Matty Schaefer fits the bill of what you’d expect a young tech hopeful to look like – clean-cut, attentive, and periodically puffing on a bright red vape as he talks about his ideas. This month marks the finalization of a deal in which he sold off his first start-up, Vade, a system that collects real-time data for parking spots. The closing of this deal isn’t really celebratory, other than the fact that the 25-year-old entrepreneur will finally be able to put the venture behind him.
Vade was the brainchild of Schaefer and a couple of his friends, who realized parking was an issue on UNC’s campus. They initially wanted to create a system allowing users to see parking vacancies throughout the city through cameras. Cameras were a far better solution than censors that most municipalities used, which could give false positives in the case of snow or dirt blocking their view. The cameras would take an image every minute and update a portal indicating whether or not it was occupied.
They shopped that idea out to local governments for a couple of years but shifted gears in 2020 when the pandemic hit and curbside delivery services began booming. Cities faced a real problem with curb congestion, and the young entrepreneurs pivoted from helping people find parking to providing cities with data on how people use the curbs. At the height of its success, Vade secured over $5 million in funding and a feature in the New York Times tech section.
But the venture took several dramatic turns, one of which saw one of his co-founders and an investor attempting to oust Schaefer, who was the CEO, after he says they began to see his spending habits and plans for rapid growth as problematic.
“[Drama like this] doesn’t usually happen at start-ups this small,” Schaefer said. “That’s the weird part. If it was Facebook, you would expect this kind of thing because of the stakes. But for this, why? It’s just dumb.”
He was able to save his position within the company, but as time went on, tensions rose, and his friend who wanted him out left the business. Not long after, Schaefer and his remaining co-founder, Christian Burke, realized it was time to give up the dream they’d spent years working towards. In mid-2023, they decided that it was time to sell. Now, Schaefer is left with the daunting task of figuring out what comes next.
With his track record, it seems inevitable that this next step will involve business. In 2012, 14-year-old Schaefer started his first entrepreneurial endeavor when his Philadelphia-area high school gave students iPads to take notes in class. He quickly realized there was a problem – and a business opportunity. Using your fingers to draw notes on a screen isn’t comfortable or efficient. He bulk-ordered 400 styluses on eBay for 10 cents a pop, resold them to his classmates for $5, and netted about $500 on the venture.
The entrepreneurial bug didn’t stop there. Soon after, a classmate introduced him to the online world of gaming computers. Schaefer became fascinated with building computers in a cost-efficient way, and that became the topic of his YouTube channel, MS Tech. He began filming videos during his sophomore year, and by graduation, the channel was netting upwards of $100,000 a year.
“Senior year was probably the wealthiest I’ve ever been on a relative basis of my cost of living versus my income,” Schaefer said. “I’d also mark that point as when I started making real money, that was like the starting point of when I lost passion for it.”
He didn’t like treating the channel like a business. It took out the creativity and made things feel formulaic. He knew what videos got the most clicks – typically the ones reviewing the latest iPhone or using high-end pieces to build gaming computers — but those weren’t the videos he enjoyed making. He decided to ditch the channel at the height of its success three years later when it had hit over 500,000 subscribers and maintained a healthy stream of income from Amazon affiliate links.
“I came to this conclusion of like, ‘alright, if I’m going to be risk tolerant at any point in my life, it should be now. I’m in college on a scholarship; I have no expenses. Now isn’t the time to be doing something I don’t want to do just for money.’ So I looked for any justification possible to stop,” Schaefer said.
That’s when Vade became his main focus. In the following years, he learned the ins and outs of starting a company from helping design custom hardware to making deals with investors and earning a $19 million valuation. But he always knew that the majority of start-ups fail, so when he saw that Vade was a lost cause, he accepted its fate and looked for the easiest way out.
The deal will sell off all the assets, mostly hardware, to an outsider who plans to depreciate them for tax purposes. The other option was to sell Vade to another company within the industry and potentially see something come of it, but that would require Schaefer and his team to continue working for the business for at least another year. They decided they were ready to move on.
For now, he is working as a lead business developer for a staffing company called Frontier, which helps other businesses find talent abroad. They seek out potential employees that the companies can hire for much lower prices than in the U.S. Schaefer says he’s enjoying the new role, referring to it as his “first job.” He lit up when talking about his new marketing tactic — sending champagne bottles and Advil to new businesses and saying that Frontier can help with the headache of starting a company.
Schaefer describes himself as “relentlessly optimistic, very curious, and in a work context very intense.” Another Vade executive described him as “40% delusional,” which he welcomed as a compliment, noting that you need some delusion to succeed, but once you pass 50%, you’re in “dangerous territory.”
He says that he will be back in the start-up space eventually. He’s prepared to write a reflection on his experience with Vade once the final papers are signed and the emotions and grief finally hit. But in the meantime, he is tossing around some ideas for his next venture, from a podcast-only social media platform to a system that will provide AI with real-time human feedback. “I don’t want to jump into the next thing and sacrifice the quality of the idea to do it,” he said. “I’m not worried. I’m very optimistic.”
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