He grew up in Mitchell, South Dakota, collecting aluminum cans from baseball games to make extra

money. His mom was a school librarian and his dad was a cop. He worked at McDonald's in college

because it was the only place that called him back. But today, Matt Paulson runs MarketBee,

a company doing $50 million in top line revenue at insane margins.

He takes home $25 million a year, owns 2,000 apartment units,

nine Starbucks locations, a private jet with his logo on it,

and has invested in over 100 startups.

And he's never raised a dollar of outside money.

He's never sold, and he has no plans to. This is Matt Paulson on MoneyWise. Welcome to MoneyWise, Matt. Thanks so much for joining us today. How you doing? Doing good. Happy to be here. I love the MoneyWise podcast. I was honored to be a guest on it. Awesome. Thank you. Well, we're excited to learn a bit about what kind of qualifies you to be on money-wise. And, you know, I think where we'll start is the way you grew up. What you did when you were, when you were, you know, a kid and then kind of how you thought about money, what your parents, you know, did in the household to really create the philosophy around money and how you adopted that into your later life. Yeah, I grew up in a small town, Mitchell, South Dakota, about 15,000 people. Didn't have a whole lot of money growing up. My mom was a school librarian. My dad was a police officer, so solidly lower middle class, got an allowance. It wasn't very much. So when I wanted money, I'd have to kind of, like, wait for birthday money or figure out how to go get it.

One of the things that I did was there was big park next to our house. I'd go, like, after the baseball games, I'd go collect all of the aluminum cans and recycle them. Nice. That was my stick when I was by fourth, fifth grade. That worked pretty well for a while. So, like, there's that. like, you know, I never had a lot of money, but we were also like not starving either.

In middle school, you know, we never had a lot of money, but we were also like not starving either.

In middle school, you know, we got a computer at home when people didn't really have computers

and we had fast internet when people didn't really have fast internet.

So like I made a website about like SimCity 2000 and other games that Maxis the publisher was making at the time and had like ads for free website

hosting on my website and I'd make like 25 or 50 hours a month and this was in middle school,

late 90s. So I was making money on the internet before of, you know, a lot of people listening to

this were born. So I guess I'm the old guy in the room now, but just kind of had some entrepreneurial

inclings. Like I was, you know, one of many, but just kind of had some entrepreneurial inclings.

Like, I was, you know, one of many people that sold candy to the other kids at school. You know, if there was a hustle, I'd say I did all of them, but like I was always for something to do, that would be a good, good way to make money. What was it about making money that drove you to keep doing stuff like that? I mean, I just wanted more of it and wanted to spend it and didn't have it.

So, you know, you had to figure out how to get it.

You know, and a lot of what I spent money on was just dumb crap. Like, I would go to the gas station to buy pop and candy all the time. And that's where most of my money went. And walk me through kind of the experience from all the random, you know, lunch money type of sales that you were doing through the McDonald's experience. I know you worked at McDonald's through college, right? Yeah. When did your mindset shift from, you know, onezy to twozy to, you know, I want to make millions of dollars? Yeah. So I worked at Burking High School and I worked at a gas station. And like those were fine, like, high school jobs because that's where high school jobs are got to college and I was get another one of these jobs and

you know I applied at the grocery store and a gas station and McDonald's in case I like nobody else

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