MetaLab

“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.”

“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.”

“And I actually think this won't work. This doesn't work as much anymore is he's based out of Victoria.”

“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 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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“Chris and I, we, you know, running an agency is really stressful, and we got this offer for the business to sell it for fifteen million. This is about eight or nine years ago, almost 10 years ago, and... We sign the documents, you know, my lawyer calls me in, …”

“Additionally, he also had one agency, MetaLab, for I think, 12 years, and then he started investing into other companies.”

“And then Metalab by this point was making three or four million dollars of profit a year.”

“Metalab back in 20, I guess it was 2012 or 20 13, we designed Slack. And at the time Slack was actually a failed gaming startup and Stuart Butterfield was basically trying to do something with the remains of it and trying to build, build a chat tool. And so He…”

“My first designer was this guy named Adam Saint... He started this company called bench. And so he comes to me and he's like, Hey, we're doing, you know, basically AI accounting 10 years early... But I looked at it and I was like, oh, it's a services business …”