Last month, I turned 40 years old. As I look back on the last decade, I am generally satisfied with how my life has progressed. I continue to be happily married to my wife, Karine. We have two great kids and two dogs that we adore (yes, two!). To say that business has gone well would be an understatement. I feel like I am largely the same person I was a decade ago, but perhaps with a different outlook and focus on life and business.
When I turned 30, I had just hit my stride in business and reached seven figures in annual revenue. It was a time of personal and professional exploration. I took every meeting. I got involved with new community groups and non-profit organizations. I experimented with several different professional identities — university instructor, seminary student, author, podcaster, and startup community leader (to name a few). I explored new business ideas and professional partnerships. While I enjoyed that period of exploration, it has come to an end.
My next decade will largely be about people, and about purpose. I only have two goals for the next decade: to be the best husband and father that I can be, and to be the best MarketBeat CEO that I can be. A decade from now, my children will be legal adults, and there will be no opportunity to relive their childhoods. I want to be around for them while they are still at the age where they want dad to be around. Someday, they will be off on their own, and I will have more freedom to pursue other endeavors. For this season of life, I’m dad first, MarketBeat CEO second, and everything else third.
Speaking of MarketBeat, I continue to love the business. It has developed a proven business model, it has a world-class team, and I want to continue to improve it for the next decade (or longer). I have no desire to sell it, start something different, or pursue another career path (like politics) entirely. I just want to keep working on the company and keep working with the team that has helped build it. While I’m involved with a lot of different professional things (venture capital, real estate, etc.), MarketBeat is and will continue to be priority one.
Introducing Mork!
We have been talking about getting a second dog for about a year now. When Mandi from B-Squad Dog Rescue sent me a picture of a three-month-old Yorkie that had come into her care, we knew that it was meant for us. The dog came from a breeder in Missouri and had apparently suffered from some hair loss (possibly due to a vaccination) and was too old to sell by the time its hair grew back. B-Squad agreed to take the dog and put him up for adoption, and he came home with us in early August. We named him Mork, since he has a sister named Mindy. He’s still a tiny little thing. He loves to chew on everything, is working on being potty trained, and is full of energy. We love him.
Family and Work Travel
Over the summer, we traveled to Tampa, Boston, Newport Beach, and Anaheim (Disneyland). I wrote about our trip to Tampa and Boston in my last quarterly update. Karine and I had the opportunity to take a “no kids” vacation in California in early August. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to go back over Labor Day weekend with the kids. Initially, we booked a place on the beach but quickly relocated to a place in the hills after learning our rental didn’t have air conditioning. I took Micah and Ady to Disneyland, where Ady achieved her summer’s long dream of going on the “Tigger ride” (The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh at Disneyland).
Our family is “travelled out” for the time being. I have two back-to-back venture capital conferences I plan to attend in Fargo and Milwaukee this fall, but have no other overnight travel planned for the rest of the year. We do plan on attending most of the Vikings’ home games, but those will likely all be day trips.
MarketBeat
MarketBeat’s big news of the quarter is that we made the Inc. 5000 list for the tenth consecutive year. To achieve this feat, MarketBeat has had a compound annual growth rate of 37.9% over the last ten years. We expect to end the year somewhere between $45 and $47 million in top-line revenue, up from $2.5 million a decade ago. MarketBeat’s growth demonstrates the scalability of digital media companies and the world-class team that has built the company.
The company continued its 2025 theme of “no new features” and instead spent the quarter on improving data quality and our existing MarketBeat All Access tools. We are trying to adopt more institutional-level data sources so that we have the best and most comprehensive data available to our subscribers. For example, MarketBeat now has real-time stock prices from Polygon instead of 15-minute delayed prices, faster earnings results data, live earnings transcripts, and more accurate corporate actions. In Q4, we plan to go through all our existing data sources, remove “low value” sources and flag specific data sources we think we can find better versions of. We currently have about 70 unique sources of financial data that power the various tools, pages, and reports on our website.
MarketBeat All Access, our B2C subscription product, is getting a significant revamp over the next several quarters. We started in Q3 by creating more long-form premium reports for our audience to read and more subscribers-only articles. We also revamped My MarketBeat, which is our portfolio monitoring tool. Our subscribers can use Plaid to connect their brokerage accounts to MarketBeat, and they can see what’s happening with their stocks with an app-like dashboard. We created detailed analyst profiles so that subscribers can see which Wall Street analysts have the best track records. Next quarter, we plan to revamp some of our other legacy tools, including our analyst ratings screener and live news feed.
Our YouTube channel continues to grow rapidly. We added more than 1,000 subscribers per day during the 3rd quarter and recently surpassed 325,000 subscribers. We featured an interview with Senator Mike Rounds in September and had a robotics video that had more than 300,000 views. To further our channel’s growth, we plan to build out a studio space in the Cherapa 1 building in the coming months. We also continue to invest aggressively in advertising our channel. We aim to hit 1 million subscribers by the end of 2026.
Finally, we purchased the domain name stocknews.com from TIFIN, a fintech platform company that operates a variety of financial products and services, including Magnifi (an A.I. investing tool). I don’t have any immediate plans for the domain, but have been eyeing it for several years and will use it for something next year.
Homegrown Capital
Homegrown Capital, the boutique venture capital firm that I run with my partner Tim Weelborg, launched its second fund earlier this year. Our first fund is now fully invested, aside from some follow-on capital reserved for existing portfolio companies. Our second fund, Homegrown Capital Fund II, has now made two investments. Between our two funds, we have approximately $35 million under management. We’ll be looking to hire an analyst role and an associate role in the next several months as we seek to grow our team.
Our newest investment is in a travel media and technology company called PointsPath. As part of our investment, I am joining the PointsPath board of directors alongside founder Julian Kheel and our mutual friend Ed Pizzarello. PointsPath’s first product is a browser plugin that allows travelers to get the most value out of their airline rewards miles. Like MarketBeat, they generate revenue through B2C software subscriptions and advertising revenue. I am excited to see how the “MarketBeat playbook” works in the travel space, and PointsPath is the perfect company to apply our growth and monetization strategies to a new category.
Commercial Real Estate Update
It was a relatively quiet quarter for our commercial real estate projects. We are working on wrapping up our apartment project in Rapid City, and we sold a strip mall at 41st and Garfield in Sioux Falls. We are finalizing plans for 150 additional apartment units at Marion and Benson and will likely start on our strip mall at 41st and Veterans Parkway, as well as another strip mall in Harrisburg, in the next few quarters. We also have 15 acres on Highway 100 slated for a 300-unit apartment complex when we think it makes sense to start construction.
In the longer term, my business partner Kevin Tupy and I are focused on investing in fewer, bigger deals. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to invest in new real estate projects in $250K chunks at a time. Over the next 12-24 months, we may divest from some of our smaller properties to do larger multi-family projects and purchase larger commercial projects.
The MarketBeat Open Returns
I am really excited for the MarketBeat Open to return later this month. The event runs from October 19th to 26th at Huether Family Match Pointe. The tournament is an ATP 100-level tournament (meaning players can earn 100 points toward a spot in the Australian Open), up from 75 last year. This year’s tournament will also be broadcast nationally on the Tennis Channel, which will get some great visibility for Sioux Falls. If you attend the tournament in person, you’ll see a significant step up in the general logistics of the event. We learned a lot from the first year, and there should be significantly better food/drinks, better merchandise, and an improved lounge area this year.
Philanthropy
My friends at Maximizing Excellence recently released an update to their landmark Sioux Falls philanthropy study. 65% of respondents to their survey believe community philanthropy is weaker than it was five years ago. While Sioux Falls has a long history of philanthropic leadership, there is increasing fatigue among donors who are growing weary of constantly being asked for money. Much of our community’s giving is concentrated among a small group of established donors. Frankly, we will need a new generation of leaders to take on our community’s philanthropic mantle if we want to maintain the strong level of social services and community amenities that Sioux Falls offers.
Personally, I have felt giving fatigue due to the volume of poorly researched asks that have landed in my inbox this year. Thankfully, it hasn’t diminished the joy I find in giving. MarketBeat has really enjoyed working with a few scrappy non-profit organizations, including Shift Garage, a ministry that offers low-cost car repairs, the Foster Network, an organization that equips new foster families to be successful, and BreadBreak, an organization that collects excess food from restaurants and gives it to those in need.
I also recently signed a gift agreement with the Great Plains Zoo to sponsor several elements in the upcoming aquarium that will be built at the Zoo in the coming years, including a jellyfish tank, an octopus tank, and a sea nettle tank. It’s been a long-term goal of mine to have a community aquarium in Sioux Falls, and it is now finally happening thanks to the leadership of Becky Dewitz at the zoo and the generosity of many donors.
Nonprofits seeking donations from MarketBeat are encouraged to read the “Community Impact” section of our about page and fill out an application.
Odds and Ends
It’s been an interesting quarter. Here are some other things that happened in Q3:
- We were the lead sponsor of the Lallycooler Music Festival in Sioux Falls, which featured Pitbull, TLC, Uncle Kracker, and several other artists. About 15,000 people came between both nights, and personally, I had a great time. We are already working with the Pavilion on making plans for next year’s festival.
- MarketBeat and SiouxFalls.Business welcomed Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser to Sioux Falls for an event as part of our CEO series. Fraser spoke about Citigroup’s economic outlook, turnaround strategy, and its presence in Sioux Falls. You can read more about her visit in this article.
- The Washington Pavilion has started construction on its new space and technology floor, which MarketBeat and Dakota State University sponsored. This project has been in the making for over three years and will be the biggest improvement to the Kirby Science Museum in over a decade. You can read about this project here, and I’ll write more about it in my next quarterly update when it’s open to the public.
- Tim Weelborg and I spent a day in Rapid City meeting with investors for Homegrown Capital. We also had the privilege of meeting the new president of South Dakota Mines and Elevate Rapid City President & CEO, Tom Johnson.
- I hosted a fundraiser for congressional candidate Casey Crabtree at the MarketBeat office in September. I have known Casey for several years and think he would serve South Dakota well if elected. Our state has a long history of sending young, energetic leaders with ag backgrounds to Congress, and Casey fits that bill perfectly.
- MarketBeat held a block party on September 30th to celebrate being on the Inc. 5000 list for 10 consecutive years. We had food and live music and raised money for Sioux Empire Pit Rescue.
Wrap-Up
If you are still reading this, I would encourage you to join me at the MarketBeat Open later this month. Tickets are still available, and you can snag your tickets online here.