Somewhere in Los Angeles, a young man is sixteen hours into his workday.

Back-to-back meetings since morning, with a Slack channel that hasn't gone quiet in weeks, his head is just notifications playing on a loop.

For most people, that routine would be a warning sign. For him, it's the opposite, because it means the company he was trying to create has found its footing. In this context, these are the kind of problems you only get to have when something is working.

Not in the way that means there's a finish line in sight, no, no, and he wouldn't want one. But enough has happened now that certain moments feel like watching a film rewind at full speed.

Some years ago, what occupied his mind was how he would pay off a $120 million student loan with nothing but a failed startup to show for it. Now, it’s having more things to do than time to do them. 

Not only would things turn around completely, but this same person would also go on to co-found one of the most important publishing platforms in the creator economy, one that today generates $32 million in ARR, employs 110 people worldwide, and sends over 3 billion emails every month.

That company is beehiiv.

The guy is Tyler Denk. 

And the story starts in a not-so-glamorous basement in Baltimore.

Yesterday, we hosted AI Day, an entire extravaganza of events.

It started with three Zero to Unicorn firesides with Alex Berger from Bolt and Nicole Treiman from Bilt (two companies you may recognize from our previous Zero to Unicorn covers), and Merrill Lutsky from Graphite (acquired by Cursor).

That was followed by our AI Champions Dinner with a gorgeous New York skyline sunset, and finally The Afterparty feat. Ian Asher.

We’re thankful especially to Bolt.new for making all of yesterday a reality as well as AWS’s support.

In case you missed it, we’ll be posting recaps of the firesides soon, and we’re bringing the AI Champions dinner series to SF in a couple weeks. Sign up below.

Join us at our upcoming events.

Ethan and Arek 🦄

Tyler’s story begins in his parents’ basement in Baltimore, together with a bank balance of less than one dollar and a student debt load that would make most people cry themselves to sleep. 

While his engineering classmates at the University of Maryland were lining up internships at established companies and building résumés that would open amazing professional doors in the future, around 2014, Tyler and a group of friends started building what they were convinced would become a billion-dollar company. 

It was a web application called VentureStorm that connected UMD business students (who had ideas, but no technical skills) with computer science students (who had technical skills, but no business connections). It turned out that it targeted the worst possible market combined: broke students with early startups with no money. It still tried to pivot to a freelance marketplace for cities like DC, Boston, Baltimore, and NYC, but ended up competing with companies like Upwork.

This is the moment our protagonist and his friends get their first introduction to programming, because they were determined to make this thing work and had no technical skills to do so.

And there was no plan B, because plan B implied that plan A might not work, and they simply didn't entertain that possibility.

The truth is it didn't work, and the company shut down around summer 2017, not long after Tyler finished college. Still, it got to reach around 10,000 users and a few thousand dollars in revenue, thanks to scrappy growth during these short years. 

While building VentureStorm with almost no budget, they relied on low-cost, hands-on distribution tactics to get traction, as he explains:

It's worth mentioning that this was not the only not-so-good starting point for Tyler.

During his senior year, around 2016, he ran out of money with 4 months rent left. What he demonstrates, again and again, is the figure-out mentality skill in action.

He discovered an annual senior bar crawl had no official organizer, and realized that whoever started organizing became the organizer. So what did he do? Young Tyler created a mockup T-shirt and established himself and his friends as organizers via a Facebook group.

And he even managed to make some friends buy shirts first to create social proof. All in all, he ended up selling around 2,000 shirts at $25 each, earning around $5-6 thousand total to pay his remaining college rent.

So by the time Tyler’s graduation arrived, the company was gone, his CV was almost blank, with just some unpaid short internships and his improvised tee venture on the list, and his bank balance was close to $0. What was real was the $120 thousand of student loan debt he would have to pay off soon. And if you're the glass-half-full type, Tyler had gained real personal and professional growth from the mistakes and lessons he picked up along the way with these experiences.

Thankfully, he had his parents’ basement available in Baltimore, so that’s where he went.

Around the same time, a childhood friend named Austin Rief was running a small newsletter business by the name of Morning Brew that was growing faster than he could handle.

That newsletter was about to make an offer Tyler wasn't in any position to refuse. It was a rope out of a hole, and he grabbed it like his life depended on it (and in many aspects, it did). 

And it started by saying “100%, I’m in!” when, rationally, he should have said: “I have no idea how to do that.” 

The offer wasn't glamorous because it wasn’t really, by most measures, a real job.

Tyler and Austin had grown up together in Baltimore, then crossed paths again during an internship in Tel Aviv back in college, began talking startups and innovation, and kept the conversation going even as their paths diverged. 

By the time Tyler was sitting in his parents' basement staring down his debt, Austin was running Morning Brew alongside co-founder Alex Lieberman. It was a daily business newsletter finding its footing and growing fast enough to create real problems. Good problems, but problems nonetheless. They had things they needed to build to resolve them, and no software engineer to do so.

Austin explained that they were looking for someone to take on some contract work, nothing defined yet, just building what needed to be built. The pay was $3,000.

With nothing in his bank account and no alternative, Tyler didn't deliberate for long. 

There was, however, a small complication. He had no idea how to do what they were asking. But, remember, Tyler had already developed what would become one of his most defining instincts, his willingness to say yes first and figure out the details later:

A self-taught software engineer, after all. 

So he got to work. Still in the basement, but at least some money was coming in. 

He taught himself what he needed to know, built what they asked him to build, and kept getting asked to build more. With time, Tyler wasn't an employee, but he wasn't just a contractor either. He was becoming the engineer Morning Brew turned to when the team needed something.

What he saw from that position was the beginning of something big. Like, really big. 

Readers who cared about the newsletter said they couldn’t start their day without it and recommended it to everyone in the circle. Tyler noticed and started to believe in what Austin and Alex were building before almost anyone outside that small circle did. 

At some point during those early contract months, Tyler was becoming the person responsible for the structural foundations of Morning Brew. The same ones that would make it one of the biggest and most important newsletters of all time.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it, so let’s be direct. The situation Tyler walked into was a mess. 

Morning Brew was producing a daily newsletter that readers loved, yes, but the machinery behind it was held together with the digital equivalent of tape and goodwill. 

Tyler explains that, first, there was no real website to speak of. Second, writers were composing newsletters by copying and pasting content into static documents, which is about as scalable as writing letters by hand. Last, but not least, advertising, which was already becoming a meaningful part of the business, was being managed through spreadsheets.

He shares how, at the peak of Morning Brew's newsletter expansion, there were six different publications, each carrying three different advertisers, which meant around 30 distinct ad units to track and deliver every single week. All of it lived inside a spreadsheet that one wrong keystroke could destroy.

So Tyler, as a good self-built software engineer, built his way out of all of it. 

First, he made the website. Then, the CMS that the writers would use to create their newsletters. He also put together an ad management platform that replaced the spreadsheets with a system capable of handling the volume the business was generating. 

In other words, they were problems he saw and solved, often teaching himself what he needed to know in the process.

What emerged from all that building was an integrated ecosystem, custom-built for Morning Brew, that made the operation run in a way it simply couldn't have without it, because the company grew from 100 thousand subscribers to 3.5 million in three years. Something had to replace the tape and goodwill. It turned out that something was Tyler. 

Soon, the same instinct that had made him believe in Morning Brew before almost anyone else began pointing at something new. He saw his creation as, more than an internal tool, a full-fledged product. And products this good don't belong to just one company. 

He saw a business inside the business waiting to be explored.

By the time Tyler had spent a few years inside Morning Brew, he had developed a perspective on the business that differed from his peers. Austin, Alex, and the editorial team were focused on what Morning Brew was: a newsletter company and a media operation that had found an audience and was growing fast. 

On the other hand, Tyler was looking at what Morning Brew had built to become all of those things, and he was convinced what lived underneath the product was worth more than anyone was giving it credit for.

People wanted the Morning Brew infrastructure. That included the CMS, the referral tools, the ad platform, and more… things other operators were patching together from half a dozen different tools. Meanwhile, the all-in-one solution was there, working better than anything else, but completely proprietary.

To Tyler, the conclusion was obvious.

So, he went to the founders and made his case. His argument was rooted in the hundreds of weekly emails they received from people wanting to replicate the Morning Brew system. He laid out how the tools they'd built had real value in the market and how other publishers would pay for what Morning Brew had been using. "I always had a ton of conviction that there was real value there," he would say later in an interview. 

The answer was no. They didn't see Morning Brew as a SaaS company, and worried it would mean serving too many different customers at once.

He didn't take it personally, and looking back, he understood why. He didn’t know at the time, but Morning Brew was already in the middle of acquisition conversations with Insider Inc., the parent company behind Business Insider.

When a company is weeks or months away from a deal that could define the financial future of everyone involved, it cannot entertain something that seriously restructures the entire business model. The timing was simply wrong. 

Rejected but not dejected, Tyler held onto the idea, even as his life took a radical turn from entrepreneurship.

It was a detour that most people would dream about: a product lead role at Google.

Perhaps you probably know the feeling, when everything is ok with your job, but deep down, you feel like you just finished with what that particular chapter had to offer, and it’s time to look for something new. 

Remember, Tyler had built most of the technology powering Morning Brew's operation, watched the subscriber count climb from 100 thousand to 3.5 million, paid off his student loans, and got to leave his parents' basement in between. 

So, in late 2020, Tyler left beehiiv (amicably) for Google. YouTube Music, specifically.

The contrast was immediate and almost comical. Morning Brew had been pure chaos, the kind where you pull your laptop out at a club at 3 a.m. PST because the newsletter has to go out at 6 a.m. EST, regardless of where you happen to be standing. 

Things got built because someone decided they needed to exist and then figured out how to make them exist, so you just roll up your sleeves and do it. It was a merge of urgency with a touch of refusal to let things stop moving. 

Google was the complete opposite. Tyler shares how layers of management stretched so far above him that decisions seemed to dissolve somewhere in the middle. He was done with his work by 11 a.m. most days. The pace that had defined his entire professional life up to that point simply did not exist here.

But Tyler had gone in with clear eyes, half-expecting exactly this, and he'd made himself a deal: extract what's useful and carry it out with you. What Google had that Morning Brew never did was structure, and that’s what he would dive into. 

There, he learned how to scope work with engineers, how to think through a full product cycle, and more. At Morning Brew, they had figured it out as they went. Google showed him the alternative. 

He spent 10 months there. A black hole in his memory, as he'd describe it, but a useful one. He emerged from it carrying a set of tools he would bring to bear on something that continued to take shape in the background.

Because even before his first day at Google had arrived, he had already made a chance phone call that would change his whole life.

The phone call happened when he was stuck at home with COVID-19, in a suspended week between leaving Morning Brew and starting at Google. 

He could have started baking bread and joined the great flour shortage of 2020 (the hobby everyone had landed on during the pandemic). Instead, he called Benjamin Hargett, the first engineer he had ever hired at Morning Brew, just to talk like old friends.

The conversation started, and unintentionally, it wandered over to the idea that had been sitting in the back of Tyler's mind since his rejected pitch. 

What if everything they had built at Morning Brew could be a regular product for anyone?

It was a lot of work, Benjamin said. If they were going to do it, they needed to bring in Jake Hurd. He had come into Morning Brew as its fourth engineer, hand-picked by Benjamin, who wouldn't stop talking about what he could build. Together, the two of them had become experts in the newsletter ecosystem. He was the missing piece. 

And so, on an online call in the middle of a pandemic, like every other world-changing idea that year, beehiiv took its first baby steps.

By day, Tyler learned to build a product with structure (how to scope work with engineers, think through full product cycles, and ship features) inside one of the largest companies on Earth. 

By night and on weekends, Tyler, Ben, and Jake were putting effort into building toward something with no guarantee it would ever become anything at all, like most founders do. 

It was an extremely stressful 10 months. As Tyler explains:

Months of nights and weekends dedicated to making this thing see the light. By the summer of 2021, they were soon ready to find out if anyone else believed in it, too.

With the basement and day job behind him, the student loans paid off, the idea that had refused to die and a company with a clear-ish product, Tyler was just getting started.

Next, we see what it took to make this side project a real company. We’re talking about hundreds of handwritten emails, a single overnight send where 10 months of nights and weekends would be put to the ultimate test and the worst day of Tyler’s life. 

Stay tuned.