Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Shark Tank’s Matt Higgins: How I Beat Poverty, Loss, and Cancer to Become a Global Investor | E73
Thu, 23 Jan 2025
Matt Higgins grew up in abject poverty, caring for his sick mother at just 9 years old. At age 16, he dropped out of high school to focus on financial growth, eventually earning his GED and getting into college. While balancing work, life, and caregiving, he lost his mother unexpectedly on the day he began a new job. Despite these challenges, among others, Matt co-founded a private investment firm, RSE Ventures, appeared as a guest investor on Shark Tank, and developed military drones for the U.S. Army. In this episode, Matt joins Ilana to share the many struggles that shaped his refusal to quit and the power of taking bold, fearless steps toward achieving your goals. Matt Higgins is an entrepreneur, author, guest investor on ABC's Shark Tank, and co-founder of RSE Ventures, a private investment firm. He advocates for entrepreneurship and innovation, often speaking on leadership, investment, and a success mindset. In this episode, Ilana and Matt will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:56) Growing Up in Abject Poverty (06:13) Having to Become an Adult Too Soon (08:13) Quitting High School to Make Money (14:01) Earning His GED and Getting Into College (16:34) Managing a Career and Supporting a Sick Parent (19:34) Losing His Mother Without a Final Goodbye (23:11) Turning Every Job Into a Step Toward Your Dream (25:14) Rebuilding Life After Testicular Cancer (28:30) The Secret Behind Matt’s Iconic Book Quotes (35:04) Beating Self-Doubt to Become a Shark on Shark Tank (41:30) How “Burning the Boats” Drives Fearless Moves (46:54) Lessons from Failure and the Refusal to Die (52:16) Developing Military Drones for the U.S. Army (56:04) Living Without the Fear of Judgment or Death Matt Higgins is an entrepreneur, author, guest investor on ABC's Shark Tank, and co-founder of RSE Ventures, a private investment firm. With a career spanning sports, media, and technology, he has played a pivotal role in transforming brands such as The Miami Dolphins and Sky Group. Matt is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Burn the Boats. He advocates for entrepreneurship and innovation, often speaking on leadership, investment, and a success mindset. Connect with Matt: Matt’s Website: https://rseventures.com/ Matt’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/matt-higgins-rse Resources Mentioned: Matt’s Book, Burn the Boats: Toss Plan B Overboard and Unleash Your Full Potential: https://www.amazon.com/Burn-Boats-Overboard-Unleash-Potential/dp/006308886X Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training
Chapter 1: What challenges did Matt face growing up?
Matt Higgins, from basically a broke high school dropout selling flowers to co-founder of RSE Ventures, building a multi-billion dollar portfolio of over 100 global brands. He teaches at Harvard Business School that appeared on Shark Tank in the US and Dubai.
There was a lot of dysfunction, a cycle of abuse that I was born into. I started selling flowers on street corners when I was nine. Little boy taking care of his mom. By virtue of me dropping out at 16, I started using whatever assets I had to move quickly with jobs. And I got the offer of a lifetime.
As I'm sitting in the office at around 10 o'clock, Angela, who worked in the office, said, your mom's on the phone. By the time I had gotten to the hospital, she had died five minutes beforehand. Every bad thing that happens to me is an opportunity for exceptionalism. When I see really successful people, they do have the ability to absorb the wins and repel the losses.
And when I had testicular cancer and it didn't kill me, I thought.
Matt Higgins, from basically a broke high school dropout selling flowers to co-founder of RSE Ventures, building a multi-billion dollar portfolio of over a hundred global brands. He teaches at Harvard Business School that appeared on Shark Tank in the US and Dubai. Author of the bestseller, Burn the Boats. I mean, wow, what a turn, Matt. Take us back in time to your childhood.
Well, first of all, it's great to be with you. Great to be with your audience. And I know your audience is dedicated to just transcendence and how to go to the next level. So that's a topic I love talking about in all its gritty detail. The most important thing to know about me, and I always start here, is just my framework of growing up in abject poverty.
And those words lose their meaning when you say it, but what does that mean? Grew up wondering what's for dinner, where dinner is coming from. Like a lot of people grow up in poverty, there was a lot of dysfunction, cycle of abuse that I was born into. My poor mom had a horrendous childhood, which only became clear later on in life. You don't understand these issues as a little kid.
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Chapter 2: How did Matt decide to drop out of high school?
So everything about me was, how do I get dinner? How do I get out of poverty? feeling like I don't belong here and where I grew up in. I grew up in Queens, New York, in a little garden apartment, little shoebox. And it was a roach motel. I mean, just true squalor.
And so I started selling flowers on street corners when I was nine, little boy taking care of his mom, kid knocking on your window at the street corner on Mother's Day and Easter, trying to sell you something. And just all these hardscrabble odd jobs, shoveling snow, whatever it would take. And at the same time, trying to take care of my mother, who, because we were so poor, had no services.
She suffered with morbid obesity. She had a thyroid gland disorder. So she would get heavier and heavier. And then at the same time, she was trying to make something of her life. She had a ferocious mind. And a couple of things intersected. My desperation of truly hating my life and hating being the hero child of having to take care of your parents while trying to do the right thing.
And then knowing that if I don't do something and take matters in my own hands, my mother was going to succumb to depression and to her illnesses.
First of all, it's fascinating because a lot of people will say certain words, but this is real for you. You know, I always laugh at some people in Silicon Valley. I call them broke millionaires. They feel broke, but they're not really broke.
And everybody these days has to have like a hard luck story. Unfortunately, we've all been like, you can't be born on third base. I'm like, what's so wrong with third base? I would like to be born on third base. Everyone's got a story. Yes.
Exactly. But also we're right before, I mean, as we record this, it's probably not when it's going to come out, but we're right before Thanksgiving and you actually have a beautiful story about Thanksgiving. Can you share that?
It's funny that you said beautiful story. And in my mind, I don't know if I feel like it's beautiful, but I guess it telegraphs how I grew up. So we were always struggling. Holidays were always a source of pain, to be honest, and melancholy because my mother wanted to turn it into something, right? Like something to look forward to.
And some holidays, it meant we don't have a turkey or we don't have... And so the Catholic Church... even though we were terrible Catholics, would always come. And I always remember this, the knock on the door and the father and me, like a little boy, you feel like you're going to go to like the God police or something.
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Chapter 3: What was Matt's experience with his mother's illness?
But a reason why I say I don't know if it's a joyful story, because it was a story of shame, mostly, growing up. We would take a bus. I didn't understand why we would do this, but we would take a bus over an hour away to actually, it was a Black Baptist church, and they would be so kind to me. I also have fond memories of... Baptist churches.
And we would collect a box of food and take the bus back. And as I got older, I could think like, was there no church closer to home? And my mother obviously was trying to hide, you know, best she could, you know, the situation we're in. So that's why I struggled. Like, is that a good story? Is that a sad story? But that was my upbringing.
But that's your story. So now continue, because that became so intentional about dropping out that I have, you know, this story is incredible.
Yeah. And I really tell this because I don't want people to be like, oh, you're the kid who made good. You know, you ran with the gang. I was like, no, that's actually not what I was. I was the sad, depressed kid who was parentified at an early age. A lot of people listening to this may know somebody who's a caregiver and not prepared, nor do they want to be in that situation. That was me.
I also felt like there was a destiny about my life. And I also felt let down by society. Family members, they moved on. And when someone steps up to take responsibility, everyone else is like, good, you deal with mom unable to take care of herself. So that's my reality. And it's complicated.
But you were so young. How at such a young age you have symphony? Because I want to hear that too.
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Chapter 4: How did Matt rebuild his life after cancer?
I think it's so funny, I think about this too, because I always want to keep myself honest. It doesn't do anybody any good if I put myself out there as being the oracle, you know, knowing things so young. Honestly, it was the feeling of being disenfranchised and disenchantment.
And what I mean by that is no power, disenfranchised and disenchanted with the system, school, support networks, family, everybody letting me down. And I was like a sweet little happy kid, you know, but by the time I was around 10 years old, I was like, you know what? Nobody gives a shit. And the reality is this is going to end horribly.
And so I need to sever with the reality of being a child and I need to become an adult now. And it happened around 10. It was like an incident that I don't really go into. But when I realized the cavalry is not coming. And so that did cultivate an extreme level of defiance. And a feeling that I'm going to have to hack my way.
You know, it's fine when your life no longer matches the reality of your peers. They're going to school and having somewhat of a normal existence. And I'm sitting there standing on line on behalf of a ticket scalper so I could buy tickets to a concert all night. And then he's going to pay me for waiting.
Like when the departure becomes so great, you realize there's no point leaning into the system's rules and you need to make your own. So I don't absent... My upbringing, I would have been that sweet little cherubic kid, you know, with little chubby cheeks, but it was that sense of being let down. The positive, it stoked a fierce level of defiance and independence, and that birthed my epiphany.
So my mom, when she left my dad, she got her GED at a local college, and then she enrolled in Queens College. And she would take me to classes, starting at a very young age, 10 years old or whatever it was, And I saw an ad in a newspaper, and it said that you could deliver flyers for this local congressman, and you could make $8 an hour. And I think I was making $3.75 at McDonald's.
$8 an hour, college students only. And I was like, what is it about a college student that's going to enable me to 2x my salary? And I became obsessed with the following. What if I were to drop out of high school on purpose, like my mother did? Because if you're a product of abuse, what if I did it on purpose, took my GED at 16? Technically, there was a loophole back then.
Anybody with a good enough GED score could go to any college in America, all the way up to Harvard. And that was probably like a, what I say, noblesse oblige. Like, we will let you come into college, even though your life is a screw up. Nobody ever probably used it. But I became so excited. Like, I have a way out. I became giddy. And then we can get into this if you want to now.
But when I started sharing with everybody this plan, I was met with equally fierce resistance.
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Chapter 5: What lessons did Matt learn from his failures?
And I had worked at McDonald's, and the kids would make fun of me because I used to scrape the gum underneath the tables, my little green uniform, and stick Chicken McNuggets stuffed in my pocket for the break and make rib sandwiches. And then as I walked out, I said, if you see me at McDonald's, it's because I own it. And everyone was like, oh.
But the truth of the matter is, that was me trying to preserve my self-respect. I sat on the steps of Cordoza High School. I packed a butt. Back then, you packed butts. I don't know if you do anymore. And I spoke to Marlboro. And I really, this is true. I really sat there and said, you know, he's probably right. And it was such a hollow, desperate moment, which is funny.
This is not a moment of transcendence or victory. This is a moment of Utter like, look what I have done. Like I have leveled my- This is real. This is real. Like I am a high school dropout with an eighth grade education. And I had started off as a kid who went to a special school and like all this kind of like, wow. And here's the other crazy thing. I never talk about this.
When you stood outside smoking cigarettes in Queens, you know, security guards would shoo you away and all that. But I was allowed to sit there now. I was emancipated, except it didn't feel very good. You know what I mean? I had no structure. Now I had no bureaucracy on top of me. Nobody would chase me away. I just sat there smoking a cigarette. And then I got to pick my ass up off those steps.
And I was like, all right, go to work. And I remember... With the GED, you have to take this GED program, which I did one day of that. I was like, I am not doing that. This is creating a feedback loop that is not healthy. And instead, I decided I would take the test on standby. You could show up and take it. And I went to Springfield Gardens High School in Queens, New York.
And I waited in line one day. And within a week, I took the GED. And fast forward, got the score back, took the SATs for good measure anyway. And I got admitted to Queens College. Now, this is the redemption story. Just like Gladiator and Maximus, I decided to return to the arena. And I went to the prom with the prettiest girl who would go with me.
And I remember seeing Mr. Rosenthal, Dr. Baker, and Mrs. Vega. And the look was all different from their prism of perspective. Mrs. Vega, who was always so empathetic, was like, oh, sweet boy. Like, you did good. And Mr. Rosenthal was begrudging respect. And so with one chess move, whatever judgment had been rendered toward me had turned to some form of admiration.
And it's an important thing for everybody listening. If you're going to make a bull burn the boat's move, also why I wrote the book, you're going to have to go it alone. If you depend on validation when you have an epiphany like I did, and you depend on counseling from people who have no perspective, nobody could look into that dirty house and watch my mother crying through the night.
And like what it would take for a little boy to deal with that pressure. Of course, their advice is going to be corrupted because you haven't shared with them what you're going through. They didn't know actually the level of pain I was in because I was wearing my Jordache jeans and using that flower money to cover it all up.
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Chapter 6: How has Matt's background influenced his success?
So...
I know, it cracked me up when I heard this, but, and by the way, this is exactly it, right? I mean, that's why Leap Academy, right? Because I don't believe necessarily that you need to crawl your way up. I think what really makes a difference is that pattern interrupt. Like you're going to have to create a pattern interrupt in yourself and people around you.
Otherwise, they just see a little bit of you working harder. That's all they see, right? So you're going to have to create that pattern of interrupts for yourself and everybody else. But I think there's also a patience play that you're talking about, which I lived through as well, because we all as high achievers want everything yesterday, but it's not going to happen.
So when you understand that patience, and it is a patience game, but it's also you're moving from this if-then-else mindset. That we all live in. If I get this, then I'll do this, right? To know I'm going to first say yes, and then I'm going to figure out the how. And when you shift that, that's when you start creating that momentum that I just love hearing about. Am I right, Matt?
No, first of all, I love the pattern interruption. I mean, the words burn the boats is an inside joke, actually, in my head. It's actually often used by right wing people. And it can sometimes be very like, burn the boats to hell with everyone. I'm saying the opposite. The boats I'm talking about in my book are the metaphorical boats that that beckon us to retreat from our own ambition.
It's the reasons why we erect barriers to our own progression subconsciously. Like I need to do this before I do that. The boats I'm talking about are to burn those so that you stop looking over your shoulder and stop questioning whether or not you deserve it. And we don't realize we do it to ourselves, but the truth is that is everything.
Like the belief, the consideration even, not even the belief, just consider whether you can make that leap like you talk about. And I have a great story in my book. It's one of my favorite ones in there. I had a student at Harvard Business School.
And what I found fascinating when I first started teaching there and mentoring students, from me having not gone there and started where I started from, it seemed so obvious that that student has de-risked their life. You will never have a bad career. You're going to make six figures. You won. And you deserve it, because it's an amazing institution.
And so yet they're so fragile and vulnerable, just like the rest of us. They don't know what they should do. And in fact, they have a different kind of pressure. which the world expects them to do amazing things. And they're not clear what they want to do. So I had one of my students who came to see me and he was about to take a soul crushing job at a massive private equity firm.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the title 'Burn the Boats'?
Oh my God, this is so powerful, man. The pain is inevitable, but the suffering will be a choice. And you need to decide if you let it take you down. But I have to say that in venture capital, and I've been investing for quite some time, we have a saying, it's called near-death experience. We literally know that the co-founders or the founders will have what we call a near-death experience.
And the only question is, will it take them down or not? it's inevitable. So the only question is, will you take it down, right? But speaking of drones, I come from the Air Force world and, you know, been a lot in that arena and you have an incredible company. So can you talk a little bit about that, Matt?
Yeah, and I'll put it in the context of this discussion and I'll shorten it too. So way back when I wrote the first into a new sport called the Drone Racing League in 2015. And it wasn't always clear to me, will this take off? It's very hard to create a sport. Talk about something I don't recommend to anybody listening. It is so difficult. So many things have to go right.
But early on in that evolution, we realized the technology that we're inventing, the ability for drones to fly 100 miles an hour with goggles, the ability to operate in very crowded environments with cellular signals, messing up the signal between the pilot and the drone, All this stuff would one day probably be put to nefarious purposes and conflict or terrorism.
And it just gave me the same feeling I used to have standing under the twin towers of 9-11, thinking like, how did this happen? How did we not see it coming? And we couldn't look away. And so quietly, a group of us created a new company in Huntsville, Alabama. It's called BDW.
And we spent the next several years working to create a tool that would give the warfighter on the edge of conflict the ability to call in their own air support in the form of this drone. And why I love that story, aside from I think it's just some of the best work that I've ever done professionally with my team, my co-founders, is we had to see the future.
We had to believe it with all of our heart. And we had to do something so difficult. There's even a name for it. It's called the Valley of Death in the military world and defense. It's this gulf where you don't get a program of record, but you have to spend so much money creating it in the hopes that one day you'll win. And we worked on it.
Tens of millions of dollars and all this effort below the radar on September 11, 2024. The US Army designated our drone the program of record for the United States. And whether somebody is interested in this category or not, or robotics or military, what I love about it is we could have just chosen to never try. We could have instead say it's just a sport.
The most incredible outcomes come from when you make those pivots and you see something and you're willing to believe it. And the reason why I said before, you have to be comfortable being alone like that little boy in the steps of Cardoza High School, is that if I had relied on other people's validation that the future of conflict was gonna be about small drones,
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