EP 8: Balancing Wealth and Purpose: Matt Peters' Path to Success

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Well, welcome back to the purposeful prosperity podcast. My name is Seth Waters and I'm here with Jack Smith, founder, entrepreneur, investor, and world-changer. Super excited to be with you today, Jack.

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Jack Smith (Host): I'm excited too, Sir.

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Seth Waters (Co-Host): Yeah, and we've got a great interview today with Matt Peters. Excited about this?

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Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. Now he is also an Inc 5000 member. He's an entrepreneur. He's a very interesting fellow. He's actually a scuba diver as well. He's got a really interesting scuba diving project that he's working on. And he's also a fellow modern elder, so he's part of the Inc 5000’s Inc Masters Group that went to Baja California and went through the modern elder academy. So I'm really excited for us to get to learn a little bit about him and his journey and where they're growing to next.

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Seth Waters (Host): Wonderful. Well, let's dive right in.

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Jack Smith (Host): I'm very excited today to be joined with my friend Matt Peters. He is a creative and strategic marketing consultant and a serial entrepreneur, multiple-time Inc 5000 award winner, and one of the fellow youngest modern elders as he came through the Inc Masters Group with me in Baja last year. So welcome to the show, Matt.

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Matt Peters (Guest): Thanks so much. I'm happy to be here.

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Jack Smith (Host): I'm happy to have you. I'm excited. We've talked about a lot of stuff. We talked about doing good and making money. And you, my friend, are a serial entrepreneur. You create things for breakfast. So tell me a little bit about who Matt is, your journey, and kind of your creative arc. You were 24 years old when you founded your first company. Tell me a little bit about the startup world that you've gone through. I think you've got some interesting stops along that journey.

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Matt Peters (Guest): Sure. Yeah, I was not one of those kids who set out to be an entrepreneur. I actually wanted to be a filmmaker. That was my plan in high school and then in college, I was a writing major and was going to go to film school. And when I graduated college, I started working in the film industry, which I didn't realize this at the time, but film is a very cool intersection of creative and business. In fact, film productions are in many ways like the entire lifecycle of a company, but just condensed. Like, you form a production company, you go do this stuff, you staff up, you make a thing, and then everybody is fired and the product comes out and it's neat. And I definitely think I saw more of the business side of things while I was working in film for a couple of years after college. But then I ended up not too long after college when I was like 24, starting my first company with a friend of mine.

We had this kooky idea that there would be, at the time it was called viral marketing - that was like the hot phrase and you could go viral. And Seth Godin had coined a few terms and at this time in 2007, YouTube was two years old. Like Twitter had just launched. Facebook had obviously been around a little bit, but I'm not even sure if it had opened up to beyond .edu domains at that time. I mean, it was all very new.

So my buddy and I were like, “Okay, we're going to found a viral marketing company and we're going to help these big stupid companies go viral,” make content that people want to watch, as opposed to having to rely on a traditional ad model where you are consuming something you want like a TV show, and then I pay money to interrupt you, and make you watch my message before you can go back to consuming what you want. So oddly enough, and given the theme of this podcast, we actually did set out with kind of like this high-minded goal that we could make all of marketing better, right?

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‍Jack Smith (Host): Love it.

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Matt Peters (Guest): We also wanted to make disgusting amounts of money.

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Jack Smith (Host): They're not mutually exclusive!

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Matt Peters (Guest): For sure! That was definitely part of what we were there to do. But we actually did, and I'm not sure I would have thought about it as a purpose at the time, but we talked a lot about like: imagine a world where interruption-based marketing and advertising is not the default. What if brands produced things that I wanted to see, I consumed it by choice, and then by virtue of that, I was exposed to the brand.

I think the Red Bull Content Studio is a really great example of how this can be done, right? You see all these extreme they're actually the ones producing content and documentaries about these extreme sports by virtue of seeing that I get exposed to their brand. And there were different people trying this that it eventually morphed into what is now called social media marketing. So we were, as far as we can tell, the very first dedicated social media marketing agency in the United States. We grew it from the two of us working in my parents' basement all the way up to $10 million revenue company offices around the world.

Not huge, still a boutique agency, but it was able to not only help us figure out how to be entrepreneurs, and how to run companies, and a lot of baptism by fire, but it put us in a pretty good financial place that allowed us to then go start some other companies. And I've started a tech company that got into techstars and has raised a lot of venture funding. I have a strategic marketing consultancy kind of on the side. I even own a dive charter business, which is the one that definitely doesn't fit with the others, but it's been a really great journey, and I've been on the entrepreneurial journey ever since I turned 40 only a few months ago. And I sort of joke that I've never had a real job.

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Jack Smith (Host): Hey, that is a great thing. I cannot say that, my friend. I've had more than a few real jobs, and I made a bad employee, which is why I'm now an entrepreneur.

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Matt Peters (Guest): That can happen, for sure.

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Jack Smith (Host): So you own a dive company, Matt? You got to have to tell me more about that. ‍

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Matt Peters (Guest): Yeah. So scuba diving,

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Jack Smith (Host): You mean scuba diving?

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Matt Peters (Guest): Yes, scuba diving is, like, my main hobby, obsession, whatever you want to call it. Very avid scuba diver, scuba instructor. I still do a little bit of teaching for fun just because I enjoy it, and it's so wildly different than my work week. I live in Boston, and most people probably don't think of New England as, like, a dive destination, and it's probably not right? Like, no one's flying to Boston for the scuba diving the way you would.

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Jack Smith (Host): It wasn't on my shortlist. I love you, but it wasn't on my shortlist.

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Matt Peters (Guest): You're going to fly to the Caribbean, you're going to fly to the Red Sea, you're going to fly to Fiji, right? But the waters in this area are fantastic, and there's lots of cool ways to dive, and one of the oldest dive boats in the area that operates out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, up on Cape Anne, the owner was selling it, and it was at risk of leaving and being taken up to Maine to become, like, a fishing charter or something like that. And so I got together with a bunch of other guys, we spun up a Quick LLC and bought the boat.

So now, in addition to everything else, I am one of the owners of the largest dive boat in the northeastern United States, which takes people out scuba diving in the waters around Cape Anne, Massachusetts, all season long. Our season is the summer, as you would probably guess. So it's a fascinating side project if you run a software company and then you have this other company, which is about as far from software as you can possibly get.

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Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely.

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Matt Peters (Guest): It's a fun way to exercise different muscles in your brain, and obviously, it's something I love. And quite frankly, between you, me, and all the viewers here, it's basically a nonprofit, right? I mean, this is not a scuba diving boat in New England to try to make a lot of money. It is in many ways, like a bit of a community service, right?

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Jack Smith (Host): You just didn't want that access to go away for your dive buddies.

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Matt Peters (Guest): Yeah. If there's no boats in the area, we lose access to being able to do some amazing diving.

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Jack Smith (Host): The beauty of entrepreneurship right there. I mean, that at the heart is what we're talking about, right, is hey, you saw a problem, you saw it leaving your community and you used entrepreneurship to solve that problem and keep that, and that access. I mean, that's awesome.

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Matt Peters (Guest): Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

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Jack Smith (Host): Very cool. I very much appreciate that. And if I understand it correctly, you like to go do some crazy cleanup stuff with diving as well.

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Matt Peters (Guest): I've done a couple of cleanup things. Most of the crazy stuff I like to do is I'm just getting more and more into technical diving, which is just going deeper, staying down longer, going inside shipwrecks, going inside caves. There are components to that, of course, that are related to the sort of ocean stewardship aspects, keeping things clean. A bunch of my dive team and I are talking about going down and doing some coral restoration kind of stuff. I mean, there's all these different aspects to the ocean, primarily, is where we do this work, and it is under threat in a number of ways, most of which probably don't even need to be discussed. So there's little bits that you can do to help with that. And we certainly try to. Though, I will say most of my free time when it is related to diving, is definitely for pleasure.

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Jack Smith (Host):  So tell me more about your purpose. You're an entrepreneur, you're a social marketing engineer, you're a dive guy, you love the ocean, obviously, but what is purpose and what is your purpose, rather, and what does purpose mean to you?

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Matt Peters (Guest): I actually think about this quite a bit, or I have been thinking about this a lot lately because I just turned 40 and although I would have thought that big birthdays were just kind of like nonsense, I actually did find myself being like, “Wow, I'm almost 40.” Like I started having some thoughts: What have I done with my life? Where am I going? I really did. I was actually shocked. And so I've thought about this a lot recently and I find it interesting because young Matt would have laughed at the question and he would have said my purpose is to make money.

That's what this company is for, that's what I'm working on right now. And then once I have money, I'll start caring about other things which I might care about - and I really did in my twenties and early thirties. I really did see it that way. But I have morphed a little bit over time where I'm realizing that those aren't necessarily in series. They can be, but I think they really need to be in parallel. There is still absolutely a part of me that really believes that one of the ways I can do good for the things that I care about. Like for example, ocean conservation and environmental things, a big thing for me is personal wealth is a great driver of how I can help in that area. So there is still a part of me that looks at businesses and opportunities as a way to generate that wealth.

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Jack Smith (Host): More money, more mission.

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Matt Peters (Guest): More money, more mission. And that is a part of the purpose for me. But as I've gotten a little bit older, I've started to think more about, I've started to notice, for instance, I have said no to things that would have made me money that I didn't feel comfortable doing for any number of reasons. Which means, even while I was standing there telling people that I was only in it for the money, I clearly wasn't, right? I didn't want to contribute to some of the areas of capitalism that I think are pretty crappy and need to be figured out.

I didn't want to approach anything that I thought was even mildly predatory. And there are a lot of aspects of the current state of social media marketing, which is an area that I've operated, which I actually think have crossed the line, and working privacy invasion, that highly targeted algorithmic marketing that I just don't think or it's crossed the line for me in a couple of places. And I have turned down opportunities to make quite a bit of money by avoiding doing campaigns in those areas. So where I'm at right now is I am still driven definitely by getting to a point where I'm financially secure and that my family can be financially secure. But I find myself now wanting to be a driver of, if not moving things away from areas that I think are a bit shady, at least like being a voice that's opposing them as much as I can.

Jack Smith (Host): Can you tell me more about that? What change are you trying to help see in the world there?

Matt Peters (Guest): I think there's a lot of aspects of, at least in a space that I know quite well, advertising and marketing, that have crossed a line for me in terms of what we're willing to do, right? All of people's information being collected a lot of times without their expressed consent and knowledge, and then being fed into these algorithms to determine things, to be able to feed them content which is just programmed to get out of them what you want to get out of them. And that could be that you really want people to buy this SUV instead of this other SUV, or it could be a little bit more nefarious in terms of the ways it can be used for political candidates. And as a society, we have not yet come down hard on a decision of where we think the line of acceptability is between advertising and straight-up manipulation, and we need to, right? I've only so far kind of worked on this from the point of view of the clients that I work with, the people I advise, I steer them away from things that I think start to get too manipulative.

Jack Smith (Host): What outcomes are you looking to achieve there? If you can maybe give us an example of you don't necessarily have to talk about the bad side but maybe talk about how you'd like to see it done.

Matt Peters (Guest):  I would really like to get back to a point where companies and brands are able to, where people have a larger choice in what they want to consume. This could be called like the old days of organic reach, right? If I make something that is interesting, or valuable, or entertaining, and people want to engage with it, and watch it, and share it and comment on it, they can do that. And I've put good content out into the world that spreads and maybe my brand message goes with it. And it's by permission. It's by consent of those of us being marketed to. I would like to move the industries back towards that and away from simply treating it like they do now, which is, “I know everything about you, I can hyper-target an ad directly to you whether you want to see it or not. The quality of my message is irrelevant because I can essentially hack my way to getting it in front of you.”

I think one is better for all of us, both as a consumer and a guy on the side of the table who's coming up with these campaigns. And so it's as close of a mission as I currently have in that particular space anyway.

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Jack Smith (Host): Awesome. So more curated and collaborated than just broadcast.

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Matt Peters (Guest): I know this is a loaded word, but it's about consent. Now in this case, like consent of the viewers, of those being marketed to. Do you know my purchase history, because I gave it to you and I want you to actually show me products that I might like, or did you get it without my consent, and are you shoving products I don't want or need in front of me, also without my consent? And it's a tricky space right now and society is trying to figure out what kind of fences and rules we want to put in place.

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Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I agree. As somebody who consumes a lot of marketing, I don't mind it. I appreciate when they show me things that I want, but I want them to show me them when I want them, not because I said something in the front room about applesauce, and then I get a Facebook ad on applesauce, which I don't know whether that's paranoia or what, but it seems to happen more often.

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Matt Peters (Guest): Yeah. Anecdotally, I don't know if it's been proven yet, but, I mean, it certainly seemed my friend and I did one of those tests where we picked a topic that we have never, under any circumstances, talked about or searched. Or anything. And then we just started talking about it in the office, and I started seeing ads for the topic we were discussing. And it was like buying a pet fish or I don't even remember exactly. It was a pet of some kind. So not exactly going to stand up in court, but super creepy.

Jack Smith (Host): No, but there's definitely smoke, there's fire kind of thing. Well, that actually leads me to a very interesting question that kind of came up as you were talking. I was wondering how AI might integrate into some of these things, on helping us make better decisions and choosing that collaboration. And maybe we can use technology to facilitate some of that collaborative and curated kind of content. Can you tell me a little bit about the future of AI and what do you think it's going to look like in the market?

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Matt Peters (Guest): Something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. My last company, Cortex, this was a big thing we were dealing with - using AI to make better creative choices, actually helping people pick color palettes and topics, and how to frame images and choices that had otherwise been viewed as very subjective. We built an AI that could actually help make those choices. And this is one aspect we're now seeing other aspects with things like Chat GPT, which has just taken everybody's imagination by storm lately. And it's raising an enormous number of questions that I think some people are taking seriously, but I think for the most part, people don't realize exactly how game-changing things are going to be over the next few years, right?

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Jack Smith (Host): Right. We all just got robots, right?

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Matt Peters (Guest): But we don't know yet whether it's a robot assistant or whether it’s, “Our job is not necessary anymore because a robot's going to do it.” I mean Chat GPT, Wharton Business School Professor admitted it would pass his class. It wouldn't get A's, but it writes C papers in a Wharton Business School class. Right? And there have been a few others of these and GPT-4, the next generation, at least the next generation from OpenAI, is coming out at some point. I've heard, like, end of this year. I don't know if that's accurate. And I have a sense that we are not all appropriately realizing the pace of change, now that we've crossed a certain threshold. So we're going to have, yeah, we have just gotten caught up with Chat GPT, which is fun, but like, a lot of flaws, and then all of a sudden the next thing is going to drop and we're not going to have been mentally ready for it, right?

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Jack Smith (Host): It's a sentient robot.

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Matt Peters (Guest): Yeah, and even if it doesn't get the sentience, I mean, I was just having a conversation with a bunch of lawyers and they were like, well, we're decades away from it being able to write contracts. And I was like, no we're not. We're like a couple of years-

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Jack Smith (Host):  -weeks

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Matt Peters (Guest): -at the outside.

Jack Smith (Host): Not even, man, you feed it with prompts properly created, they already have templates to write these contracts. You're only, once-

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Matt Peters (Guest): -it ingests the entire history of case law, it's going to be-

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Jack Smith (Host): -in seconds, right. Overnight you feed in that and it processes all the case law associated with that and comes up with 27 cited entries and you pick your favorite and go.

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Matt Peters (Guest): I mean, it's going to be, I don't even pretend to know where it's going to take us. It is going to do a lot of good in a lot of ways, but along with that, like most things, it is going to cause a lot of trouble in a lot of ways and in certain instances a lot of bad. And I think like, Deepfakes is sort of the banner example for - this is separate from GPT - but what happens when we no longer can trust video footage that we see, right?

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Jack Smith (Host): That's already here, right? I mean the Deepfake, you got to be hunting, you got to be technically competent to spot the difference anymore.

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Matt Peters (Guest): And I mean, there's going to be some really interesting opportunities to get back to what we were mentioning earlier, I'm going to say like cause-driven entrepreneurship. Like who's going to found the company that is the company that can verify the truth of video footage such that if you are looking at something on CNN.com and you don't see the “verified by” whatever logo in the bottom right corner, knowing that something looked at it and guaranteed that this is not a synthetic video. And I, technologically, have no idea how you would do that. But who's going to found that company, right? Who's going to found the thing that adds these layers of security that we need to function? There's going to be an enormous amount of opportunity here on the positive side and also fixing the negative side and all of these other things and it's absolutely fascinating.

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Jack Smith (Host): I agree. It's exciting. It's exciting times. So you're a serial entrepreneur. You've started a bunch of different things across a number of industries and sectors. How do you define the purpose of your business and how do you align that purpose with your own purpose? And as we talked, I think that may have even changed over time. 40-year-old Matt might have a different answer than 24-year-old Matt, but maybe talk me through that arc a little - how you choose the purpose of the businesses that you want to align your purpose.

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Matt Peters (Guest): Well, in each case, so far anyway, in businesses that I've started, we've always started with solving a problem, right? We've identified a problem that we see in the marketplace and we've set out to solve it. And this is different than the way some companies are founded, which isn't necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. Some companies are founded by people with a specific skill set and, “We can do this service, let's go out and do it,” and it might be nice to have or something like that. There are other people who create this breakthrough technology and then they go looking around for a while like, “Does anybody need this thing we built?” And it might take a while to find the market problem that it solves.

And there's all sorts of ways that you get about this, but when you're identifying the problem right from the get-go, right? Like there's these new types of platforms are available called social media. Brands can make use of them to increase their connectivity with customers and decrease their costs. Let's help them do that. Our mission was very natural, which was, we think we can make advertising better by reducing reliance on interruption-based advertising and increasing permission-based advertising. That was purpose number one, which went hand-in-hand with the problem we were solving. That kind of morphed into our second company, Cortex, where we were largely going after the same mission. We wanted to help people make better creative decisions. A result there is going to be less bad advertising and marketing. We will be exposed to less crap.

They will be able to be more efficient in advertising. To us, we saw it as much more of like a benefit. So our purpose kind of held true there. They come about, I think, somewhat naturally, or they have come about somewhat naturally for me. So I don't know if I've actually had to sit around and think very hard about how to make a business align with my purpose, especially because, as I mentioned earlier, at some level, one of my purposes is to make money at each time. So if the business is successfully doing that, then I'm kind of already aligned.

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Jack Smith (Host): This is prosperity too, right? This isn't about giving stuff away for nothing, right? The idea is you're doing good in the world, you're making money with it, and then you're doing more good with the money you make with it. That's the concept. So absolutely be proud of profitability. That is not a bad word.

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Matt Peters (Guest): I agree. I've actually been chatting with a couple of friends about next projects and how there's a lot - my friend group like early 40s, late 30s, early 40s, looking at what comes next, what are we going to do as our next project. And there is a lot more discussion now about what I would call being like purpose-driven than I remember in my early 30s discussions with people who were taught, who had just had an exit and we're going to start their next thing. And so I'm curious as to whether or not that goes with age or whether that's the sort of thing where once you've had a little bit of success under your belt, you have the luxury of saying like, “Oh, I'm going to tackle something with a little bit more purpose.” It's interesting. I'm not sure if there's any like I'm not sure if there's any data on this and I'd be actually interested if you find any.

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Jack Smith (Host): I'll mark that and we'll go take a look. I'll circle back with you on that. Well, as far as next steps go, do you have any sort of plans? You said you're kind of in a transitionary period with Cortex, a little bit reflectionary. Do you have any kind of thoughts on what's next?

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Matt Peters (Guest): I plan to take 2023 “off” - as a bit of a sabbatical, and see if I have the luxury to do so, which is great. I'm very happy that my life has gotten to this point. There will still be a fair amount of work and consulting involved, but I'm intrigued about what happens if I actually take a year to focus on my health, and exercise, and various other things which have fallen by the wayside ever since I was 25.

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Jack Smith (Host): That's the part of the hustle that they don't talk to you about, that needs to stop, right? You got to stop putting your health second. It's all part of the package.

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Matt Peters (Guest): Yeah. I mean, it really is. And it's like, I even was aware of it while it was happening, but nevertheless didn't do anything about it. So I'm viewing this year very much as kind of just like taking a break for a little while, like letting burnout kind of decrease back down and reconnecting with people that I haven't been great about connecting with, and being healthier. And we'll just see how it goes. Maybe after two months of this, I get so bored I immediately start doing something else. But for the first time in a while, I'm going to not have a plan for a little bit.

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Jack Smith (Host): I dig it. Well, I'll bring you back on in a couple of months. Maybe next, this time next year, we'll see what twelve months sabbatical would look like on Matt Peters. I'd love to have you back. You'll be in the monk robe, you'll have your Molly beads, and it'll be great. I love it. Well, Matt, I appreciate having you out here. Thank you very much. Congratulations on your sabbatical. I know it comes hard-fought and a little bittersweet, but I'm very excited to see what your future holds.

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Matt Peters (Guest): Thank you, Jack.

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Seth Waters (Co-Host): Well, Jack, what a great conversation with Matt. And one of the things that really stood out to me as you guys were talking, was his point about being on mission and understanding your why.

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Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. And I think it's an interesting time in Matt's life. They've gone through a lot with their company Cortex, and the early success and being a Techstar startup, and the trials and tribulations of raising money in this very challenging venture capital world, while staying true to who you are, and staying on mission. And it's really inspirational to see Matt take a conscientious look and a thoughtful look at the journey, both the good and the bad. And I'm excited to see kind of where they go and grow. He's got a brilliant mind and a passion for community. And I know he's got a big scuba diving project he does to clean up the waterways there on the east coast, doing rec. dives and cleaning up our oceans. So an amazing human with an amazing story and I'm excited to see what comes next for them. So I appreciate him coming on the show.

And thank you guys for listening to Purposeful Prosperity. Tune in next week when I'll introduce you to another amazing entrepreneur doing great things in the world. Until then, please like follow, and share, and keep doing good in the world. Thanks for listening.

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