Matt’s first startup, Sitepoint.com, launched ten years ago when he was 15. While living in Vancouver Island, Canada, and his staff working in New Zealand, Matt has just opened an office for his spinoff called 99Designs.com in San Francisco. Sitepoint is the 799th busiest site on the internet, and Matt has run it magnificently. He’s a very impressive and accomplished young entrepreneur.
At 99Designs, graphic artists from around the world compete with each other to develop logos, web pages, and other graphics for corporations, small businesses, individuals, and others.
Steve Bell, consistently being one of the highest-rated contest holders at 99Designs.com since 2004, was invited into to this interview when he was in San Luis Obispo, taking photographs at Cal Poly. He spoke to CBS for 30 minutes, but only got 30 seconds of video in the edited version.
This video is the result of a 60 minute interview by Sue Kwon of CBS News San Francisco (KPIX Channel 5), and a 30 minute interview with Steve. I had the chance to interview Matt for a good portion of an hour before the interview, with my own college-age startup clients in the room. Matt started SitePoint.com at 15; ten years later it is the 798th-busiest site on the internet. 99Designs was originally part of SitePoint, but Matt has recently spun it off and opened an office in San Francisco. I found Matt to have the wisdom and “sage advice” for entrepreneurs, of someone who might have lived about 5 business lifetimes! Very nice guy, to boot. I’ve added him to my list of “tech heros!”. He lives in Vancouver Island, Canada; has most of his employees in Australia; operates a substantial publishing empire; and that’s just the start of it. There are some good articles about Matt around the web, if you’re interested in more details.