Austin Rief
Austin Rief is, by Sam Parr’s assessment, “probably the smartest business person I’ve ever met.” That’s a notable claim from someone who has spent years in rooms with billionaires.
What Sam means is something specific. Austin approaches every business problem with a combination that is genuinely rare: deep emotional investment in getting things right, paired with an almost surgical ability to remove emotion from tactical decisions. He could care intensely about a company and still give ruthlessly clear advice about what it needed to do.
Starting as a Sophomore
Austin was a sophomore at the University of Michigan when alex-lieberman started the newsletter that would become morning-brew. Alex was a senior. The original version was a PDF called Market Corner, emailed to a student listserv.
Austin joined as a reader. Then as a co-founder. He and Alex sat together every night doing the math:
“Newsletter subscribers grow five to ten percent a month, CPMs stay flat, and over time you can get to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of revenue a month. It was really that simple.”
The advantage they had that Sam Parr did not: they were still in school. That gave them 18 months to two years of what Austin called “fake runway” — time to build without the pressure of revenue. No one was threatening to shut them down.
Building Like Underdogs
Austin and Alex approached Morning Brew with the mentality of people who had nothing to lose. They printed out Morning Brew, Axios, The Hustle, and The Skimm every morning. With paper and pen, they circled what they liked and crossed out what they didn’t. Alex was not gentle with their own writers.
Their core values: ownership mentality and underdog mentality. Austin described how it worked in practice:
“We came into work every day a group of misfits who had no idea what they were doing in media, and we acted like underdogs. You see how underdogs show up in March Madness — they’re loose. They don’t have this weight on their shoulders. Every day we came in like, screw it, we are going to kick the ass of all these legacy media companies who raised a hundred million dollars. And what they did was burn it and flush it down the toilet.”
At 22 years old, Austin was tracking cash flow daily to ensure payroll would clear. He ran to a JP Morgan branch at 4:55 PM on December 27th — two minutes before close — because he hadn’t realized that when New Year’s falls on a holiday, payroll goes out early.
The Paid Acquisition Insight
In 2018, Austin was spending every dollar Morning Brew could generate on Facebook ads. Some days they were growing 20,000 subscribers. He tracked daily cash flow to figure out how much more he could safely spend.
His singular regret from that period: he couldn’t find more money to put into ads. The flywheel was spinning and he wanted to pour more fuel on it.
This was a meaningful difference from sam-parr’s approach at The Hustle. Sam held back on ad spend; Austin kept going. By the end of 2018, Morning Brew was spending roughly $500,000 a month on Facebook ads. The Hustle was spending a fraction of that. Morning Brew ended the year with one million subscribers. The Hustle ended with around 200,000.
“By the time we were actually paying for subscribers, we knew we had a great product. We knew how long subscribers were staying. And we knew how to work within scarcity — finding ways to grow without money. That muscle, if you skip over it, is a really bad thing.”
The Traction Moment
2019 was the year Austin nearly had a falling-out with Alex over a business book. An investor had told Austin to read Traction. Austin read it overnight and sent Alex a Slack message: “Dude, you need to read this book yesterday, and this is what we’re going to do.”
Alex didn’t read it for a few days. Austin sent a second message. And for the first time, Austin was genuinely pissed at his co-founder. It was the moment Alex recognized that Austin had stepped into the real CEO role — not in title, but in what he was actually doing.
The adoption of EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) from that book became Morning Brew’s operational backbone. The company went from being mired in the weeds to having a system for prioritizing.
“A slide in our investor deck showing our one-year plan took us nine years to execute. We tried everything on that slide and most things did not work. It took nine years to accomplish our one-year plan.”
Selling to Axel Springer
Morning Brew sold to Axel Springer in 2020, after an 11-month process that Austin described as an emotional rollercoaster. The deal process started in November 2019. First terms came in January or February. Then COVID hit in March — three weeks of uncertainty where Austin and Alex weren’t sure the company would survive.
Then the business ripped. Ad revenue came back. Subscriptions climbed. They went from “we don’t know if we have a company” to “are we even being priced appropriately?”
They signed anyway. Partly because they were scared. They had shopped the company to every traditional media outlet — Hearst, the New York Times, financial companies like Fidelity — and received nothing in writing from anyone else. Axel Springer was the only offer.
By 2021: $46 million in revenue, $10 million profit. By 2022: $70 million in revenue.
What Austin Teaches About Newsletters
Asked what newsletter founders get wrong today, Austin’s answer is immediate: they see the economics from 2017 and think those economics still exist.
The value of a subscriber has dropped because there are so many newsletters now. The real mistake is chasing growth hacks and B-minus content to build a large list, then being shocked when the ad rates don’t reflect the subscriber count. Content has to come first. Engagement has to come first.
“People aren’t focusing on the content. It’s all about the content. That’d be like selling a SaaS product where the code doesn’t work that well. You have to focus on the content first. Everything else follows.”