He Sold His Company For $15M, Then Got A Job At McDonald’s

0:00Here's the headline. millionaire working at McDonald's. And actually, it's actually much more interesting than that.

0:13This is the story of a guy named Scott. Meetup.com is probably the most popular thing that he made. Meetup is a really cool site. I used it when I moved to San Francisco, joined a bunch of groups, met a bunch of people. It's basically a way to go from the internet to actually meeting people at real life. And so I knew about Meetup. I hadn't even known about Scott. But what I didn't know was the story that Scott, after he had sold his first company, actually went and worked at McDonald's just to kind of reset. And he did that for a while. And now he was going viral because he's kind of doing it again.

0:43He didn't tell anybody, but people saw him update his LinkedIn and it said Amazon associate or like warehouse associate or something. Basically, he's back at a Amazon warehouse now being a pickpacker, kind of minimum wage job again. And people are like, dude, this is not the first time he's done this. He did this with McDonald's like, you know, 20 years ago. And I found this fascinating. And I went down to Scott rabbit hole and I want to talk to you about it. You have some good stuff there too, right? Is that how it caught your eye? Yeah. So basically he grew up, I think in Iowa or Idaho, somewhere in the Midwest.

1:12And he grew up there and he saw that Marc Andreessen releases Netscape. And he was like, this is amazing. And so he's like, I'm gonna get in the internet. And so in In the mid-90s, he starts, I believe, one of the world's first online internet agencies. I think it was an advertising agency, something like that. He sells it for around$15 million, which is something like$30 million in today's money. And he sells it. And after he sells it, he was like, I've been working for six or seven years at this internet startup. And I work in marketing, but I'm only around bankers and lawyers and other yuppie people.

1:50That's horrible for my position as a marketer, but also I feel so out of touch with the people. Let's use his words. So he wrote this on his site. You found it back at the Internet Archive, which I thought was great. So it says, why I got a job at McDonald's. I spent a lot of time with bankers, lawyers, Internet freaks, and corporate wonks and other people living strange lives. As a good marketing guy, that's a bad thing. And as a practicing anti-consumerist, that's a bad thing. So I got a job at McDonald's to help get back in touch with the real world. Also, after six grueling years of the internet whirlwind, I wanted to experience a profitable, well-oiled, multi-billion dollar machine.

2:25And I deserve the break today. And then he goes and works at McDonald's. And he even talks about, he shows his application. He goes, I just walked in off the street. It was at like Fifth and Broadway in New York City. I walked off the street. And he's like, the manager was like, so are you used to like working with teams or something like that? And Scott was like in his blog post. He goes, yeah, I was honest. I said, yes, I am used to that. Yeah, he goes, I was truthful. in my interview, he asked if I can handle a fast-paced, intense environment. I said, yes. He looked at my resume and asked about my current part-time job as chairman of iTraffic.

2:55I said, it's an internet thing. He said, okay. And then asked me for my waist size for the pants. And he works there for like six months and he has this amazing blog post about everything that he's learned. By the way, I don't think he worked there for six months. I think it was like more, more like three or four weeks, something like that. But he said, 575 ain't much. So he He was making$5.75 an hour times 40 hours a week times 52 weeks a year. That's$11 ,960 pre-tax. He goes, some people said it was disrespectful to me to check a job at McDonald's. I didn't need the money. They thought I was making fun of people that worked there.

3:28The opposite is true. I gained a bucket of respect. People that bust their butt for such low pay. It's one thing to scan past statistics you see about how many people make$12 ,000 a year or read about them in the paper. It's another thing to sit back there in a fry-heaving, McNugget-wielding six-hour shift and go home smelling like fries and McNuggets and realize you only made about$30 this day. It's an eye opener. Interpret that as you see fit. And then what happens is while he's working at McDonald's, Cranes, which is a business publication, they want to do a story on Scott about like CEOs in post-acquisition life.

4:00And he's like, yeah, come and see what I'm up to now. And they use this photo of him working at McDonald's where he gets McDonald's uniform. and it's just the greatest photo I've ever seen. And if you scroll through this old blog post, we'll link it in YouTube, you can see some of these pictures of him working. It looks like, it looks pretty wild. Well, they spun it like he was struggling, right? It's like dethroned CEOs is the title. And they're like, how are they handling the dot-com crash? This dot-com CEO is back working at a McDonald's. And it's like, wait, that's not what, it's not even what happened at all, but okay, sure.

4:35Now fast forward to today. By the way, he made$15 million, I think, get that sale. So he sold his agency for about 15 million bucks. Who knows stock cash? Who knows if this is like, but ballpark, right? Let's take it directional. And then he goes from there to working at a McDonald's, you know, just to kind of like reacclimate with the real world, which I thought was really good. And fast forward to today. So in 18 or 19, something like that, he sells meetup.com to WeWork. The price was rumored to be 200 million, but who knows? It's enough that he doesn't have to go and work someplace like this.

5:08turns out he has a job at an Amazon fulfillment center. And he doesn't make a big ordeal out of this. He doesn't tell people about this. He just puts it on his LinkedIn. Someone finds it and shares it. So he ends up and does a podcast where he talks about the story of why he's at Amazon. And it's the same type of thing where he's like, I just felt out of touch with average people. And I wanted to feel that again. And he doesn't exactly say this, but he says something like, the interviewer was asking him about his experience there. And he's like, the interviewer was like, isn't that the place where like, they just had a big issue with them, the workers in the warehouse wanting to unionize.

5:45And he's like, look, I don't want to talk too much about that. But yeah, that's where it was. And I think it's a good idea. And he sort of insinuates that he was part of it, that he was part of it. And he was kind of like whispering in people's ears. And he doesn't explicitly say that. But the language that he uses where he's like, I don't really want to talk about it. But yeah, like I was there, I saw it all happening. And he was like, you know, it's funny, I'm like an entrepreneur. And I'm usually the guy who you'd unionize against, but I thought it was a good idea to have a union. And it's as if he's like the one riling people up.

6:17And so this guy, in a weird way, he's like a little Forrest Gump character, like he's like experiencing all these things in the background. And he's like, potentially a pivotal part of the story, but he doesn't really talk about it. It reminds me of, you know, like movies, This is a F'd up analogy, but it's like movies where it's like the genius nerd gets sent to prison, but then he like does, you know, then he's like the master. Then he like brings a new angle and sort of rallies the crew inside the prison in a different way. Right. Or like we had Shkreli on the podcast and he was talking about the same thing.

6:46He said he went to prison and he started the Bitcoin club, like the crypto club, and he started all these like learning clubs for technology inside the prison. But then they also taught him a bunch of things. It was like meeting of the of the world. That's what this reminds me of, this sort of going into the fulfillment center and like stirring up the union efforts. I have a friend of a friend who was a banker. He was like the really successful Wall Street guy. And he retired, but he got bored. And so he was like, dude, I'm going to drive for Uber. So he starts driving for Uber. And he ends up after doing that for a little while, he starts a private driving business where he's like a broker.

7:22So, for example, when I go to the airport, I do use a private driver, but it's only like$30 more than an Uber. It's not like much more expensive, but it feels a little bit nicer. He started one of these and he ended up being a broker for it. And he is now making like a million dollars a year being a broker for some of these drivers when you want a car. And it's kind of a similar thing. Would you ever if you had like a break in your career, would you ever want to do one of these kind of blue collar jobs? Yeah, dude, when I saw this, I was inspired on three fronts. The first, this is a guy who plays his own game.

7:55And if you know anything about me, you know, that is what I respect the most. People who have their own viewpoint, they bring their own frame to the game. And they say, this is how I want to use my time in life. And this is what I think is right. They don't really follow the hurt, right? Like how many founders who sell their company, then become a VC, then go from VC, oh, back to being a founder and advisor and go on podcasts. By the way, I did all this after I sold my company too, right? I sold my company, started investing, started a podcast, started doing the normal path. And so when I see people who just thought from first principles about what they cared about in life and decided what they wanted to do and did it, even though it sounded weird or unconventional, highest level of respect for me.

8:34So that's the first thing, inspired by that. Second, inspired by the idea of basically just getting out of your bubble. I do this in a different way, not usually by a job, but like, you know, you told me about that conference farm con, which is a conference for farmers. And I went there and that was the only tech, that was the only conference I went to. I didn't go to any tech conference, any investing conference. I went to a farming conference because I knew it would put me completely out of my bubble, exposed to a whole bunch of different people with different thoughts and philosophies and different views about the world right now.

9:04And I knew I would get new ideas. And sure enough, a business came out of that. We ended up launching a business, the milk road out of that. And so there was, you know, I'm a big fan of that. I'm inspired by that. the only thing I would do differently is I wouldn't necessarily just copy what this guy did and just go get a blue collar job necessarily. Like it's the lesson for me is think for myself, what's my version of this? That's fear. That's more real to me, right? Uh, that, that I actually do feel compelled to do that. I would feel excited to do and go do it. Maybe it would be driving Uber.

9:33Maybe it would be going and working at a warehouse. Maybe it'd be something different. I'm not sure, but this, this really like sparked something in me to, to take my, to use my time to go do something like that. I completely agree. By the way, you know, one version of this for me, it's either teaching at a school, like go to be a second grade teacher for like a year or Gordon Bombay and just go coach a team and go, go do my version of the mighty ducks. I've actually been itching to do this, to go and just coach like a seventh grade boys basketball team or something. I did this for a while. I coached at a, it was actually like a school for autistic and Asperger's kids.

10:06And I coached their basketball team. And it was like one of the best experiences of my life just doing that on the side for fun um and i think i might go back and try to do something like that that's i think that would be my version of this dude a few weeks ago i emailed this high school asking if they need like an assistant uh track and field coach right and i got that i was so pumped up about it like this is so philly this is awesome the best is when they're like you're not qualified for that well yeah i honestly was a little nervous about that but i get like the hours and like what they what they demand uh of me and i'm like that's a lot of work that's a huge commitment so like my inspiration like really quickly like lowered down so I got to figure out if I'm gonna do it um can we can we finish Scott because there's more of his story that I think is pretty interesting so he's born in a big family and um like you said sort of the middle of the country I think Illinois or something and uh we just named three different I states by the way Illinois Idaho sorry sorry I'm from there And we offended all of them by grouping them all together.

11:05All right. So he's the youngest of five. His siblings are like 20 years older than him, just kind of the way their family dynamics worked. And so he's the youngest by like 15 to 20 years. And he starts his first business when he's nine. Do you know what it's called? No, what? Scott's slave service, which a nine year old can get away with because he's basically saying it's free labor for for simple for my siblings. And so he's like, hey, whatever whatever tasks you got, I'm yours. I will do whatever whatever tasks you have. But he gets the entrepreneurial bug there, starts learning to code. His first job out of college is actually at Sony.

11:40And he tells Sony, he's like, hey, this is like 94, 95. He's like, the Internet's going to be a thing. And they're like, OK, kid, like whatever you say. He's like, no, no, no, you should have like a website. Like, all right, well, if you want to build one, go for, you know, have at it. So he ends up building the first website for like, you know, Sony dot com. and he realizes pretty quickly he's like okay this ain't it he also in 93 had started one of the first internet shows so one of the first podcasts essentially he started his own radio show on the internet um which is called advertorial infotainment and he was basically questioning consumer culture so he considers himself sort of an anti-consumerist in many ways so he he does that then he does the first thing which was that that business we called i traffic which is a media buying agency.

12:24And he was joking around like at the time there was really no media to buy on the internet yet, but he knew people are going to want to advertise on the internet. This will make websites have a business model. So let's do this. He sells that thing 15 million ish, which by the way, that doesn't, I mean, it's so obvious now. Yes, he's right. But that's pretty wild to like be that bold in 94, 95 to make some of these predictions. He was, he nailed them. He was a hundred percent right. And he knew that because when he was a teen and again, he's 20 years younger than all his siblings he's got a lot of alone time and he's basically spending it you know programming just for fun and he's just becomes convinced that like computers and the internet like this is where it's at then he does the mcdonald's thing and by the way do we want to read a few of his like blog post takeaways from his mcdonald's thing that you sent me i thought this was really good why did in why i don't you know we we had to use web archive to find his this post he took it down i wish he did it's fantastic well we still got it we'll show some of the pictures on here he's got like a picture of like his burn from the fire the fry machine and stuff like that on his arm.

13:22But like, here's one of them. So he goes, nobody, number four, nobody thanked me. I worked hard. I got paid peanuts. I even ate McDonald's during my food break, deducted from my pay. It was intense. The cash register was complex. The people want their food now. The lines get deep. The McFlurry must be made just right. I was trying hard and I was doing an okay job. Now, I've been a leader and a manager for most of my life. I've had plenty of crap jobs, but I've been the boss for the past few years. And I faithfully read Fast Company Magazine and my Harvard Business Review. And I've read that countless times that the value of a leader or manager showing appreciation for people's effort.

13:52However, my instinct has been often that showing appreciation really isn't too necessary or good for people. They just take pride in a job well done. And they can read my mind and see the appreciation. Well, from day one at McDonald's, I was yearning for someone just to say thanks or you're even doing okay would have been sufficient. But no, neither management experience nor reading about management teaches this lesson in the same way as feeling it being an underappreciated employee. So I read that a few hours ago when I was getting ready and I went messaged a bunch of employees and I said, you're doing great.

14:22You're doing great. You're doing okay. Because this is everyone should go and read this post. It is. This is awesome. This is a very inspiring thing. Yeah. He talks about the dollar menu and a bunch of things. Okay. So he does that. By the way, if you look on this page, he left his phone number in the photo of the application. I text, I texted him. Uh, I'm going to try it. Well, I'll try to get him on. yeah I would love that Scott come on that'd be amazing so then he has his next period he's like he's got 30 ideas he's like what I want to do next he's got 30 ideas and have you read the story about kind of how he narrowed that down to two was it the September 11th story yes exactly so he lives a few miles away from the Twin Towers so September 11th happens he sees the the planes hitting the building and I think the story was like he was kind of on the rooftop of his building or he's outside of his building.

15:14And it was the first time he had ever met any of his neighbors. Like he'd been living there for a while. He just didn't know anyone. And this, now that they were all outside and they're seeing this crazy thing, they're all talking, they're meeting. And he was like kind of struck by, man, I really live a pretty like solo life and I'm just on the internet. And he had had a couple of other experiences that kind of triggered him in that. So there's the September 11th thing. A week later, he reads this book called Bowling Alone. And I guess this book has big impact on him because he then ends up giving this to every meetup employee and bowling alone was just basically a book about statistics.

15:50And he's honest. He's like, I didn't even read the whole thing, but he's like the beginning of the book makes a very clear point that more and more we're doing less things with other people, which is caught, which the less interaction you have with strangers causes you to trust strangers less, which then causes you to spend less time with them. And it's this terrible cycle that we go into. And he's like, then he notices in his own life, he's a big fan of this band, Aluna. And he goes to a bunch of their shows and they're a small band. And so he ends up, he's like, dude, I'm in like conference centers in a hotel, ballroom B.

16:21And he's like, I'm listening to the band play. And he's like, you know, I used to just go alone. I would, you know, kind of dance or sing alone. I'd go home alone. He's like, but soon enough, you know, I started to see some other faces there that were the other regulars. Like there weren't many of us who were big fans of this band. But he's like, we still didn't talk to each other that much because it wasn't clear that it was okay to go talk to each other. So that's where he decides he narrows down his list of ideas from 30 to two. One of them is meetup where he's like, well, what if we made it where the internet could help people meet up in real life and we could solve this bowling alone problem where people interact more with strangers, which increases their trust in strangers, which increases the amount of time they're willing to talk to other people and make it okay to just have these real life interactions, even with the internet.

17:04um the second one which he doesn't talk about too much is something called photolog did you see this it's like a a flicker like service yeah he was early man he was too early he was super early i think he sold it for like 90 million bucks or something so he did well with it um it was like the biggest social network in certain countries around the world but then flicker came out flicker was growing faster and then then the next wave of social networks came out i saw him describe it as as instagram before instagram but i didn't know that it was that financially successful that's amazing. Yeah. So he did really well with that as well.

17:35And so he, um, you know, he sells that company. Does he start meetup and photolog at the same time? That's a good question. I'm not sure if it was the exact same time. I know there were, yeah, somewhat in tandem. Uh, they were, they were sort of like, you know, either same time or, or very close to each other. And so he does meetup, meetup starts growing. And then he makes a pretty controversial move, which is he decides not to add, not to make meetup business model, just ads. He's like, no, I'm going to charge people for the service, which at the time was like very anti again, he goes counter to the main mainstream of what everybody else was doing with their websites at the time.

18:09And traffic drops off like 95%. But he's like, he stays with it. He's like, I believe that this is the sustainable path for this is like the people who are organizing these meetups, they should pay a fee because they're the ones kind of posting and getting the value. It'll keep the quality bar high. So let's do that. And he survives the big 90 % drop in usage and meetup becomes a profitable, sustainable business and it goes on for a long time until they sell for to we work for i don't know 150 to 200 million bucks by the way i have a friend uh greg who used to work at he also got acquired by we work and so i texted greg this morning and i was like greg do you got any stories about this guy scott he goes i got one and so he goes uh i get to we work and scott tells me hey meet me at 555 broadway at 6 p.m and then i go okay and he texts me right before he goes by the way um clear your calendar for the night okay i don't know what's gonna happen here but like all right i'm interested i'm game so he shows up and there's just a white van with five other people in it he's like all right i'm gonna die i don't know what's happening tonight but i guess tonight's the night i die and um scott walks in tells the driver let's go and then he says um hey you're you're new here and i want to um do something i do with everybody who's new which is we're gonna to go crash five or six meetups tonight and you're going to get to actually like go experience them firsthand first day um let's go and so he was just taking six kind of new people in the company to go and they crashed like a harry potter meetup and then like a women with diabetes meetup and they went to six different meetups that night and they stayed out all night basically at this thing and greg was like dude i'll never forget that such a cool founder move to do that and to kind of stay in the community stay like amongst the the users and the people and to make that part of the culture for new people that are in the company.

19:55How awesome is that? Dude, this guy is amazing. I love him. So good, right? Yeah, and that he's been in the game for so long and that he's still, he's not like a high and mighty executive. You know what I mean? Like he still kind of seems like he's in it. Well, and then it takes another twist. Meetup then gets carved out of WeWork. And so this brings up, this connects two other data points of our podcast. So on the episode with Jeremy Giffen, And he talked about one of his biggest underrated opportunities right now is messy carve outs. What he meant was that sometimes there's companies that acquisition happens.

20:33And usually like either a year later or so, the company realizes that, hey, of all the assets, they didn't really want one of the assets or that the company that acquires it starts to go south. And this good company they bought is embedded inside of a bad company. And this is exactly what happened with Meetup. So they buy, WeWork buys Meetup for, I don't know,$150,$200 million. But then Meetup itself, or sorry, WeWork itself becomes, you know, a dumpster fire. But Meetup was still a good asset inside of this dumpster fire. And so here comes a guest of the pod, Kevin Ryan, who's been on the podcast, came in and actually bought Meetup for peanuts out of that sale.

21:14I remember looking, I mean, I didn't have like the finances at the time to be able to afford it, but someone was like, hey, do you want to get it on this? and I was like, yeah, this is like super interesting. Actually, on the podcast, I think you shared the numbers, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I didn't think that it was going to be Kevin Ryan. It was a bunch of like, you know, I'm not even in the ballpark to be able to afford whatever it was. But I was like, you know, maybe I could throw in just a small amount of money to like a group of people who are trying to buy it. And I thought it was very interesting.

21:39And then lo and behold, the man, Kevin Ryan comes in and if he comes in, like to me, he's a really good signal. Something is interesting here. So he bought it. And then they put in a CEO, they turned it around. It's like profitable. And they just did a great job with it. They got a great, it turned out to be a great investment for them. Is it a big business or is it just like a pretty good business? That's just not automated, but like, it just, we'll see what happens. You know, it'll grow 15 % a year, maybe. Yeah. So, I mean, it's all relative, right? So it's a, it's a better business than any business I've ever built.

22:14However, in the grand scheme of things, I know what, I know what question you're asking, which is like, is this some sort of rocket ship type of crazy billion dollar business? I don't know. I don't think so. It looks like it's a flow and steady, flow and steady, profitable, cash flowing business that's good for humanity. So in that sense, it's an awesome business. Yeah, I think this guy's the man. I think he's absolutely awesome. You should listen to the podcast. It's called Internet Misfits, I think that he was on. And he's the definition of an Internet misfit. And he talks a little bit about his time at Amazon.

22:45He's a cool guy. This guy's really fascinating. He's a fascinating dude. And I always I've recognized this guy forever. You know, when you and I were just getting going the Internet, that was when meetup was in its heyday. And I would go to so many meetups. I actually started my event, HustleCon, because of meetup.com. I created a small meetup event on meetup.com. I got a lot of free users that way. That's how I built my email list. I love meetup.com. I like this guy, Scott. We got to we got to have him on board. Yeah. By the way, Internet Misfits, that's a great podcast name. If if we didn't have such a cringe name, that could have been ours.

23:15that would have been a great name for us let me, can I tell you about a different story? yeah, sort of actually similar to Scott going to McDonald's, so have you ever heard of, you're weird with your pop culture, I don't know what you do and do not know, because you don't know many things about pop culture, have you ever heard of Rosie the Riveter? no, so basically in the early 1940s, America goes to war, all the men between like 18 and 35 go off and serve the war, so there's this huge huge need for manufacturers or workers in manufacturing plants to go and create like B-17s like these bombers or whatever we're making.

23:54Not only just what we were making before, but now we have to make all these weapons and all these supplies. They needed to get young women, which who never worked before to come and work in factories and they needed to make it look cool. And so they had these ads like if you can work an electric mixer, you can work a drill. And so they They would do all these things to get young women to entice them to come into the workforce. And then Westinghouse, which at the time was a huge manufacturing company, they created this campaign called... The name of the character was Rosie the Riveter. And the ad says, yes, we can.