Why Morning Brew sold to Insider and Axel Springer

The Business of Business spoke with Morning Brew co-founder Austin Rief about why the business email newsletter company sold itself to Insider.

Here is an excerpt:

How did the deal with Insider come to be, and how does Morning Brew operate as a part of the larger company?

We started getting a bunch of offers around 2018, but we didn’t think they were that interesting, and we had no intention of selling the business. But [Axel Springer] was persistent, and they reached out and COVID happened. We have really big ambitions and want to be aggressive in what we’re doing, and having the backing of a large company that’s gonna allow you to take risks was attractive to us. We had no idea if there was gonna be a second wave of COVID that was gonna affect things, or maybe an economic recession. We’re in an ads business, and ads businesses are quite volatile. They’re not recession proof at all. And to have the opportunity to have the same ambition, if not bigger, but have some stability, and some economic backing was really, really great for us. So we’re an independent company within the Axel Springer family. We have our own HR — we don’t share anything in terms of staff. In the grand scheme of being owned by a $12 billion company, we’re pretty autonomous.

Read more here.