YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Lieberman

lines on the record: 63
first: 2022-03-20
most recent: 2022-03-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, definitely check out imposters. I think y'all will really enjoy the podcast on any of the podcast players where you listen to audio podcasts. And then you can follow me on Twitter at Business Barista. And really appreciate you for having me on the show again. Thanks so much.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I am loving. And the reason I would say that, and I would repeat it over and over for five minutes, is I was expecting to feel like super energized after just saying that. No, but my belief is if you do that for long enough, you subconsciously start to believe it. And it changes biologically how you feel about yourself. I really do believe that because I just think stories at the end of the day, like language and stories have such a biological impact on us, both external stories as well as the stories we tell ourselves.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ourselves dictate our behaviors for our entire lives. Like literally when I'm spending my time on today, the work that I do, what you're spending your time on with your startup, with this podcast, it is dictated by deeply ingrained stories that were formed earlier in your life, whether you're conscious of them or you're not. And so once you understand the power of story, you also understand the power it has if you can trick your brain into new stories. And so like, you know, I didn't say this before in my mental health stack, and it's because I haven't done it recently. And, you know, bad Alex, I need to start doing it again. I used to like every, and this sounds crazy, but every day in the shower do like loving kindness mantras where I would literally say, you know, I am beautiful, I am strong, I am focused.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question because I've thought a lot about this and the reason is a lot of people have far more confidence in me and my abilities than I have in myself, right? If you were to ask me, Alex, do you feel successful? Alex, do you feel like you are really good at the things that you do? I'd kind of brush it off. I'd say, no, I'm fine in terms of success, in terms of my abilities. Yeah, there are a few things I'm good at, but there's a whole lot that I'm not good at, right? It's so interesting. I optimistically look at everything in the world, but when I look internally, I look at what's wrong, right? So I think to the point of what Kanye is doing without judgment of his own practice, I think this idea of loving kindness, this idea of manifestation, which people I think give a lot of shit to, actually works. And the reason I think it works is at the end of the day, the stories that we tell”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mental challenges that were created by acute challenges in life, like someone who lost their child or someone who came from poverty, right? They didn't necessarily have a diagnosable mental disorder, but they absolutely had mental struggle. And so my definition of mental health is more like mental fitness, which is what are the tools all of us use to think clearly about this world and navigate struggles mentally.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's almost like basically a bad, a false shield, a false sense of protection for people who don't believe they're anxious to never have the motivation or the need, the quote unquote need to develop these tools. And I think, unfortunately, it doesn't give enough power that our brains have over all of us. And so the way I think about defining mental health, and as you'll see this with imposters, not every person that I have on the show is going to be someone that had anxiety, depression,”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, I think this really hits at the heart of what is mental health because some would say that mental health is basically the clinical disorders per the DSM, the main mental health basically encyclopedia or textbook. The way I think about mental health is like everyone lies on a spectrum of mental health. And also people experience mental health, I would say chronically and also mental health acutely based on situations in life. The reason I say that is I believe the art, like the suggestion that everyone lives on the spectrum also makes it that much more important that everyone builds their toolkit because at some point even if people don't have say generalized anxiety disorder, I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of people on this planet at some point in their life are going to feel intense anxiety.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I am experiencing heightened anxiety, those are things that lowers the peaks. Basically, what is the toolkit that allows me to react to things happening? And so that is my mental health stack. And it's different for everyone. But I guess the secret here is I would say 90% of it for me is those first three things that I named. Again, super boring and simple, but I just find has the biggest impact on my mental fitness.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I have not taken care of one of these things for more than three days, my baseline moves from what I would argue is typically a three or four to a six or seven. It's like that big of an impact. And of course, I haven't given up drinking, but on days that I drink, the next day as a function of probably the alcohol itself as a depressant slash me not getting as good of sleep, baseline always higher. The other things that I do, so I have a therapist, I have an executive coach, I meditate. And the fourth is like me educating myself. So reading books like Buddhist texts, reading people like Pemma, reading J Shetty's Think Like a Monk, reading Ryan Holidays, Daily Stoic, all of these things to give myself the mental tools and the way I think about those is those are the things.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And bring that down or bring it up if it's not taking care of the right way. And then there are things that help basically lower the fluctuations. And so, for example, kind of the trio of self-care things that I do. So exercise, sleep, and diet.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of anxiety would hit me, and I would feel like the room was closing in on me. Like everyone was focused on me in that moment. I would have to leave the room. I would literally have to go walk outside because I felt like I was going to break down. I hope it just paints a picture, especially for people that have not experienced panic attacks or anxiety to the point where it can be debilitating that at times it was absolutely my full-time job overrunning morning brew. That's the first thing. Second, as it relates to my mental health stack, basically the way I think about it is I think of my mental health on a spectrum from like one, it's called like perfect calm, 10 being the worst anxiety that I've ever experienced in my life. And to me, there are a group of things on my mental health stack that take my base level steady state anxiety.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a time in 2018 when I had my first panic attack, I had a sleep induced panic attack. Basically, it's normal for people to either when they first fall asleep to like kick their foot and kind of like jolt theirself up or have saliva in their mouth from me. I literally choked on my saliva where it normally wouldn't do anything. But because I was in a certain headspace, I basically told myself, I'm not breathing correctly. And when you get the thought that you're not breathing correctly, it's over. Like then you start not breathing correctly. And then you're asking yourself, are you breathing correctly? And so basically for two or three hours, my mom on speakerphone had to like talk me off the ledge of like, you're going to be okay. You're not going to pass out. But for the next call month before seeing a psychiatrist ending up getting prescribed for medication, I had panic attacks every day. And so there were times when I was in the office and I would just be sitting in a meeting and I wouldn't be talking. And then all of a sudden, this like.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, and just to quickly react to what you're saying, managing your mental health, especially when it's in a challenging place, is a full-time job. There were absolutely times as CEO of Morning Brew that I did not do my job effectively because I was literally just trying to survive isn't the right word, but like get through the day.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's why I spend so much time on is because I realize no matter what happens, whether I have a lot of money or I don't, my perception of everything that occurs in my life. Whether I perceive that as good or bad is based on the clarity of my thinking, and to think clearly, you need the tools to navigate that, especially at times when it's really hard to think clearly.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found the profound effect that me talking about it has had on people, just even talking about imposters, the reactions to this show, about people feeling like they were heard for the first time in their life, about struggles they've endured for decades. It makes me feel more purposeful than anything else I've ever done in my life. And then the other piece, going back to the money part, is, you know, when I realized that selling the company and having the proceeds from the exit did zero to impact my happiness, I think it acutely focused me on one very simple truth, which is that the way that I and we all perceive the world is truly the most powerful thing in a good way or a bad way. And so the best investment I can make in myself is giving myself the tools to see the world clearly.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About my health. And I was worried as someone who exercised a decent amount that one day I'd be running on the treadmill and my heart would just give out and I'd be one of those people who died really young from their heart stopping. And so what would happen is I would spend a lot of days where I'd just be so fearful of working out. I would have the fear of dying each time I worked out. And I would ask myself, what can I control here? What can I control? And what I could control these scenarios was pushing myself to be uncomfortable and work out every day. And for the person who's not experiencing this, right? It sounds kind of crazy because most people aren't worrying about their heart popping while they're running. But that was a thing for me. And what I controlled was the thing I could control was the action of facing that fear. And so, you know, to bring it back to mental health, I've been aware of my anxiety in OCD for a long time. The reason I think I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about it and helping people with it is”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First 30, Ross basically talking through this. The remainder was like we were good friends. And I give that example. And the long story short is I can very confidently say that I did not steal this person's ideas, but it didn't matter what I thought. The whole thing was I could control the information that I gave them. And I think for a large part of my life, the things that I was anxious about were things that I couldn't control. So I'll give you an example. My whole life, I've had OCD. It's hereditary. My dad had OCD. For him, it manifested in the form of like clean OCD. The guy was pureling his hands everywhere. You know, he passed when I was a junior in college, but we always joke now like COVID would have been the worst thing. He would have been a head case during this. But for me, one of the ways it manifested was in different forms. One of the forms was like health OCD, where after my dad passed away, I was obsessed.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like hmm, are they talking about me? And so in that moment, I got really anxious about it, right? Because the last thing I would ever want to be considered or one of the last things is like an idea stealer. And so what I couldn't control in that scenario was how they were feeling. What I could control is taking the impetus to reach out to that person rather than through the grapefund, communicate with them. So I sent them a message and I said, hey, is this tweet about me? And they said, yes, period. And they explained why they thought I had copied their idea. And I said to them, look, I understand what you're saying. And I understand why you're concerned about this. If you'd be open to it, I would love to explain to you all the facts from my side. And that's all I can do. I can't control how you feel about this, but what I can control is giving you all the information so you can decide what you think happened. So ask them for their number, got on a phone, call basically talk for the next 45 minutes.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, there's so much here. But to comment for a second on control, the reason I think the idea of control is so profound is because everything that gives us anxiety or causes fear is based on something out of our control, right? And so if you think about if you mentally shift every day, if you focused your attention on the stuff that you could actually control, control what you can control, you very quickly see how things kind of like noise falls to the wayside, right? I'll just give you a random example. There was someone who had posted or had tweeted basically saying that there was a founder with a big audience on Twitter who copied my idea. What should I do? And I saw this and this person I had been DMing with recently.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's really interesting. And I think the reason that's such a powerful thought is the idea of luck, I think the reason it's an uncomfortable idea is like we as human beings like being in control. And when you're dealing with luck, it purports that you're no longer in control. Something happened that was out of your control. What I find fascinating, I don't know if this is what Jim was thinking about when writing about return on luck, is that the idea of return on luck to me puts lock back in control. basically saying something happened as a function of something you couldn't control, but it's what you control, like what you do after the fact because of you make a decision based on what you can control. And that really shows your abilities beyond luck. It shows how you leverage skill in the face of luck.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone says create more lux surface area. I think creating luxurify is really just saying where do you have a hand or where can you leverage skill to make luck occur more frequently because you're just giving yourself more shots at luck? That's how I describe controlled luck. Uncontrolled luck is you haven't done anything to your surface area. You're just lucky.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No hand in that. Controlled luck is what I would call meeting Austin. The skill or the say that I had in this is that I made the decision when I was my first semester senior year at Michigan that rather than spending nine hours a day playing FIFA, I was going to spend three hours a day playing FIFA and the other period of time writing this newsletter because I saw a problem and I also wanted to keep myself sharp around business. I had I would say I'd have handed it that I reached out to people saying I'm looking for help on this newsletter. Let me know if you're willing to help me. The luck is the fact that Austin decided to reach out to me. He decided to say that he wanted to get involved and that I brought him on as kind of this co-founder for a hobby and he ended up being the perfect partner for a very significant business. So that's where I think”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the first time I'm saying this, but I think the way that I think about it is luck absolutely exists. And I think in my mind, there's two types of luck. There is controlled luck and uncontrolled luck, meaning skill that is disguised as luck, right? Like you actually had a hand in the luck that occurred versus luck that you had no hand in. So I'll give you an example of both. Uncontrolled luck, luck that I had no hand in would be me being born as a white man in a privileged neighborhood in New Jersey being able to quit my job from Morgan Stanley because I had the privilege of having a parent who would cover my rent for six to 12 months when I try to start my business. And so when people say I took a big risk, I remind them of exactly how things went down and how the risk I took was so much less than many other people in this country. That is what I call uncontrolled luck.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a combination. I'd be lying if I said I reviewed every single decision journal that I've written. The act of writing it not only super helpful for me, but I send it to other people to have them poke holes in it. But for some of these, I am adding into my calendar six months from now a calendar invite with an attachment to the memo or when I end up hearing about one of my portfolio companies raising another round, I'll just have the natural trigger in my mind of looking back on the memo and seeing how my thesis is playing out and whether it's a really strong raise or not a strong raise. I basically get to look back and say, was my decision-making sound here or is the result that is happening right now based off of luck versus skill?”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things. And the third is that I force myself every time I approach a decision around an investment, I write an investment memo for myself. Basically, the eight Alex's in my brain are just the investment committee for me. And I always ask the same questions. And part of the questions, or one of the questions I ask is basically if it hits the fan six to 12 months from now, why did it hit the fan? And I should never leave that blank. And the other thing I do is I write down what my emotional state is when I've made that decision. And I basically got this decision journaling framework from Shane Parrish from Farnham Street. And it just helped me basically all these exercises are what I would say is to necessarily strip yourself of excitement and optimism for a brief period of time to think clearly.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One is I never make an investment decision anymore while I'm talking to the founder. I always create a separation of at least 24 hours. It's kind of like the Seinfeld rule that Tim Ferris talked about with Seinfeld, where Seinfeld, you know, the way he thought about the rule was he would write new jokes and you feel really excited about those jokes. And he would never show them to anyone else for 24 hours because he didn't want people to ruin the feeling of excitement that he had. But I used it in the same way, used time to separate emotion and action. The second is, and I actually heard my co-founder Austin talk about this, which is why I started doing it, is forcing founders to show memos, like to show past investment memos they've sent or answer questions over email. Because to me, what that strips people of is like salesmanship, which is an incredibly valuable skill, but I think it can be limiting from an investor's perspective because you can be wooed by the wrong.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's trade offs to that, right? The trade off is maybe you're a little bit too reactive because you don't see cracks when they start forming. Maybe it gets you to not ask if something should be done differently enough. On the flip side, there's the other brain, which I would call the bomb-sniffing dog of business, which is the brain that is naturally saying, what's wrong? Not inherently bad, either of them, but there are trade-offs. And so what is the trade-off with a bomb sniffing dog? Well, you can come off as pessimistic. You can come off as not seeing possibility. You could cut things off too early because you only see the negatives. For the first, the eternal optimist, again, it could prevent you from being proactively intellectually rigorous. And so I think understanding where you live on the spectrum of bomb sniffing dog to eternal optimist is really important. I sit closer to eternal optimists. And so to your point, in the beginning, as I was getting dex,”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it is really, really hard. I think also, to your point, it really depends on the stage you're investing in, the way that you think about it, you know, whether you're investing pre-C and seed or let's call it Series A and beyond, how much you're thinking basically about like the intangibles and kind of like the traits of the founding team versus how much you're actually looking at the financials of the business, the growth in terms of whether it's users, customers or revenue. And so for me, just to give context, like I focused generally on pre-seed and seed. And I struggled exactly with what you're talking about because my natural way of, I think there's two very different brains, especially building businesses. I would say one, I'll call it the eternal optimist, which is really the person who just always sees possibility what's possible. And it's a great way of being.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is. And I think also, like, again, people look at entrepreneurs, and I think they assume they're super risk-loving. And I would actually say I'm not a super risk-loving person. There are people in the startup space that I know basically have 95% of their net worth tied up in crypto right now. Even the idea of like raising tens of millions of dollars from VCs, like that even makes me uncomfortable. Because I like the idea of running cash flowing profitable businesses that you can then reinvest in yourself, even if it means you have to grow a little bit slower, but you can sleep at night because you're not hemorrhaging cash. And so I always say that because like I think there's a spectrum of risk tolerance for entrepreneurs. And I would say I say closer to risk mitigating than risk loving. And I think that shows also in how I invest. It's not like I have all my money sitting in treasuries or munis.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“75% of my portfolio, actually 70% is basically just index funds in the S&P. My view is just take the base that I've built up and literally don't look at it for 50 years. That is my view. And then the other 30% is to hopefully create some alpha in the portfolio. So, you know, start putting some money into real estate via Blackstone via their REIT. They're doing a bunch of single family home rental investing. I've allocated, you know, let's call it somewhere between 5% and 10% to other alternatives. So that be crypto, that be angel investing and private equity. But again, 75% is sitting in just large value in growth stocks that I've set and forget basically for the next five decades.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, basically, you know, my approach has been I feel so incredibly fortunate to have built up a really strong capital base at 28 years old. And so, you know, basically my goal as it relates to getting smarter about scaling my wealth is really like so when I'm talking about like studying the equity markets or reading through a 10K, I literally just want to get smart enough to ask the right questions. And the reason I say that is I now have financial advisors who are managing my money. And I want to just be smart enough to ask the right questions as they're deciding how to allocate my capital. I don't want it, at least right now to be my full-time job to allocate my capital. I also don't have the personality where I'm like looking at my portfolio every day, seeing what my single name stocks are doing. I have an interest in it. But really, I would say.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question. I think what's going to have to happen is technology is going to have to just get better and better at managing communities while maintaining their intimacy. I just think that there's basically platforms are going to have to be built that allows people to always feel that like they're in an intimate group with eight or ten people, even if the group actually is 50,000 people. But that is incredibly difficult to do. And you see little glimpses of this. You see it with Zoom doing their breakout rooms. But if you're talking about building a business truly around community, you know, something like a Discord channel with 15,000 people and getting hit up by bots on the side is not going to cut it.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing about community is how to scale it. Is the number one thing when I invested the second angel investment I ever made was in this sneaker community, Soul Savvy. I'm incredibly bullish on what they're doing because going back to my interest in passion communities, sneaker collectors are insane people in the best way about their sneakers. And so to have a community where you get to share your collection, talk shop with other So now they have multiple Slack instances for soul savvy members. None of them are over 1200 people. And they've had to build out the technology for when they post something to Soul Savvy members, it cross-posts to every single community.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To protect ourselves from predators. Community has always been a massive thing because it's hardwired into us the importance of connection to others. And so I find it interesting and peculiar why it's like so zeitgeisty right now. And so all I'd say is, yeah, it's really important. It's always been important. Very few people can actually build strong community because you talk a lot about it and then you go and try to manage a community and it's a ton of work. And to give props to one community I'm in, there's a crypto community called crypto packaged goods, CPG, that was started by Chris Cantino and Jamie Schmidt, and it's exceptional. But the amount of time and effort they have put into cultivating this now, I don't know, 2,000, 3,000 person community is crazy. Like there are people basically working full-time jobs to moderate this community. And so what I would say is it's super important. There's a huge difference between community and brand affinity, which I think people conflate a lot. And the hardest.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, guys, you know, gearing up for round three, I was thinking about opening up the group. What do you guys think about it? And there was like palpable anxiety from the group around opening it up at all because I think they feel like such a special and safe space to have open conversations, not just about the books, but just like their own lives, their own motivations. And I think their concern is, okay, as we open it up, not only how is the quality of the new entrance going to stay high, but also how do we moderate quality conversations when instead of eight people on a Zoom, we have 30 people on a Zoom. And so it's a very real thing. I think a lot of people espouse the value of community. It's also just fascinating that it's like a thing right now because community has as far back as time, like religion is one of the, you know, the first versions of community, even before that, like, you know, our kind of like primal, the primal version of ourselves, there's community.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I'm running a founder's book club right now. I love this book club. And why did I do it? It was when I was like after moving out of my role as CEO of Morning Brew, I was fiending for something to build and grow. And I think I didn't care what it was, I just needed to build something. And so I started picking like time-bound projects. So I didn't have to commit myself to the next seven years to something. And so I was like, why don't I just build a book club? I'm trying to read. I can force accountability with other people and I get to meet other founders. So anyway, we're two books into this thing. The first book we read was The Sovereign Individual, which is a big book, especially in the crypto community, written in 1998 by well-known investors basically predicted everything from crypto to COVID. The second book we read was The Will Smith Memoir, phenomenal book that I think investors and professionals can learn a lot from. But anyway, there's 20 of us in this group when we do our book club meetings. There's eight people in a meeting. And I asked the group this week, I'm like,”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're an eight out of ten in self awareness, eight out of 10 in empathy, and eight out of 10 in storytelling, well, generally you're a 10 out of 10 in that mix. It's what David Perell calls the personal monopoly when it comes to writing. And so for me, as I think about my career, whether it's with Morning Brewer building other businesses, I'm constantly thinking about what are the basically, what are my unique skills, my natural superpowers that I'm just willing to spend more time sharpening than anyone else I know. And how do I line those up with my deep interest to create an asset for me over time? And so for me, my skills, I would say, are vulnerability, empathy, and creativity. And I believe over time what that will allow me to do is to build large engaged audiences and large engaged businesses with strong cultures. That doesn't have to be the combination to build an asset such as an audience or a business, but it is an example of how to do that.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By your interests, your skills, and then the asset that that moat creates. So Gary Vee's interest, his deep interest that motivates him is building businesses. His skills are the combination of self-awareness, empathy, and storytelling. And so empathy in my mind relates to his ability to have his finger on the pulse of what consumers are doing, which gets him involved in new technologies or businesses early. So NFTs, it was v-friends, baseball cards and collectibles. He did that before it became big. Early investor, I believe in Uber and in Twitter. And so for him, what is the asset that he's built from this kind of compilation of skills? It is a massive engaged audience that accrues value when he sleeps. And the way that I think about this combination of skills is all you're trying to do is basically, it's less about being a 10 out of 10 in any given skill, but it's more”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mote as a professional or as an entrepreneur is very simple. Do I have a unique accumulating advantage in my career? If so, what is that advantage? And so when I think about a personal mode, basically I think of it as a compilation of skills and knowledge that when combined together in kind of this recipe gives you sustainable advantage, meaning if you're a professional in a company, it makes you highly regarded where your job security is high. If you're an entrepreneur, it makes you really good at leading your business. And so, you know, there's a few examples that come to mind when I think of people who've built personal moats. The first is, and it's going to be controversial that I say this, but like Gary V, I love Gary Vee. I think the guy's a genius. I know there's people who think that he just shouts on the internet, but basically, I break it down into your personal mode is defined.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this idea of a personal moat, I actually, you know, I got the concept from Eric Tornberg, who is one of the founders of On Deck. He wrote a Twitter thread about this. But basically, the idea of a personal mode is you can think about it just like a company mode, right? So company mode you think about is basically what is the strategy or unique advantage of a company that allows it to establish power and maintain power for a long period of time. And if you want to think about like what are the things that create most for businesses, I think Hamilton, Helmer's book, Seven Powers, is kind of like the Bible for understanding what generally creates sustainable power, things from switching costs to economies of scale, brand power, et cetera. And so I think about personal modes the same way, just in the context of an individual. Basically, the question you should ask yourself if you're wondering, you know, what is my personal?”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An entrepreneur. You are building a business. You have a responsibility to the people you have raised from. And unless I knew I would go all into that, I don't want another full-time job, at least in that capacity. I'm also not convinced, by the way, a lot of entrepreneurs go the entrepreneur to investor route. I'm not convinced that's the route that I want to go yet.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Look, I think doing that makes a ton of sense, right? We've seen everyone from Sahel Lavingia to Naval to my co-founder Austin to Sahel Bloom. Like these guys have all created funds or rolling funds. And I think it makes a ton of sense, right? Not that right now is necessarily a hard time to raise capital, but having an audience, right? Like people can raise $10 million like that off of the back of the correct Twitter audience in a given week. And it's remarkable. So I think it's an amazing opportunity. Honestly, it was a very personal decision where it's just like, I didn't want another full-time job. I like the ability to write checks using my capital when I choose, but also if I wanted to stop doing it or I wanted to just like take a break for a month, I had that luxury in my mind when you raise a fund, you are”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a few reasons. One is when there's any new technology, I think two types of people are attracted. One is technologists because it's an opportunity to really be on the frontier. The second is creative people because when you're in a totally blank space, like that is a creative's dream to really be a trailblazer within a new framework of technology. Anytime you have a new industry where there's alpha, a significant alpha or asymmetric information or dislocation, there are always going to be opportunistic human beings. Like throughout time, that is a behavior that will never change. And so I think a lot of what you're seeing, even like in the world of NFTs, is entirely opportunistic. And again, I don't think that is good or bad, but as both an investor or an entrepreneur, I think it is your job to spend enough time in it to ask the right questions and cut through.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how people would pay because it was so painful. And I also knew that content, like profiling some of the people who are their customers and are their travelers, content is a big part of their strategy to drive demand. And so I knew that was a place I could actually add value and truly like help increase the value of the business over time.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Audience is a rabid audience, which is also why, again, creator led businesses, I love because you're naturally latching onto a rabid audience to start. And the final would be businesses where content strategy is a very clear remit of their strategy. And so I can actually be value add as an investor to help them think through how they build out their content program as an accelerator to their business. And so I'll give you an example. One is this company called Atlas, which is streamlining the visa process for non-domestic travelers because getting an international visa for non-US citizens is incredibly laborious, takes a ton of time. And so the product basically streamlines everything from call it a three-week to month long process to a two-day process. Am I the customer? No, but I was able to get to a place where I could see how this was really, really painful.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am a consumer, a hypothetical consumer of this product. What does that mean? Well, one, I do try to stay within kind of like the suite of things that I could be a customer for or something I get to a place where I really feel like I was able to empathize with whoever this customer is. So especially right now, do I think I'm going to be the world's greatest B2B SaaS investor? No, I do not. But maybe that's like a space where I'm like there's someone who's spending 24 hours a day thinking through the ins and outs of B2B SaaS. Maybe I write a track as an LP because I'm betting on them and I believe there's opportunity in the space. And so I generally focus on businesses where I very clearly can put myself in the shoes of the customer, media businesses where there's not opportunity to invest, which I would say is rather limited from a venture investing perspective. Passion businesses. So like I love investing in businesses where the”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question because, to be honest, the hardest thing for me has always been understanding the value prop of a product and the opportunity of a product that I am not very familiarized with, right? I even talk about always like building.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Raise. And so I think being considered or thought about as one of many in this category of creators gives you deal flow by way of this new standard of carving out for creators in rounds for startups.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my angel investing career, when I don't necessarily believe yet that I can be a better than average picker. Like basically, I operate under the assumption that I am going to be an average picker in the beginning because I need to get enough reps to understand what to look for. And so the only way that I'm going to be able to drive above average returns is see above average deal flow. And so to me, creating content, building audience acts as a natural magnet. And the cool thing that I've also found is a lot of TRA VCs are now looking for both operators to involve in rounds as well as creators. I think it is very much a natural thing now for, let's just use an example of Andreessen to carve out a portion of their round for people who have built audience basically as kind of going back to the idea we were talking about before, a built-in marketing channel for that business when they”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Helping them think through their product strategy, helping them think through their content strategy. And so I've just gotten a ton of value. It has made me more thoughtful as an entrepreneur by spending time angel investing. And again, you can take two approaches as an angel investor, right? You can be active or passive, passive being you just write a bunch of your own checks or you write checks as an LP into funds. And that's not necessarily a bad strategy. There's just, it creates different options. For me, I've wanted to be active because to me, angel investing is an investment decision that secondarily is an educational opportunity. And so I try to be active with all the businesses I work with as it relates to deal flow. Yeah, to me, that is not only like the advantage of building an audience, but it is also I find it to be a necessity for me to give myself a chance of driving good returns, especially early.”
2022-03-20 · We Study Billionaires · TIP432: The Creator Economy, Building a Personal Moat and Mental Health Stack w/ Alex Lieberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT