The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 69 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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: 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: 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…”
Tiny's Sparling: Centralizing financials strips portfolio CEOs of operational ownership
“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…”
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.”
Wilkinson: Public reputation drives M&A deal flow far better than cold outreach
“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.”
Wilkinson: Issuing frequent non-binding LOIs establishes serious M&A deal traction
“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…”
Puri: Three core companies drive nearly all value in Tiny's portfolio
“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…”
Wilkinson: Distressed acquisition Girlboss generates its purchase price in annual profit
“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.”
Wilkinson: Bitcoin is currency trading and speculation, not productive business investing
“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…”
Tiny Bought $500,000 in S&P 500 Put Options in February 2020
“And so what we did is we basically said, okay, in late February, we said, okay, if this, if the S and P 500, the index of the 500 largest companies in America goes down by 20%, we will get a big payout. And so we bought for 500,000 dollars, put options that we…”
Tiny Lost $6.5M Reinvesting Pandemic Hedge Profits When the Fed Intervened
“And so we take all the money except for 500 grand. We took 500 grand out. We took all the money and we re-bet it and we lost everything because the Fed came in and the markets rebounded.”
Wilkinson: $30K on TED tickets generated $10M to $20M in revenue
“And so my doing that, just going to Ted and probably spending 30 K on, on tickets for three years, I think it ended up resulting in 10 or twenty million dollars of revenue for my various businesses.”
Wilkinson: Tiny raised an $11M rolling fund in four hours via Twitter
“We literally were like, we tweeted it out as like an afterthought and we raised it in like four hours.”
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 …”
Wilkinson's Businesses Doubled in Size After He Hired Replacement CEOs
“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…”
Wilkinson: Strong executive talent often prioritizes salary and stability over founding
“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…”
Andrew Wilkinson: Raising outside fund capital creates constant cognitive interruptions
“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.”
Wilkinson: Neglected SaaS side projects are prime acquisition targets
“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…”
Wilkinson: Portfolio company generates $500K profit investing gift card float in T-bills
“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.”
Wilkinson: Tiny scaled We Work Remotely from $400K to $4M EBITDA
“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…”
Wilkinson: Email preliminary valuations early to screen out unrealistic founder expectations
“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…”
Wilkinson: Acquisitions almost always work, but venture bets lose all his money
“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.”
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.”
Puri: MetaLab and Dribbble generate the bulk of Tiny's revenue and EBITDA
“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.”
Shaan Puri: Holding company deal cadence is painfully slow for founders
“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.”
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: Dribbble is worth $200M or more
“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.”
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”
Wilkinson: Tiny charges zero management fees on its rolling and private funds
“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.”
Wilkinson: Repurchased Pixel Union for $26M and Took It Public at $260M
“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.”
Wilkinson: Tiny does not ever want to sell its portfolio companies
“I don't ever want to sell businesses. And the only reason we sold Me Lime was because Mitch wanted to sell the business.”
Tiny Turned a $500,000 COVID Put Option Hedge Into $7 Million
“And so what ended up happening is we bought these put options. They went from being worth 500,000 dollars to seven million dollars. All of a sudden.”
Tiny Incubated Software Negotiation Service Buyer for $50,000 Before Selling to Ramp
“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”
Tiny Incubates Operator-Led Businesses With $50,000 for 50% to 70% Equity
“We basically find really scrappy operators where we can basically say, look, we've got all the back office, all the structuring legal, it's ready to go. We'll build the website for you. You just need to take it and run with it. And we go typically like 50, 50 …”
Wilkinson: Spending time with misaligned peers forces you to copy their desires
“If you spend too much time around people who want things that you don't actually want, you will still desire and achieve those things.”
Wilkinson: Established businesses are cruise ships while startups are volatile speedboats
“A startup is really like a speedboat, right? It's exhilarating. It can go anywhere, but at the end of the day, you know, you're driving over waves, you're getting your, you know, body destroyed, you're freezing cold. You might hit a rock. You might get drunk. …”
Wilkinson: Tiny Capital acquired coffee maker AeroPress for $70 million
“The deal was seventy million seventy million to buy it.”
Wilkinson: Recruiting business operators is much harder than sourcing acquisition deals
“The hardest part is recruiting the amazing people. Like our biggest challenge isn't doing deals. It's like, we could do a deal every month. It's how can we find enough amazing people to run all these businesses? And then how can we validate that they're going …”
Wilkinson: Executive stress is driven by the number of things you influence
“I think the number of things you influence is what causes the stress.”
Wilkinson: Founders should exploit 2021 valuations to issue stock
“And I think now is a great time to be scanning your portfolio or businesses and going, how can I
How can I basically take advantage of valuations right now and either, you know, issue stock or use my stock in my business to go buy stuff or just wait for oppor…”
Wilkinson: Girlboss can reach $20M to $50M in annual revenue
“I think it's a 20 or 30 or fifty million dollar a year business. Once we kind of do the events, we're, we've been thinking about, you know, all sorts of opportunities within the business.”
Wilkinson: Tiny acquires working businesses without changing operational DNA
“The difference between what we do and this guy is this guy's essentially starting a new business. And what we like to do is find a business that's already working where we can actually just leave it. And make it, you know, maybe we'll help plug in a new CEO or…”
Wilkinson: Extreme delegation naturally evolves into investing and hiring CEOs
“And a lot of why we've gotten as big as we have is cause I just, I don't like doing stuff that I don't like doing. And so I just kept delegating the stuff I didn't enjoy. And when you do that a lot In its kind of final form, that's just investing where you're …”