Morning Brew with Austin Rief '13

6/20/2017

Austin Rief ’13 is currently a junior at University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business studying finance and minoring in computer science. Outside of the classroom, Austin is cofounder and COO of Morning Brew, where he runs a daily email finance newsletter geared towards millennials. In his free time, Austin enjoys reading non-fiction books and watching sports. Recently, Austin's company, The Morning Brew won the start-up competition at Michigan, where he took home a check for $15,000 towards his business.

BT: How do you source your news?

AR: We sift through about 15-20 top news sources on a daily basis to find the 5 stories we believe our demographic would like the best. That is part of our secret sauce. We combine both our 2 years of experience in knowing what our community wants to read with 2 years of hard data we have collected in terms of what stories our community interacts with the most.

BT: Have you always been interested in the news?

AR: I have not. I started becoming interested in the business world around junior year of high school and that really took off when I got to Michigan and was accepted into the business school.

BT: Who do you watch or listen to for your daily dose?

AR: I am an avid reader of legacy media sources such as the WSJ, NYT and FT. However, I am also really interested in other perspectives. I really enjoy newsletters (obviously) and in particular enjoy reading Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, and Fortune’s Term Sheet.

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