When Matt McGee got home from work, the lawn was already mowed. His grandmother would be sitting on the porch in Kissimmee, Florida, “drenched in sweat with a Diet Coke,” he says. “She just mowed the lawn and trimmed all the bushes and didn’t let me do it, even though I was a 22-year-old kid that could have done it.”
Sandra Lee Bonham, Sandy to him, was “your classic Greatest Generation woman, no doubt about it.” She came from Ashtabula, Ohio, cleaned houses, and set up the end-cap displays in grocery stores. She was married to a Navy man McGee calls “a personal hero of mine,” and when he died, “something inside of her caught fire, and she decided that she was going to do everything on her own from then on out. And she did.” The lawn was the lesson. “You’re the only person holding yourself accountable,” McGee says. “You don’t get to slip up.”
She had one other rule for him, and she repeated it. “You’re going to finish things you start.”
He had a lot to finish. He went to junior high and high school in South Carolina, and at fourteen he moved out. “I had to make money to stay alive and to feed myself,” he says. “School just was in the way. It was that simple.” He worked mornings at a car wash, on tips and a very low wage, always with a second job, and at sixteen he dropped out of high school and got his first apartment. I ask him to take me to the car wash. “It was awesome,” he says, and he means it. “Putting gas in your car was a big deal, and I could do that at some level, and I had a car that ran. I had friends that didn’t have that.” Under the sunny read was something steadier. “I always believed I was going to do something bigger than what I was doing.”
Ask why he went back to school and he answers with her. “You’re going to finish things you start.” He spent about six months in adult education, then a friend knocked on his door. “Hey, I’m going to sign up for college, you’re coming with me.” McGee had not planned to. He went anyway, to community college in South Carolina and, after he moved in with Sandy at twenty, to Valencia.
The road from there took a wrong turn first. With no one to guide him but a grandmother “who had a high school education and never dreamed of going to college,” he chose a for-profit school over UCF, took out “a lot of money in student loan debt,” and finished with a marketing degree that “couldn’t transfer anywhere else.” He says everything happens for a reason, and he can name this one. “It makes being at Ohio State that much sweeter for me.”
For most of those years the fuel was proof. “I wanted to prove people wrong,” he says. When he and Brian Becerra started Swish, “the general consensus I got when I started the company was, oh, that’s cute.” When he said go Bucks, a friend would say, “You didn’t even go there,” and he would file it away.
“The most powerful thing a person can hear is you can.”
He is trying to set that down, and he is precise about why. “That energy helped me a lot through my 20s, no doubt, and through my early 30s,” he says. “But at some point, when you start becoming a leader and other people look to you, the way you react to things matters.” His staff look to him. His wife and his son will. “I can’t be that guy anymore, because I don’t want them to be like that.” Ten years of running the agency taught him that “management and leadership are just two different things.” Leadership, he says, “is people.” He spent twenty-two years, by his count, pulling as much as he could out of himself. The new work is pulling it out of someone else. To a person who doesn’t believe they can, the answer now is an invitation. “Hey, we can both do the thing. Why don’t you just walk with me for a bit and I’ll show you how to do the thing too.”
The practice ground for all of it is a piano. He did not grow up playing. He took it up about a year and a half ago, on purpose, as an experiment on himself: twenty-two years of pulling the best out of himself had produced a method, and he wanted to know whether the method worked on something he had never done. “I know that the whole goal was to have a repeatable framework that I could apply to things that I love and push me,” he says. “And I am repeating that through piano now.” Music was the thing he loved. “I think music is the most wonderful thing that’s ever existed in mankind’s history.” So he sits down for an hour a day, “doesn’t matter if I want to or not,” on a mantra he borrowed from Kobe Bryant. “The secret is there is no choice. If you wake up and you feel good, work out. If you wake up and you don’t feel good, work out.” Several measures can take days, sometimes focusing on repetitive right hand work for a lot of it, and the sitting with it is the point. “Music at its core is problem solving,” he says. “You’ve done it 74 times in a row, but that 75th, you do it right, because you continue to diagnose and iterate.”
The piano is also a test he gives other people. Three to five years at five hours a week makes a decent player, he tells them, or you could upload it to your brain in fifteen seconds, like The Matrix. “The majority of people matrix it,” he says. “You should always want the hard route. Always. You get nothing out of easy in my opinion.” The hour at the keyboard is where he keeps the muscle the agency runs on. “When a big problem comes through with Swish, none of us are fazed at all,” he says. “AI is the new hard thing. How do we take this new, widely publicized, technology and actually create value from it, all that is hard problems. And solving those is how you become better.”
“Everyone’s navigating to simple. And I just feel like that’s the death of the person for me personally.”
I tell him what I have been hearing for an hour: a man who lives in the future (“Being present is very hard for me,” he agrees), whose one moment of plain joy in the story was a full gas tank at fourteen. So where is the joy now? “The joy is the process, always the process,” he says. “I become more intimate with it every day, every week, every year.”
In May he graduates. He has a conversation he already rehearses with his son, Miles, who is ten months old, for the day Miles says, “Dad, I want to play in the NBA.” McGee believed that about himself “until I was like 13 years old.” He will lay out two paths, play for the love of it or do the work every single day, “and they’re both right answers,” because for him the point was never the end. “The finish line isn’t the goal.” His father is still learning the same thing. Ask what has been the most fun, and he does not say the agency or the degree. “It’s just being a human. That’s the best part.”