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Austin Rief

Austin Rief is co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew, a business and financial news newsletter company that has grown to roughly 5 million subscribers, and he is also active as an early-stage investor [1]. He led the company as chief executive officer from April 2021 to February 2025 before moving into the executive chairman role, having originally co-founded it and served as chief operating officer beginning in January 2015 [3][4][5]. He studied finance at the University of Michigan's Stephen M. Ross School of Business [9].

Morning Brew began not as a business but as a hobby project during Rief's sophomore year at Michigan, when he responded to an offer from Alex Lieberman, then a junior, to help expand a PDF-based finance digest called Market Corner into something larger [11][12][13]. The two relaunched it as an email newsletter and sent the first edition of Morning Brew on March 14, 2015, while both remained full-time students, with Rief taking a summer investment-banking internship at Moelis & Company the following year before deciding banking was not for him [7][11][12]. Rief has said the two founders' contrasting styles, Lieberman's creativity paired with his own emphasis on process, shaped how the product and company were built [11]. Rather than raising venture capital, which was then flowing into media startups such as BuzzFeed and Vice, the pair ran a "family and friends" round in 2017, pitching around 150 people and ultimately securing about 27 checks averaging roughly $30,000 each, and Rief has recalled cold-pitching classmates for email addresses in Michigan lecture halls to build the early subscriber base [11][15].

Rief has pointed to 2018 as the company's inflection point, when subscriber numbers grew from about 100,000 to nearly 1 million, driven by two tactics: paying to be promoted inside other email newsletters to reach an engaged niche audience, and becoming an early advertiser on Instagram Stories when Facebook opened that ad product, which let Morning Brew acquire subscribers for as little as ten to twenty cents each [11][12]. He has described some months in that stretch as adding 10,000 to 20,000 subscribers a day, a pace intense enough that the company hit and exceeded its Facebook ad spending limits [11][12]. By his account, the business eventually reached about $70-75 million in annual revenue with roughly 250 employees and double-digit profit margins, before the founders sold a majority stake in the company for approximately $70 million [13].

Beyond Morning Brew, Rief has co-owned the hospitality venture Oceans since 2023 and has discussed other consumer business models publicly, including the economics of boozy-bingo events such as Bingo Loco and Bongo Bingo USA, which he has said generate roughly $20 million in annual revenue by pairing entertainment with extended alcohol sales at partner venues [6][14]. He has also spoken about the early rivalry between Morning Brew and competing newsletter The Hustle, recalling that the two teams treated each other as competitors before becoming allies after both were acquired [13].

Insights & ideas

Austin Rief argues that treating a venture as a business too early can be counterproductive, noting that Morning Brew's refusal to think of itself as a business in its first years let its founders avoid short-term, revenue-chasing decisions that could have killed it [1]. He emphasizes that growth for Morning Brew was gradual and compounding rather than a single dramatic event, and that milestones like reaching a million subscribers feel less dramatic when growth happens day by day without large capital raises [1]. He also highlights the value of moving fast on new advertising channels, describing how being an early adopter of Instagram Stories ads let Morning Brew acquire subscribers extremely cheaply and fuel explosive growth [1].

Rief further reflects that early investor and mentor rejections, rather than discouraging him, acted as motivation to keep building, and that hindsight can distort how founders narrate their own origin stories [2]. He also notes that scrappy, unscalable tactics, like personally collecting emails in lecture halls, were essential to Morning Brew's early list-building [2].

Investments

  • CSwsh

    A fan engagement platform that uses AI to capture and organize user-generated content from live experiences

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