Andrew Wilkinson
Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Tiny · 14 appearances on the record.
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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.
190statements → 60claims → 25claims resolved → 56%fully supported → 3.83/5average certainty → 1.96/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 166said about them ↓
14 supported 8 partly supported 3 contradicted 5 not yet assessed 30 not checkable as stated how the 60 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
15 predictions · 45 assertions · 21 opinions · 52 insights · 56 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 60 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 25 are resolved, 5 are not yet assessed, and 30 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Andrew argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Wilkinson: Major AI competitors to GPT-3 will emerge within six months
“There's going to be a lot of. A lot of other players in that space coming out over the next probably three to six months. And that it will be, there's going to be an ecosystem of offering similar to AWS and Azure and Google cloud. I think it'll be the same thi…”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Andrew Wilkinson on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Andrew Wilkinson said on My First Million that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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: Claude Saved $100K Annually in Taxes Across Holding Companies
“I actually saved a 100,000 dollars a year of cash taxes by moving an investment from one hold code to another thanks to Claude”
Wilkinson: Indistinguishable 4K Video AI Coworkers on Zoom Within 24-36 Months
“I think that within 24 to 36 months, these will be four K video people that are indistinguishable, indistinguishable from a human that you'll talk to on zoom.”
Wilkinson Has Invested $25M to $30M Into Venture Startups
“And so I think I have like. 25 or thirty million dollars of venture.”
Wilkinson: Boring $2M Cash-Flow Businesses Beat Venture-Backed Startups
“Look, if you just started a boring business, like a trash hauling business or window cleaning business or whatever it is, You got it to one or two million dollars of cashflow, sell it or hold it. You're set for life. And instead they go off and they raise all …”
Wilkinson: Andrew Huberman's Media Business Is Completely Undisruptible
“His business, I'm like, that is a completely undisruptible business unless he gets hit by a bus or something.”
Wilkinson: Tiny forces AR discipline by leaving companies with two weeks' cash
“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…”
Wilkinson: Buying Cash-Flowing Businesses Beats Venture Capital
“I think that I'm much better off incubating businesses and buying businesses. Cause it's a very steady, 15 to 30% cash return. And I feel it. I feel the wind in a much bigger way.”
Wilkinson: Ackman exited his short position before his viral CNBC interview
“If you actually look at the timeline, he'd already sold out of that position when he went on CNBC.”
Tesla's Competitive Advantage Is Overestimated Due to Apple and Google Software
“I just think that everyone overestimated their competitive advantage. And then at the end of the day, you've got all these legacy manufacturers and, you know, ultimately if Apple and Google are providing the interface that most people use, it barely matters, r…”
Market Panic Will Let Cash Buyers Acquire Businesses at 20-30% Yields
“You're about to enter an environment where anyone with cash who has a large sum of cash is going to be able to buy a business at say a 20 or a 30% earnings yield, meaning you can buy a business and pay yourself back in two or three years, maybe five years, and…”
SaaS Founders Can Hedge Concentration Risk by Shorting Public Competitors
“Let's say that you own a SaaS business. And your entire net worth is in the SaaS business and you currently you know, you've raised money at 20 times revenue or something. You might want to find a SaaS business that's publicly traded, that is a comp to you. An…”
Smart Investors Should Rent Homes and Put Their Capital Into Equities
“If someone's completely, if they're not an investor at all, then sure, go buy a house all day, whatever. It's a reasonably okay investment. But if you're even remotely smart and you know how to read and you go and read investing books and stuff, I think it's c…”
Wilkinson: Extreme entrepreneurial success requires a personality disorder or trauma
“I think in order to be that successful, you have to have some kind of personality disorder. Or like trauma or something, and you look at Musk or Bezos, or if you read more about Bezos, I think he's a really difficult person to work for.”
Wilkinson: Closing a $100M+ acquisition was simpler than a $1M deal
“We just did our biggest deal ever. And it was over a hundred million dollars and it was no more work or complexity than doing a one million dollar deal. And in fact, It was simpler than a one million dollar deal. Cause it's just a better business with a better…”
Wilkinson: Tiny stopped monthly CEO reporting; involvement harms portfolio performance
“We just did this a tiny, we changed, we don't get monthly reports anymore from the CEOs. So like there's businesses where I don't, I haven't even talked to the CEO for like three or four months. I don't even know what their numbers are. And what we've realized…”
Wilkinson: First-time founders are raising at $40M valuations with just ideas
“I've seen companies of with a founder, who's a first time founder, With an idea and they're raising it a forty million dollar pre valuation, right?”
Wilkinson: How billionaire-backed Asana crushed his bootstrapped startup Flow
“The story was basically, we started productivity software called Flow. I decided to bootstrap it like Basecamp. And we had a big competitor, Asana. And Asana was run by a billionaire, the co-founder of Facebook. He raised a shitload of money. And originally I …”
The other half of the tape: Andrew Wilkinson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 147 times in 47 episodes on My First Million. 19 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Shaan Puri 81Sam Parr 58Jeremy Giffon 2Steph Smith 1Codie Sanchez 1Alex Hormozi 1
Statements about Andrew Wilkinson, by other people (19)
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.”
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”
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%.”
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.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 1 episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 53 mentions in 13 episodes 4 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)
- Is This The End Of The Pod?
- 3 Underdog Stories That’ll Get You Inspired This Week
- I Lost Everything Twice… Then Made $26M In 18 Months
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 56 mentions in 8 episodes 7 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)
- Sam Reveals The Company He's Worked On For The Last 8 Month
- 3 Business Ideas You Should Start in 2024 (ft. Pomp) (#524)
- How I Bought A Multi-Million Dollar Egg Carton Business For $0 | Sarah Moore Interview
- 4 Profitable Business Ideas That Men Are Sleeping On | ft. Codie Sanchez (#512)
- CEO Lessons: Bulls**t Mission Statements, Firing People & Saying ‘NO' (#505)
- Behind The Scenes of Selling My Company For Millions | Suli Ali (#410)
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
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 →