Matt Wilson truly embodies the spirit of his company, Under30CEO. He is so passionate about entrepreneurship and helping young people fulfill their dreams that he has recently started another company, Shadow Concepts, an innovative digital marketing firm. Matt first envisioned Under30CEO when he was an undergraduate. He admits the road to owning a business is not easy but it is very possible, even for the inexperienced. Matt has embraced the Internet as the place to build his businesses and uses Social Media to grow them but the reason he is successful is because he believes in developing real relationships. He may be an expert on Twitter and other social media services, but what makes Matt exceptional is his unwavering passion for business.

What is Under 30 CEO?

Under30CEO.com is the leading media property for entrepreneurs, inspiring the world’s next generation of business leaders. Under30CEO features direct interviews with the most successful young people on the planet, profiles twenty-something start-ups, provides advice from those who have done it before and publishes cutting edge news for the young entrepreneur.

Under30CEO’s community is filled with thousands of dynamic young people following their passion and creating businesses that are both lucrative in profit and socially conscious.

Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get to where you are now?

I’ve always been an entrepreneur whether it was selling lemonade at age 5, golf balls that I got out of a pond, or having a landscaping monopoly on the entire neighborhood I grew up in.

I went to school at Bryant University, a small private business school of 3,500 students. I focused heavily on corporate finance and accounting and I realized that there needed to be more resources for entrepreneurs. I wanted to start my own business and I needed the tools and resources to do it. Fortunately, my team and I discovered there was a niche on campus, and we grew the organization to 150 members, we hosted the world’s largest elevator pitch competition and had Ted Turner and Kenneth Cole speak on campus. I absolutely fell in love with supporting entrepreneurs and I knew I wanted to do it for the rest of my life.

Fast forward to graduation, I was pitching Venture Capitalists, writing business plans but operating out of my parents basement. I wasn’t surrounded by smart, young, passionate people anymore and I needed to make a change. I got together with my best friend since 4th grade Jared O’Toole, who was also in the same boat. After a few beers, we realized there must be a niche for this globally. Under30CEO was born.

We respect your boldness but what do you mean by saying ‘stop doing shit you hate’?

What do you have to lose? It’s so easy to start a business these days. We’re putting the tools and resources out there. We’re telling you how to do this stuff every day on our website. You may not have any experience, but the only way to get experience is to try. You can go out and take a leap when you’re young because you have so little to lose. When I started Under30CEO, I knew that if it failed I would still be in my early 20’s and have the rest of my life ahead of me.

How has your initial vision of Under30CEO changed over time?

We have changed our business model so many times. Under30CEO started as a niche social network for young entrepreneurs. We have gone through crazy highs and crazy lows. At first, we didn’t really have a business plan, which was fine because we were still figuring out which direction we were going and we’ve been very flexible since about the direction of the company. We were very anti business plan in the beginning and it was fine because we didn’t know what we were doing. We knew the niche we wanted to target and we knew we wanted to be a social network. It’s been a long journey and we’re very lucky that we’ve been able to figure it out as we go. But, if I had to do it again, I would’ve stuck to one thing and tried to persevere through it.

You’re are the first social media expert we’ve interviewed on Starting Stories. How would explain social media to someone who doesn’t understand it?

I think there are so many people out there that don’t understand that your computer is an extension of yourself. A lot of people write off social media platforms because they think it’s just a bunch of people talking about what they ate for lunch. The truth of the matter is if I meet someone I like in person and I connect them via social media, I will never lose contact with that person. Also, I can meet like minded people on social media: entrepreneurs, marketers and bloggers. These are people I can sell to, market to or encourage to read my blog. Social media allows you to cultivate relationships with real people. Those real people are markets where you can make money.

Can you talk about the range of familiarity people have with social media?

We’ve seen the whole range. Some people have no idea whatsoever and hardly know how to turn their computer on. I taught my grandfather how to use his computer, so I’m used to it. There are some people that are using social media really well. They know how to market themselves. Those are my favorite clients because I can come up with really creative, high-performing campaigns. It’s fun for me because these people are already doing well. It’s a challenge for me to figure out what we can do to take it to the next level. We focus on driving more traffic, creating communities and strengthening relationships with people online.

What advice to you have for other young entrepreneurs?

Take advantage of every opportunity you can. Go to every networking event in your area. Reach out to people you respect on twitter. Send an email asking them to meet up with you. Show up at events and listens to speakers. If someone suggests a book to you, read it. The reason they suggested the book to you is because it helped them, so it can probably help you. There are so many people out there that take the easy way out. They think, ‘I just saw an amazing keynote speaker but I’m not going to shake his hand and give him my business card, because he probably won’t want to speak to me.’ But, you never know unless you try. I’ve been in so many great positions where I’ve said, ‘I’m going to go for this,’ and it’s worked out so far. Take advantage of every opportunity.

Who do you respect on the Internet?

I’m a big Seth Godin fan. He thinks so differently than everybody else. He looks at what is happening in the world and asks, ‘What would happen if I took the converse approach to this?’ I respect Gary Vaynerchuk for how pumped up he gets about business, and the brand he has created. I just read “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi and it has reaffirmed my belief in networking. I really do believe that your network is your net worth. I want to be able to walk down the streets of New York and know everybody. It sounds ridiculous because it is, but I want to know everyone in the entrepreneurship space at least.

What other ways do you promote your business?

We are big believers in PR. We’ve been in Business Week, Entrepreneur, Black Enterprise Magazine and on MSNBC because of personal relationships. I was able to tell a good story and show them actual results, but many of these placements were because of friendships. Behind every computer is a real person. I know the small business editor at the New York Times. I told him any time he needs a source to give me a call. Those are the kind of real relationships that it takes to promote your business.

What is the future of Matt Wilson?

My definition of success is to do what I want, when I want, however I want. That means freedom financially and with my time. Running a start-up, sometimes you don’t feel like you have any time. I can do what I want now but my business relies on me. In the future, I want to have an entire staff so my business relies on them and I can be freed up to do more creative things. I don’t want to work for my business, I want to work on my business. Down the road, I want to be involved with other companies. I also want to invest in other companies. I see myself as a leader and I like to work on a lot of ideas. I want to show people my vision and get them to execute it.

If you could be a Social Media consultant for any company in the world, what company would it be?

I would help Vail Resorts with their digital marketing. They own a bunch of great mountains in Colorado. They own Vail, Breckenridge, Beaver Creek, Keystone and Heavenly in California. They’re doing some amazing things with social media. It’s an industry that I’m so passionate about, so I’d love to work with them.

Special thanks to Matt Wilson. For more information, please visit under30ceo.com, or connect with Matt on Twitter.

Hey guys, it’s Carrie, stepping out from behind the editing desk to interview Marisa Catalina Casey, founder and executive director of the community art center Starting Artists. I’ve been volunteering with Starting Artists (SA) since February and have been more impressed each day, not just by the scope of Marisa’s entrepreneurial expertise or her unwavering dedication to the cause but also the impressive results experienced by the students and the community, and the incredible student workforce she’s created.

We stopped by Starting Artists on a Monday afternoon as students were filtering out, after the first day of the last week of the Summer Arts Intensive. Each week focuses on a different theme and this week it’s, conveniently, Entrepreneurship. The program was over for the day but a pack of teenage student interns lingered to help prepare for the next day, clean up and hang out. Unlike most college internships, SA middle and high school interns have an opportunity to be paid for their services through the NYC-DYCD Youth Employment Program. But Being a Starting Artists Student Intern is no cakewalk. Marisa holds her interns to the same ambitious standards she’s set for herself her entire life. She expects her interns to be proficient in Adobe, Apple and Microsoft programs, to be self-guided role models and mentors to younger students, and to exhibit the drive to create opportunities for themselves. It doesn’t take long to see that the interns and students rise to the occasion, following the Starting Artist motto: Get inspired, get creative, get to work!

What is Starting Artists?

Starting Artists is a non-profit community based art center located in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. I founded SA in 2006 while I was finishing graduate school at Columbia. We teach students media based arts and entrepreneurship skills both after school and during the public school vacations. Mainly we benefit under-served youth, which means folks who can’t afford art instruction, don’t have access to the arts in their public schools or have been discouraged from pursuing the arts. Our after-school program runs from 3-6pm Monday-Thursday and it’s always been drop in and free.

Can you describe your background and early interests?

I’m glad you asked that because I feel my background and early interest in art are the two things that led me to do this kind of social venture. One of the things that’s always been important to me is to give back to the community, particularly by helping young people express their voices. I was adopted from Bogotá, Columbia when I was three, so negotiating my identity and family were always issues for me. I was exposed to the notion of social entrepreneurship at a very early age since my mother was the founder and director of the non-profit international agency that facilitated my adoption. She was a social entrepreneur before anyone was really talking about social entrepreneurship.

When I was younger, I became fascinated by the idea of documenting and recording. I think a big reason for this was the fact that I have no baby pictures of myself. I often think about how examined life is now. I literally have 50,000 photos of my niece and nephew. The first three years of my life are totally un-documented. In dealing with this, photography was a tool that was invaluable to me. I was also lucky that my public school had a darkroom and a passionate teacher that was there to lead us. The darkroom was this great diverse community within school where everyone had this shared passion.

In high school, I was able to combine my interests in photography and giving back when I decided to do a fundraising calendar that benefited the orphanage that I was adopted from as well as other orphanages internationally. I took photos of kids that were adopted from all over the world and teamed up with another student who designed the calendar layout. We printed it, got it published and sold it as a fundraising tool. The calendars made thousands of dollars for international orphanages. It was so successful that I repeated the project my freshman year at Brown University. I worked with a professional designer who donated her services, we got the calendar into Barnes and Noble and it made a lot of money. That was one of the major entrepreneurial and creative projects that I did early on. I wasn’t directed to do it by anyone, and I wasn’t part of a club that did it. I sort of carved out my own space. So I thought to myself, there should be other places like this for kids who are already entrepreneurial and creative or could be encouraged to become so.

What was your college experience like?

When I went to college I knew I wanted to explore my Latin American roots so I majored in Latin American studies at Brown University but I made sure that I infused creativity into each of my classes. For at least one project in every class, I’d do a movie, or a collage, or a photo display layout.

I was still really interested in photography but there were no photography classes at Brown at that time. There was a photography club but it only had a few members and was really just a tiny student run darkroom that members paid some initial fee to use.

So I joined and I was like “Hey guys, we should do more stuff.” My freshman year I helped build a new dark room in the basement of the Woman’s Center. I ended up running the photo club for my sophomore through senior years. I also started Brown and RISD’s first all photography magazine called 68 Degrees. Students, faculty and staff, from Brown and RISD participated. After that, photo-club membership skyrocketed! We set up exhibitions and did workshops that taught people how to use the darkroom. We ended up having to petition the student council for more money.

I made sure that if photo was something I was really excited about and I wasn’t majoring in it, that I created opportunities for myself. That has been one of the more entrepreneurial traits that I’ve tried to instill in my students here.

What kinds of jobs have you had leading up to Starting Artists?

The summer after I graduated I did a philanthropy internship through this organization called Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO). SEO was well known for placing students of color in sectors that were un-diverse, like media companies, investment banks, corporate law firms, and philanthropic foundations. I knew that some day I wanted to start something of my own, since I’d started so many things in college but I thought it’d be great first to learn who funds these things and how.

The internship was at the William Randolph Hearst Foundations. I was doing the job of a program associate but was at the lowest rung. I was one of the first readers of proposals from all of the non-profits looking for funding from the foundation. I would help decide if the proposals were a ‘no’, ‘maybe’ or ‘definite’ and why. I really learned a lot about philanthropy but I didn’t want to lose track of my media, photography, and publishing interests.

So, I applied to Aperture for their Work Scholar Program. It’s basically a glorified internship where we were paid very little but given a lot of access. They offered me a position as an editorial intern, and told me I would work on the book-publishing and magazine side and I could pinch hit if they needed design help. At Aperture, there were some interns that just did their job but what made my experience different was that I was always going around the office asking for more things to do. I’m the type of person that if you give me a task I’m going to do it right away, as quickly and efficiently as possible and then I want to move onto the next thing. I don’t want to sit there and play Tetris. I would go around to all the other directors in different departments and say “Do you have anything for me?” I got experience doing the design side, the editorial side, the publishing side, and getting rights and permissions. They offered me a full time position as international director of rights and permissions, which would have been an amazing job, but I didn’t want to write contracts all day. I then worked for this portrait photographer for a while who I met through Aperture, but I wasn’t really that passionate about the commercial for profit, celebrity photography side of the industry. I ended up going back to the Hearst Foundation and taking a job in philanthropy that they’d originally offered me the summer after I graduated college.

My favorite part about working at Hearst was the site visits. I got to visit all kinds of sites, from a huge hospital to a tiny art center to a medium sized homeless shelter to the Salvation Army and everything in between. I loved seeing how things actually happen and realized I wanted to be a hands-on person. The other thing I realized was that there still weren’t those places, that I’d been thinking about as far back as high school, where young people could be creative and entrepreneurial. It was all the same old same old in terms of arts education and youth development and they were very separate from anything entrepreneurial.

So I started thinking more concretely about what I would have wanted as a teenager: a free and open space where I felt comfortable and could learn things like how to do the fundraising calendar. At that time, I was also helping my mother set up a philanthropic foundation. I was writing proposals and planning fundraisers that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, which taught me a lot about how to make a non-profit work. With the idea for Starting Artists in mind, I decided to go back to school to get my masters in order to learn the nitty gritty.

I decided to go to the program for Arts Administration at Columbia housed at Teacher’s College. It was a really nice mix of the things I was interested in: Education, the Arts, Business and Law. I knew that if I was going to start something myself that I’d really be doing it myself. Grad school taught me a little bit of everything. I learned where I excelled and where I would hire other people and also how to know whether I hired a good person for the job.

Can you talk a little bit about the pros and cons of choosing to go the non-profit route?

I decided to found it as a non-profit because that’s what I knew. But if I knew then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have. The way I see it, the history of the non-profit sector really has to do with being able to get funding from the US government. But what happens when the Bush administration decides to focus on faith based initiatives and stops giving grants in your sector? You’re not gonna get funding for how many years? Four years? Eight years? You don’t know. It’s at the whim of the administration. And yes, the government incentivizes giving to non-profits by allowing donations to be tax free, but what happens when the economy tanks and the foundation and corporate grants aren’t coming in the way that they used to? And certainly in a sector like the arts, we are the first ones to get cut off the list.

We’re a very entrepreneurial non-profit, meaning we utilize a lot of for profit concepts and ideas. I believe that there can be a hybrid where you accept donations as we do, and get foundation grants and local grants while at the same time being proactive about things that we can do to get dollars in the door. For example, we have a pop-up shop on our website where we sell t-shirts, inspiration kits and other things the students have made. We also charge for some of our services, like special workshops preparing students to apply to art specific high schools and colleges. We also do birthday parties, have exhibitions and hold private classes for a fee.

Since you started SA, has the initial vision changed at all?

Yes, we had a sort of non-traditional beginning. A lot of people start their projects or organizations by just doing it and figure it out on the way. For me, I wanted to get all the official stuff out of the way and start building the infrastructure while I was still in graduate school. I decided to obtain 501c3 status before we even had one program running. At first, I didn’t highlight the entrepreneurial aspect of the program. It was just “Starting Artists will benefit under-served youth in Brooklyn through hands on-experiences in, and exposure to the visual and performing arts.” Our initial mission was very broad, which is great because it can capture a lot of things. It’s important to have a broad mission because of the Unrelated Business Income Tax, which holds non-profits accountable for taxes on any income that doesn’t directly relate to their mission. Once we started running programs we refined our mission by focusing on our strengths: the visual arts, and more specifically the media arts, and how they apply to entrepreneurship. Something that really differentiates us from other arts programs is that we give students an arsenal of 21st Century skills that they can apply to their careers later on. We train 10 year-olds to use Photoshop. If they’re applying to an arts specific high school like LaGuardia, or even later when they’re applying to college and jobs, they’re going to stand out because they have those marketable skills that they learned early on. Art is the hook that brings students through the door but even if they decide that they don’t want to be an artist as their profession, they’ve got all these other valuable media and entrepreneurship skills that would help them in any career.

How much time elapsed between founding SA and starting to run programs?

About a year. During that time we really got our ducks in a row. To get your 501c3 you have to incorporate, you have to assemble your board you have to do your bi-laws, your manual, you have to hold board meetings, fundraisers, figure out marketing, programming, partnerships, all that stuff can happen before you have one program running so that’s what we did.

As that was happening we looked for a space. We were looking for a space where the landlord was interested in having a non-profit and would potentially give us a bit of a break. We utilized the free labor of students at Columbia Business School, and Teachers College who, through their marketing classes helped us figure out where we wanted to be located and even helped us come up with our motto “Get inspired, get creative, get to work”. Cobble Hill is a great neighborhood with a really diverse mix of people and we were lucky to find a landlord who was excited to have a non-prophet.

If you could change one thing about SA, what would you do differently?

As much as we love our space, since it’s a beautiful storefront on Smith Street, it still costs money and it’s our number one expense. If I were starting again tomorrow, I would look for a completely donated space. That would really free up the money that we work so hard to fund raise and earn through our projects. Right now we’re volunteer dependent and only have one paid staff member. Perhaps a space that was affiliated with a college where we could potentially have students working with us would be a good idea. It’s actually something we might consider in the future.

What do you think is the future of Starting Artists? Could you see handing over the reigns to a
different Executive Director?

I could see hiring a new Executive Director someday. What I think differentiates my way of thinking about SA from the way older generation non-profits see themselves is that I don’t have a static model in mind. SA could go in a lot of different directions. It could run with me at the helm, with someone else at the helm, it could be partnered with a larger organization like the YMCA and we could grow. We could turn into a for-profit organization and build upon our previous successes. It could close and be a project that had a life cycle and ended. Although that is really sad to me, it is the reality of any kind of venture and I don’t think that it has to be a bad thing. I have a personal mission, and this is one way that I’m completing it but it’s not the only way. Everything that I’ve learned here is going to inform other projects that I do.

What advice would you give to other young entrepreneurs?

A lot of people talk to me about their ideas and want advice. One of the first questions I always ask them is “why are you doing it?” That’s related not only to their personal passion and why it’s meaningful to them but also whether or not this is an idea we need. People pursue ideas because they think they’re profitable but I believe that a true entrepreneur is someone that believes so passionately in their product or service that they’re willing to risk everything to do it. If you’re only motivated by money, it’s not going to be enough because the life of an entrepreneur is a really tough. You have to be an evangelist. The long hours and the low pay aren’t worth it, if you don’t really care.

Special thanks to Marisa Catalina Casey. For more information, please visit startingartists.org or find them on facebook.