so would you really sir let's get going yeah let's go hi I'm Tobias Carlisle this is the acquirers podcast my very special guest today is Andrew Wilkinson he's building the berkshire hathaway of the internet Andrew and I have known each other for quite a long time we're going to be talking all the paintings expressed by podcast participants are solely there and do not reflect the opinions of the players funds or area hi Andrew how are you 8 Tobias great to be here tell us a little bit about tiny so tiny is a holding company for wonderful internet businesses and we buy profitable internet businesses that have generally stood the test of time so we're not buying startups we're not buying drones VRA are Bitcoin we don't do any of that stuff we we find kind of simple boring predictable internet businesses and we generally buy them from founders so it's people who have been in the business for five to ten years and they're looking to go off and do their next thing or retire and the reason they sell to us over private equity is we keep it very very simple so we do deals in fifteen to thirty days just like Berkshire Hathaway we make an offer in two or three days we close super quick so no BS and then we don't mess with the businesses so when we acquire a company we keep the staff in place we keep the culture in place and all the operating rhythms and we hold the business for the long term we don't we're not setting out to flip them or financial engineer them or anything else and so we try to kind of be great foster parents to wonderful businesses how do you how do you track down the businesses how do you find the businesses that you're looking for so we've like we for a while we used to reach out to people all the time and occasionally something I'll catch our eye and we'll you know it's like the you know you're walking down the street you see the most beautiful woman in the world and you have to go chase her down and say hello that only happens once in a while so there's a few businesses I can think of where they were just so exceptional that we had to kind of Dennis the Menace the founder and bug them and it's worked a few times but a lot of the time we find the best deals come from people who have heard our story on a podcast like this or an article or followed me on Twitter and they say hey I listened to an interview with you and what you're doing resonates with me and I'd love to talk so just like Berkshire we don't want to be participating in some competitive bid process and dealing with bankers we want to talk to somebody who wants to do a straightforward deal and wants to sell to us I know that you're your background for folks you don't know I think at 19 you started metal labs which is a product design shop just metal app metal everyone so how did that how that what did you what did you see when you start that up how did that evolve and where did you get to that you still own it or you've recently bought it back still I still own it so well the story starts a little earlier actually so I grew up in Vancouver Canada and when I was 15 my dad came to us my brothers and I and said hey great news kids were moving to Victoria and Victoria Canada is an even smaller city on the west coast of Canada and to me it was like moving to just Kalamazoo middle of nowhere didn't want to go there and so we move and me and my brothers are kind of bored and we have this summer where nothing's going on but my dad feels sorry for us and he gets us a new computer and cable internet and I just became completely obsessed and I started fooling around with the Internet and learning how to build websites and so I was on a chatroom and I met this kid from Hawaii and we started brainstorming about idea and we said hey let's start an Apple News site and so we started doing that and it was just a hobby but I had nothing to do and so I became completely obsessed with it and I started posting articles and were you know reviewing products and posting news and before we knew it we were actually breaking stories and getting a ton of traffic and at first I was you know my first kind of big break was going hey you know maybe I can get companies to send me free stuff to review and so I emailed all these companies and a week later like ten thousand dollars of stuff shows up at my front doorstep from FedEx and I'm like well that's pretty cool this is great and then we started getting so much traffic that we were able to go to Microsoft and sell ads to them and so all of a sudden were making thousands of dollars a month from advertising and so really I you know I ended up hiring a team of writers I ended up interviewing Steve Jobs and travelling to all sorts of conferences so I had this incredible experience in high school when I look back you know at the time I didn't recognize I was doing business I didn't know what I was doing business to me was this thing that my dad brought home in a briefcase looking sad I I I kind of got my MBA in high school like I pretty much skipped high school and was on the phone negotiating a deals and doing email and hiring people and stuff and so I started really young and when I graduated high school in 2004 I went to my dad and I said dad you know what I think I'm just gonna keep doing this internet stuff I'm not gonna go to school and we're driving down down the street in our old Volvo and he slams the brakes on the car and he points at a gas station and he says that's you you're gonna be pumping gas and so he sits me down and he's like look you got to go to university you got to make something of yourself and so he talks me into going to school and I say dad will what should I go for and he says well you're doing journalism why don't you do journalism and so I go to journalism school in Toronto and on day one I'm just going what am I doing here that professors are all saying they just got laid off from the paper and that's why there there professors and we're learning this kind of stodgy old school newspaper journalism and so very quickly within two months I'm like I'm out of here and I decided that I wanted to go move to San Francisco I wanted to be you know where the heart in the heart of it where everything was happening and go work at Google or something but I was dead broke I'd given away this website to the guy that I ran it with and I I needed to make some money to move and so I decided that I would do some freelance web design and I realized that if I pretend to be an agency instead of saying hey I'm Andrew Wilkinson in my parents basement in my underwear I could probably win more work and look more legitimate and so I designed a really slick looking site I came up with the name metal AB and if you looked at this website you would have thought oh wow this is a very sophisticated agency but in reality it was just some teenager and I started using the sales skills that I developed running that website to go out and call startup founders who had raised venture capital in 2005-2006 and I suddenly before I knew it I was doing 30 40 50 thousand dollars of revenue with very good margins because my only cost was a computer and a desk and Internet and before I knew it I had all these clients in San Francisco and none of them really knew I was in Canada they would say hey can you meet me in Union Square tomorrow and I'd get on a plane really quickly and fly down because we're about now it's kind of a away yeah it was awesome and so what ended up happening is I ended up getting a reputation and meta labs spread via word-of-mouth in Silicon Valley and it became one of the premier product design agencies we ended up going on to design slack work with coinbase and Shopify and tumblr and all sorts of really cool companies early on and as a result we started getting big clients like Facebook Google Amazon Walmart all sorts of fortune 500 so that business started making profit and at the time I didn't know what I was doing like I was literally just in bank balance accounting we're at the end of the month I'd look at the bank balance and say hey there was 30,000 at the beginning now there's 40,000 I guess this is going well and around that time I didn't know what to do with the money I didn't know anything about investing and so I looked around and I said man this agency is a lot of work I have to go sell constantly and be on planes this SAS software stuff sounds pretty cool and so I ended up taking the money I made to doing that and I started a SAS software business building software to help me run the agency so time tracking invoicing estimates that kind of stuff and you know it was amazing we launched it and I would wake up in the morning and I'd made 200 bucks while I slept and I just got hooked on that I absolutely loved it and so I continued doing that for years and by about 2013 I was running five companies as CEO you know me and my now business partner my CFO were just sweating it out in boardrooms trying to figure out what to do we had over a hundred employees and we just really didn't like our lives and we went to a mentor and we were complaining to him and he said look why don't you just sell one of the businesses that'll allow you to take a little bit of a breather and you can decide what you want to do and so we did that we sold a stake of one of our companies and all of a sudden we had a bank balance we had a balance sheet before we'd always just had a lot of cash flow and when we when we got that money we went okay we need to learn about investing maybe we'll do real estate or stocks we didn't really know anything about it and I got really lucky the first book I picked up was snowball about Warren Buffett and when I read about Buffett everything just clicked for me this idea that you've got this guy who sits on his ass reading all day and yet he owns 70 companies and has all these public market you know stocks and four hundred thousand employees and as somebody who is miserably running a hundred person company I was going this is amazing this is the ultimate level of delegation and so I spent about six months reading every single book I could on value investing yours was one of my favorite deep value it's very and and I just got obsessed with it this idea of being able to buy a dollar for 50 cents and so what I ended up doing with my business partners helped is going out and recruiting CEOs to run all of our businesses stepping away which was a little hard at first made a few mistakes hired you know the wrong CEOs learned how to incentivize them and hire the right people and then we we struck out and we said you know what we've talked to a lot of private equity firms over the years and it was always a really miserable experience and it didn't really align with what I wanted for me as a founder I was very high pace I liked making a decision quickly I liked straightforward simple deals and I wanted to sell to somebody who understood my company my baby the thing I'd spent 10 years building and so what would happen is we'd get these reach outs from private equity firms and they'd just take you through this miserable four to six month process and you know first you talk to an associate and you spend two weeks talking to them and then you realize the associates some college Gator doesn't know what he's talking about okay now we're gonna talk to the partner on the phone we're gonna spend two weeks talking to them on the phone then they're gonna come visit us they're gonna show up at our office wearing suits they're gonna freak everybody out they're gonna use a bunch of financial terms that me as a founder at the time didn't understand at all and they're gonna give me a really rosy term sheet then they're gonna spend two months trying to find reasons to renegotiate with me and then right at the last minute they're gonna try and put a bolt in my head and give me a big ern out right and I just went through that process and went this is like you know meeting someone you're dating and saying you know you're you're secretly religious but you don't tell them that until the day before you got married this is ridiculous right so I just thought hey if Buffett can do this Buffett's doing billion dollar deals why can he do them in seven you know seven to ten days and private equity can't and so we set out to basically become the acquirer that we wish we could have sold to back when we were selling businesses and we founded a holding company that we call tiny we rolled all of our existing businesses into it and we started companies and our PlayBook is really really simple you know like I said earlier we look for businesses that will exist over the long term that have already proven themselves that are profitable that are doing something good in the world you know we don't want to be buying anything we feel bad about owning and that are simple that are very understandable that I could explain to my mom so we're not buying complex software or anything that requires a lot of R&D we're buying job boards online communities you know simple meal planning apps we're buying design agencies which we deeply understand you know wide variety of businesses Sony we've been doing that now for seven or so years we're up to about twenty five companies in total now and hon you know 400 plus employees or something like that but it's really wonderful because I get to spend all my time you know focused on hiring great CEOs looking at deals and just kind of overseeing everything and you know I'm not quite at the warren buffett thing where you have no calendar but I got to spend most of my time talking to interesting people like you and thinking and reading so it's a good light and in the middle of nowhere in Victoria that's good so in terms of when you find something that you want to buy hat what distinguishes your process from the private equity process which is it's a little bit deceptive if they sort of give you a headline number and give you some headline terms and then they're basically trying to backpedal knowing that you've invested all this time and this and it's gonna be harder for you to sort of give something you've got the sunk costs so you're trying to do something more like Buffett where it's a simpler deal what decision would you it's a fair price for where the business is today and like private equity we have an idea of what the business can be worth if we can improve it and one of the things we've noticed is that often founders are incredible at one thing they have a really great superpower so they might be really really passionate about the product they create but they may not enjoy marketing or sales or finance or other things and we have such a broad experience that we can look at it and go wow they're incredibly growing organically and they're already profitable and everything's already working because they have such a good product what would happen if we added a really good you know head of marketing and we started allocating budget there and then we'll also often identify simple levers we can pull just to accelerate growth in small simple ways it's that that classic Andy Grove line of you know they were panicking over some big business decision and he said if we got fired today and a new management team came in what would they do because it's often clear but founders get into this kind of myopic bubble and so the difference is we I mean private equity has their secret number of what they're really willing to pay and then they have their headline number we just tell them what the secret number is and we tell them that immediately and it's funny like we sometimes will not even get on the phone with an and with a potential acquisition unless they've already discussed our valuation and they've said I'm open to that because so much time is wasted on both sides of our long you know multi hour multi-day sometimes phone calls before you get to this key piece of information and going back to the idea of you're gonna marry somebody you want to know on the first day they're Jewish and that means a lot to them and you're not Jewish or whatever and you can have that conversation you don't want that on day 60 and that's what private equity does how do you think about valuation how does that play out it that private multiples used to be much much lower they were sort of three to four times free cash flow or revenues or how do you think about that for these types of businesses well we're usually looking at the durability of the business so if somebody has a business that's a sandcastle we'll buy you know we'll buy anything as long as it's a good business doing something good on the internet that we can understand we'll look at it but we'll pay a hell of a lot more for a competitive advantage in a mode so for example when we bought dribble which is the largest community designers on the internet it's one of the top thousand sites I like to say it's like a New Zealand business and what that means is that it's energy independent it has its own food supply it doesn't have any middlemen it exists away from nuclear war and frankly nobody's paying attention to it and Tribble is like that because nobody googles it they go to it directly it has millions of people that go there every day and it's a key habit that's a business with a moat that one we were willing to pay a really high multiple on earnings but if somebody comes along and says hey I've got a job board for finance people and we look around do we go you know this is a good business today but LinkedIn jobs and indeed and all these other people are competing and they're venture-backed I don't know if I'm gonna pay a huge multiple on that maybe I'll pay two to four but on the better business man I'd pepped it or 30 times if it makes sense and I think that goes back to you know with Munger and Buffett they bought coke at twenty four times earnings and it did really well for them because they could project it what's gonna happen and it was very predictable and there's a huge moat so I think it just depends on the durability of earnings you've got the extreme delegation that or it sounds like you've got the extreme delegation that Buffett and Munger have put in and part of that is getting the right person in a see own incentivizing them properly how do you think about hiring and incentivizing well our our kind of playbook has been to find people who have already done it before what we used to do is hire people who really liked and we thought they had a lot of potential and Moxie and we learned the hard way that while you get to work with a lot of wonderful people that way it's actually really hard because people learn on the job and so what's worked really well for us is a finding people who were connected to in some way so when we're gonna recruit a new CEO we go and we pull our group of existing CEOs and say who's the best person that you know that could run a business like this so we're vetting them through our network which helps a lot so we get great candidates that way but the key thing we're looking for is somebody who's already done it you know it goes back to if you want someone to build your deck you want to hire a red sail carpenter who's been doing it for 20 or 30 years you don't want to hire some college kid who thinks you can kind of figure it out and so we look for people who are executives or CEOs that businesses they're very similar to the ones that were acquiring but I've done it at scale already so when they go back down to size they know exactly all the dance moves that they can pull to get back to you know that skill it's not a requirement that the business that you're buying has management in place because that's something that Buffett that's kind of a refrain if his yeah that's a huge advantage for us you know it's interesting like we started Buffett started as an investor we started as operators yeah yeah I think like you know if you're buying See's Candies and it's existed for 40 years and it has a deeply ingrained culture you need a company man to run a business like that and we'll certainly look at promoting from within but the businesses we acquire are often so simple and small that and and the founders are so tapped out and ready to leave usually that if they're leaving we have a massive opportunity to pull someone in and we just have to be careful not to mess with the culture so the number one thing we say is look if people like to work remotely and they don't you know they don't do a lot of meetings and X & Y & Z we really try and stay true to that and we don't synergize the businesses at all so we really try and leave them as an island to do their own thing so similar to Bertrand that way but the management change it gives us a huge advantage again over private equity because private equity takes that same approach of the founder has to stick around we just won't tell them until the last minute do you like it if they're around - sort of in some sort of advisory role that's the you don't care either way oh yeah we definitely want the founder you know sometimes they're sticking around in the business and they're gonna stay and run it for a period and we'll work together to transition sometimes they will you know just be in an advisor or you know they have equity usually we keep the founder with some percentage of equity so that they're still a part of the story but it just depends on what they want some founders are just like I want to sell I never want to think about this business again and they disappear other founders I get emails from every week saying have you thought about this and that you know either of them are fine I guess a comp for what you're doing is maybe something like constellation mark Leonard and constellation D is that fair is that not fair oh yeah it's not really because what constellation does is they synergize so what they'll do is they'll go it's similar to Vista so they'll go out and they'll buy you know software for managing car rental dealerships they'll buy one of them then they'll go out they'll buy one big one then they'll roll up a hundred smaller ones they'll cram them all together and they'll use the same sales team and stuff what we're doing is the opposite of that we're buying one great business and it exists by itself and we don't slam any of the businesses together I think that's synergy synergy stuff is so intoxicating but it's so rarely works and it's really difficult to keep great talent because they don't feel the autonomy that we currently provide them like our CEOs literally they send us a monthly financial report they send us a quarterly SWOT and then we say call us if you need us and there's no board meeting we don't call them we leave them alone they make all their own decisions the only thing we make decisions around is capital allocation so they want to go ahead and spend five million bucks on an acquisition or a big R&D project we're gonna approve that you probably I mean I imagine that you're mostly totally self financed it all comes you're just reinvesting what you're getting but do would you ever take outside capital or look to list the business we've looked at a lot of different stuff the challenge for us I mean so far almost everything has been compounded from the original business from meta lab and that's been crazy like I remember doing a projection of what would happen if we can pound it at you know 25% over ten years and the numbers seem crazy to me and now the numbers came true that's been really really gratifying see what we've what we've done is you know we've had enough we've had a lot of people approached us about investing their money and until recently we always said we'll never take any outside capital because we're having enough trouble just investing our own free cash flow in the market we're in it was crazy like the multiples were very high and expectations were high but given what's happening right now we're actually just about to close a fund right now with a few high net worth folks and family offices so we're really excited about that and we're still the largest single LP so we're putting all of our free cash flow into that but it's gonna be an experiment for us we've never done it before and we're keen to try it is that in response to the volatility in the market or was that something that was planned prior to that no I mean literally I am I got a call from investor I know and he just said he was gonna he was you'd called me before about investing and we'd done one deal before just as partners and he said you've gotta raised this trust fund like it's just a complete no-brainer and we're just seeing we think there's gonna be a lot of opportunity in the next six to 12 months by virtue of the fact that the market has sort of come back a little bit so that was I imagine it's the the sort of stuff that you're looking at is asset like compound growth probably better businesses the sort of businesses that do get higher multiples so that's I imagine that's a challenge meeting the expectations of vendors meeting the expectation of the seller it's it's been it's been interesting because you get people where they come to you and will say okay we would pay you know eight times free cash flow for your business and they go well you know my biggest competitor which is venture backed raised five million dollars at a 300 million dollar valuation can we say yeah but they sold minority pref equity and that's very different and they're doing venture your bootstrap business and so I think one of the challenges for founders is they don't really understand the finance world sometimes and they'll see these crazy headline numbers not realizing that the founder has basically sold their soul and put a gun to their head and said I'm gonna deliver a 50x return or else so that's been a challenge in this market but you know I think everyone's just been so optimistic for so long that you know people you know people are just more a little more conservative about the kind of stuff they'll accept but I think that we'll see you know some opportunities over the next six months certainly in the venture world because I think a lot of these companies will not be able to raise their next venture around but there's a lot of exceptional businesses that have been built they're just not venture skill they've got a good business model they've got you know a profitable like on a gross margin basis they're very profitable but they've got a very bloated cost base because they're based in San Francisco and they have a huge team and fancy offices and stuff and so we think there'll be some opportunities to restructure venture businesses and give them a good home and that's part of what we're looking at raising for what industries and sectors do you think the most interesting right now yeah well you don't you don't think in those terms you just sort of you're you're just looking at whatever comes in the door we're pretty much looking at everything that comes in the door you know I'm a big fan of online communities and digital goods so for example we have a business that sells Shopify themes and Shopify apps and it's one of the best businesses in the world you spend thirty to fifty thousand dollars developing a theme and it's just code and then you sell it you know sometimes hundreds of thousands of times for 300 bucks a pop and so it's very very high margin you've got lock-in into an ecosystem and Shopify you know businesses like that are super interesting at times like this because I think that there's when people are financially constrained they start thinking about okay well how can I make more money people get more entrepreneurial and then also a lot of habits are being changed right now around retail so people can't shop in retail and so they're shopping online and so Shopify is naturally getting boosted significantly by this as people start stores and try to diversify their income so right now we're kind of asking ourselves what doesn't change what can exist in this new economy where everyone's stuck at home and for the most part we've been quite fortunate that most of our businesses participate in this new economy but we're having to think a lot we just lost a deal that was very interesting but we just couldn't wrap our heads around how long the lockdown went on and if the lockdown went on three months extra we could lose ten million dollars if them if it went on six months you know we could lose twenty million dollars we're just very cautious about that so we're trying to think about you know what are the areas of the internet that are gonna stay healthy one of the challenges for an acquisition particularly in a private businesses that the vendor has so much more information about the business than you do as the acquirer how do you cross that chasm how do you get comfortable with the business well generally you know these businesses are very very simple so often you know all the transactions happen over the internet in a stripe account or something like that so we can do kind of forensic analysis on all of the metrics if it's recurring revenue we can figure out churn rates and customer acquisition costs and all that kind of stuff but you know there's a quantitative side and that's the quantitative side there's diligence checklists all that kind of stuff and then there's really the qualitative side and generally we're trying to buy businesses from people who we have someone in common with where we can really vet the founder and trust them and going back to that Buffett quote of you can't do a good deal with a bad person so we're really spending a lot of time going is this a good person do they give us the heebie-jeebies would they want to with you know would they do something sketchy and is this somebody that would have built a good business someone we can trust so you know we're obviously doing that side of it and then we're also going through diligent checklist similar to what someone else would do it's just that because these businesses exist in cyberspace you're not gonna go in tore the candy factory you know you do that virtually that sounds like to you it's nice because we don't have to travel very often right we've done deals where you know we don't even get on a plane sometimes we do if it's really meaningful to the founder but for the most part we're just able to do it over the phone and video do you do any public market investing because there are great businesses that sort of meet the criteria perhaps that's so expensive but do you look at public markets yeah we do more personally so my business partner Chris and I both invest in the public market just in our personal portfolios or we'll use it for hedging so if we see a big risk in the private businesses sometimes we'll take some capital and we'll head you know currency hedge or bison puts on something as a pair trade but it's not our primary business we I think if you're a value investor there's something intoxicating about the public market and the idea of being able to buy these businesses at wild prices that wouldn't exist otherwise but to date we haven't done anything and every time I look at doing a takeover or a take private or taking one of our businesses public I talked to friends who've been involved in public companies and they just grabbed my face and say what are you thinking don't do it you're such a good thing going on so never say never but for now I think that's not on the table yeah don't over complicate your life you have a 20-minute term sheet what's the 20 minutes own sheet oh the non-binary term sheet no no Henry I'm sorry yeah we well we I mean on non-binding non-binary well we okay there's two different two different things that's again I don't know if I've branded it the 20 minute term sheet but basically we don't think that hard about sending out term sheets they're non-binding documents but we just like making things really clear to people and so what I mean by that I'll spend I don't know 1 to 3 days digging through someone's business on a high level and then I'll say look here's an indication this is this is what we would pay this is how we think about it that's something that normally a private equity firm would drag out a month and I don't quite know why so we'll send that document over and say hey directionally is this right will usually whip those up in 20 minutes so maybe maybe I had said that publicly we did a really interesting thing so one of the so we've now got all these different businesses and we sometimes get into a position where we start accidental businesses and so an example of that was a friend of mine as a podcaster he had was kind of opposed to doing ads and so he said hey if you like what I'm doing support me on patreon and he did really well and he started making a lot of money and he said hey can you take a look at my numbers and you know maybe you'll have some business ideas or marketing ideas or whatever and so I started looking at it and I'm going holy crap this is like a SAS business he's got a recurring monthly revenue that's coming from a broad diversified customer base listeners and it churns at a very low rate because people love his podcast and it's growing at 20 or 30 percent a year this is incredible and he has 95 percent gross margins and 90 percent net margins right like it's just completely insane and so as I dug into it I started seeing all these opportunities I was looking at patreon and thinking this is not the best way to monetize a podcast you know you can't provide your listeners premium additional episodes or ad-free or anything like that and so we ended up building some software to help my friend and it was just something we spun up through our agencies and then we had this software and it worked really well for him his business started growing way faster he started making more money and we went we started a business we don't want to be in the business of starting businesses and not only that but hey this is actually a venture idea this is a massive market that's untapped where nobody is monetizing podcast this way and whoever goes out and builds the for structure for that's gonna do very well so we launched a company called super cast and I started getting people emailing me and saying hey I'm a venture investor I would love to invest just friends and venture firms we know and I'm an anti venture like I'm not not anti venture it makes sense in some situation but I'm a bootstrapper and so we did this thing called a non binary term sheet so my psychology is such that if I was to raise money at a high valuation I would feel guilty if it didn't reach its potential but I didn't want to be foolish and raised it a non-market valuation and so we were able to get a ten million dollar valuation for the business that was really just an idea and some software and stuff but that was what the market was saying it was the valuation was but I did this thing where if it doesn't achieve a million dollars of revenue within two years the valuation gets cut in half and so that I call the non binary binary term sheet and the idea is that look if I'm wrong about this I don't want to feel guilty I'm gonna get my equity crushed down with everybody else and the investors will get a lot more and so that's thing we did that was kind of neat but again it's like not something we don't want to be starting businesses and raising venture in general so it's non binary in the sense that the outcome is non binary you don't want a situation where you either smash it out of the park and you make a whole lot of money or you it does very well it doesn't smash and also that if it let's say that it does 500k a year and it's profitable it's a million then it does 1.5 and it's making money I want to do it at evaluation where my investors can see their money back in five to seven years and so that was my thinking is it can be successful in either world and I think that to many venture businesses are just all or nothing and it creates these perverse incentives where founders have their net worth in the business entirely investors are diversified across a hundred portfolio companies and they only see outcomes out of ten and so the founder has an incentive to protect his egg but the venture investors say hey you got a swing for the fences and take big risks and what meanwhile the investor is fine because he's diversified you wrote a great medium post about podcasting where he said Joe Rogan might be already a podcast bill you know what's that what's the what was the medium post about and how did you come to that conclusion yes so I called it um Howard Stern is getting ripped off and it was it was interesting I mean if you think about it this subscription podcast thing it really works if you have a habit so I have a habit for instance of getting into the shower every day and I turn on fresh air with Terry Gross I don't really think about it I just like that I also subscribe to Sirius and I because I like Howard Stern and I like his interviews and so you know I'm willing to spend quite a bit of money to listen to Howard Stern and I get Terry Gross for free and I started thinking about it and going with the podcast infrastructure that exists today why is Howard Stern on Sirius he could do this himself and instead of making 90 million dollars a year he could make the full 250 300 million that Sirius gets paid Sirius gets paid all that money because they provide satellite and infrastructure in studios but as of five years ago even that stuff is irrelevant you can reach your audience via a podcast and you can reach an even larger audience now and so my argument was that Howard Stern should cut out the middleman and he should go independent and do this and just make insane margin and profits from it and you know the same goes for someone like Joe Rogan Joe Rogan is already making thirty million dollars a year forty million dollars a year from advertising and I'm sure it's basically pure profit if he took an additional five percent of his audience and he converted them to getting an extended interview once a week or an extra episode or he went subscription-only or even just offered an ad-free stream for superfans you know he would make another forty fifty million bucks and when you start thinking about what's a business that makes a hundred million dollars a year in profit that's growing at 30% alongside with all other podcast and you're the number one podcast in the world I think the numbers about a billion dollars so that was how I thought about it yeah I mean that's that's probably even a conservative valuation you might even pay that for that business totally if you ever once sell I'd be very happy to send him a term sheet Drupal is a really interesting business I've I've poked around on the site before can you just go into what what the what is that business exactly is it is it advertising or is it it's a platform how does it work exactly so dribble it's actually such a cool story so when I was first starting as a designer I was a huge fan of this guy named Dan cedar home and I read every single book he was this famous designer and he wrote written all these books about Web Design and so I followed him religiously and he started this website called dribble and the idea was he wanted a place to share what he was working on with other designers being a designer is kind of a lonely job you're often sitting with headphones on doing Photoshop for eight hours a day and people are all over the world and often you're not near any other designers and so just like Twitter you create an account on dribble and you can post what are called shots and shots are just like hey check out this logo I'm working on and people can comment on it people can remix it they can say I'm gonna you know do a take-off on this or they can sell merchandise around it it gets a t-shirt or you know sell a digital good for a font or something so it started out really just as a way for designers to get feedback from other designers and you know the business just grew like crazy and so he started it with a developer named rich thorne at mmm sorry let me just have some water here he started it with a developer and they started building one more features and it turned into this global community where every single day in 10 different countries designers were meeting up in person they were hosting you know conferences and real world events they were sharing all their work they're finding jobs so there's a you know the largest design job board on the Internet is on Tribble they were you know finding clients they were giving each other feedback just endless numbers of things and so the business is really multifaceted it's kind of like LinkedIn for designers if you're in business you have a LinkedIn account if you're in design you have a Tribble account and so it makes money through selling pro accounts so if you're if you're a pro designer you want your profile to look a bit better you want clients to be able to message you you want to be able to search the platform better you'd pay for a pro account if you post a job you'd pay 300 bucks or whatever it is to post a job listing we let recruiters pay money to search the platform better give them more powerful tools we do recruiting so if like Adobe wanted to hire a designer you know 10 20 designers they'd come to us and we do a White Glove service and the neat thing about it is you know you've got this massive engaged community and as long as you keep them happy and don't mess with them too much there's almost infinite numbers of businesses you can build for them right they have really interesting problems that they need solved that are very valuable to them where for a designer to be able to say look you're shy and introverted and quiet what if we just made it really easy for you to get clients right by promoting yourself in trouble and we made it easy for the clients to reach out to you that's really powerful and enables a lot of relationships so we're doing something really really good in the world in a really cool creative community and we've been able to build all these neat business lines around it and just last question and your meta Labs is product design what what is product design for those who are like me not not so schooled in in the art basically like designing software so for instance we deserve slack version of slack yeah we designed slack and often we're actually designing and building so we always like to say you know if somebody brings us a napkin sketch or the next big idea we can actually take it from napkin sketch to a real ship product in the app store so they have a big amazing design team and amazing engineering team and you know they do everything from R&D for big fortune 500 companies helping them you know with Walmart we've helped them do their e-commerce experience for over 10 years we did Amazon photos you know all sorts of stuff like that and then sometimes it's with startups helping them actually build the first version of their product while they get started it's absolutely fascinating I love the tiny capital comm website - by the way love that blue screen of death for the the old-school DOS kind of interface a lot I see it's ok I'm glad it's a little bit shiny now folks want to get in touch with you to sell you a business how do they go about doing that or they can just say hi just tiny capital comm if they wanted to email us about selling us a business or they can just follow me on Twitter twitter.com slash a Wilkinson perfect thank you very much Andrew Wilkinson tiny capital tidy I'm sorry yeah thank you very much yeah yeah tiny capital sounds to financee we couldn't get the domain of tiny comm we will get it one day