Tiny Capital

“The challenge in tiny is that we Are generally pretty hands off and where we're really leaning in is in a lot of the software businesses, because those are the ones that are at the most risk.”

“I mean, we partnered with Matina, so I'm a partial owner with SciComm. You guys know Rob and the rest of the guys at SciComm, Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny. And we are available online through Matina, through Amazon. We launched in Whole Foods, in Costco, Canada,…”

“And I met the founder of Letterboxd and I realized, oh my God, this is a business where this has a moat. So it has a network effect. It's a huge social network for film reviewers.”

“And I said, well, you know, if you just pivot that idea just ever so slightly, And instead of doing restaurants, you did realtors or wealth managers who have quite a large marketing budget and are used to spending serious money. And it only has to work a littl…”

“I mean, we bootstrapped the entire business and now across all of our companies, we do almost three hundred million dollars in revenue.”

“When tiny buys a company, we generally just leave them alone. If they already have management in place, we say nothing changes. You know, no one should know that any, that we've even bought them. Obviously people know that, but really like there should be no c…”

“We own Letterboxd, which is the largest social network for film lovers.”

“At one point being worth over a billion dollars, by the way, should redo the title of the book from barista to billionaire. Now it's former billionaire because our stock went down”

“He said, you know, I've reframed it so that all my money, 90% of my money plus goes into my philanthropic foundation and then it gets given away to great causes. So when I think about working really hard or losing a deal or a investment going well. The win isn…”

“And I often find that any time that I'm making the easy choice, my life gets hard. And when I make the hard choice to shut down the business, fire the person, you know, say bye to a project that I was excited about. It's almost always the right choice and it m…”

“You know, if it's like tiny tiny, like Andrew Wilkinson, or late checkout, like us, like we end up building these private equity groups almost, that a holding company that people like to follow, it just helps all your products, both from a hiring perspective, …”

“And it's Huberman's brand, if you're not familiar he acquired it alongside another Andrew Wilkinson at Tiny and so they've been growing that”

“Like Tiny, so Andrew Wilkinson's business, like they have their businesses that are owned as a hold co But then they also have a fund management business that they run where they raise money from outsiders to go buy businesses that they then oversee as part of…”

“I think that probably a major difference between like the tiny slash Wilkinson model and how we do it is that we are operators. And so the investment strategy has slowly, you know, continues to, you know, move over time, but it's been fewer, bigger deals that …”

“Whenever we owned the financials, it felt good because we felt in control. Problem was we were in control. The CEO looked at the numbers and was like, those are your numbers. Those aren't my numbers. I don't own that. I don't know. I don't know what that targe…”

“I started multiple software businesses that I bootstrapped and lost in one case to over ten million dollars.”

“Over time you realize like people want stability and they want surety and they want to have health benefits and all this stuff you don't get. And so I realized like there's this whole other class of people where they want to run a company for somebody else. Th…”

“When I started hiring CEOs, because before I knew it, all the businesses started like doubling. And the reason they doubled was because I was only giving 20% of my time to all the companies. And frankly, I didn't know what I was doing. And I just started hirin…”

“By the way, this is how Tiny's doing this Matina, which is the drink they're doing with Huberman. They bought a yerba mate company and then they, he's, he loves mate and he's been drinking it for a long time.”

“Andrew Wilkinson, he put out this tweet where he said, we partnered with James Clear. Tiny owns 40%. James owns 60%.”

“My prediction is that this won't make nearly as much money as some of his other boring things that no one would ever talk about.”

“I would bet that he's going to make hundreds of millions off of these plays. If you add up the, you know, three to five that he's going to do in this category, I would bet that that's a three to three, like a three hundred million dollar prize.”

“Andrew Wilkinson and Chris Barling are the founders of tiny. They're the ones that set up this dinner with Charlie Munger.”

“The problem with raising money is that at the end of the day, there's people who can call you, and you owe it to answer the phone, and they can interrupt you at any given time, and especially in a rolling fund, there's like 50 of those people.”

“One increased prices, 30% after not increasing prices for five years, they massively grew profits, right? That took 10 minutes, a little bit of planning and that paid off big.”

“One had a bunch of customer gift card deposits and they were like, Oh shit, we can invest these in T-bills and make five percent makes 500 grand a year of just pure profit.”

“We bought a business about almost 10 years ago called weworkremotely.com. And it's very simple. It's a job board... We buy the business. We pay three or four times earnings or something, which was, you know, a fair price given what it was doing. We immediately…”

“When you see a business where they're just not, they're myopic on something, they're not doing the best practices. And often it's because they have other priorities. I mean, The base camp guys had a hundred million dollar ARR SaaS business. The last thing they…”

“Chris, Chris and I, we used to leave two weeks expenses in the business. If it meant that if they don't collect their AR, their accounts receivable, they go off a cliff. Now, what they don't know is they're not going to go off a cliff because Tiny, the bank, w…”

“We've realized that, like, cold outreach is not the way to go. Like, we would much rather go and have a public presence and a reputation and have people actually seek us out and say, hey, I want to sell you my company.”

“I'm like via email. I want to send the first offer. I want them to say, yes, that's interesting. And then I'll spend time on it. And what I used to do is I would spend all this time getting to know people and unboxing the business only to realize that their ex…”

“We throw out LOIs constantly. Like I have no qualms about that. They're not binding documents. You know, we'll send someone an offer and there's something about if I read an email and I say, Hey, I'll offer you two million dollars for your business. I don't th…”

“I think your deal with HubSpot, though, is better than what we would have paid. Well, and it was like, we got to the numbers, and we would have been cheaper than HubSpot.”

“And ironically, since I went to the Oscars, we ended up buying Letterboxd, which is a social network. It's like the largest social network for film buffs.”

“So in. 22, it did. Sixty two million in revenue with eight million in earnings.”

“Andrew Wilkinson, the founder of Tiny Capital, has, like, a Twitter subscription, and it's, like, I don't know, 40 dollars or something, 30 or 40 dollars a month... He's gonna, like, pick someone random from his audience every month and have a thirty-minute co…”

“I actually haven't lost that much money in businesses where I'm buying the whole thing. Almost all of those work. It's the ones where I'm doing venture or I'm betting on something or I'm trying to start a business. That's where I lose all my money.”

“He recently took it public last week. It's now trading at eight hundred and fifty million Canadian dollars, which is only like six hundred million bucks in real money.”

“In 2021, it did 62.8 million dollars. And that's interesting because it actually has been growing not crazy fast. So it's been growing something like 23% a year. Or for the last handful of years, we can only see a couple years here, but it does a 45% or 40% ma…”

“Additionally, they had a company called Mealtime, which is like a meal prepping software that he sold for twenty-five million dollars, so he had a, and they gained, they profited thirteen million dollars off that.”

“Okay, so you, if you look at where the bulk of the revenue and EBITDA comes from, it's two companies. So yes, he's got a portfolio of 30 companies, but it's MetaLab and it's Dribbble that are carrying the thing on its back.”

“Having said that is probably the type of business where You make one good decision, one good deal a year or two good deals a year. And that was a great year. And that I think that speed is just very hard for most entrepreneurial people to go at.”

“His company, which is called Tiny, which buys businesses, it's going public. And Andrew owns roughly 71% of the shares, and it's going public at a nearly billion-dollar valuation”

“So basically the company that is taking public at this point has, and this, now this stuff is actually public. It's doing about a hundred fifty million in revenue, fifty million in EBITDA.”

“There's metal lab, which we can guess is doing 40 or fifty million in revenue, twenty million in profit. That's the cash flow engine of this whole thing of being able to buy these companies.”

“Turns this thing into a behemoth, making, now it's making many tens of millions of dollars. If I had to guess, it's worth Two hundred million dollars or higher. This is just pure guess. And that becomes a crown jewel of this company tiny.”

“And in fact, it was kind of like a venture portfolio in a way where a couple of the companies were really the standout ones that were driving most of the value. And I think for them, it was actually three. There was the one they took, they originally took publ…”

“Who's doing permanent equity? Who's doing a buy and hold strategy? Okay. There's some people doing it, but they all raised money. He used his own company's profits to do it.”

“The second you raise money, that, that your cap table is one of the few things that you can't reverse, or it's really hard. And he didn't raise money for a company that, MetaLab should not have raised money. And it did not raise money. And because of that, he …”

“And so these documents were sitting in our office and I was like, oh, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. I kept putting it off. And then finally I signed it. And I realized that between the time that I, it was sitting there for a week and in that week, …”

“Basically now the business is, I won't say numbers, but it's making as much as we paid for it every year in profit. And I think it's probably five or 10 X more valuable than what we paid for it at least.”

“Started another five to 10 other businesses. And almost all of them failed. Like it was incredibly, incredibly painful. And after that, I kind of swore off starting businesses and I've only just come back to it over the last three years.”

“I think it was doing about four million dollars of annual profits. It had grown a lot. And we paid 26 and then we bought four 60 and a couple other businesses. And then we took it public at a two hundred and sixty million dollar valuation.”

“And a couple of years later Albertsons came and they bought it for tens of millions of dollars.”

“I don't ever want to sell businesses. And the only reason we sold Me Lime was because Mitch wanted to sell the business.”

“And I think that Bitcoin is currency trading, right? Like just buy great businesses, do the thing, you know, and I think everyone is just speculating on this stuff and there's a ton of fascinating arguments for it and I follow it, but I have just fully steered…”

“Our rolling fund and our private fund, we don't cover, we don't do any management fees whatsoever, because I'm allergic to this.”

“We have an Angelus rolling fund. We invest about twelve million dollars a year there, and I'm pivoting it to totally focus on secondary and minority buyouts.”

“When we started buyer, which is our negotiation service for software that we launched two years ago and we ended up selling it to ramp. So I think we started that business for 50 K”

“Yeah, I'm like 90% in tiny, but what I have done is I've had liquidity and other things outside of tiny.”