Why This Millionaire Took A $5.75/Hour McDonald’s Job

This 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 in real life. And so I knew about Meetup. I'd 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. He 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, he's back at an Amazon warehouse now being a pick packer, 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 a Scott rabbit hole and I want to talk to you about it. You have some good stuff there too, right? Is that how? Caught your eye?

Yeah, so basically he grew up, I think in Iowa or Idaho, somewhere in the Midwest. And 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 going to get in the internet. And so in the mid-'90s, he starts, I believe, like 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. Yeah, 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 6 or 7 years at this internet startup. And I work in marketing, but I'm only around like bankers and lawyers and other like yuppie people. That's horrible for my position as a marketer, but also like, I feel so out of touch with the people.

Here, 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 6 grueling years of the internet whirlwind, I wanted to experience a profitable, well-oiled, multi-billion-dollar machine. And I deserved a 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 5th and Broadway in New York City. I walked off, uh, 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 he— 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. I 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 6 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 6 months. I think it was like more, more like 3 or 4 weeks, something like that. But he said $5.75 ain't much. So 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 take a job at McDonald's. I didn't need the money. They thought I was making fun of people that worked there. The opposite is true. I gained a bucket of respect for people that bust their butt for such low pay. It's one thing to scan past like 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 6-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. And he's like, yeah, come and see what I'm up to now. And they use this photo of him working at McDonald's wearing his McDonald's uniform. And it's just the greatest photo I've ever seen. And if you scroll through this whole blog post, we'll link it in the 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.

Now fast forward to today.

By the way, he made $15 million, I think, at that sale. So he sold his agency for about $15 million. Who knows stock, cash, who knows if these is like, but ballpark, right? Let's take it directional. And then he goes from there to working at a McDonald's, um, you know, just to kind of like reacclimate with the real world, which I thought was, 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. Turns out he has a job at a, at at an Amazon fulfillment center, and he doesn't make a big ordeal out of this. He doesn't like 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. It's the same type of thing where he's like, uh, I just like felt out of touch with average people and I wanted to, 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, uh, the interviewer was like, isn't that the place where like they just had a big issue with, uh, them, the workers in the warehouse wanting to unionize? And 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. And 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 fucked up analogy, but it's like movies where it's like the, 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, and sort of rallies the, the crew inside the prison in a different way.

Right.

Uh, or like we had Shkreli on the podcast and he was talking about the same thing. He 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 just like meeting of the, of the world. That's what this reminds me of, this sort of going into the fulfillment center and, and like stirring up the union, the union efforts. All right. If you like that clip, there's a full conversation with a lot more just like that. Just follow my finger. It is right here.