question, what if this fails? So what if I go full-time on Morning Brew, I quit my finance job at Morgan Stanley, which is where I was working after school for a year, and then I have to figure out what's next, what would happen then?

And so I played out the scenarios. I said, if I go all in on Morning Brew, the odds are that the business fails in six months because most startups fail. And then I said, maybe I could go back to Morgan Stanley because this experience as an entrepreneur could maybe make me a better trader. And then I was like, but let's say I'm wrong about that. Maybe I could apply to business school because starting a media company and growing a newsletter, like doing something entrepreneurial generally is looked favorably by business schools. And then I was like, but let's say I don't get into business school. Then I was like, oh, maybe I've made a lot of connections in the New York City startup scene and I can either go start another startup or join an existing startup. And I was like, but let's say I can't figure that out. Then I was like, maybe I can just apply to a job like normal people do when they apply to nine to five jobs.

And I got four or five layers deep with these different options. And what I said to myself is, if I can't figure something out after Morning Brew hypothetically fails, it actually isn't the fault of Morning Brew or going all in on Morning Brew. It's Alex Lieberman's fault for not keeping options open and not building the right relationships or network that I could leverage should anything happen. So that's the first way I thought about it. 

The second way I thought about it was through the lens of regret, which I believe Jeff Bezos has this framework called the regret minimization framework. And I basically did that without knowing Jeff's framework. What I said to myself is, what would I regret more? Would I more regret staying at Morgan Stanley and watching someone else go all in on building their version of Morning Brew and succeeding? Or would I more regret quitting Morgan Stanley, going all in on Morning Brew, Morning Brew fails, and then I have to find a new job? And the short answer is, I would far more regret the first one because I was far more energized about Morning Brew. I had this vision to build an exciting business media company. I had the opportunity to have freedom and build something myself. And so through the lens of regret, it's like I would far more regret watching someone else build what my dream was. And so that was kind of like another thing that shifted my brain, the scale of my brain towards Morning Brew and away from Morgan Stanley. 

And then the final way I thought about this was through the lens of my dad. So some of you already know this, but for those who are new listeners, the long story very short, is that my dad passed away when I was a junior in college. He passed away from a stroke that happened suddenly. He was 46 years old. And you know, the kind of the scary similarities around my dad and my path is that my dad had traded mortgage-backed securities for Citigroup for 20 years before this happened. My job at Morgan Stanley, my first job outta school, was to trade mortgage-backed securities, the same product my dad had traded. And so I started getting this feeling of deja vu, this fear that I was literally just starting on this path to have the same exact thing happen to me that had happened to my dad. You know, maybe if I was really enjoying my job at Morgan Stanley, I would've thought about things differently because it would've brought me joy. But I was not enjoying my time at Morgan Stanley. I was really enjoying the three hours a day I was spending on Morning Brew after work each day. And so I asked myself the question, if I was on my deathbed tomorrow, what would I feel better about saying I had been spending my time doing—working in finance, in sales and trading, or building this business that I started in college and seeing if it could succeed? And the answer was so glaringly obvious that after I thought through it in that way and a few other things happened, like my co-founder Austin and I having a very clear discussion about, are we going to go all go all in or not? And also knowing if we thought we would be able to make money on the business so that we could support ourselves living in New York City. Like kind of once those last few checkboxes were checked, that's when I decided to go all in. 

So I went all in September of 2016. I'd been working in finance for a year before making the switch; obviously hindsight's 20/20 and it was the exact right decision and it completely changed my life. But I just wanna finish this point by saying that you never know if it is the right decision at the time, and it is the absolute norm for it to feel messy and uncomfortable and anxiety provoking. And that is exactly how I felt. So if you have any decision like that happening in the future, just remember this story and remember this is exactly how I felt seven or eight years ago. 

Okay, we're close to 20 minutes and I want to make sure that I give you back your day. So we're gonna just talk about one more thing here, which is not work related, but I think it is such an important balance to work. Something that I've realized after selling Morning Brew and just seeing what creates energy for me is it is so important to find joy and fulfillment in things outside of work. And I think there's two reasons. One is because the odds are that work is not gonna be the only things that bring you happiness. So if you're just spending your time on work, it means you're probably forgoing hobbies or interest in life that would give you as much joy, which means you're just stripping yourself of potential happiness. But also I think, you know, something I've talked about in the past is that it's always hard to know when you're building business, how much of your motivation and interest in business is driven by extrinsics, like social status or money and power, versus how much is driven by like love for the journey.

And I think a really good reference point to kind of compare your excitement and enjoyment with work to is things that are not work related. Things that do not make you money, do not create status for you, because those things you only do because they drive intrinsic joy. And so then you have a comparison of something that is not being done for money or ego versus something that could be done for money or ego. How does your energy compare with these two? And so just an example for me is I've taken up some hobbies. I would say the three that have brought me the most joy recently are Legos. I picked up Lego building during the pandemic and I still probably build a set once every other month. I find so much joy in it, I really find it meditative. It's the one activity where I don't procrastinate. I never check my phone when I'm building Legos, and everything else in life, I'll check my phone every like 15 minutes just kind of out of habit. The second thing is piano. I'm learning piano. It's both incredibly frustrating but also incredibly rewarding. So that's been awesome. 

But the one I wanna tell you about right now is interior design. My wife and I recently moved into a new apartment in Hoboken and I have gotten so much joy from thinking about, how are we gonna fill our space? How are we gonna make this space look really nice and sophisticated but not stuffy? And what are certain design principles that I can leverage? Like even a small one that I learned yesterday is like the value of layering, right? Almost in fashion when they tell you good outfits are well layered outfits, I think a similar approach applies to interior design. And so it's been a ton of fun to just kind of like surrender to the creative outlet that is designing our apartment. And again, there's no benefit to me other than just my wife and I enjoying our space. And so I would just say that it is so important, no matter how much you work, to find at least one thing outside of work that you can kind of surrender to because it will be the best reference point for you as you think about your career and your work, whether you're doing something that actually drives fulfillment for you intrinsically versus just extrinsically.

And so I'm gonna stop there. I gotta say, doing these episodes like this really gives me a ton of energy. I literally just write down four bullets of the things that I'm thinking most about in my life. Hopefully they're valuable to you. Hopefully it feels like you and I are just like sitting in your car or your home right now when we're having a conversation. And I hope there's at least one nugget that you got from this episode that you can apply to your own life and to building your own company. With that, let me know what you think about this episode. This is like OG Founder’s Journal style, but if you like it, I would love to bring it back. Shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com and otherwise, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. I never take it for granted, and I will catch you next episode.