In this interview Matt Paulson explains how he balances his core business MarketBeat with family, community, and a variety of side projects such as real‑estate investing, angel investing, writing, podcasts, and hobbies. He emphasizes strict time boundaries—leaving work by 5 PM, declining most social events—to protect family time. Paulson relies on trusted partners (Kevin Tooby for real‑estate, Tim for venture investing) and hires specialists (CFO, accountants, content team) so that side ventures and operational tasks consume minimal of his personal hours. He describes moving past FOMO by realizing that missing events does not cause harm, and by recognizing his seniority and earned seat at the table. For MarketBeat, his focus remains on paid marketing, monetization, and growth, while he allows himself to experiment with new hobbies and projects, letting them run their natural course and ending them when interest wanes, all without jeopardizing the "mothership". This hands‑off leadership style, combined with clear delegation and a willingness to let others own decisions, enables him to sustain a 19‑year business while maintaining personal fulfillment.
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Matt, like, I have personally, I've gone so down this rabbit hole, like, because, you know, with a lot of the stuff that I've done over the last 10 years, it's like a lot of exposure to very successful people and trying to like, you know, I think the internet does a lot of this too, is we see one side of the story, but we don't realize how many trade-offs there are. And like, you know, you and your About section, all this stuff that you've been published out there is like, You decided to balance family and then you got community and like it's this attention, like we can only do so many things. And how do you, how do you just, how do you think about community, family, MarketBeat, your real estate, the angel investing? How do you think about the trade-offs of time?
All of my kind of side projects, I try not to cause like to suck up a ton of time. So like with the real estate stuff, like there's, I have an operating partner, a guy named Kevin Tooby, who's fantastic. And like, I can think about real estate for 0 hours a week and like, it'd be totally fine. On the venture capital side, I have a partner named Tim. He's awesome. You know, I think about that, you know, on the busiest weeks, 5, 10 hours. On, you know, a very quiet week, you know, I might not have to think about it too often at all because there just might not be anything to do. Um, so I just, I'm very careful about my time. Um, like, I don't Like there's so many like evening events that happen in Sioux Falls that I get invited to and I just don't go to any of them because like, I kind of want to be at home after 5 PM because I've had, you know, 7, 8 meetings during the day and like, I just want to be at home with my wife and kids. And like, it's like, yeah, it's great that your banquet's happening and like, I'll write a donation to your nonprofit, but like, I'm not going to go. And yeah, I just kind of have to kind of be a jerk about it sometimes because like, you know, I probably got invited to 20 Christmas parties in Sioux Falls and I went to like 2 of them. Just because, like, am I going to be gone 4 nights a week for the months of November and December? Like, no, of course not, right?
Yeah, you got fam— you got family. It's a—
gotta just set those things aside and be okay that you're not everywhere all the time. And, um, nor do you need to be. Like, it's just like, you don't need to go to everything.
Where in your journey did you get that peace with yourself that you were okay not having FOMO? Did you ever have FOMO?
Used to have a ton of FOMO. And then it just kind of became like not possible to like do everything with 2 kids and 2 dogs at home. And when I like wasn't able to do all of the things and then like nothing bad happened and like didn't really miss it, you know, you don't really miss out on anything, then it just kind of eventually just get over it. And some of that might be like getting a little bit older and being 40 now versus, you know, late 20s when like Like I used to like want to earn my seat at the table and like now I've got the seat at the table and I don't feel like I need to earn it anymore by showing up and helping with every last thing. And you know, time just doesn't exist to do it either.
How do you choose what to focus on?
Like there's the stuff I have to focus on, which is like at MarketBeat, it's, it's like the paid marketing to grow MarketBeat and then the monetization. So like I always pay attention to that. And then beyond that, It's kind of whatever interests me at the time. The, because like next, a week from today will be my 19th anniversary of building MarketBeat. And I know that because my AdSense account has a birthday of December 26th, 2006.
That's awesome.
So like there's this like continual journey of 19 years of, of like personal finance blog to investing blog to investing websites to MarketBeat. That is like interrupted. And I think the reason I've been able to like stick with it that long and just kind of keep doing the same thing, well, partially because it works, but like because I just allow myself to kind of pursue other hobbies to their natural conclusion. Like I did the book writing thing, wrote 6 books because I thought it would make me some money and it did, but like also like totally wasn't worth it. And then like, ah, got bored of it, kind of moved on to the next thing. Had a podcast for a while, doing the Twitter thing now, doing a podcast tour. And eventually these things will get boring and I'll stop doing them and move on to the next thing. But just giving myself that space to do these things and experiment a little bit and kind of pick a new hobby every now and then. My hobbies are not golf. It's like, I'm going to go learn how to make great espresso and be the coffee guy. And then, and I was like, yeah, I can still make great coffee, but like sometimes you just don't give a crap and like put the pod in the Keurig machine and like, I just want caffeine. Yeah. Like I was really into watches for a while, kind of got out of watches, still have a bunch of great watches, but like that was my COVID hobby because like that was something you could do during COVID Yeah.
One of the things that I see that other people struggle with and I have also in the past is experimenting in ways that are safe without blowing up the mothership. And I think that's the balance that I think, you know, either they're like hamstrung or like captured in their operating role of the company, which doesn't allow them to have that flexibility that you're talking about, or they chase that flexibility without taking care of the mothership. And so it becomes this like either-or thing. And I— and you're showing that you can be both. If it's— what makes that work?
A lot of it is all the stuff that I don't want to do at MarketBeat, somebody else does. And some of that, like, you know, I don't want to do QuickBooks, so like hire a couple people to be, you know, the CFO and an accounting person and, you know, a couple other people. And like, I just will kind of willfully ignorant about all the financial stuff works other than like looking at the P&L every month to see how, you know, where the money's coming from and going out. But like the actual, like, how, like, how payroll gets done and how bills get paid. And like, I really don't want to know about that. And I do do my part just to kind of keep good accounting processes in place. But, you know, continually telling people like, hey, this is your decision. I'm not going to get involved with it. Like, this is kind of your neck of the woods and like not micromanaging. Like, we have a content team of like 3 editors and 10 writers, a couple of YouTube people. And they asked me my opinion and I was like, like, this is up to you. This is your decision how you handle it. Like, I'm not going to tell you what to do and just kind of really going to keep my hands out of this stuff that like is not kind of the stuff that I'm really good at. Like if somebody wants to mess with the advertising, I'd say like, go away. This is not your area of expertise.
Is that where your main— that's your baby?
Yeah. I mean, that's been my whole thing for 20 years is getting people to click on ads on the internet and buy stuff like Like, that's, that's like the thing I'm good at in the world. So now it's like, how do we grow Mark Beattie's email list or SMS list, website traffic, kind of our own audiences, now YouTube channel too. And how do we just get a ton of people there and how do we get them to click on ads and buy stuff? And that's the whole business.
