Thoughts on Employees Leaving

What's up everyone, this is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business team or new product.

First, I want to give a huge shout-out to all of the worker's out there enjoying a very well-deserved labor day. And I want to give a special shout-out to the amazing community of Founder's Journal listeners and workers, and the more than 120 employees of Morning Brew. Now on the topic of employees, I want to talk about the unfortunate, but very real experience of losing great workers and employees. Every founder, leader, and manager goes through it, and it never gets easier, but I want to give you some perspective to help you think about it and moving forward. Let's hop into it.

With Morning Brew at more than a 120 employees now, we have lost several employees and it doesn't matter how great of a business you've built, how strong your culture is, or how well you retain talent, you just simply can't retain a hundred percent. And it stings every time you experience it. I've personally found that for me it stings because I personalized it. And I've found a lot of other leaders personalize the experience of someone else leaving as well. We tell ourselves it's a failure on our part that we could have done something different to keep these people, these great workers from leaving.

So I want to say something that will hopefully release some of this undue pressure and anxiety that you likely put on yourself. First, losing an employee isn't necessarily a bad thing. Second, losing an employee does not mean you did something wrong. While it is important and good to be critical of yourself, that is how you grow as a leader, you need to realize how important context is, given there are literally dozens of ways and reasons that employees choose to leave a company. And so, as you go forward as a leader, I just push you to focus on the why, rather than the what, to understand if and what you could have done differently to get someone to stay. And the best way I want to do that is just to give you examples. I always find that there's no better way to illustrate some lessons than stories, so I want to provide you three specific examples of stories from Morning Brew's journey of growing and losing employees.

Example #1: Morning Brew’s First Writer

So let me start by sharing the first one. Morning Brew's first employee. We hired them in early 2017 when I had just gone full time on Morning Brew, I had left my job at Morgan Stanley in finance, was working out of an accelerator on NYU's campus, and Austin, my co founder, hadn't even gone full time yet. He was still at Michigan finishing his senior year. The first employee we hired was a writer, because for us, the most important thing was getting ourselves out of the weeds of writing. Austin and I were not best in class writers and we needed to hire best in class writers if we wanted to be a media business. So we hired this writer, they were trained in journalism, we hired them off of AngelList, which actually proved to be a really good place to find talent in the early days of the business. If I'm being honest, this person's job was honestly very punishing in the early days of Morning Brew. They'd write a daily newsletter, actually six days a week at the time, by themselves from 9:00 AM, when they got into the office to almost midnight every single day. And then after they were done writing, we would all work together to code what they had written into a MailChimp template to then send to the next day.

The first employee quit. They quit after three or four months. They were burnt out, they were feeling sick, like literally physically sick, and they didn't have close to the balance in life that they wanted. If you put yourself in my shoes, you could imagine how I felt. I just felt horrible. Imagine how tough it is to hear from your first employee, right? You're trying to prove yourself as an entrepreneur and you feel like you, or one for one in fucking up hiring someone, where the person's miserable, they're working too much, and they no longer want to work in the company. I felt horrible about it, and I took total responsibility for them leaving. But in retrospect, it wasn't a bad thing for this person to leave for themselves, and it wasn't bad for the business.

You know, in hindsight, I can say that we should have created a more sustainable work environment, but that's not realistic. We didn't have the tools or the resources to do this. And even to this day, with a 120 people, the role of a daily newsletter writer is pretty damn demanding. We ended up hiring someone whose expectations were in line with what was required of an early stage media startup's daily writing demands, and the first hire, who I just mentioned, that left after a three to four months, I've been talked to them in a long time, but my guess is they are likely much happier today than they were when they were working at The Brew. So how do I, how do I think about all of this? Well, I would say most of this, we couldn't have changed. It is an example of expectations, just not stacking up to a reality, us being an early stage business with very little resources and a ton of work to prove ourselves.

And it's not a bad thing for an employee to leave when this is the case, when expectations don't meet reality. But what I will say is it was a good reminder for myself and Austin, that setting the right expectations with things like job descriptions, interviews, et cetera, is super important, so that things like this don't happen frequently. The more that expectations and reality are in line, I think the more that you end up having employees enjoy what they do and stay at the company for a long time. So that's the case of employee number one, where I would say we could've done expectation setting in a better fashion, but everything else I think was out of our control.

Example #2: Morning Brew’s First Copywriter

Now, let me give you another example. This was another early employee, I want to say they were employee six or seven, who was Morning Brew first copyrighter. So that it was a super talented, funny person who actually did stand up comedy on the side, and they wrote the ads for Morning Brew. After a few months on the job, this person, I'll never forget it, pulled me out of our we work office to just a side table in the main area we work, and they told me that they would be leaving to join Google. And they were going to be joining Google to write jokes for Google Home, which is the Amazon Alexa competitor. And again, I think of this as another example where an employee leaving isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's not about the what, it's about the why. And the why here is as you gain credibility as a business, as you become known as an upstart media business, you're going to lose employees either via them getting poached by other media start-ups or established media businesses, or the employee simply leveraged their brand and their resume, now with your company's name on it, to join another company.

In reality, there was nothing we could have done to prevent this employee from going to work at Google. It was a high profile job, they were probably getting paid more, definitely had better benefits, and it was honestly just more in line with their desire to write straight up comedy. And for me, I actually wore this news as a badge of honor, to know that we had a Morning Brew alumni who now went on to work at a trillion dollar company. I want to talk a little bit more about early employees who decided to leave Morning Brew, but first a quick message. So let's hop back into it. We've talked about two of our early departures from our first employee to our first copywriter.

Example #3: Employees Who Caught the Entrepreneurial Bug

Now I want to talk about actually a group of employees who've left Morning Brew for the last 12 months and what we've learned from that experience. And I would generally put these departures into buckets. So the first bucket is the group that I would describe as those who caught the entrepreneurial bug. We've had a number of employees that have left The Brew to start their own thing, their own businesses, or be a first employee at a business, and obviously, like I said, it always sucks to lose really good people that were with you from the early days, who went to battle with you, who were in your five by five WeWork space with you, but there's also just something so special about this happening.

As I reflect on everything about Morning Brew and our incredible journey, there's actually nothing more gratifying than realizing that we created a culture where people experience entrepreneurship at the ground floor and then realize that this stage of business was for them. And that is like, so special. I remember that things became really real for me with Morning Brew when we started hiring more senior people and we went from not just being responsible for a more junior employees livelihood's to being a responsible for entire family's livelihoods. So we weren't just a responsible for the salary, have a senior employee, we were responsible for how they took care of their children and their pets and their children's children. So to me, having this trickle-down effect where people are decided to build their own businesses and be responsible for their own employees livelihoods because of what inspired them at Morning Brew,honestly, I am so incredibly proud of that.

And I always looked back to the PayPal mafia, not saying Morning Brew is the PayPal mafia. We are not. But I looked back to like Peter Teal, who's considered the Dawn of the PayPal mafia. He went on to start Palentier and Founder's Fund. Max Levchin, who was the CTO of PayPal and went on to start a firm, Elon Musk who needs no introduction. But if you want to better understand them, we actually have Founder's Journal episodes about him. David Sachs, who founded Yamor and Craft Ventures, Reid Hoffman who later founded LinkedIn. And while the Morning Brew mafia, isn't the PayPal mafia, to see so many of our employees start doing things, it doesn't make me regret departure's, but instead just feel this immense pride and trickle down effect that entrepreneurship had on them. So that's the first group of early employees.

Example #3: Employees Who Don’t Want to Specialize

The second group of early employees is people that I would say, realize they have to shift from Swiss army knife to kitchen knife and realized it wasn't for them. So when we were in the early days of the business, the expectations of our junior employees and our early employees, for them to be a Swiss army knives, where they would do a little bit of a lot of things, 'cause we were constrained in our resources and you have to wear a 10 different hats. I vividly remember our team doing our jobs during the day. And then at night we would be packing swag and sending it out to our top readers in our five by five WeWork space. I remember our first engineer working on everything from our website, to our referral program, to gathering data on our subscribers so we can do paid marketing correctly.

But then what happens is, as the business gets bigger and as you go from early stage start-up to late stage start up and there's more clarity around the specific parts of the org and jobs to be done, because there's more of a plan, what you ended up needing is not Swiss army knives, it's a kitchen knives that can go really deep and do one thing extremely well. And this can be a really difficult transition, both for a business and its employees. Going from doing all of the things and feeling of ownership over much of the business to doing one thing and feeling specific and smaller ownership over a bigger business. And so I found a number of our early employees who left to both of these groups, I don't think either of them both were within our control or were bad things that they left. This is the natural evolution of business as you move to different stages.

TL;DR

And so, as I reflect on these examples, I just gave you, I would say the first case, the first example is where I would argue we could have done the most different. I think Austin and I could have a better set expectations to this first employee about how grueling being a first employee and first writer at a media startup was, but in other examples, whether it's losing an employee to a big name tech company, like Google, losing employees to starting their own businesses, and losing employees who like being Swiss army knives, rather than kitchen knives, I believe this is just par for the course in building your own company. At the end of the day, your job is to have the right people with the right skills in the right seats at your business who want to work towards your mission everyday. And in the examples of above, I believe most of these folks either no longer aligned with the seats that they had to sit in, or they just didn't feel nearly as passionate about the mission, because maybe there was a new mission that they wanted to go build themselves.

So just to wrap this up, I've given you examples where you should not put blame on yourself for losing people in your business, but what are examples where losing an employee can be avoided or maybe on you as the manager are the leader? The way we define it is, anything that falls in the bucket of something being within your control to make sure really good people with the right skills in the right seats feel aligned with your mission, when you feel like you can control it, that's where you should probably think about it. So if someone leaves because they really don't like their manager for actual reasons, I would, as a leader own that responsibility and deficiency, because that could be changed. If someone is de-motivated because they aren't being compensated what the market for their role commands, and that is something you have control over, I would own that responsibility as a founder and leader.

If someone leaves because they aren't in the right seat, but there's possibly another seat in the business that is right for them, but I don't identify quickly enough for them to not leave, I would own that responsibility as a founder or leader. So just remember your job is to keep great talent that has the right skills in the right seats and feels motivated by your mission. But that doesn't mean your job is to keep every employee. In fact, it's a normal and inevitable part of business to lose employees, but rather than personalize it, try to understand it in order to think clearly about if their departure was a good or bad thing, and if there was anything you actually could of done to prevent it.

I Want to Hear From You

And so with that, I want to turn it to you. As I've said, the last few episodes last month was the biggest month of Founder's Journal yet. We have hundreds of thousands of listeners and this journey is just getting started with that. I would love to hear from you, whether you're old and you haven't written it yet, or you're new and you want to get to know me, write in and let's chat. Send an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista with a little bit about yourself, what you do, and why you decided to listen to the podcast, and we'll get back to you as soon as I can.

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