we're gonna go ahead and get started so welcome to another cyber conversation we are so excited to have you all with us today this week we are featuring matt paulsen from here in sioux falls and the great state of south dakota so we are um glad since i've heard is a south dakota university to have somebody here um relatively local joining us so today um just for some quick reminders if you have a question that you would like to ask you can ask that through the q a but without further ado i am going to hand it off to matt thank you katie for having me on it's uh always fun to that with some high school and college students and i guess i'm 34 right now so i'm probably 15 years we moved from high school graduation now but um it is amazing how that time goes by and you still feel young even though maybe you're not so young anymore but i run a financial media company it's called market beat and what we do is we publish news information about stock market and there is a ton of technology underneath that in terms of delivering 100 million emails a month to running a website that gets half a million visits a day um there's just underlying tech behind that that that's kind of interesting um i do want to start probably um in kind of my college career you know graduated from high school entered dsu as a freshman in 2004 with computer science degree and had some really great opportunities through dsu a couple that come to mind was i got a tech fellowship to do work with the uh college of business and information systems at the time and the library so i did some some programming work for the library and made some neat databases for people to search and then did some some projects for dsu including like a news website um that they were using instead of emailing everybody all the time for a while and that was kind of fun um and then some of the professors started a tech company there that was kind of an agency of sorts doing software development work that was uh tom howerton josh paul i wayne polly at the time so i worked for those guys for a couple years um writing code and you know dsu was able you know i was able to get an internship with the state unified judicial system um doing kind of i.t leg work from dsu so dsu just made a lot of great opportunities i graduated from dsu with an undergrad in may of 2008 and then i stuck around and started the masters of science and information systems program right away and i finished that the following fall so it was may it was fall of 2009 when i kind of graduated second time from dsu and at that time i had a job doing doing web programming work for a company called factory 360 out of pure south dakota so i was kind of a remote employee before anybody was a remote employee doing kind of web programming work with asp.net and c-sharp and sql server um just for any client that wanted to hire us back in the day um going back um it would have been fall of 2006 uh it was around christmas break that year that i thought hey you know there's not a lot of great opportunities um for jobs and you know in madison south dakota as a student i had a tech fellowship but beyond that like you know my options were working at mcdonald's or working at sunshine and i wanted to do something else so i started doing some freelance writing online you know that paid pretty well i was making a thousand two thousand dollars a month of that that turned into a personal finance blog that was called american consumer news so 2007 2008 2009 i kind of ran that it was a wordpress blog not a lot of tech um going into that or at least not a lot of not a lot of unique tech you know kind of around 2009 2010 that business started to change in terms google uh started sending last traffic to personal finance sites like mine but we also realized i also realized that the investing content on my personal finance blog was doing really well and digging into it using google analytics i kind of figured out that you know a lot of that traffic was coming coming from the finance tab on google so we i realized that you know if i wrote about you know stocks and investments um you know google would pick them up um on their finance tab and send a lot of traffic and this is also kind of during the height of the great recession so um everybody's wondering if citibank you know wells fargo and bank of america we're all going to go out of business so we can write a story about citibank and have 5 000 people read it within the next you know 24 hours um so it was really fun kind of a way to hack google traffic for a while and um that that worked and that's kind of you know led to a pivot towards investing which led to the creation of a different brand called american banking and market news saying okay uh the personal finance stuff isn't working so well but you know there is an opportunity with investing whenever the market's really shaken up like it is now people pay attention to the stock market they read a bunch of online news and that was only good for for me and people like me so we ran the website called american banking market news for a while um it did pretty well um but i knew that you know it wasn't going to last that way forever these things can go in waves and if you want something that can be more sustainable um you need a product to tell you need customers you can't just have a website that's got advertisements on it and that led to um kind of the kind of the creation of the marketplace brand and i thought okay what if we um what if we kind of have an opportunity where um yes we get website traffic from google but you know how do we keep those people stuck around so i thought you know we could do kind of a freemium investment research offering so we have a newsletter that we publish for free and then we sell subscription investing research software on top of that for either 20 or 40 a month so people can either pay us nothing and kind of be a prospective customer but that's okay because we still have them kind of in our universe and it doesn't matter if google sends that person back to us in the future because we can always email them and say hey come check out this new thing at marketbeat and then kind of really build that customer base from from there on um so market b kind of became its own thing in 2011 in 2015 we actually got the market we named it we used the american bank in the market news name before that and it's continued to grow and evolve and um from there i think i wanted to show you guys a couple features on the website that we built out that were pretty proud of so you can see some of the tech so i'm going to share my screen now i've got a million tabs open like everybody else does but this is the marketplace homepage this is what people see when they first come to marketbeat and one of the main tools that people use on marketbeat is what we call my marketbeat but this is a way for people to keep track of their investment portfolios so you can see all of the holdings in the sample portfolio here and you can see some really interesting metrics you can say okay what is the breakdown of my investments where is my money actually at underneath all these different investments you know what is my return on investment what are my biggest portfolio holdings if this wants to load it will show you know how has my stocks done compared to say the dow jones industrial average or the s p 500 you can see lots of interesting just you know how does my portfolio compare to the average market beat user and you know people have found these things really valuable um you can also you know we also do it a ton of news so and say okay i follow bitcoin here's all the latest bitcoin news we kind of have a calendar feature so we can say when am i going to get my next dividend payment or when it's a company that i own going to have their next investor call stuff like that um you know you can view all you all the recent sec findings for your investments and this is a tool that a ton of people use all day every day and it's got a lot of interesting information on it but you can see here we've just brought out a ton of different tools and reports uh we publish a lot of content and one type of content that we produce that's really interesting is content that's completely automated so there are certain types of financial content that are very cookie cutter that don't need a human to write them so we have developed technology called called natural language generation technology we were the first company to adopt this in 2011 uh the associated press started using in 2013 so we were kind of a little bit ahead of the game there but we have articles on our websites that are completely written by an algorithm here so you can kind of see how how this might be a cookie cutter article so it's you know this company was upgraded by this research firm this was the old rating this is the new rating this is their price target on the stock and then here is kind of their quote and then here's what all the other analysts are saying here's how the stock did today here's how the stock's earnings was um you'll hear some insider buying and selling activity and you know we end up with a thousand word article that um nobody ever had to write and that's been a huge advantage for us over the years um because for a long time you know google in google's finance tab we could publish these articles in there and have the article cost of zero dollars and zero cents and um at one point we were getting about 30 of the traffic that google finance was sending to publishers so that was um a really interesting way to corner that market um there's obviously a ton of other technology or a ton of other stuff on here we built our own ad serving system we built some interesting visualizations so we can say okay how are different aspects of the stock market doing today so you can see finance like life insurance is not doing so hot uh banks aren't doing so hot but tech companies are doing okay um you know today's really mixed bag sometimes it's all green sometimes it's all red and we built some stuff like that i think that's probably all i have to show off today but uh there's a ton of market we've built out and uh we've reached a lot of scale we send out over 100 million emails every month we've got about a million and a half subscribers about 500 000 people on our website every day we'll probably do about 10 million in revenue this year so uh we've gone from you know just me working in my basement or my college dorm room um now we have eight employees we'll be hiring a ninth pretty soon and it's just um become a great business and um you know really it all started with kind of the tech foundation i picked up at dscu you know i really was really attracted to web programming there um so i took all of my programming classes and just took that right away and applied it and uh today we have a business you know 10 12 years after being out of school that's really interesting makes a lot of money employs a lot of people and some good stuff has happened so i think that's probably what i have for my intro um so happy to take some questions on here too uh canty i think you're gonna do the questions right yes i am and i have a whole lot of questions for you great some from me some from our viewers so we're kind of curious about a lot of things that you've showed us about just the just now you've shown us the sector performance map so could you tell us how it works does it pull information or data from anything and divide them into grids like or how does it work yeah let me pull back up here where did that go yeah so this is a visualization tool called d3 it's a javascript library that we use to make this um but you know we have a database that has every company in the s p 500 and then it's broken down by um what stock sector it's in and then it's broken down kind of by industry so there's a guy named rebecca mckeever that works for us she's a developer that that made this um so kind of specked it out and said it'd be great if it could do this and then say you want to zoom in on a sector so i want to zoom in on technology sector you can do that and say okay here's the technology sector stocks and then you can break it down by industry and then buy i think i guess it's only broken down by industry but you know actually then you can click on the industry to zoom in a little bit then all these stock prices come from a company called bart chart they're updated um not quite real time they are 15 minutes delayed because real-time stock prices are one hard to do too really expensive to do so we've just decided to do delayed prices but um their current minus 15 minutes and um yeah then d3 is the library that we use to make this pretty it's pretty impressive and it's all it's all like really cool so um earlier you mentioned something about a tech fellowship at dsu yeah could you tell us a little bit about the tech fellowship yeah um so i'm not sure if it's still around or if the name has changed and maybe katie or pam can tell us about that but the way it worked when i was a student was there was a competitive application process you kind of do apply to the university they had a set number of thoughts and then based off your application you would get in and the way it worked out is you worked maybe 12 hours a week and i paid 17 an hour which is you know still pretty good money now but it was fantastic money then for a student because um you know i i my freshman year i worked at mcdonald's making seven bucks an hour in my sophomore year i worked as a tech fellow making 17 bucks an hour so that was a really good deal my trying to think who i was all assigned to um i did there there was a unix lab there in the basement of east hall when i was a student called dsunix so part of my time went to that and part of my time was for projects for tom halperson and then i was when i was a senior they decided i needed to help out the library with a couple projects and we one of the things i did for them is they have a whole bunch of different databases they have access to but there wasn't a great way to kind of filter them and say okay what's the right database for me to search so i kind of i made a tool to search the databases that they had available and made it really easy to find like which one is the right one to use um so i kind of built a little website with the sql server back end on that and that was a project i did for them and i don't know there was a what yeah i made a website called dsunews.com because at the time like whenever anybody wanted to email like every single student like you could do that and like it ended up being 20 or 30 emails a day and uh it was decided that needed me put a stock to that so i made a website that was on and you know um then it was like a website plus a daily digest of emails and i think they dropped the website now just the daily digestive emails and that's a lot better than getting a ton of emails um so it's fun to be able to help out with that and i'm just a lot of other random projects i think one of the things they did was i made a little app that you you could do like in classroom surveys so you would have like a you make a poll and then you get a custom url students could go to that url and then pick out whatever their answer was so a professor could you know ask a multiple choice or a short answer question and see the results right away this was when ajax was first technology so it was pretty novel back then right now you know now it's pretty typical to make that but that was pretty cool so it was a good time i learned a lot made some good money got some good experience yeah i'll follow up on that matt so um we do have a tech fellow still that it changes a little bit and it may look different for the students that are there now but it is absolutely opportunity that you look for so at that time matt looked for the opportunity and took advantage of it and went for it and dsu has a lot of those different types of opportunities that a student should look for and ask questions and see what it looks like and then um find you know find their niche and and be able and not even their niche maybe it's a new challenge for you and you know take advantage of those challenges and those opportunities but yes we do have them yeah and i think that's a that's a really good point pam makes cause there are a lot of good opportunities for students and most people like completely blow off the emails or ignore them or just don't take advantage of them and you know to get ahead and get the job that you want versus the job that's offered to you is you know taking advantage of some of those opportunities is what makes the difference i like that that's a wonderful advice actually um so we have another question how did you get interested in coding good question so in my um so when i was like seven uh my mom was a school librarian and um they had they were ibm 286's that they had at school and teachers could bring them home for the summer so that was kind of fun to have a 286 at home before the internet before any of that stuff to mess with at home and it had qbasic on it so the library had a q basic book and i thought okay i could do some really basic stuff with this and i did some really basic stuff with this and that's about it and i kind of forgot about programming for a while and then our high school had visual basic classes so i took visual basic one two in high school and you know i made like some really basic apps like a roulette wheel and a hangman game and you know these are all windows apps but did that and then in college you know computer science one computer science two that whole set of classes and there's it's just you know i really like to be able to automate stuff and make things processes simpler and programming is kind of the tool to do that and it's just something that came naturally and i really enjoy doing i have a follow-up to that question so many of our audiences are usually students in high school and middle school so what advice would you give them so if they're interested in coding like how would you advise them to start or where would you advise that they start yeah um and that's not something i have a great answer to today because i think that the tools have gotten like way way better than when i was a student i know there are a lot of different learned approach under programming things for all age levels kind of depending on where you're at you know i kind of feel like the younger you are the easier it is to learn programming um like at my age it's it's hard harder to pick up new languages and stuff like that because you're so set in your ways but when you're in high school one you have a lot of free time um too like there are so many great tools out there now to learn you know what is a variable what is a loop what is a function what is a class and you know you can start with some of the um you know the code school things that are online and you know pick out a programming language after that and you know try to find a problem in a real world that you might be able to solve with code and um you know try to solve it with code and you want to kind of make code actually do something useful in your life you kind of get get hooked on it and keep wanting to do it and you know expand your skills from there but i think a lot of high schools do have programming classes now so if they they are available certainly take advantage of them i mean i think a lot of people dismiss coding unnecessarily because they think it's maybe too hard or you know don't want to do it but you know if you want to make sure you have a job for the next 50 years you know learn to code because they're just not enough people that exist that know how to write code compared to the number of jobs that there are so um if you want to future proof your skill set and you know have a skill set that's going to be valuable to a company you know forever that won't go you know out of style you know programming is one of those opportunities i certainly belong in the category that cannot code i'm awful at it i i tried so hard but i never really quite got the hang of it and so i moved on so but that's true um you just keep practicing i guess so um with market beat why did you choose finance and technology yeah um i i think it was the intersection of an opportunity and a couple of skills that i had so you know there's not a lot of static content on marketbeat everything is is powered by a database somewhere and you know being able to marry that ability to code with something that was something that could be you know continually improved over time and there was also a good business opportunity there was really the nexus of you know here is something that i've learned how to market there's a lot of growth opportunity there and it matches with my skill set um really kind of made it the perfect thing to do and you know i'm not one that spent a lot of time researching stocks and investments prior to starting a company but it was a big opportunity i saw that and said well i can get excited about this and there's a huge opportunity here so i guess i'm going to learn investing and you know build the business around this opportunity that exists awesome so follow up on that what advice would you give to middle school and high school students who are interested in starting their own business yeah um you know there are certainly some students that start businesses young usually with help of parents that's certainly the exception rather than the rule i think the best thing that young people can do to be successful business later in life is to learn sales and you know learn to be able to go out and you know try to solve something because you will face a lot of rejection and once you kind of get past that you kind of become fearless in terms of asking for people for business relationships and sales and um you know if you can find a place where you know you have to go door-to-door and sell something that's uh that's a real learning experience and you know makes you unafraid to ask for people to be your customer in the future so trying to find an opportunity where it's not you know you're working at a grocery store or restaurant where it's you know you just do what you're told and you're not responsible for any business results but if you can put yourself in a situation where you have to create results you know that is the kind of experience that you want that will stick with you you know into your career thank you for that awesome advice um with regard to market beat how did you build your team yeah um so we have eight employees right now who will hire a ninth pretty soon um and we hire really slowly um you know what i've had mark be really as a stand-alone business for about nine years so we average about one person a year and it's really you know i try to automate everything i can so we need as few employees as possible but at some point you um you find kind of a um a weak spot that just needs to be addressed by a person so i didn't hire my first employee until 2013 and that was a customer service person because i was literally responding to 50 emails a day myself for marketbeat i thought okay somebody else can do this i i found a girl to hire to be the customer support person she's still with me um you know she's worked for mark b for seven years now and second employee was a front-end web developer you know my skills are primarily back-end i'm not a design guy i'm not a css you know wizard i can do it but it's not my strengths okay that's the next weak spot the third week spot was i needed somebody to manage all the writers on my website so i found an editorial manager to kind of work with freelance writers that write on market beats and you know the question is always like what is the weak spot that we need to address and then who is the person in my universe that i know that i can hire um like we've never posted a job posting anywhere it's because whenever we have a job posting always ask our team and people we know like who do you think would be good for this that might want a better opportunity than they have now and you know marketbeat is it's a pretty sweet company to work for because pay's really good benefits are really good you can work from home um i don't think i'm a pain that about to work for so there um you know we've we've had zero turnover in the lifetime of the company and i think that's a testament to how how what kind of companies to work for and um but yeah and it's always about what it what is the weak spot right now and how can we address that with the next tire and um it's been 14 months since our last tire but it is by time for the next one so we are gonna start looking for somebody pretty soon to be a customer support person and maybe some other responsibilities we can we can marry with that we have two people on our 14 now and we need a third because we're responding to over 100 emails a day right now and um plus all the junk ones we get that we just need to like click close on there's probably like another 300 of those of just spam that we get so um it is a challenge we need to solve again all our participants listening they have they are most likely going to hire market weight is most likely going to hire so keep that in mind um what programming language is market beat built on sure so all of our stuff is uh is a code base that's about 10 years old so it's built on asp.net 4.7 web forms now i'm going to use sql server 20 it's whatever the newest one is i don't know we just upgraded it um and then i think we use bootstrap on the front end for kind of a javascript css kind of framework um and it's all on a bare metal server with a company called liquid web we actually i think there's two servers that power marketplace and we have another two servers that power some wordpress sites that we own so our hosting bill is a couple grand a month and then we use send grid for email deliverability that that bill is seven i think that's up to about 10 grand a month just because we send so many emails now but you know they've got a really good api for sending an email and they're able to handle the 100 million emails we send a month now i mean the thing about investing is like information that's an hour old is kind of useless so you have to send out two three four newsletters a day to keep people up to date and that um creates a lot of email the final question we have knowing what you know now would you change anything in your career yeah that's always a difficult question um you know in actual respect i would have started my business right away not got a full-time job and went for it but you know that's a statement that's made with you know hindsight in mind if i knew it was going to be the successful business of it that it was um you know i would make that decision you know a lot sooner to go full time with it but you know for the first couple years you know market beat had a great first kind of 18 months and then growth start out for like two years i thought okay is this something i'm gonna be able to keep going and at the time i didn't know um but in the last year my day job it's really started to pick up and okay i think i can make a goal of this and if not i guess i can go get a job but i've always been one to seek opportunities say yes to opportunities and i don't feel like there's an opportunity that i i sat on that i missed out on um so i mean my encouragement to students is always you know read what opportunities show up in your university inbox and you know say is this right for me to every single one of them and say you know i've got four years as a student probably you know what is how can i make the best use of that time you know in the classroom through extra curriculars with job experience and you're never going to have more free time than you do in college and that's reality because then you get married and you have kids and you have other responsibilities that show up and and you get my house and your blonde demo and stuff like that and you know your time just becomes less and less and less so as you have that free time make the best use of it and see what you can do with your college career thank you for answering all our questions um i know you kitty has something yeah so great a great advice there i love that of there is definitely a lot of free time in college and it goes away quickly when you you finish um now we do have a poll that we're going to launch here so everybody should be seeing it pop up on your screens and if you can answer that for us that would be great um we also want to invite you back to next week's um cyber conversation with buzz hillstead from sbs cyber security he is the senior vice president and does incident response there so he'll have some great uh ins advice i'm sure and experience in um how you would respond to attacks on businesses and organizations so we're looking forward to have him our july the rest of our july cyber conversation schedule is posted on our website you can register for any of those and we will soon be posting our august schedule as well so be on the lookout for that you can continue to follow us on social media and for those who are watching this who recorded from our youtube channel we thank you for for um joining us there and we hope that you'll subscribe to our youtube channel as well so thank you everybody and have a great day you