Andrew Wilkinson
Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Tiny. On 5 shows, 21 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorexecutiveauthor@awilkinson ↗LinkedIn ↗neverenough.com ↗
Wilkinson co-founded Tiny, a holding company that acquires and operates profitable internet and consumer brands. He previously founded design agency MetaLab and authored the memoir Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire.
5shows
21appearances
353statements
43resolved
28supported
5contradicted
65%fully supported
217said about them ↓ Everything Andrew Wilkinson said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Wilkinson: Employees are unreliable and fail to understand founder vision
“You know, if I was using employees they're unreliable. They don't see my vision. They don't understand every aspect of design.”
Wilkinson: Basic businesses will be fully run by AI in 3-6 months
“And I think that we're probably three to six months out from being able to just can businesses off to AI to run at least basic businesses like this.”
Wilkinson: Things creator has 'won' more than Asana founder Dustin Moskovitz
“I am generally much more in the camp of the things guy has won, not Dustin Moskovitz. Dustin Moskovitz is just playing a different game than the things guy.”
Wilkinson: Leaders should fire an employee immediately upon first considering it
“And the kind of heuristic I have is if I ever think, should I fire this person even once I should fire them immediately. It has always been a signal, at least for me, that when someone's a superstar, I can't imagine firing them.”
Wilkinson: Hire fully formed talent for current needs rather than potential
“So I'd say like the lesson really is hire for what you need. Don't hire just for potential, which is counter to what a lot of people say. A lot of people say hire for potential and coach them into being whatever you need. I just haven't found that. I think you…”
Wilkinson: ChatGPT will eliminate software middlemen by building tools on demand
“For all tools basically all middlemen businesses are gone. And I believe fundamentally that we are all going to go to the search bar and the new search bar is ChatGPT and you're going to query it and ChatGPT will just build whatever you need or it'll hook into…”
Wilkinson: Rolling Out Existing AI and Self-Driving Would Eliminate 20% of Jobs
“So if we just paused AI, we shut down all the AI labs and all we focused on was just rollout of what already exists. I think probably Between self-driving cars and AI agents, 20% of all current jobs are gone.”
Wilkinson: Software will commoditize as AI eliminates coding barriers
“And so my belief is basically that as more and more people don't need to learn how to code and can build software, software will become more and more commoditized. There'll be way more competition and it'll be a way harder world for software businesses.”
Wilkinson: Angel Investing Is Roulette, Not Poker
“I think of it as roulette. And I think like this period that we're talking about was about me learning how to play poker, right? Poker has way better odds than roulette. If you're good at poker, you can actually win. You've got, you know, a 60% odds. When you …”
Wilkinson: True value creation by Chamath Palihapitiya won't be clear for decades
“Chamath, we won't know if Chamath has actually built value for another 10 or 20 years. And frankly, like his, it's all very like secret. Cause I think a lot of his stuff is private. So we really have no clue how much money he has, how much money he made what's…”
Venture Capital Investing Is Totally Random and Functions Like Roulette
“I still think ventures totally random. I do it for fun off the side of my desk.”
Tech salary inflation will reverse as remote hiring shifts overseas
“I think that this high salary inflation is not here to stay. I think what's happened is all these companies down in San Francisco are going, oh, crazy. We can hire cheap people in Canada, but they're not yet going, oh, hey, we can hire people in India and the …”
Wilkinson: Too many venture-backed startups buy unsustainable growth for funding
“However, if it's one dollar 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 Buying 30 cent dollars to show growth and get their next round of funding.”
Wilkinson argues school and MBAs are wasteful for tech entrepreneurs
“I think school is often a waste of time, especially if you're in tech. My number one piece of feedback to people is, Get experience. If you want to be in business, start a business. Don't do an MBA.”
Wilkinson: Built and Runs a SaaS Business Entirely Autonomously via OpenClaw
“And so as a test, before I started doing this in our operating businesses, I basically built a business a SaaS business, and then I've been running it entirely autonomously using OpenClaw.”
Wilkinson: Customer support will not be a human job very soon
“Like support to me is not a job very, very soon.”
Wilkinson: Anthropic and OpenAI will soon launch AI CEO products
“My, I mean, my kind of belief is like pretty soon Anthropic and OpenAI are gonna launch like basically like CEOs. So you just be like, I'm just gonna hire a CEO for my company. Give me your data. I'll figure it out. I'll run it. I'll run the whole business.”
Wilkinson: Software Will Face Extreme Pricing Pressure Like Restaurants
“I think pricing pressure is just gonna go crazy because it's like the restaurant industry. Like, you know, restaurants are not a bad business. They're bad because there's too much competition.”
Wilkinson: Software is a worse business now than five years ago
“All I can say is software is a worse business now than it was five years ago.”
Wilkinson: Holding company spends $40k/month on Claude instead of hiring
“So instead of a payroll, we just have a 40,000 dollar a month Claude bill. And it's doing everything.”
Wilkinson: AI-built custom software will collapse vertical SaaS pricing power
“And I think the new world is, you know, if. 400 people in the United States own funeral homes, let's say like 20 of them are smart and no AI, they're all going to build their own software. And so what does that do? That means It's great for the consumer. There…”
Wilkinson: Any software product that is just an API call is cooked
“It's like anything that could be an API call is just cooked. So to me, that's like an API call business. That's like the first thing to get run over.”
Wilkinson predicts AI agent 'iPhone moment' within next five years
“And so I think that if it was accessible to everybody in terms of, if you could just open chat GPT and say, Hey, ChatGPT, I run a business. Can you help me? And it started asking you questions and it said, oh, well, you know, you do sales. Do you want me to se…”
Wilkinson: Teaching children how to code is becoming obsolete
“So now teaching kids how to code is like teaching kids basic and we have a GUI, right? You don't need to learn punch cards and basic programming because, or MS DOS, because we all have keyboards and mice. We don't have to do that. And I feel like coding has re…”
The other half of the tape: Andrew Wilkinson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 193 times in 69 episodes across the shows. 24 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Shaan Puri 81Sam Parr 58Greg Isenberg 24Theo Tabah 6Rob Fraser 2Paddy Galloway 2Nick Huber 2Morgan Housel 2
Statements about Andrew Wilkinson, by other people (24)
Housel: Extreme success often stems from channeled anxiety rather than passion
“A lot of people who are very successful are just walking anxiety disorders harnessed for productivity.”
Shaan Puri predicts Andrew Wilkinson's creator joint ventures will yield $300M+.
“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.”
Parr: James Clear app will make less money than Tiny's boring assets
“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.”
Parr: Building geographic-arbitrage design agencies works less well today
“And I actually think this won't work. This doesn't work as much anymore is he's based out of Victoria.”
Isenberg: A followed holding company brand boosts hiring and acquisitions across products
“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, …”
Puri: Apply a 'charisma discount' to persuasive speakers and amplify deadpan ones
“I apply basically a discount factor. It's like a charisma discount. So the more persuasive somebody is about everything, the more I have to discount to some degree. It doesn't mean I just like throw it away. Right. But I have to be careful not to get overly ex…”
Hormozi: Acquisition.com targets fewer, larger deals vs Tiny's model
“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 …”
Puri: Early dollars generate far more incremental freedom than later wealth
“The early dollars create a lot more freedom than the later dollars. I think is the way that you're explaining it. And those early, early dollars and early freedom matter a lot more than the later dollars because you only get so much incremental freedom. In fac…”
Andrew Wilkinson Uses His Private Jet to Aggressively Pursue Deals
“Andrew Wilkinson does this. He throws his weight around. When he wants something, or he like sets his target on someone, a relationship, or a business he wants to buy, or whatever, He really throws his weight around in a way that I definitely don't, right? Lik…”
Puri: Anti-goals are crucial to avoid winning while losing
“In life, I think anti-goals are really important to counterbalance. And the specific thing here is, what are the Understandable traps we could fall into while trying to achieve those goals.”
Parr: Tiny Went Public Trading at 850 Million Canadian Dollars
“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.”
Parr: MetaLab generated $62.8M with 40-45% margins in 2021
“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…”
Parr: Raising outside capital permanently prevents founders from repurposing agency profits
“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 …”
Parr: Tiny generates $150M revenue and $50M EBITDA
“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.”
Parr: Tiny going public near $1B valuation, Wilkinson owns 71%
“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”
Girdley: Tiny operates both a holding company and a fund management arm
“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…”
Courtney: AJ&Smart explored an acquisition with Andrew Wilkinson's team
“I've spoken to people about selling AJ and smart. I actually probably someone you also know, I was chatting with someone on Andrew Wilkinson's team.”
Andrew Wilkinson's Tiny took 40% equity in James Clear's habit app.
“Andrew Wilkinson, he put out this tweet where he said, we partnered with James Clear. Tiny owns 40%. James owns 60%.”
Andrew Wilkinson drives Twitter subscriptions by raffling monthly one-on-one video calls
“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…”
Parr: Tiny sold Mealtime for $25M with $13M profit
“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.”
Puri: Wilkinson funded Tiny using agency profits rather than outside money
“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.”
Parr: MetaLab generates $40M–$50M revenue and $20M profit
“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.”
Parr: Andrew Wilkinson's test indicates I am on the autism spectrum
“Well, I just took Andrew Wilkinson's, like, personality test. You see him tweet that thing out the other day? Yeah. Your boy's autistic, apparently.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
My First Million 147
the Startup Ideas Podcast 39
the Knowledge Project 4
Lenny's Podcast 2
20VC 1
2026 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2024 70 mentions in 25 episodes 3 per episode
- 5 Genius Business Tactics Turning Broke Authors Into Millionaires
- Data Backed Businesses Guaranteed To Make +$1M From Day 1
- The Cashflow King: “Here’s How I Do It”, Negotiating w/ Jeff Bezos, Elon’s Cracked Rocket
- I Spent 7 Days With The Richest Men In Texas
- Brainstorming +$1M Weird Business Ideas With Morning Brew’s CEO Austin Rief (#543)
- How to start a Holding Company (full tutorial)
- How to get 145k followers on LinkedIn in 1 year (it takes less than 1h/week)
- Rob Fraser: The Power of Focus
- 17 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 78 mentions in 13 episodes 6 per episode
- How To Grow A Small Agency Into A Billion Dollar Company (#414)
- Our 2020 Predictions For OpenAI Came True… Here’s What’s Next (#508)
- How to Turn a Podcast into an Empire
- Personal Holding Companies: Build vs. Buy?
- The Ultimate Guide to Building Million Dollar Agencies
- My Biggest WINS & REGRETS Of 2023
- Sam Reveals The Company He's Worked On For The Last 8 Month
- 3 Business Ideas You Should Start in 2024 (ft. Pomp) (#524)
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 6 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- We Hosted A Shark Tank For Tech Startups | My First Million Demo Day (#356)
- How FTX Scaled A $30 Billion Company With Only 30 Engineers!
- 3 Profitable Business Ideas You Should Start in 2022
- Is The Rock Going to Make $1B+ From Tequila? + Placebo Water, STR Update, and More
- Brainstorming The Best Business Ideas To Start In 2022 with Noah Kagan
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 23 mentions in 17 episodes 1 per episode
- How Vending Machines are Generating Millions & The Next Big Social App | My First Million #187
- Making Millions Improving Mobility & How to Beat LinkedIn | My First Million #184
- Fitness Hotels, Steel-Manning, and Why the Creator Economy is Overhyped
- MFM #165: How Jack Butcher is Selling his Art for $76m & How to Research Wealthy People
- Why Everyone Is Wrong About the Metaverse, Gaingels, Companies that Don't Advertise, and More
- What Venture Capital Will Look Like in the Future | My First Million #215
- Why You Should Spend 5x Your Budget on an Engagement Ring | My First Million #201
- When to Go All In on an Idea & the Crypto Exchange That Could Have Been | My First Million #200
- 9 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- What Does It Take To Become Rich? How Some People Make Millions! My First Million Podcast 04-02-2020
- 20VC: Airtable's Howie Liu on Potential Consolidation In The Collaboration Tools Market, The Transition From Peacetime To Wartime CEO & How To Make The Move To Remote Work Successful; The Process Beyond The Tools
- How to Navigate the Upcoming Depression | My First Million Podcast | 03-24-2020
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Andrew's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Tiny | 14 | 190 | 56% 14/25 | full record on My First Million → |
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Tiny | 4 | 76 | 83% 5/6 | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Tiny | 1 | 33 | 75% 3/4 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Tiny | 1 | 29 | 67% 2/3 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Tiny | 1 | 25 | 80% 4/5 | full record on 20VC → |