This is the 20 min in VC with me Harry stabbings. If you'd like to see more behind the scenes of my newly Peloton addicted. No alcohol life. You can on Instagram @ H stebbings 1996 would to bees I always love to see you there but to the show today and a very special one as this guest is not only invest in businesses, but he also builds the man buys them from that alone. I'm sure you've guessed but I'm thrilled to welcome Andrew Wilkinson to the show stay. So Andrew is the managing partner at tiny capital a vehicle. As I said that buys Builds an invest in wonderful internet companies within their
family of companies is durable home to the world's best design professionals matter lab and super cost name a few tiny does also invest in businesses including the likes of superhuman SpaceX pitch and buffer to name a few today Andrew oversees a group of companies within the tiny family with over 300 employees and tens of millions of dollars in Revenue. But before we move into the show today, I wanted to take a moment to mention hellosign and great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience hellosign is an effortless.
Solution he's by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements and they raised a total of 16 million dollars in funding and then recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive 230 million dollars check out. Hello sign.com /to zero VC to join the thousands of companies and Founders who value fast secure and simple e-signatures and speaking of signatures and getting deals done there. You really need to build that relationship and there's nothing like meeting face-to-face and there's nothing like Zoom
And to make that happen Zoom lets you connect and do business across town or around the world Zoom ties together all of your communication needs into one easy platform for video conferencing phone calls group chat webinars and your conference rooms and connect from anywhere easily with your mobile phone your laptop or conference room Zoom is how business gets done get your free account at Zoom.com today meet happy with zoom and finally, I've always been a big history man. And so I do want to talk about Cooley the global Law Firm built around
Ups and Venture capsule since forming the very first Venture Fund in Silicon Valley coolies for more Venture Capital funds than any other law firm in the world with 50 plus years working with VCS. They help PCS Foreman managed funds make investments and handle the Myriad of issues that arise throughout of funds lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing vc-backed companies going public head over to Cooley go.com and check out cool e.com also, but that's enough for me. So now I'm very excited to welcome Andrew Wilkinson.
managing partner had tiny capital
You have now arrived at your destination. Adieu. My wedding is such a pleasure to have you on the show today. I've been an admirer of yours from afar for a very long time on Twitter. So thank you so much for joining me today Andrew great to
be here. Thanks for having me Harry.
Not at all. But I would love to kick off with a little on you. So tell me how did you make your way into the wonderful world of tech and startups? And what was that sounding moment for you and Tiny and very succinctly three to four minutes.
Yeah. I've really had three careers. So accidental entrepreneur CEO.
Operator and then now investor basically when I was in high school, I started a tech news site and it just totally took off and so I started getting hundreds of thousands of visits to this site. I started writing news. I hired a team of writers started selling ads and negotiating ad deals. And so I basically got my MBA in high school running this website and pretty much skipped all of high school and so through that I got to interview Steve.
Steve Jobs, I got to travel all over the world and have all these incredible experiences. But at the end of it, I was kind of left not sure what to do. What I ended up doing when I graduated high school is I decided to move to Silicon Valley. I really wanted to go work at Apple or Google and learn how big company was run but I didn't have a ton of money and I decided that I would start freelancing to make some extra money and one really great Insight I had was that if I pretended to be an agency.
I could probably win more work. And so I came up with the name metal AB, I designed a very very slick looking site that made me look like a big agency and I started using the sales skills that I learned running this website and I called up founders of Silicon Valley companies that raise money. I'd go on TechCrunch and see that someone had done a raise and I'd call them up and I would say hey, can I help you with your marketing site? Can I help you? Design your product and I don't know if you remember but back in 2005. Nobody thought about this.
Sign design was something you add later you hire 20 developers you work for a year and then a month before launch you Spruce it up. And so I became the go-to guy in Silicon Valley to jump in there and basically design people's mobile apps and web apps and marketing sites and before long. I started getting more and more work and within the first couple months I was making 30 40 50 thousand dollars a month and I started asking myself. Well, why do I want to go work at Apple or Google? This is pretty
Incredible and what I didn't realize was that agencies are usually terrible businesses. They don't really make very much money. But because I was living in Canada. There's this amazing Arbitrage where I could afford to pay people really great salaries here, but I could charge Silicon Valley prices. And so I actually had a profit margin and was profitable the agency ended up winning one more work and eventually got Apple Google Walmart Facebook Amazon also worked with a lot of startups really early on Shopify Tumblr.
Our coinbase Pinterest we design slack but this whole time so while I'm successful in this agency, I kept looking over and seeing all these SAS companies sprouting up and running an agency is really hard work. You've always got to be winning new clients and finding your next dollar and so when I looked at SAS and recurring Revenue, I became obsessed with this idea of making money while I slept and I started reading about base camp and with David Hannah Mary Hansen and Jason freed we're doing and I said I'm going to do that. And so I started
To pull SAS software companies while I was running the agency and use the profits from the agency to fund those and the software we built was basically project management software time-tracking software estimate software and I got my first taste of recurring Revenue I'd wake up in the morning and I made 300 bucks and from that moment. I was totally hooked and so I kept diversifying I kept taking the profits from all those businesses and starting new companies and at the end of the day in 2013 I was
Totally overwhelmed. I had over a hundred employees. I was the CEO of five different companies and I went to a mentor and I said, I hate my life. I'm not enjoying this. What do I do? And he said look, why don't you go and sell one of your companies if you sell one of your companies that'll give you some money to put in the bank. You can have a lot less stress and maybe you can start thinking about learning how to invest and so I did that. I sold one of our businesses to a family office and suddenly for the first time I had cash in the bank, I'd always had
Flow but I was always rapidly redeploying it and so it took a little bit of time off. I started thinking about learning about investing I figured stocks would be something to learn about it. And so I picked up a book about Warren Buffett and when I read about Buffett everything just totally clicked for me. Here's this guy with 70-plus businesses and 400,000 employees and yet all he does is read and think and look at deals and invest and he leaves his CEOs to run all of his
businesses and only helps when needed and to someone who is running five companies and hating his life. That was very very appealing and as I read more about Berkshire I started asking myself. Well, why hasn't anyone done this for Tech anyone that's done this for Tech had built kind of a synergize conglomerate like GE where everything is interdependent, but nobody had truly copied the Berkshire model of running all these distributed businesses and leaving them to do their thing and so my business partner and I started acquiring
Businesses instead of starting them. We hired CEOs to run all the existing portfolio of companies and we took a big step away and we founded tiny which is are holding company. And what we do is we acquire wonderful internet businesses. We make a few small improvements. We plug-in CEO typically because often the founder wants to leave and do something new and then we hold them for the long term and we don't mess with them. Our focus is on buying wonderful businesses, that will be profitable.
Well and being able to really have them be sustainable and exist in 10 years. Whereas most other requires have a thesis around slamming them into another company or they're going to flip them in two to four years and that's really resonated with Founders at the end of the day. It's been pretty cool. I live in Victoria Canada, which is kind of the middle of nowhere. I got to dress like a Schmo. I don't think anyone here knows what I do. I live in a beautiful place spend my time hunting for wonderful companies and I get to talk to interesting people like you so it's quite a nice life.
I mean that is just wonderful for my ego. I do want to tap on so many different elements that you mentioned. If we start on kind of the element of Berkshire for tag and when we think about the assets that you're looking at I heard you say before that you look for companies that are like New Zealand now, I love this analogy. But what did you mean by like New Zealand and what qualities requirements really get you excited by looking at those assets because there's different Avenger
New Zealand is located in the middle of nowhere and nobody's paying any attention. It's quietly successful its profitable and they have
Have a reasonably good economy. And it's not where other investors are looking. There's this great Charlie Munger quote fish where the fish are and most investors are fishing in these very big fishing holes with thousands of other fishermen. So an example would be VR and AR or crypto. Everyone has the same idea and they're all fighting for it and there might be some big fish in that fishing hole. But only a few people are going to get it we try and find quiet sleepy fishing holes off the beaten path where there's only one or two.
Two other fishermen and we just quietly enjoy ourselves. We find that a lot less stressful. So New Zealand is no one's paying attention, its food and energy independent. So it exists on its own and what I mean by that is in a technology business, there's no middleman. So there's no Google or Facebook risk. There's no algorithm between us and the community or the customer and the New Zealand's also away from nuclear war. It can withstand the test of time and it doesn't need to compete with venture-backed businesses.
Has with unlimited money so we don't want to be in a situation where we're buying a company where billions of dollars are going to flow into competing with it tomorrow. We just think that's too difficult. So that's why we like to choose industries that are sleepy where nobody really cares about them where maybe there's not a multibillion-dollar opportunity, but there's a ten or a hundred million dollar opportunity.
Can I ask when you think about that ten or a hundred million dollar opportunity the thing that becomes even more important than ever is your entry price. How do you
About price sensitivity when entering and how do you think about effectively pricing these assets? And also is it challenging because their Tech Founders and they see TechCrunch and they see hundreds of millions of dollars of valuation and it's a very different thing if you're doing a social network for fishermen or whatever that may be how do you think about price sensitivity and communicating that to the founders?
I mean at the end of the day the price to the founder, we're not talking typically above venture-backed businesses. We're often talking about businesses that have been bootstrapped or
by accident by a founder and they're often five to ten years in they have a nice income from the business and its profitable. And so what we do is we basically pay a fair price based on where the business is at and that's typically based on what earnings are expected to come out of the business over the next five to ten years. And then the other way we think about price is just risk. So yes, it's paying us a million dollars a year in profit, but will that million dollars a year disappear as soon
Is the Google SEO algorithm changes or add rates go up and so if it's risky we're willing to pay a lower multiple and if it's less risky and there's a competitive mode will pay a much higher
multiple. Can I ask you a question? I'm sorry. This is off schedule. But I'm too interested. How does covid impact the revenue models and kind of Revenue protection that you have because when you have venture-backed companies, you know, some of them have three to five years of Runway and often large fund raises with this model is obviously leaner and although profitable the profits can and often do yet
Hit how do you think about covid impact on the kind of profitability and margin?
So like anybody asks, we don't know what the second and third-order consequences of the lockdown will be I'd like to think that most of our businesses participate in a knowledge economy online. And so we have a huge advantage in that all of our companies operate remotely that's always been part of our DNA and if they're not remote, maybe they have an office but Everybody's Free To Work remote. So we've been able to Pivot really easily into that. Some of our businesses will certainly
Be affected, but generally they're low fixed costs and so we can scale cost down as needed to make sure that we can continue to be sustainable and then there's other businesses that kind of be antifragile in an environment like this. So one example of that is dribble which is the largest social network for designers where did designers go when they're stuck at home, but they want validation and feedback and a sense of community. Well, they're going to go to dribble. We also own the largest remote job board in the world. I
think that's going to do very well in this environment as more companies start hiring remotely. We also in a meal planning app called me lime and people are cooking a lot more. They're trying to plan the groceries out there trying to make a dollar go further that does well in an environment like this the places where we're going to be hit our more on our services businesses. We own multiple agencies in addition to medlab and we're watching those very closely. We expect those to be affected. But again, we always keep our fixed costs very low. We've never done a fancy 10 offices around
The world kind of strategy it's always been very lean. So I think we'll be okay.
I am interested they because he said about kind of the growth of some of those businesses that and I haven't someone on the show the other day and they said about kind of growth versus profitability and it being leavers and really than being fundamentally at odds you increase growth you decrease profitability and vice versa. I'm intrigued how do you think about this given your perspective and would you agree with
that? So I would see like we just have a culture of profitability. So because we started in Canada, we really had no access to
To Capital we had to focus on profitability and understand our PL and make sure that if we had thirty thousand dollars in the bank at the beginning of the month, we had a little more than that at the end because that's so part of our DNA. We really exclusively by profitable businesses or at the very least businesses that can be immediately pivoted to profitability now, obviously, we think there's many instances where a company should forego profitability to grow but the key here is sustainability if I can spend a dollar on marketing.
And make it turn into a dollar fifty and three months then absolutely we should check that cut that check a million times. However, if it's $1 turning into 30 cents over two years. I really don't think that's a good use of capital and I see way too many venture-backed companies buying $37 to show growth and get their next round of funding. So we aren't anti-growth. We're just Auntie unsustainable growth and you know regardless of our focus on profitability.
All of our businesses are growing their Top Line and their bottom line at 30 or 40 percent a year and doing it profitably. I think it's one of these odd beliefs that people think they need to burn money to make money. We just haven't seen that in reality
speaking of got a bunny money to make money we've seen many did I was lost five or ten years in buncha. It's that to a lot of you know, it's sad the company's shutting down. I am intrigued because as we said that it's a very different model to venture. How do you think about loss ratio stay within the portfolio and then diversification in terms of
Construction is a result.
So we don't really think a lot about portfolio construction. We really just try and focus on individual companies and buying wonderful companies. We look deal by deal and evaluate whether we think this is a business that can stand the test of time and exists in two to five years. I mean for me personally, I'm very comfortable having a few eggs in a basket and watching it closely rather than diversifying to death for 10-plus years.
One of our biggest business was metal ab and that was kind of one big. I'm pretty comfortable if I deeply understand the business and so we don't really think about that in terms of loss ratios. I'm not counting on having losses. We occasionally will and we will have business failures, but they'll more look like softness and bad returns. I doubt we're going to have zeros. It's just not like Adventure game. These are generally businesses that will continue to exist. They might just be less profitable than we
Act can I ask in the cases where there is like these huge outcomes available light dribble. I mean dribbled a larger social network for designers. That is absolutely eventual outcome and it could be a venture play in many respects. How do you feel about VCS encroaching on the tiny portfolio? And how would you like to work with the Venture Community?
I'm not anti Venture. Like I really want to make that clear. We just haven't run our businesses that way and we haven't raised Venture. So I would say that if we had a business that was obviously in need of a large amount of cash.
Capital and we needed somebody at the table who is willing to take a big risk where we knew that in order to grow it into a billion dollar business. We need to burn a hundred million dollars, but that's the only way to capture the market. I would absolutely do that. I would be calling Benchmark and Excel tomorrow, but I just don't see that. We haven't observed that in our portfolio and I think about dribble is one of those New Zealand businesses every single day hundreds of thousands of designers. Wake up every morning.
And they punch dribble into the URL bar, you know, we don't need to go out and buy customers. They just naturally organically appear and because dribbles the largest the largest network is generally where people go people want to be in a social network with others. And so when I think about what we could do if we had 50 million dollars in the bank, it doesn't look very different than where we're currently at bootstrapping the business and continuing to ensure its profitable. But again, like if we saw an opportunity, we absolutely would that just
Isn't been something we've seen
yet. I totally get you in terms of kind of seeing that opportunity and this is totally off the bat, but I'm tearing should I constantly oscillate between thinking that will see the unbundling of social networks into your dribble like communities of the world and then I also think absolutely no we won't will see the underling intake Facebook groups LinkedIn groups, whatever incorporates into the name platforms. Where do you sit on the unbundling versus bundling a very specific Niche communities and
groups? Well, that's a really tough one like you think about meetup.com, for example
Which is a business that we looked at buying and we just couldn't wrap our heads around it because ultimately when it comes to social networks, usually the largest Network always wins so you can see this with Google versus Yelp Yelp had built this originally Niche Community. It had gotten to scale it became very large everyone looked at it and went. Okay. Well they have this tremendous mode, which is all of these user reviews. It would take 10 years for anyone to recreate these user reviews. Well, it turns out with Google have
An Android and Google Maps, they can just ask every single person on Earth how the restaurant was that they went to last night because they know that they visited it via Google maps and suddenly Google Maps has better data and blows Yelp out of the water. So I think in instances like that absolutely it can be highly disruptive but I always think like dribble is a bit of a unique snowflake. I mean designers are very very sensitive to anything seeming corporate or being part of something.
Big or commercial and I think that because it's creative Community. There's a risk in that, you know, maybe we mess it up and do something that's too aggressive. But there's also this huge blessing in that they don't want to be part of something big they want to set themselves apart and be on an island and so if LinkedIn came out with LinkedIn design whatever and they started adding shots to their platform. The question is would the designers feel that that was a nice place to be for them.
That they felt good about and I think the answer is probably no and so, you know, we look at dribble. We feel good. However, you know, we also know the remote job board business. I have no idea how long that will exist because LinkedIn can easily come along and start adding remote jobs as a feature and at the end of the day our business is kind of a feature not a product. And so when we're buying businesses like that, we really have to be disciplined around price because they can get washed away with with the tide at any
moment. Yeah. Absolutely they can which is absolutely why of my question on price.
I was so interested by and also interesting because I read a lot of your writing and as we were chatting about before the show, listen to many of your podcast episodes before and you said before on paper, I'm a terrible CEO so blunt question Andrew, but why is
that? Well, I think like a lot of Founders. I'm very urgent and I love doing things quickly. I love ideas. I love strategy, but I don't really like is implementation and follow through and managing people and what I've realized is that I'm very good at Laser focusing.
For a short period of time on one company deal idea strategy whatever it is, but I don't enjoy spending the next 60 days implementing a plan and building that plan to be honest. Yes. I can run a company. I've done it. I did it for 10 plus years and I was very successful at it. But I find one company for me at least isn't enough. I wanted more diversification of thought I wanted to be able to jump into different ideas and different.
Types of businesses and I realized I just love business. I'm like an inch deep and a mile wide and so it really suits me well to invest because it allows me to be on a high board level and interact with all the CEOs and understand all their businesses and help them grow them but at the end of the day, I'm not managing people. I'm not overseeing the implementation of ideas and in the day, there's people who love doing that and I love to just step out of their way and let them do it because I would just not be happy doing
and I didn't enjoy being a CEO and running a large company. I like running a five person company or a 10-person company
that's night totally agree. I'm exactly the same as you which is why I like Venture so much. Can I also you mentioned a couple of things that are striking? I think the first to me would be you mentioned obviously also be on boards before I've recently become board member, you know, it was last 18 months of my first couple of boards. What would your advice be to me on what makes a great board member and and how do you think about being the best board member you can be?
Well, I think the biggest thing to remember is that you're not
CEOs friend that you're not there to be a buddy you're there to actually ask probing questions and to rub their nose in the consequences of what could go wrong, but one of the things I've also learned is that on a board even when you own the entire company, you can't dictate what they need to do. You can only guide and you can set guide rails and so at the end of the day you're ultimately deciding is this the right person to run the business or not. That's the key question. You're also thinking about incentives.
So, how do I align this person with the outcome that I want and ensuring that they're totally aligned with your goals? And other than that like you could see one of the things that's been interesting to me and I've been on Venture boards. I've been on private Equity back boards and then the boards of our own companies and I've seen this over and over again where I've experienced something and I see the CEO making the same mistake and I try and tell them and I've found that generally the CEO needs to actually go take the
Work stick it into the electrical socket and realize that he gets Zapped which is unfortunate and infuriating because you're sitting there like a slow-motion train wreck saying, oh my God, he's making this mistake. I don't want me to do this going to ruin the company or whatever but I've just realized you can't control people and all you can really do is give them soft advice
CG thing, right? Hey, this isn't a sink that boat decision. Let him realize that on his own or this is and I have to intervene is that the decision-making for you in the
businesses that we aren't I'm never going to let us see.
I'll make a sink the boat decision. Right but if it's a two-way door if it's something where look I think this business model idea is hokey. But they've got it in their head as the greatest idea ever if I go in and I say, we're not doing that. That's a bad idea. They're just going to resent me and they're always going to bring that up at future board meetings. Well, we could have done that thing and we would have grown this year. But you know you held me back from doing that and so as long as it's a two-way door, I will always let someone make a mistake and I might register.
Pacers what does he do? It's like disagree but commit right saying I don't agree, but I'm going to commit to let you do this. So we do that a lot. If a CEO is to come along and say I want to go spend ten million dollars on a cryptocurrency strategy with a 5% chance of success. I think we'd have a very different
conversation. Yeah. I'm sure you would and I think quite understandably my other questions you listening to that was I'm always oscillating Andrew and I love you advise between do I focus on my strengths and just get better than I often hear hate just focus on your strengths and be wild.
Class or someone said to me the other day. No people arrogantly think that competitors killed you through your weaknesses. How do you think about that? And how would you advise me in terms of doubling down on strength versus really coming back and nailing weaknesses?
We always say every CEO has a superpower right? I don't know if you know the saying to a person with a hammer everything looks like a nail and I'd say each of us as a CEO or a leader or an investor or whatever has a lens through which they view the world.
And we say, you know generally its product sales marketing Finance or operations and they're basically looking at it and going well product is the secret to everything or marketing is the secret to everything or sales or whatever what I've found, you know, I'm generally a product person. That's how I started when I was building my company's I was the guy who would always say well we'll do better once we launched this feature will do better. Once we redesign the marketing site and make it look prettier and that's where I kind of default to in fortunately.
It often is the key thing if you have a really shitty Bakery that's ugly as hell and it located in a bad location, but you have the best cinnamon buns in the city people will probably line up and go there but what I've learned over time is that I understand enough about marketing and sales to know what the right incentives and the right people to do those things are and I've seen the results that can come from it. So what I'd say is you want to double down on your strengths, but then you also want to be able to identify and know enough to know what the people you're going to delegate look like right? So knowing what
Good CFO, looks like a good head of marketing a good head of sales. But I used to beat myself up and say first it was I should learn how to code then it was I should learn internet marketing and depth and at the end of the day, I always say like if you're a commercial real estate developer, you don't go and learn how to lay bricks. You don't go and learn how to pour cement right you focus on the spreadsheet and the design and selling the units and the key stuff that really matters to you. And you delegate everything else
out. Can I ask we mentioned the heart
An element that how do you do timing greatness in a row way you're not equipped yourself. So it for me. I'm not an engineer if I'm doing CTO candid interviews for portfolio companies. How do I determine greatness in those candidates when I'm not an engineer myself? How do you think about that?
Well, I think you look at the outcomes, right? So we've learned this with hiring CEOs. It's when we're hiring a CEO we're looking at the resume and going have they done this before right? So if you're going to go and build a new deck you're going to hire.
Red silk Carpenter and so I'm going to go well how many decks have they built how many years have they been a carpenter? And so we'll go out and we'll recruit somebody who has run a similar business at a bigger scale and we'll say okay this is going to massively increase our odds of success. Whereas if you hire somebody for potential which is what I used to do I meet somebody in go. I love this person's Moxie. They're really sharp. They move really fast. They seem to kind of understand marketing. I think they can be a good CMO will grow them into that.
That's always failed which seems like such a simple concept of just hiring people who have done it before but for some reason we don't do that because we don't know what those people look like. So I like to try and flip it around and just go have they achieve the outcome. I want in the
past. Yeah, then it's Nia green and it's often the symbols are the best. I'm glad it's not the case who is otherwise I would never have got a job in my early days, but I do want to ask him anything because you said that about kind of when you hit certain points other things happen. And you know, I had David from base camp on the show very recently and he said about kind of crowd.
Think about your relationship to money and you'll always think when I have ax I'll be happy when I have 1 million. I'll be happy to have money and I'll be happy and that moment never comes and it never came to him and it doesn't come in human nature. I'm intrigued one of your core principles is people over profit. How do you think about your personal relationship to money?
So I grew up in Vancouver and my dad was an architect and money was always really tight. He'd run his own Architecture Firm and architecture is just a difficult in this tree and so money was always
ways this thing that my parents fought about and we're stressed about and at the same time growing up in Vancouver. It's quite a wealthy City and I happened to be in the catchment area for a wealthy public school. And so I ended up going to this public school where I was surrounded by the children of millionaires and everybody's dad drove a Porsche and they had ski chalets and I went to Hawaii for vacations and you know, I go over to their houses and they be these palatial mansions and I just looked around and went this is bullshit.
Want this? I can't believe I've been so hard done by and all I wanted was to get the things that all these other people had and so when I started making money, I went out and I bought a fancy car and I bought nice clothes and fancy stereos and all these things and I didn't find that it had any impact on my happiness. The only thing that had an impact on my happiness was not stressing out about rent knowing I had enough money in the bank that I was comfortable for two or three months.
It's I could go and eat when I wanted and drink what I wanted and so once I kind of achieved Maslow's hierarchy of needs I realized well, there's no additional benefit to money really and I also realized that travel didn't make me happy at all that it really just made me kind of miserable and anxious and then I'm a creature of habit and so in talking to people who are older I've realized that ultimately the main thing that matters are being a part of a community and having activities you can engage in having great friends and having a wonderful
Family and grandchildren and so for me I look at money first and foremost as a way to protect my personal freedom and what I mean by that is building a wall between me and things I don't want to do people. I don't want to see ways. I don't want to spend my time and then to protect my family my friends and my community and I found that really really satisfying and so I try and focus on just doing things I want to do and I have a system that I call Auntie goals where every year my business partner and I
Sit down and we say what is our worst possible day look like and how do we design our day to avoid that? The other thing that I love about money is that allows me to explore new ideas. So if I can interested in a topic often start buying or investing in businesses and that space which then lets me talk to interesting people and make new friends in the area and collaborate with them. And so the I find that really rewarding one example of that is podcasting. I got totally obsessed with this idea of subscription podcasting and
Again to the business of podcasting and seem like this Powder Keg this thing that had been growing for 20 years. It was so obvious that was going to supplant radio and yet money just hadn't come there. There was only 500 million dollar market cap and podcasting two years ago. And so I went out and I bought a top Indie podcast player. We ended up starting a business in that space and that's just been so fun. Like I love just finding an area of passion and then almost buying my way in the door to skip the line and get a bunch of access to interesting
people. I mean,
I absolutely love that in sounding my 50 bucks the beginning of 20 minutes. He didn't quite buy my way in but I do love that. I sensed interesting people. So I'm totally aligned to you that I do want to dive that Andre into my favorite element of any episode being the quickfire. And so I think the short statement and then you hit me with your immediate thoughts. Are you ready to rock and roll? Yeah, let's turn. Okay. So you have amazing views in Victoria. You've got to have a book to accompany them. What's the favorite book and why
so lately it's been the Dow of Charlie Munger, which is just a collection of quotes of Charlie Munger. Who's
Buffett's business partner he is the most interesting person in business and investing Bar None. I highly recommend it and I've read that book probably a hundred times.
What is your superpower and then weakness in company building 30 seconds on
each I would say my superpower is paste and delegation. So I'm like an ice breaker. I know how to make teams move quickly and blow down barriers and get things done very very quickly using delegation. So an example of that is over the last couple months. I've started multiple companies.
And I've spent probably four hours in total on them coming up with a high level idea and then delegating everything and so it just allows me to move much faster and scale faster than I would normally my weakness is follow through like I said before I just don't like recruiting and managing people and running a roadmap and dealing with all the data Day
stuff. But I say success. He's the first person you think of
well, you know, it's top of mine because it is your last guest but I've always thought that Jason and David from base camp have it made I think they've got an incredible business where
Bots in day-to-day on building it. They're still enjoying it after 20 years. They're being a ton of money and they have a huge market and yeah, they haven't built a sauna but who gives a shit they're making tens of millions of dollars a
year. I mean, yeah, I totally agree David. This is so cool. Tell me your father pointed to a gas station on a drive with you once and said if you don't go to college you could work there. Do you find you to give similar career advice? I guess what career advice do you find yourself often giving
now mine for the record? My dad was dead wrong, I think.
There's often a waste of time especially if you're in tack. My number one piece of feedback to people as get experience. If you want to be in business start a business, don't do an MBA. It's a little bit like someone coming to you and saying I'd like to be an Olympic runner and that person would not go to running school. They would just start running every single day longer and longer and I just find it totally insane because you get all these kids that have spent four years learning about business, but they've never actually been involved in a business or learned anything.
And the thing that upsets me most is just levels of student loan, which if you know, you pumped into a business or you know, I didn't have a tool you'd have so much more Financial Freedom so that I'm totally with you that as a university drop out after two weeks. I'm thrilled
to hear that I lasted a little longer. I think I was three months and I dropped out.
I'm very disappointed. You managed to stick it out for so long and you tell me what's your biggest
insecurity? My biggest insecurity is probably if I misinterpreted in some way like if I do something and I'm perceived as a
Jerk, but I didn't mean it in that way that I you know, it's just being blunt or something like that. That's probably an insecurity that I
have. Listen. I totally understand those insecurities. Probably mine is like just the requirement to always be light which is just
going to totally so I think it's part of that
thread. It's a it's really dangerous one actually, but ultimate one, what would you most like to change about the world of tech and startup sound tree? I think
just showing people that there's a lower-risk alternative to venture-backed startups that can still make you very
rich
A line sheet and I think David is to final one next five years for you. And for tiny what do you want to have achieved with tiny in that's five
years. Well, we don't really think a lot about that really putting one foot in front of the other. I would hope that we own more wonderful internet businesses and that we still are enjoying our day to day life. And that's about it. I haven't had a lot of success with long-term planning. I find it's just kind of guessing
it totally is that's why Financial projections always a slight anathema and comedy moment for me. But listen Andrew as I said, I've been
And a huge fan of yours on Twitter for a long time. I'm so pleased that we got to make this happen. So thank you so much for joining me
today. Thank you Harry. It's been a pleasure.
As I said at the beginning such a fan of Andrews model down if you'd like to see more from him. You can find him on Twitter at a Wilkinson likewise to be great to welcome you behind the scenes here you can do so on Instagram @ H stebbings 1996 with two bees. However, before we leave each day, I wanted to take a moment to mention hellosign a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience hellosign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements and they praised
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Than any other law firm in the world with 50 plus years working with VCS. They help PCS Foreman managed funds make investments and handle the Myriad of issues that arise throughout a funds lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing vc-backed companies going public had over to Coulee go.com and check out cool e.com. Also, as always I sir preciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you a phenomenal episode this coming Friday with low Tony found our Plex so capital.
