PLEASE listen along with the podcast.
This is meant to be read with the audio narration!
This episode is going to be very different from normal!
This episode, it's intended to be used as a custom resume to explain my overall entrepreneurial journey for a specific employer: Vayner X
Vayner X is Gary Vee's owned conglomerate communications company, and they have a really particular insight into who's up next in the music scene. Gary Vee and the Head of Music at Vayner X, Mike Boyd Jr, run a playlist called Monday to Monday where they feature artists who they think will be up next.
Note: Go to “PART 1” below & 3:18 on the podcast to skip this preface
To emphasize how good they are at seeing what's next in culture, actually put me on to Nipsey Hussle YEARS ago before myself, or even a lot of my hip hop friends knew who he was. Now that's insight!
Shout out to my brother, mannn, and one of my best friends since the first grade, Solo Celo. Whose Spotify streams have exploded from under a few 10,000s to over 10M in this year’s Spotify wrapped. Gary Vee and Mike Boyd discovered Solo Celo and featured him on the Monday to Monday playlist only a few months ago. And since then, in the midst of me trying to figure out what to do next with my career & my life, Solo went out of his way to reach out to me and tell me: “Mannnn, you got to talk to Mike Boyd! Let me make the introduction. Write up some stuff about yourself, we'll make it happen. I think something amazing could happen.”
I'm really determined to not work for anybody right now; I don't really want to have any boss, but I'm willing to make an exception for VaynerX music. I think it would be fantastic to work with them.
And so instead of sending in some basic resume, I decided to go wayyyy out of my way to make this podcast for anybody out there, including any Intersection fans or any of my friends and family. So that people can finally see a more clear narrative, you know, my life and my entrepreneurial journey has been such a bounce back and forth that it may seem scattered and unfocused. But through this story, you will see how I've been on to trying to do the same stuff! Which even most of my closest friends and family have, frankly, no clue!! I've given up a long time ago trying to explain these threads. But now I think there's enough to show for where the congruence is in the way that I've been thinking and approaching my work for almost the past decade now.
And how my unique insight into having a ridiculous amount of consumer empathy, understanding what's next in culture, but overall having a really strong sense for how to help companies and leaders within the tech scene build a stronger one to one relationship with their consumers and their audience and all of my experience and knowledge at the intersection of technology and culture.
Anybody who's a friend or family member of mine or a fan of The Intersection, you’re gonna enjoy this.
Ready?... Let’s get into it!
PART 1: How My Burning Desire To Find a Unique Entrepreneurial & Creative Community That I Could NOT Find No Matter No Matter How Hard or Far I Searched - I Decided To Create Myself.
This all started off in 2017 when I was 17 years old… (shout out to being born in 2000. It's really easy to keep track of my age that way).
Hustle Gurus was a documentary-style video series. I ran around Chicago with a camera strapped to my back, and posting it on my YouTube to connect to local entrepreneurs in Chicago.
In the quest to find a community I was looking for this audience of the video series would serve as a catalyst for this community to connect and crystallize.
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Even though it seemed semi-clear, in my mind, I couldn't quite articulate why I couldn't find the community I was looking for in my gut. However, I could ingrain that feeling through every creative aspect of each piece of content and the brand at large.
Which is ultimately what creating a brand is all about, right? Expressing the core value of your brand through every touchpoint of someone’s experience.
If you pay attention to any of the videos of Hustle Gurus, you'll be able to see the interview questions I did, the video style, the graphics, the creators & the people that I featured speaks to this brand ethos and mission.
And in real time, video after video, which you can see on the Intersection YouTube channel & the Substack right here if you're reading it… These videos quickly improved over time.
Here are some of my favorite videos:
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You know, as many founders do, when you have an insight, a gut feeling that is hard to articulate, you have to flesh it out through massive action.
To my disappointment, I ended up experiencing burnout. Not because of overworking. I knew at some point in my gut or intuition that I wasn't traveling in the direction that I was necessarily trying to get to… I felt like I was stuck in turning myself into a video creator, which again, wasn't my goal from the outset. I just wanted to use video to build a community. So in reorienting my direction through what felt very painful at the moment…
I pivoted this video series exclusively into a podcast and rebranded the show to the Do Good Collab and the Do Good podcast.
A few of my favorite Do Good Podcast episodes:
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Ra & Mnny: Performing At Summer Smash & Not Getting Paid For 150M Streams
(1 min clip + full pod)
Improving Health Care In America w/ Gule Sheikh
(1 min clip + full pod)
Trip: Dropping Out High School, “Rips”, Influence Of Street Culture, & Being Multi-Disciplined.
(1 min clip + full pod)
Building Robots & Floating Gardens To Clean The Chicago River
(1 min clip + full pod)
You know, it's much easier to bring a guest and convince them to come on a podcast than it is to create an entire documentary-style video about their life. All the preparation that goes into that… Get approvals of what I can and cannot film, edit these very lengthy complicated videos, hours of footage, and so on and so forth. If I could just invite people to a podcast studio, maybe I could get in front of the right people much faster and build the right kind of audience for this interdisciplinary and collaborative community I was on the way to making happen…
** Fun fact side-note, I covertly gained access to a podcast recording space at Chicago's premier technology incubator and co-working space called 1871. As a rambunctious teenager, I befriended staff members and other members of the space who would let me in and give me access to resources with the unspoken but mutually understood thing that I was a broke high schooler who couldn't afford the membership. But through such a presentable space and a great recording studio, I ended up attracting all types of fantastic guests.
I pulled this off for around two years until one of the not-as-resonant staff members found out and asked me: “You know, Matt, how do you get in here every day?” And kicked me out… But it's okay, I still go back.
Fast forward, again, I ran into the same issue of burnout and needing to reorient my focus. Is this really worth it if my goal is to not build a podcast, but to build a community?...
In the midst of this frustration, one day, in the Albany Park Public Library I sat down for maybe an hour to an hour and a half or two hours banging my head…
“Matthew, what is this thing you're trying to create?! How can you get there faster?!”
And then I started writing… A movie-esque type of scenario of A Beautiful Mind or I felt like Einstein or some shit because suddenly the idea was pouring out of me!
Maybe the way to create the community I was looking for might serve much better as a co-working space, an incubator space!
I had desperately searched all throughout Chicago, any physical collaborative space for entrepreneurs, and no matter where I went… Whether it was 1871 for general technology, MHUB for hardware manufacturing, Matter for health tech, 2112 for music business and music tech, Catapult for a curated cohort of entrepreneurs they intended to bet on for investment-related reasons, Tech Nexus, We Work, Work Box, Pumping Station One for the super quirky material science Fab Lab nerds. I love nerds. I'm a nerd myself, respect. Or even Lost Arts, founded by the then ex co-founder of Kickstarter, Charles Adler. Or even all the university spaces! The Garage at Northwestern, The Polsky Center at the University of Chicago, FORGE series from the University of Illinois…
This is just to make the point that I really had this explorative and thirsty search, but they all felt limited and lackluster. I thought, “why is this?” I tried really hard to think about it.
I thought, “maybe just maybe, in the interest of creating 'specialized communities for like-minded founders'… all these communities had ended up stifling themselves and lacked a certain amount of cognitive diversity. And that sapped them out of a certain kind of creative inspiration.
What if we could create a space where a Hip Hop producer could work alongside an agriculture technology founder? Or a streetwear fashion designer could work alongside a health technology founder?
And that same streetwear fashion designer could go knock on the door of the material science engineers and ask them about using 3d printed dyes for their new fashion collection. Or a FinTech (financial technology) founder who's foreign to creative and media could go knock on the door of the videographer & photography studio and pitch them… “Hey, guys, can you create an explainer video for my business in exchange for some stock points on my new trading platform?”
And so I vigorously wrote all of these kinds of examples down for cross-industry interdisciplinary talent. That was the key. And I thought I had hit a goldmine.
And so I set out to build the Do Good Collab incubator and co-working space.
However, I was still a broke 19-year-old living off McChickens, freelance video gigs, or my mom's cooking. What to do… what to do..
I started pitching this vision everywhere I could online on every social media platform, and any person who was willing to listen.
One day, over time, I got direct word of, through a mentor of mine Liem Lee, there was a small health tech company on Grand Avenue, near the Rainforest Cafe, the McDonald's & the Portillos. (If you're from Chicago, you know what I'm talking about.) And they were rapidly growing. They were about to outgrow this space, which could fit around 15 people. But they were still tied to the lease, and they wanted someone to pay the bills to pay it off.
To make a long and maybe hard-to-follow story short, my friend Keisha Howard, founder of Sugar Gamers, presented an opportunity for me to save her dying coworking space of which she was the last member. To work with the landlord and sell new tenants on operating out of the space. And while I was in the midst of frantically sending emails and texts and calling anyone I knew to try and sell them on this coworking space because I only had ONE MONTH to convince 9 different people to pay $1,000 a month to make it their new office, my mentor I mentioned, Liem Li, responded to one of my emails about how she had a connection to this health tech company that might actually be a BETTER place to operate my coworking space. And that I would have more time to convince people and sell them on it.
The founder of this health tech company that was growing out of their space and needed someone to fill it was her friend and told her that as I could cover the rent and utilities, and convince a group of entrepreneurs to pay, it was mine. It was a much more rinky-dinky space, but I only needed to close members at a $250 a month price. I had around two and a half months of runway to make it happen.
I set out frantically reaching out to anyone and everyone I knew, pitching, pitching, pitching this mission and vision.
I've linked a video that I created in the physical space as a promotional tactic.
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To my surprise, I started getting interest… One person agreed… cool. Another person… awesome. A third person agreed to pay this $250 I'm like, “holy shit. Am I actually pulling this off?!?” You know, I thought to myself. So I started doing tours, open houses.
A week and a half left to pull this all through, I had ended up convincing 9/13 people I needed to cover rent and utilities. Unfortunately, my clumsy ass didn't account for the cost of amenities, internet, refurbishing the space etc. Those weren’t all going to pay for themselves, you know. Not to mention the costs of incorporating and other legalities, which I had never dealt with before.
I reached out to my friend Spencer Gordon-Sand. Now founder of Spencer Ventures and partner at Lofty Ventures. He had an extensive network of top-tier investors on a global level. And I thought if I can pitch this vision to enough people to want to come join the space, then surely there'd be an investor. He said, “Hey, Matt, send a video to us and we'll do what we can.”
Here's the video I submitted. It really articulates the essence of what I was trying to create:
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Just a week or something or a few days before I was supposed to close the whole thing, a few of the soon-to-be members backed out in a humbling experience. Because they came out of the trance of my enchanting vision pitching skills to the sobering reality of my obvious lack of formal business experience as a 19-year-old. Not to mention only a few months later, COVID would begin to consume the world. And so the promise of running a co-working space would have collapsed anyway.
It wasn't until last year that I decided to revamp this vision as a new podcast format with a fresh brand called The Intersection. I developed a much more mature, clearly articulated expression of this vision. Because at the intersection of tech, culture, business, and the arts would form all of the unconventional mix of people I felt like was lacking.
Because also the intersection could mean anything. If it ends up evolving, The Intersection could mean The Intersection of any kind of industry. It's a proper way now to define the community.
I was hoping to start an event series soon. But I ended up putting the show & The Intersection on pause. It wasn't generating me any money and I was at a point in my life where…life be lifing.
The cool thing about The Intersection, though, was in spite of having this average of less than 100 views, through my ability to tell great stories and to pitch I was able to bring on fantastic guests such as: Nate Jones, former director of the Talent Opportunity Initiative at Andreessen Horowitz and who was an eight-year partner there. Who told crazy stories like hanging out in Mark Zuckerberg's backyard (in 2011) with Kanye and Ben Horowitz drinking and listening to rock music at 3AM.
(or) Andy Dunn, founder of Bonobos who sold to Walmart for $300M. Jason Ma, the co-founder of 88 Rising, Emma Mckey whose stitch embroideries have been picked up by the likes of Bad Bunny, Kanye, Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper. Not to mention, again, the mutual connection between me and VaynerX, my boy Solo Colo.
A few of my favorite Intersection episodes:
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Alright, that's the end of part one. The overarching Intersection storyline of how I always wanted to build an entrepreneurial community, but I couldn't quite figure out what the unique insight was in my gut. And so it evolved and rebranded and was reattempted. Where now today, the light at the end of the tunnel is very clear. I know exactly what kind of community I'm building.
PART 2: My Time At Light Pong: Building The World's First One Dimensional Game Console.
Let's take a step back to 2021. I was recruited to join a budding ragtag team getting ready to launch a new video game hardware product on Kickstarter, called Light Pong.
We were creating the world's “first one-dimensional game console” That could play a bunch of very simple intuitive games through this tube of LED lights: “Whether you were 6 or 66, you could play Light Pong and share it with your family and friends.”
—> Light Pong’s Kickstarter Campaign
My job became to do pre-launch marketing for this Kickstarter campaign, trying to make videos of the product go viral so that we could increase our pre-orders.
I ended up, to my surprise even, generating 50 million views in less than two and a half months!!! Across TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and I forget what it was called but Snapchat had its own vertical video platform.
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I ended up running all of our social media profiles: TikTok, Discord, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram… Uploading content on a daily basis, creating content strategy schedules.
And then when the Kickstarter launched, my focus shifted to being the one-on-one touch point with our audience and community.
One of my unique approaches was to intimately involve our Kickstarter backers and all of our pre-order customers into feeling like they were a part of our team. To know that your opinion, your creativity, as a consumer, as an audience member can actually make a difference into the product development process itself.
Stuff I did to let people in to contribute to the product development process included: remote interviews & having people around the world be a part of our content, behind the scenes as things developed.
Live sessions on our Discord, whether it was our graphic designer, the CTO, sound effects lead, our UX designer, etc., I would make sure that they got set up on a live stream of their work; our community would be notified so that they could hop in and give their own feedback and opinions in real time.
Prime examples of including our community in our content:
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Student From Québec Presents Light Pong At School. So We Put Him In Our Vlog
A Young Entrepreneur Building "Planet Pong" Joins Me To Talk Game Design
Prime examples of live community product feedback sessions:
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Compilation of Live Feedback Sessions
Weekly Community "Bonfire"
I led community engagement sessions in the form of live streams, game nights; they could watch our team play Light Pong together, watch us work in the late night, or even silly experimental stuff like we said: “Hey, guys, tune in this week to watch the team drink PILK” (which is a combination of Pepsi and milk and there was some kind of trend around it or something, it was ridiculous…)
“Into The New Year” live stream featuring the whole team
Team plays Light Pong Late Night At The Office
Team Drinks PILK at home office
Example of a community game night
Any and every single piece of media, whether it's all the videos across all our social media channels, or even professional photography was due to my production!
Professional Chicago photographers would tag along with me, and we would go on ragtag missions to bars and nightclubs. Which sometimes would work out to our great benefit. The venue owners would say: “What the hell is this? What did you guys bring in here? Is this a part of the venue?” And we'd say “no,” & they’d say, “Oh, well, interesting. “Get my info.” On the flip side, people would get really mad and say “you're stealing business!!” and kick us out. It was a fun time, though.
On top of that, similarly to the essence of the day in the life documentary style videos behind Hustle Gurus, every other week created a new update video on a very transparent behind-the-scenes look into what it was like day to day building Light Pong.
It became this very human transparent look, being able to see what it was like for us to build the thing in real time.
Prime examples of “In The Office With Light Pong” Documenting The Process:
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I also decided, as a direct messaging strategy, whether it was Instagram or any other social platform to manually, myself, send messages between thousands of different online audience members.
That may seem like unnecessary manual effort, but I thought there was something really interesting and genuine and human.
People would say after I message them: “Oh, fuck you, you stupid company trying to get me to buy stuff!” And I’d say no, this is a real person!” They'd say: “Huh?, prove it!” And I would prove it and people would be baffled, they would be shocked! Totally 180 change their language and suddenly start talking to me about how their day was going, what they're up to, and not only open up about themselves on a very human level, (which I think did something profound to our brand awareness.)
By the time that we actually had an ask, shout out to Gary Vee.( I didn't even think of it this way at the time.) But now I am “Jab Jab, Right Hook”.Ie. if you're not familiar to the Jab, Jab, Right Hook concept. It's about giving value, giving value, and then asking things from your audience or your customers.
I was having these human to human conversations and when we needed people to vote for us for awards, or be involved in giving feedback on certain things, I could ask that of them. And it wasn't a random out-of-the-blue request, they knew it was Matt! So I was able to pull in all type of different requests, which helped us in a plethora of ways.
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I was the unique touch point between our customers, our audience, our play testers, and the company.
Unfortunately, the product (Light Pong) has still not launched yet. We're not going to get into all that; it's another recording for itself.***
PART 3: (My most recent employment and maybe my last, or not, depending on if VaynerX has anything to say about it.) My time at the MIT co-founded music & AI startup, Rivet.
So after leaving Light Pong, I ended up joining Rivet, a music technology and AI startup to essentially help music artists make it easier to make a living from their art and connect with their fans.
(They were) looking for a digital marketing lead. And this position was brought to my awareness by my good friend Landon Campbell, the Chicago general manager of Drive Capital. Landon himself is very focused on shifting Chicago's traditional behavior of being very risk averse and investing in boring companies, to start investing at what he likes to call "napkin-stage-level ideas."
Bonus: my Intersection episode with Landon
Before even my first introductory meeting with them (Rivet), I probably spent over 10 hours creating a super extensive spreadsheet of all the music artists, artists, managers, DJs, event curators, and any other music-related talent I had a personal relationship with in Chicago. Which happens to be quite a damn few bit of people! Just to prove and show to them how much I was willing to open my arms to my own network and how much of a network I really do have of the creative music scene in Chicago.
**which we'll get into a second because I was trying to be a rapper for a long time.**
I’ve included this list (here):
Custom private network for Rivet spreadsheet
I walked into the office during our very first initial meeting and I said, “Hey, you know, at first I was just going to come into the office to help you guys for the sake of it, then I was going to try and pitch you on my own consultancy. Now actually, I'm applying for the digital marketing role!” And the Co-founder & Head of Product Simran said, “Oh, uh, take a walk with me…” And before you knew it, to my delight, I was eventually brought onto the Rivet team as one of the first people to ever join the company.
At Rivet, so what did I do? I proceeded to lead most of our artist development, product feedback, user research work. To get people's feedback behind their psychology and lifestyle in relation to the ever-evolving product of Rivet, alongside Rivet's Co-founder & Head of Product, Simran and & attempt to onboard them in the process.
All the artists and creatives invited to the office I personally invited, coordinated and facilitated 40 to 50 people within the four to five month span I was there. And I was very confident that via my support we could elevate our brand awareness for us on a local intimate level.
Dope Examples Of Documented Rivet Artist Office Hour Sessions:
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Another key aspect of my role was how I became direct partners with the fractional CMO, Brian Diema. Brian is the former director of marketing strategy at Silicon Valley Bank, the Director of Middle Market Corporate Banking at JP Morgan Chase for two years. Brian and I co-lead all types of PR work & message testing to try and get really peculiar and specific on how to articulate the value proposition of Rivet.
—> RIVET MESSAGE TESTING DECK
Every single music publication from Chicago or every single message testing participant… Take a guess. How did these all get locked in?? Through me!
Brian, being a senior veteran marketing professional, was able to add his corporate experience to what was my ragtag scrappy personal network of what happened to be the perfect kind of target audience.
To the very end, by the time Brian and I departed from Rivet, he really advocated for me and believed in me in ways more than I believed in myself! Which was, you know, really endearing.
On top of all this, I was deemed the “CEO of the Fanarchy With Rivet podcast.” An experimental podcast we started, to not just exist as a random fun podcast for the company, but to be a direct value extension of the product. Where, since artists are coming to Rivet to make it easier for them to make a living through their art, we wanted to create a podcast about artists, artist managers, and other people in the music industry giving game on how to help artists manage the business side of their work.
My personal take on a company’s content strategy is that: if it isn’t helping you build a more intimate one-to-one connection with your audience or making it easier to understand and navigate your company's offerings, then it needs to be about achieving the same kinds of things, to provide the same kind of core value that your product or service is already doing, to help you build more credibility as a company that makes that kind of thing happen for people.
We had a ton of really cool guests on the show including Chicago legends like King Louie, Joey Purp. When I met King Louie for the first time, I walked up to him to dap him up and said, “live and die in Chicago!” laughs He was like “wordd”.
Or other super dope music industry professionals that were able to give artists game, like Chris Classik, one of the most legendary studio owners in Chicago. Not to mention Doja Cat’s manager & co-founder of music tech corporation, Song Finch, Josh Kaplan.
All on my own. I fully edited, wrote all of the questions for, filmed, sourced several guests for, and led all of our growth strategy and marketing strategies, and created all the social media content (hundreds of different clips) and ran our podcast hosting platform on Buzzsprout. So on and so forth, fully running the podcast all on my own… and then letting the CEO, Anj, step in during the interviews to ask the questions that I had created and engaged with our guests.
Some of my favorite episodes of Fanarchy With Rivet:
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And then, just like I did in Light Pong, I made sure to include our audience and our community in the content marketing strategy in a very human, non-scripted way with my friends like Drew The Kiiid, who opened up for Lil Durk at the United Center, or Sam Thousand, a veteran live musician performer. To explain certain aspects of Rivet that make it what it is, through the lens of their own experience.
Rivet “How-To” Videos:
Or this funny example of an artist who made the most out of the platform. So I made sure to reach out to him on my behalf and make a little fun “here’s how to make the most of Rivet featuring (so and so artist)”, making the rest of the audience feel open and connected to other users of the platform but also making that artist feel like the fact they made the most out of the platform is encouraged, respected, and uplifted.
Here’s the video I’m talking about:
Eventually, I decided, for various reasons, I kind of just really want to do my own thing. And so I left on good terms with the founding team.
My priority focus became building One 2 One Insight, my consumer empathy and understanding consultancy, to help founding teams and corporate executive teams understand their current customers and their target audience better than they think they already did. Almost like a business or technology anthropologist.
PART 4: My full circle trip back to being a solo founder at One 2 One Insight.
Steve Blank, the godfather of customer discovery, has famously said that you can't outsource this kind of work, i.e. the act of talking to users. It always has to be the founding team doing this. So I set up One 2 One not to be some kind of third-party outsourced assistant. Rather, a coach to equip founders and founding teams with new skills & methodologies for the act of talking to users and learning from their users with more grace and effectiveness. Ironically, this skill took me no degree, you know, I went to the school of hard knocks.
One2OneInsight.com
This is super relevant (I know) to VaynerX because you guys are all about an obsessive focus on the consumer and having empathy for the consumer and seeing consumer behavior and where that's headed and what that means for industries and culture at large before anyone else does. And this is my specialty. This is my bread and butter.
For example, one project that was super cool was helping one of my best friends, Gabe Tavas, Founder of Symmetry Wood who happened to be my first ever business partner. Gabe and his team are material science experts. And they've created this material that mimics exotic wood in the interest of combating deforestation and protecting indigenous people’s communities.
If you can create a material that mimics trees like Ebony, which serves as a very dark exotic high paying wood, and illegal logging companies end up cutting down tons of other trees just to get at these specific high paying woods. It has so many terrible ecological implications and implications on indigenous peoples throughout the world.
Symmetry Wood has been featured in the World Economic Forum and winner of the James Dyson award international design competition (Symmetry Wood James Dyson Award Video
Symmetry Wood was confronted with a mission: to figure out what kind of initial consumer product to invest their material into creating for with a limited amount of resources and funding
They thought creating materials and products for guitars was a great idea, but they weren't quite 100% confident about it. Gabe on his own had tried to do this kind of customer discovery research by talking to different guitar store owners and enthusiasts about their experience and understanding of the wood material itself but he was struggling a bit with it and knowing I had just started One 2 One brought me on to help.
With only so much funding & resources to produce this material, Pyrus, its putting a lot on the line for your budding startup. If they created Pyrus on the assumption that the guitar market would be receptive to it and its not, that’s gonna be a problem. So here I came in!
With zero experience in this industry, I jumped in as I decided let's not talk to guitar enthusiasts, rather large guitar manufacturing executives to understand: What do they think about sustainability? Have they tried alternative materials? The same for their consumers, What do they know about their consumer sentiment around this kind of stuff? How have they tried to service it?
Somehow, miraculously, (as I always do with my cold outreach methods) I got on calls with large guitar manufacturing executives. Including the VP of Sales and Customer Engagement at Fender, or exotic wood buyers at Martin. And created a super detailed insight report on: is this an appropriate place to focus their first efforts so that they don't waste the production of their materials.
You can actually see the case study here:
One 2 One Symmetry Wood Case Study: PYRUS
Bonus nostalgia before the final chapter:
Final Chapter, Part Five: How Matt Got His Foothold In The Creative Arts Through Trying To Make It As A Rapper In High School.
And in much much relevance to potentially being heavily involved in the music industry as a creative strategist via Vayner X, I was utterly convinced of trying to make it as a hip hop artist.
Let's go back to around early 2015. Shout out to Solo Colo and the rest of ETP Exit The Premises, my guys, the gang! We would start to create a bunch of music videos on YouTube. One day, as a half-serious/half-joking request, "Hey, let me be in one of the videos!" I still remember what would end up being my first verse and what is now a long time ago deleted video…
Let me try to run it back for you in my 15 year old voice:
Rap so swift might get knocked out
chief with the fire call it a cookout
your bars are so dry you could call it a drought
and I'm havin some doubt that you down for the count
if you havin some doubt I’d like you to announce
stuff so good count it up by the ounce
blah blah blah I’d ask you to pronounce
some of y'all try to keep it lowkey
switch up emotions with emojis
I would call that straight baloney
superduper squad day one homies
**laughs** … I brought this to my high school and played it in my Japanese class. Even shoutout to Park Sensei who was watching. People suddenly were like, “Wow, Matt, this is so amazing!” “Whoa, Matt, bro, keep doing this! Keep at it, this shit is good!”
I made singles, two EPs, mixtapes, designed graphic art, distributed my music on streaming platforms, learned Apple's Logic to record songs. I performed in front of Chance The Rapper’s Social Works open mics for high schoolers, in clothing store basements, and hole-in-the-wall venues. I navigated my way to find studio spaces in Chicago, learning how to work with engineers. You know, the whole nine yards… even when the music wasn't good, ignoring the haters at school, as I really tried to make it as a music artist.
ETP was really like, you know, these are my guys. Shout out to the gang.
I made a lot of friendships that would lead to, in a compound effect, more and more creative relationships between videographers, choreographers, DJs, radio hosts, event curators, fashion designers, engineers, producers, which ended up evolving to present day as a very unique advantage. That was the cause and effect of being able to do things like tap into all the artists' relationships that were the crux of all that work I did at Rivet.
Here’s some of my old music:
My SoundCloud (2015 - 2019 OG songs)
NonStop Spotify (Recent songs)
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For the final cherry on top top top ! Here is a TEDx talk I did for the University of Illinois at Chicago: The Art Of Networking, Blending The Personal and Professional:
S/O to my guy Jayson Dombele who gave me the call one day to ask me if I wanted to do it… So random!
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There you have it! I don't know if Mike Boyd Jr listened to all of this if you did happen to listen to this, bro. WOW, that's crazy!!!
And then obviously S/O to anybody who's a fan of The Intersection or any of my homies listening. Shout out to you guys, and I hope you enjoyed this. Hope you enjoyed my story.
Peace.
Matt's Entrepreneurial Journey: 8 Years Distilled In 30min