SPEAKER_00: This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs, a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at linkedin.com slash twist Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Odoo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever. And right now, Odoo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at odoo.com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash twist. SPEAKER_03: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Startups. Today on the program, Andrew Wilkinson is with us. He is the founder of MetaLab, which is owned by Tiny. And he has used the profits from MetaLab to make Tiny into a really interesting, I guess, holding company of a bunch of other businesses that many of us know, like Dribble or WeWork remotely. So welcome to the program, Andrew Wilkinson. Thanks, Jason. It's great to be here. Am I correct in understanding that what you've built, well, since you've been doing MetaLab in 2006, you started with an agency that helped build beautiful products, uh, famously, uh, Uber Eats, SPEAKER_07: Google, and Slack work. I don't know what you did for Google, but I remember the Slack work and Uber Eats work. And that agency did so well, you had profits that let you start tiny, which I guess some people refer to as tiny capital, but you buy businesses with the profits from SPEAKER_11: your consulting business. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. I, um, I started my business kind SPEAKER_12: of by accident. Uh, in 2007, I started freelancing and I realized nobody wanted to hire some 19 year old. And so I came up with the name metal lab, started calling startups. And within a couple of months, I was making way more money than I would, uh, at a normal job. And so I just never stopped. And, uh, we ended up going on to work with a lot of really successful startups like Coinbase and Slack and got fortune 500 clients, et cetera. And in about 2010, uh, I started taking my profits and diversifying. So I built some SaaS software businesses, uh, partnered with Shopify about 10 years ago and built a bunch of businesses there. Um, and in 2013, uh, I realized, you know, our cash flows were too big. We couldn't just keep starting startups. So we started buying businesses. Uh, we've been doing it ever since. SPEAKER_14: So tell me about the work on Slack. I know if, uh, you go to metalab.com slash project slash Slack, SPEAKER_16: you can see the work there. They approached you to do the design or the interaction. I know there was a little bit of, uh, a back and forth there on Twitter recently, I guess when things are successful, SPEAKER_07: a lot of people like to take credit for it or maybe diminish other people's credit for it, but what was the work you actually did there? How did you meet Stewart and, um, tell us about that project? Cause Slack was kind of known for a beautiful design and making IRC beautiful. SPEAKER_12: So Stewart's actually from my, uh, my hometown, Victoria, Canada, and we were kind of tangentially aware of each other. And he had been off building glitch, raised a ton of money from Andreessen and a bunch of other people. Um, and the startup just failed. And so he had to lay a ton of people off, uh, and he was trying to figure out what to do with it. I think he had, you know, a couple million bucks in the bank and he emailed me and he said, Hey, we've got this internal tool that we've built, which is like a IRC chat client. We're thinking about spinning it up, uh, into a product we're going to call a Slack. Would you guys help us design the product? Uh, and so we ended up getting deeply involved in kind of the original formation of the design and kind of the, the logo, the marketing site, the web app, the mobile app, uh, and we designed the first version of it. And then we passed it to their team and their team did an incredible job turning it into the, you know, $27 billion business that it is today. SPEAKER_07: And, uh, Johnny Rogers, I guess, who was, uh, you know, product and engineering at Slack, uh, came at you and you were sort of taking, uh, a victory lap and talking about your, uh, history with, with Stuart. And he said, meta labs did zero development work on Slack, certainly not mobile and web apps. The works we contacted you for branding and visual design pass. Meta labs was not our first beta user, uh, the UI skin and early branding. The team did were great. And there SPEAKER_21: have been durable of time. Purple is a great crowd, but don't overstate your claim in order to mythologize your own role in the creation of this company. Too many other people have SPEAKER_22: worked too hard. Your reaction to his reaction. SPEAKER_12: Well, I think it goes back to on Twitter, you say anything and you're going to get the least charitable interpretation. So I tweeted, I thought I was kind of eating humble pie. I said, Hey, I missed this. Stuart offered me equity. And I said, Oh, this has already been done. Jason and David had already built, uh, um, campfire. There was hip chat. I was, I was kind of thinking this is going to have a hard path ahead of it. And that was my post. But in the post, I wrote, we did, we did quote unquote, the mobile app. They came to us for design. We did the mobile app and a web app. And I just typo it. I wasn't thinking, I wasn't trying to ever imply that we did the development. We didn't do the development back then. Uh, we didn't do dev work. And so he latched onto that and thought I was taking credit for building the entire thing. And then everyone piled on. I didn't see it for six hours. And by the time I saw it, it had got a life of its own. So we don't take any credit for what happened from the moment we passed it to Slack, but for three, four months, I mean, we designed the original logo, uh, entire color palette, all the UX. We have all the PSDs to back it up. So it was just crappy. I get it. People are kind of protective of their work and they think someone else is taking credit. So they pile on, but it was kind of crappy. It felt SPEAKER_27: bad. And they paid you a quarter million dollars or something to do a design project like this. SPEAKER_12: What is this kind of thing? I think we got paid 80 grand. I don't even think we made a profit on SPEAKER_16: the projects. We worked on it so much. Um, so you get 80 grand. They offered to, for you to take that in equity or some portion of that in equity. SPEAKER_24: I think at one point, Stuart just said, Hey, what about doing some of this for equity? And I SPEAKER_30: said, Oh, we only do cash. So if you had done, let's just say half an equity of the 40k, it would SPEAKER_11: have been 40k. And I don't, I don't even want to do the math. Cause it'll make me cry. SPEAKER_32: All right. Let's do it then. I mean, it would have been like, SPEAKER_11: the valuation would have been maybe 20 or 30 million bucks if it was 25 basis points or SPEAKER_34: something of the company. And so 1% of a $27 billion company is 270 million. A quarter of that SPEAKER_30: would have been 50 million, 75 million. So it would have been about 75 million if you're taking SPEAKER_36: half in cash. Yeah. And so do you take equity now when you do? SPEAKER_12: We do sometimes. I mean, it's hard. It's hard when you're running an agency up in Canada and you don't have investors, we couldn't get investors if we wanted them in 2007, we couldn't get banks to look at us. So at the end of the day, we lived and died on our P and L and we had to build a profitable business. So it was a decision. I mean, we worked with, uh, Pinterest early on. We worked with Shopify early on Tumblr, all sorts of Coinbase, all sorts of down billion dollar businesses. But we ended up deciding that we would go and compound our own capital and invest it in our own businesses. And it's worked out really well. So no regrets, SPEAKER_20: but yeah, there's a lot, there's certainly a big anti portfolio. SPEAKER_34: Tell me about this process of buying companies. How do you go about buying a company? What was SPEAKER_40: the first company you bought? And then how do you go about managing this collection of 30 assets? SPEAKER_12: Well, it was really born out of my own experience dealing with private equity firms. So I'm sure, you know, but we would get these reach outs, uh, from some private equity firm. It'd be, you know, a kid who's the summer intern. We wouldn't know that we would exchange, you know, all of our financials that would take two months. And then it would kind of wind through this really annoying, long process. And they would always tell us one thing in the beginning, like, Hey, we'll, we'll buy your business for X hundred million dollars. And then by the end, they'd always try to put a bolt in your head and change all the terms. And it would always take six or eight months, tons of meetings, tons of flying around. And we just felt it was so frustrating, um, to have to do all that. And so, you know, we kind of said like, well, what would happen if we just went out and became the acquirer that we wanted to be? And we went to founders and we said, look, we're going to buy your business. We're going to tell you what we'll pay, uh, within seven days. We're not going to change that price. We're going to close the deal on 30. And on day 31, when we own your company, your employees are going to wake up and nothing will have changed and you can leave if you want. So it was all the things we would have wanted as founders. We wanted someone to take care of our employees and leave our company alone. Um, but we want to take some chips off the table. So we've been doing that now for about seven years. Uh, we own about 30 businesses, maybe a little more than that. I think we have about 700 employees across them. Um, and it's really resonated with founders and worked out well for, for both parties. So it's SPEAKER_44: been, it's been really fun. How do you, how do you set up the financing from that? I mean, buying something that's got a million dollars, $2 million in revenue in today's market costs tens of millions. SPEAKER_12: So how do you finance these things? Well, I mean, we've had a profitable business for 15 years and we banked our profits. We started more businesses. Uh, we sold a few back in the early days. And so everything that we've done, uh, up until pretty recently has been with our own money. And then, uh, about two years ago, uh, for the first time we took some outside capital, we partnered with Bill Ackman, Howard Marks, Shane from Farnham street, uh, Ryan Graves from Uber, and a few other folks. And we went out, we started buying businesses in the Shopify ecosystem. That business we just took public. Uh, it's got about a billion dollar market cap up here in Canada. It's called we commerce. So that's been really cool. Um, and then we recently also raised $150 million fund for tiny. Um, so that's the first time in 15 years we've had any outside capital at all. And up until then it's been, you know, me and my business partner, Chris, uh, taking money out of our bank accounts and, uh, taking out a little bit of debt here and there. SPEAKER_47: The new year is here. It's 2021 and you got a fresh start for your business. You're probably thinking, my God, we had a great 2020. We're profitable. We got a little money in the bank. It's time to expand. It's time to build out the team. Well, we're doing that here at launch this week in startups doing so well, all in pockets doing so well. We need a second producer and a third video editor. We're hiring a community manager. Things are going gangbusters. Where do we find the most qualified candidates? LinkedIn jobs, obviously duh. We love using LinkedIn jobs at launch because we can manage all of our job postings and contact candidates from a single view. It's all streamlined into one simple screen, just how we like it. 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Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. SPEAKER_21: So tell me about this WeCommerce business. This is a collection of assets that you bought and then took public. How did that all go down and what do you actually do? Yeah, it's kind of a funny story. SPEAKER_12: I met Harley from Shopify and Toby as well about 10 years ago at a conference. And at the time, Shopify was pretty small. I don't even think they'd raised their Series A yet, maybe 15 employees. And they had a problem, which was unless you were a developer, it was really hard to make your site SPEAKER_24: look nice. And so they built a templating language and they basically wanted us to come in and be their SPEAKER_12: first partner and bring great design to the platform so that with one click anyone could install a theme and make their Shopify site look beautiful. And so we ended up starting a business called Pixel Union. To do that, we started a whole bunch of, we built a whole bunch of themes and it was a great success. And before we knew it, you know, that business was doing hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue a month. And in 2013, I had, I was still running the agency, I had a whole bunch of SaaS businesses and other stuff I was running. And honestly, I was just exhausted. And so I decided to sell the business for the first time ever. I'd never sold a business before. And so I sold, sold that business. And when the money hit my bank account, I was like, okay, I need to learn investing and stocks and all this conservative stuff. And so I picked up a book about Warren Buffett. And when I read about Buffett, I was like, holy crap, this is amazing. And, you know, got really into investing. And so I actually stayed on the board of the business until 2019. And I saw an opportunity to buy back the business from the private equity firm that bought it from me. This is Pixel Union. This is Pixel Union. And so we, we bought it back. This is the business we did with Bill Ackman and Howard Marks and all those people. And we bought it back and we formed WeCommerce. And the idea was basically just to use our playbook that we use a tiny of just buying the best businesses and various ecosystems in a very founder friendly way. And we wanted to make a long term bet on Shopify. And so we ended up raising 60 million bucks and taking the business public. And now we're out there just looking to buy more incredible businesses in Shopify, in the Shopify ecosystem. SPEAKER_07: And so the whole business just is dependent on Shopify. So you rise and fall with Shopify's incredible ascension right now. But doesn't that create a massive liability or, you know, risk factor? Like what if Shopify, I don't know, Amazon comes into their business or whoever comes SPEAKER_21: into their business, it makes it more difficult for them. What do you do? SPEAKER_24: Well, it's very much a bet on the future of ecommerce and Shopify. And I think that ecommerce is such a massive market and Shopify is such a dominant player within it that that's a whale I'm very comfortable being a barnacle on. And I mean, you can make the same argument for all sorts of businesses that are in the Salesforce ecosystem or the Microsoft ecosystem. At the end SPEAKER_12: of the day, you're always tied to somebody, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, whoever it is. And we have a lot of trust and a lot of a lot of experience working with Toby and Harley. So we feel very SPEAKER_07: comfortable being a part of that ecosystem. We recently had the pitch.com founder on the pod. Tell me about that business and what you did there. SPEAKER_12: Yeah, Christian's amazing. So Christian and I were actually competitors. So one of my first businesses I started was a business called flow, which is a task management software product for teams. And Christian was my mortal enemy. We started at the same time, he had a wonder list. And one day I was in San Francisco, and he happened to be there too. And so we decided to meet up for a coffee. And I walked in expecting to stare him down and kind of glare at him. And we just hit it off. He was such a nice guy. And we've been friends ever since. And I don't know if your audience knows, but he sold the business to Microsoft. And when he left Microsoft, he called me up and he said, Hey, I've got a couple of product ideas, I'd love for you to help me build them. And so we brainstormed, uh, you know, what's wrong with PowerPoint and came up with a whole bunch of great ideas for pitch. And then my agency metal lab helped build, or sorry, helped design the first version of it. SPEAKER_11: Does that mean you have equity in pitch.com? You get to participate on the upside of that? SPEAKER_16: I do. I do. Do you invest in companies? Um, just as a straight angel investor or venture investor, you said this have this $100 million fund you raised, that $100 million fund is to buy businesses, SPEAKER_17: do you invest in businesses or both? SPEAKER_12: Yeah, it's 150 million. And it's just to buy businesses. I look at, uh, you know, buying majority of, uh, or control interest in businesses, that's my primary business. Uh, venture is something I do off the side of my desk for fun. You know, I meet somebody interesting, a friend starts a business, uh, you know, I'm kind of interested in an area. It's a way for me to make a small bet. It's a roulette chip. It's not something that I take very seriously. SPEAKER_07: And pitch hired you to sort of benchmark their, your designs against the internal team's design. SPEAKER_66: How did that wind up going? Did you win or did the internal team win or did everybody win? SPEAKER_12: I think it was a bit of both. I think the metal lab team pushed them and vice versa. Uh, to be honest, I wasn't super involved though, uh, in the actual day to day, you know, we have so many businesses now. I can't be involved in individual projects. SPEAKER_07: Which business is driving, uh, the most revenue and, and the fastest growth right now in this portfolio of 30 companies that obviously includes dribble. And we mentioned flow, SPEAKER_21: the product management software. We work remotely. You bought from Jason Fried and David Hammer Hanson over at 37 signals. I know that business was doing well as well. SPEAKER_72: What, what business is doing, doing the best right now, objectively. SPEAKER_24: Well, I mean, when we started, we just had the agency that was profitable and we slowly started SPEAKER_12: diversifying and up until probably five or six years ago, the agency was still the largest thing. And now what we're seeing is a lot of the other businesses are reaching maturity and we're much more well diversified. And I would say, I mean, dribble. Since we acquired it, we have, I think 10 or 12 X the revenue, uh, in what is it? Five years. Um, so we're incredibly excited about what's happening there. Um, and I mean, there's lots of amazing growth stories within. We work remotely. I think we've 10 X that business. Uh, what is the footprint of a business like dribble? SPEAKER_06: Is it a hundred million dollars in revenue, 50 million in revenue? What's the, what's the ballpark? It's tens of millions. Tens of millions. And when you bought it, what was it at? SPEAKER_30: Everybody knows dribble is a place just, you know, uh, single, single digit, single digit millions. Wow. Um, and so somebody was running dribble as a side hustle or as a business and SPEAKER_44: they just ran out of steam running it. How do you wind up buying something like that? SPEAKER_24: Well, I think you talk to any founder in year one and they say, I love my business. I'm in it forever. I'm going to run it till I'm 80. And then you talk to them year five, year six, especially if their business has done well and they've started took some chips off the table. Often they kind of start to slow down often by year eight, 10, they're kind of exhausted. SPEAKER_12: They want to do something new. They've got some new ideas. Um, and that's kind of where we come in. So with dribble, for example, founders have been doing it for about eight years. Um, they were a designer and a developer and they really loved building the product, but they didn't love doing marketing, HR support. Uh, you know, they felt like they couldn't go on vacation and they were just kind of exhausted. And so we basically came to them and we said, look, why don't we buy 80%, you guys keep 20%, uh, and we'll fight really hard to make that 20% worth way more than, SPEAKER_80: you know, if you'd own the whole thing. Um, and I think we've been successful in doing that. SPEAKER_66: And then what, what is the outcome for a business like that? I mean, the market is incredibly hot right SPEAKER_07: now. Are you thinking about putting more things together and taking them public since our SPACs and the Canadian market seems to be a little bit easier to go public on? Companies can be smaller SPEAKER_21: public on the Canadian market. Is that right? Explain the difference between the two markets. SPEAKER_12: Well, in Canada, you can, uh, take a lot, you can take a business public a lot earlier. Uh, the regulatory environment is a little less aggressive. There's what's called a venture exchange here where you don't have to do quite as much, um, uh, regulatory approval and all that kind of stuff. And then you can graduate to be like, being like a, you know, big board kind of company. Um, we're considering taking more stuff public, but I mean, to be honest, we just did this RTO in December. It's called a reverse takeover instead of a SPAC up here. And, uh, we're still evaluating. I mean, it's been an incredible outcome financially. The valuation that we've gotten has been amazing. This is for WeCommerce you're talking about. For WeCommerce. But yeah, you know, the, SPEAKER_17: the bet there was, um, what is the market cap of WeCommerce? It's about a billion dollars Canadian. SPEAKER_34: Wow. So weird. When you look these things up on Google and the stock market, so this is the over the counter market in Canada. Is that right? The market? It's not even, it's not even really SPEAKER_21: trading in the States yet. It's only OTC. Got it. So people can make trades, but they're generally like private trades. You wouldn't trade it on Robinhood or something. You have to use a broker. SPEAKER_12: It's not on Robinhood yet. I think we will be in some, a couple of months. Got it. So you can do SPEAKER_30: this over the counter thing, get people trading in the stock, but then to be fully liquid on a big market or on like trading platforms, you have to get off the OTC. Is that what happens? SPEAKER_12: Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, with a business like Dribbble, Dribbble doesn't really need capital. It's profitable. It can keep reinvesting its capital and growth. We can make more acquisitions and stuff. SPEAKER_24: And so in order for us to take it public, we would need to see, uh, an opportunity to buy, you know, something really sizable or see a massive growth opportunity where we need tens SPEAKER_12: of millions of dollars of capital. Um, and we just, we just don't, we haven't needed it yet. SPEAKER_30: The over the counter thing got like a bad name in Canada for a while. It was like oil companies SPEAKER_10: and drilling and weird stuff, right? Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of crap that SPEAKER_12: goes public this way. Um, mining, you know, weird junior mining companies or food product companies SPEAKER_11: with a million dollars of revenue kind of stuff. Um, do you think that can be cleaned up and do what Chamath did for SPACs, but in Canada, is that like part of your vision for this? SPEAKER_12: I think part of the reason we've been rewarded, um, so, uh, so well by the market has been that we came in and we've legitimized that in a big way. Uh, I mean, there, there were already sizable companies going public via reverse takeover. Um, but the fact we're bringing investors like Bill Ackman and Howard Marks and Ryan Graves to the table, I think, uh, really bolstered it. And we had a business that was in a extremely hot space, you know, Shopify, e-commerce, SaaS, uh, and we had SPEAKER_80: a consolidation play. I think people are really excited about it because of that. SPEAKER_90: And what was the revenue footprint there for, for something like WeCommerce? SPEAKER_11: Uh, I think at the time we took a public, we're at maybe a $20 million run rate. SPEAKER_91: Wow. And so it's obviously doing a little bit better now, I would assume, but 50 times revenue, pretty amazing for, for evaluation. SPEAKER_80: Yeah. I mean, we try and ignore the valuation to be honest, like it's kind of a distraction. We're just focused on making good investments and putting one foot in front of the other. SPEAKER_47: From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. With Squarespace, you can blog or publish content easily, promote your business, announce upcoming events or special projects, sell products and services of all kind and more. No matter the problem, Squarespace is the answer because they have beautiful templates by world-class designers, powerful e-commerce functionality built right in, and everything is optimized for mobile right out of the box. You have built-in SEO, free and secure hosting, and of course, 24-7 award-winning customer support. And back in 2020, when we were in the middle of the pandemic, we decided to create remotedemoday.com for founders to pitch thousands of angel investors. And I said, hey, let's get a beautiful site up immediately. My team immediately went to work with Squarespace. And it's been a huge success for us. We found a number of amazing investments and really just planting a flag and building a beautiful website and tweeting it and sharing it. That's what makes the magic happen. People come, they go, wow, this looks credible. This is beautiful. You know what? It was just an idea 15 minutes ago, and now it's a beautiful presence online. So go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial, squarespace.com slash twist, squarespace.com slash twist. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. SPEAKER_30: How do you find companies to buy? How do you find them? Is it now that we're doing podcasts like this and sort of putting out the, the, the shingle, Hey, we're buying companies. How are you doing it? Or are you just like, you have a team of researchers who look on the web and find stuff people are talking about on message boards. How do you, how do you do it? SPEAKER_24: Yeah. I mean, we focused really on writing and then that kind of evolved into Twitter and SPEAKER_12: podcast interviews and other ways that people become aware of us. Um, and you know, you do this for long enough, you do enough good deals. You have enough happy founders where it gets around and people start saying your name. And so it's all just been word of mouth. We probably get about 50 companies reaching out to us a month. Um, and we do maybe a deal every three or four months. SPEAKER_31: Uh, there's no rule around that. What you really do something when it's logical. Um, but, uh, yeah, SPEAKER_100: it's been, we've been really lucky in that way. How do you evaluate which company to buy and which one SPEAKER_101: not to? Well, at the end of the day, cause you said you're inspired by Warren Buffett. Yeah. So SPEAKER_07: I'm curious, like what Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett influenced you at all in this regard. Cause they do like to buy businesses, uh, famously, like they own the seize candy company, I think was one of their first businesses that they still love. So tell us about how you pick SPEAKER_12: those businesses. Well, we're first and foremost, looking for a business that's well designed. You know, I'm a designer. I want a great product. Um, and there's a lot you can do when you have a great product that's organically growing. Uh, I'm looking for something that's not dependent on Google or Facebook for all of its revenue, uh, that's profitable where the employees are happy, where there's a good culture. And I, I have to feel that at the end of the day, they're doing something positive in the world. Um, you know, I don't want to be doing some sketchy affiliate marketing or, you know, something like that. Um, so yeah, I mean, and then it's gotta be something we can buy for a fair price. Uh, and you know, that's, uh, that's something that in this SPEAKER_80: environment is challenging sometimes where founders see these billion dollar valuations, but sometimes reality isn't quite there. Um, so, uh, yeah, we've gotta find someone who's willing to sell at a fair SPEAKER_43: price. Yeah. I guess they own fruit of the loom, Duracell, Dairy Queen, Geico, NetJets, a bunch of SPEAKER_34: different companies. And then I guess they just find great management and get it out of the way. So tell me after you buy them, what is your process for managing these businesses? Do you try to hire a higher CEO for them? Do you centralize all the accounting sales back office in one place? Or do they each run independently and have their own finance, their own sales, whatever accounting, SPEAKER_21: or is there some common infrastructure? How do you, how do you manage them? SPEAKER_12: It's funny. You mentioned, um, Berkshire and Buffett. I mean, we literally just copied them precisely. So everything down from, you know, the way that we do our M and a process to the way that we structure the businesses is almost identical to Berkshire. So when we buy a business, typically the found it's sometimes the founder stays on. I'd say that's more rare. If the founder SPEAKER_80: stays on, we just leave them alone. They keep doing their thing. Uh, we say, call us if you need us SPEAKER_12: and send us a quarterly report, uh, via email and that's it. Um, and otherwise we're bringing in a CEO. Um, and that's the hardest part of our job is finding somebody who will not only be a fit for the business, um, you know, and has the right experience, but also is kind of going to get the DNA of the business and the culture of the business. Um, doing, uh, putting in a new CEO is like doing brain surgery and the body can reject the organ frequently. So you have to be very careful. Um, and then from there, we really just leave the businesses to do their thing and, uh, be what they are. And each business has its own culture. Uh, it's got its own management team. It's got its own finance, uh, you know, accounting. What have you had to get, have you had to get involved where things SPEAKER_66: aren't going well? And then how do you address that? Because yeah, I'm assuming if things are SPEAKER_07: going well, yeah, just send me an email with a quarterly it's up and to the right. We're good. SPEAKER_24: What happens when it's not good? Well, I mean, I've learned the hard way. I can't get involved, right? If I go in and start solving problems, it doesn't really help anyone. At the end of the day, SPEAKER_12: my job is to hire and fire CEOs. So things aren't going well. Um, you know, every couple of years, at some point I have to let a CEO go, which is always the hardest part of my job, but I'm not getting involved in the businesses operationally or putting out fires. Uh, I just think that's like swoop and pooping. I've still a little context given how many businesses we own. So SPEAKER_11: swoop and pooping, swoop in and then poop poop. Give it. Well, I mean, this goes for the fun stuff. SPEAKER_110: I've never heard this term. Is this a Canadian term? Or did you make this one up? SPEAKER_15: Well, it's like, it's in the, in the creative world. It's like the, the art director comes over SPEAKER_12: and he swoops and poops all over your work and he doesn't have context for why you made all the decisions. So I mean, it's the, the hard part is like, you know, I'm an entrepreneur. I've founded a lot of businesses. I have a lot of ideas and it's very tempting to swoop in and say, oh, you know, dribble, why don't you go launch this? And why haven't we done this yet? But at the end of the day, I usually don't have context and the CEO knows better. And I mean, the hardest part is when I see the CEO doing something I don't agree with, um, our way of operating is actually to let them do it, unless it's completely insane and it's going to destroy the business. So we don't actually SPEAKER_80: intervene unless something is like a self immolating event. SPEAKER_43: What do you look for in a hired gun CEO? Because we all know founders are a specific breed. They have SPEAKER_07: a certain passion for the business. They likely own 40% of it, 20% of it, 60% of it. They have founder authority. They can do what they want and the team listens to them. Um, and they've been there since the beginning. They set the culture. When you bring in a hired gun CEO, which is what you're doing, SPEAKER_89: they probably own low single digit percentage ownership in the company. And then how do you SPEAKER_12: pick them and keep them motivated? It totally varies. I mean, you got to remember, like, think about who runs private equity businesses. Think about who scaled, you know, LinkedIn or other venture backed businesses. There's this whole world of executives who are highly paid and like to do the next scale, right? I think often, a founder can get a business to a certain point. And not every founder is a Mark Zuckerberg or a Bill Gates. A lot of them want to check out, they realize they're not the best person to run that business or, you know, to scale it or whatever. And so, uh, basically we go, we look for people who have done, uh, something similar before where they've taken a business that's similar to the one we just bought and they've taken it from say, $10 million revenue to a hundred million dollars revenue. Uh, and we incentivize them, align them as best we can. Uh, and you know, SPEAKER_24: the reason people like to work for us is because we have a lot of cool businesses, A and B we leave them alone and C we're not going to sell the business. What kind of qualities do they have is sort of what SPEAKER_30: I'm getting at. I know there's this like group of them out there who are kind of like Ronin or whatever. SPEAKER_07: They're, they're samurai for hire, but what, what, what makes them great? Are they MBAs who they just have OCD and just focusing in on scaling the business, cleaning it up and obsessing about the earnings is more important to them than creating the next product. How do you optimize for picking them? SPEAKER_11: It totally depends. I mean, often we have a, uh, you know, these businesses are five or 10 years old. SPEAKER_12: So usually we have product market fit. We've got happy customers. Something's really working often. They're mechanics who are pulling levers, right? So they're, they're going like, Hey, the founders SPEAKER_24: really loved product, but they weren't doing marketing. They weren't doing sales. Let's operationalize this business and let's really scale this and do all the best practices. SPEAKER_56: Um, you, you recently wound up acquiring girl boss. I thought that had been acquired by attention SPEAKER_07: capital. Um, and obviously there's a high profile founder involved in that who kind of was the brand. So how did that work out and how do you replace somebody like Sophia who's kind of larger than life? SPEAKER_12: Yeah. So we, um, I guess I met, I met Sophia at, um, a conference maybe five years ago. We became friends and I ended up investing just as an angel in girl boss's original round. Um, and I followed it for a long time and, uh, you know, just kept saying like, look, if there's ever an opportunity to buy the business. And she ended up selling to attention. We couldn't get there on terms. And, uh, when attention bought the business, you know, we were very supportive of that. And then at a certain point, attention said, Hey, actually we're thinking about selling this. We're going to go in a different direction. And so we bought it, I think it was in March or April. Um, and we've really just focused on base hits. SPEAKER_68: So that business has a massive social following a huge newsletter. Uh, we've brought in some great talent to run each of those divisions. And then we just hired a CEO who we haven't announced yet, but who I'm really excited about. And I think it's going to be great. SPEAKER_34: What is the business there? Is it advertising or cause I mean, I actually looked at investing in SPEAKER_120: that business as well. And I never got there with Sophia, you know, um, I think she was over subscribing. Maybe that was more on me moving too slow. And there was just like a tiny amount, SPEAKER_34: uh, available, but is it an advertising business? The social network didn't work. I think they spent a SPEAKER_21: lot of time and money on building that social network. What is the business and the, and the singles and doubles that you're working on? And what do you buy a business like that for just ballpark? SPEAKER_30: When, when it's sort of a distressed business and the, the leading founders gone? SPEAKER_24: Yeah, I mean, because they'd raised venture, they really had to shoot for the moon. And so they built SPEAKER_12: the network and were focused on the social network and doing big events and all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, we looked at the business, we went, Hey, underneath all that, there's a really good, small or medium sized business. It's not a venture scale business. SPEAKER_24: And so we've basically just been pivoting the business to focus on those core areas, SPEAKER_12: which are the newsletter and social. We're selling ads on those. We're about to relaunch the podcast. So at this point, it's a media business, but we see a lot of opportunities to get into other areas like hiring, uh, and even potentially, you know, relaunch the network in a more conservative way. SPEAKER_21: So you think the business could be like, we work remotely, basically the job board function. If you're a girl boss, and you're looking for jobs, and people are looking to increase the number, SPEAKER_91: uh, gender diversity at their company, this could be an amazing niche way to, um, you know, SPEAKER_24: run a mess hiring board. I think it's one one of many ways the business could go, we do have a job board already. We work remotely right successful. No, no, no, I'm saying like girl boss has a job boss does already. Yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_47: As someone who's invested in over 250 companies and advised many more, I want to get right to a serious pain point that I see all the time. And that's reducing your burn and ask yourself, how much money are you spending right now on all the software products that you use? And how much time does it take to integrate them all together? Well, let me guess way too much is probably your answer. And Odoo, O-D-O-O is here to change that. Odoo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. It's simple and modular. So you use what you need and all their apps integrate perfectly with each other. Plus it's all open source. So you can spend your capital on talent instead of expensive software. What kind of apps does Odoo have? Well, take your pick. For instance, their accounting products are perfect for anyone who's ready to upgrade from Excel or QuickBooks, but doesn't want to break the bank with some of the more expensive options out there. They also have project management, invoicing, sales, marketing automation, help tests, timesheets, inventory, and so much more. Your first app is free forever. And right now Odoo is offering a $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack. That's not a joke, not a hundy, 10 hundies, 10 hundies, if I do my math correctly, equals $1,000 off. So go to odoo.com slash twist, odoo.com slash twist, odoo.com slash twist and get the $1,000 in credit right now. Do you like the ad businesses, SPEAKER_07: the ad based businesses? Or are those challenging for you to run? It seems like a lot of your stuff is subscription based and membership based. But do you like the ad business as well? SPEAKER_12: Well, no, I mean, we looked at, um, we actually looked at morning brew and the hustle, uh, and many other newsletter businesses. And I think they're incredible, incredible businesses. They're like the modern day newspaper. But the issue I always had with them is that at the end of the day, ad rates can change. And when one line on your P and L can just drop by 50% because a number changes, you know, a CPM rate changes or something that's a little scary. Um, and the amount of head count required to sell ads and stuff freaks me out a little bit. Um, but I don't think they're bad SPEAKER_24: businesses necessarily. I just think you have to be careful. If you're buying one, you can't pay too much SPEAKER_68: and make the assumption that today's ad rates will stay the same for 10 years. They might drop by 70%. SPEAKER_91: They might go up by 20%. They're unpredictable. Got it. Yeah. It's, it's super tied to what's SPEAKER_28: happening in the market. And so hustle that sold to HubSpot, uh, for something like 30 million bucks SPEAKER_21: or something. Did that include trends.co or is that two separate businesses? I wonder. And then SPEAKER_06: insider business insider bought morning brew. Is that right? Yeah, I think, I think that encompassed SPEAKER_80: everything. Included. They're great. I mean, I love the founders of both those businesses. They're, um, they're phenomenal businesses and I think they got great deals. So I'm super excited for them. SPEAKER_07: Um, 30 million is a great deal. Yeah. I mean, it felt like trends was doing maybe $10 million in business. What was it doing? Do you think? I don't know. It was millions of, it must have SPEAKER_10: been millions of dollars in business. So maybe they got five times revenue. If they were doing fine, SPEAKER_12: I can't, I mean, I was under NDA, but, um, you should have salmon. It looks like trends was at 2 SPEAKER_07: million is, uh, what Sam reported recently. Uh, one of my researchers told me, so that's pretty good. And then hustle, you know, maybe a couple million and then yeah, 10 times revenue. That makes sense. SPEAKER_11: What did morning brew get sold for? I wonder. I don't know. It was publicly reported at 60 or SPEAKER_21: something. Oh, okay. 75 million. I heard. Yeah. So that's pretty amazing. I wonder what they're re they broke 10 million in revenue, I think in ad revenue. I'm not sure, but you, SPEAKER_52: you think subscription businesses are better than ad businesses. Those are the preferred ones you like to buy. SPEAKER_12: Yeah. I mean, generally I like a business if it's not recurring, I want it to be kind of frictionless. So for example, you know, a job board, we work remotely, for example, it's not recurring necessarily. There are recurring aspects to it. Like when you buy a job, it'll recur for 30 days a few times, but at the end of the day, um, you know, it's still a digital transaction, but it is frictionless. People come to your site, they self-serve and they buy an ad. Um, and that's a lot better than SPEAKER_24: having to have an ad sales team or a job sales team that goes out, calls all the hiring managers and tries to sell them individual jobs. It's just a, it, it scales much better. SPEAKER_21: Yeah. If people can just go in and buy a job, I think we work remotely. It's like three or 400 bucks for a job posting. Is that right? That's the upper bound of what you can charge, I guess. SPEAKER_20: Yeah. With all the fixings, I think it can come out over 500. SPEAKER_03: What, what's the, you're still based in Canada, correct? And you're running all these businesses out of Canada or mostly out of Canada? SPEAKER_24: I mean, they're located all over the world. The teams are mostly remote. We've been really SPEAKER_80: lucky through COVID because the teams are already remote. We've been running remote for 15 years. Um, but yeah, everything via Canada and, uh, it's a great place to have a business up here. SPEAKER_07: Well, you're collecting us dollars and you're spending Canadian and that has to be like a pretty SPEAKER_80: good arbitrage. Often. I mean, a lot of our employees are now in the States or elsewhere. We have a team, you know, in Spain and all over the world. Um, but yeah, for the Canadian SPEAKER_145: businesses, it's phenomenal. If these businesses are all run independently, is there no synergy SPEAKER_34: across them? So if girl boss wants to do job boards, they can't just take the rework remotely SPEAKER_30: job board software and plug it in because they're separate businesses. You may own part of them, but if 20% of each one is owned by outside investors or the previous founders or whatever, that puts you in a bad position because you can't use one piece of IP or one innovation from one at the other, right? You don't get those synergies. SPEAKER_12: What's super, it's super tempting, right? Because you'd think that'd be a great idea until you go to the WeWork remotely CEO and he goes, hold on, you want me to spend a month and you want me to have my developers distracted migrating over to this, you know, this other business. And then he's saying, well, I could have made an extra 100k this month, but you've distracted me. And then, you know, everyone's upset. So we generally say the companies are free to collaborate if they want to, only if it makes sense and is logical for them. Um, we don't force anything like that. SPEAKER_11: Do you bring them all together and try to get them to trade best practices in some way or do Zoom SPEAKER_21: calls with the leadership? SPEAKER_12: No, I mean, we have a, um, we have a, an email group and various people know each other, but we don't get anyone together. They're also different. A lot of the time there's, SPEAKER_68: there's a lot of best practices that get shared between individual CEOs who build relationships, but a lot of the businesses have different business models. So it's not like a constellation SPEAKER_24: software or something where they own a hundred identical or similar SaaS businesses, and they can all share a CRM and best practices and stuff. SPEAKER_43: What do you think about the consolidation of big tech companies and their dominance SPEAKER_07: in terms of copying other people's products? We saw Clubhouse come out recently and Twitter's doing spaces. Facebook's obviously copying it. And you know, people can argue Clubhouse copied some other formats, um, and they're building off of other people, but there is something distinctly different about, let's say, Facebook copying Snapchats innovations three or four times SPEAKER_30: each, right? People forget that before they put stories into Instagram, they did poke and other things and ephemeral messaging. I mean, they stole three or four ideas from Snapchat, and they executed on them three or four times to get them right. And they and they finally did. And they obviously have many more stories and Snapchat has not that Snapchat hasn't done well as a business. But now we're seeing Twitter getting good at copying ideas and innovations quickly. I've never seen Twitter actually get a product out as quickly as they got spaces out. And I don't know if that was tracking because of they saw Clubhouse siphoning off all their users and the entire graph getting taken off. But I'm just curious, do you think now founders are getting knocked off super quickly and that's a problem SPEAKER_12: or that's an opportunity? Well, I think like so many one of the errors that a lot of founders make is they make a feature, not a product. I think Clubhouse, I mean, the jury's out, but I think that Twitter has an amazing advantage in that that's where people hang out. And if you have a following, it's so easy to just go, well, I've already got 100,000 followers on Twitter, why would I go and try and recreate that somewhere else if I can essentially do the exact same thing as Clubhouse and bring my followers into that? So I think that I mean, you can argue whether that's good or bad. I think as a founder, it feels horrible to be copied. But I think everyone's constantly copied everything, copying everything else in tech. So you know, at the end of the day, it's kind of like, too bad that that's just how things work. I've been really impressed to start to see Twitter actually innovating their product for the first time in seems like five years, like it feels like there's just been absolutely no feature development and seeing them build or buy review and some of the SPEAKER_45: other acquisitions they've made really interesting acquisition in your mind. SPEAKER_12: Well, it goes back to that same thing of if you I always love to buy businesses that are like airports, right? And what I mean by that is an airport is a place where there's very few options per city. If you're going to fly out, you're going to be a one of one of two airports or something like that. You have to sit there for an hour before your flight. And so you have this you have this captured audience, right? There's all these people sitting there waiting for their planes. And when you own an SPEAKER_24: airport business, you can choose what stalls go in, you've got all these empty stalls. And so you SPEAKER_12: can create all these new business lines, you can say, Oh, let's sell them massages. And let's give them grilled cheese sandwiches and a fancy restaurant, etc, etc. And so I think Twitter's kind of like that, they've got this huge captured market of all these people hanging out there every day. And there's infinite numbers of businesses that can be built on top of that. So you know, for example, even as a as an influencer or as a business person, you know, I want a way more in depth analytics on my Twitter, and I'd happily pay 10 bucks a month for Twitter Pro. Or I want to have an easy way to, you know, send an email to all my Twitter followers and do a sub stack. Okay, that's a product and they've bought review to do that. I want to be able to do audio chat. Great, let's add spaces. I think there's probably 20 or 30 more products they could tack on. And I think Twitter is just incredibly under under monetized. SPEAKER_34: Twitter is definitely under monetized. Do what do you think the opportunities are with Twitter with paid because review obviously is paid newsletters. It was like the original sub stack, SPEAKER_30: I guess they came up before sub stack, I believe. So now Twitter source sub stack pulling their social graph off. I know because I logged into sub stack and created a newsletter and then every day I get like five new subscribers. And if you log into sub stack, it's like here's who you follow on Twitter, would you like to click and sign up for their newsletter? So I see what's happening is people are going to sign up for somebody else's. I'm one of their followers, I probably have a high follower count as one of their, um, what do they call it verified users, maybe with high counts come up top, and people sign up for my newsletter, even though I don't publish one on sub stack. But I have like a landing page there is really fascinating. So Twitter could, for the first time, officially share revenue, or help their customers officially build revenue. How crazy would that be? SPEAKER_24: Well, I think there's just so there's infinite possibilities. I mean, everything from helping SPEAKER_12: you make your tweets more engaging, giving you analytics on who unsubscribed when you know, you made x or y tweet, what kind of topics resonate, who the most influential people you could get to tweet your stuff are. I mean, that's just the basics. And then stuff like just going out and duplicating clubhouse. I mean, there's there's so many there's so many different things you can do there. The sub stack thing, I think is just, I think it's a, I don't think there's a ton of money to be made there for sub stack. Because as many smart people have pointed out, sub stack charges 10%. And as enough people get to scale, they're all going to go, well, geez, I don't want to give sub stack 500k for email SPEAKER_68: software, I'm going to switch off. Twitter doesn't need to think about it like that as a cash flowing business, they can almost give that functionality away and just create more lock in for their platform, SPEAKER_12: right? If I've got all my followers on Twitter, plus I have half of them subscribed to an email SPEAKER_68: newsletter. And it's dependent on the Twitter, Twitter integration, and I get more subscribers as a result of being part of the network, I'm going to stick with that over sub stack. SPEAKER_40: Yeah, I mean, it would be amazing if everybody who logged into Twitter, all of a sudden, it said, SPEAKER_07: turn my newsletter on, and you just click turn your newsletter on. And when people click follow, it says, Would you like to get their newsletter as well? Now, every time I get a follower, I get their email address, and I own that newsletter. No, like YouTube doesn't let you do that. Facebook doesn't let you do that. Instagram doesn't let you do that clubhouse doesn't let you do that. They never give you the emails of the people who follow you or subscribe to you. But this could be Jack's huge innovation. And this would change everything, right? SPEAKER_17: Well, even look at medium, right? So why do I post on medium? Well, it's easy. It's, you know, SPEAKER_24: clean, I can link to it easily. Twitter could easily spin up, Hey, do you want to make a post, a text post, it's unlimited size, and it just appears as an embed in a tweet or something like that. And immediately, you'd have way more post engagement subscribers, just keeping people on the platform for all the things they're linking up to, I think creates way more lock in. What do you think about clubhouse? You think SPEAKER_22: that's going to be a big business? Do you think it's overvalued at a billion? SPEAKER_17: What do you think of that? I mean, I think it's 5 million downloads, $1 billion valuation. I think it's cool. I think it's, um, it feels kind of cool, right? It feels like you're hanging SPEAKER_12: out in a room with a bunch of people and it simulates that I think the problem is that as they open the gates to everybody, there's going to be a lot of noise. I don't know if you remember, but about 10 years ago, there was this business call or startup called turntable FM. And it was super cool, right? You get like, they would get like diplo to DJ in it, or you'd have cool celebrities and stuff, but then they opened it up. And before you knew it, you know, as you go through each room, there's lame music playing, there's people you don't know, and there's a lot of noise. And so I think the challenge on clubhouse is going to be, how do you make the really high quality content rise above all the else, all the other stuff? And how do you make it easy to explore? Um, and so I think they've got a challenge. And then also Twitter can roll out spaces. Instagram can roll out spaces. I mean, just very quickly, they can be copied. Um, so I don't know, jury's out. Uh, I think I wish them the best. I do think it's a great product and I enjoy using it myself, but I do think it's a, it's a little challenging. SPEAKER_30: What are your thoughts on cryptocurrency, if any, in looking at all these businesses and watching crypto as this like little sideshow over here, everybody's talking about crypto, maybe for a SPEAKER_21: third option, you got advertising, you've got subscriptions, is that like, maybe this is the third way to do monetization, maybe people are participating in ecosystems, and they're earning SPEAKER_30: cryptocurrency as part of building them out, maybe with dribble, if somebody's portfolio got them points or something. Do you, do you think any of this is legit or do you think it's all nonsense? SPEAKER_12: Well, I think the biggest test of crypto, so crypto has been hot for what, eight years, 2013, 2012. I haven't seen a single business that's at scale that isn't involved in speculation. So buying things, hoping the value will go up. Um, that uses crypto. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is something secret, but it seems like the money, the money is being made by running an exchange, um, selling speculative collectibles or that sort of thing, or selling cryptocurrencies themselves. Um, and then actually being treasury. So holding the cryptocurrency and storing them securely for people. Um, but I haven't seen, you know, all these ideas like earn or, um, you know, marketplaces for microtransactions, where, you know, the future of work, you get paid by the second to, to complete different tasks or being able to donate, you know, micro credits or something. I think all that is hypothetically really cool. And I got excited about it, but the fact that I haven't seen a real business get built SPEAKER_17: here yet is a little concerning. And what do you think that is? Is it just that the people who are SPEAKER_30: joined to crypto are kind of incompetent and people who are super competent can make money with actual SPEAKER_03: real currency. They're like, you know, dollars, therefore they don't bother with imaginary money, SPEAKER_12: or is it just, it's not going to last, the last speculative mania, uh, the web, the web startup boom in 1999.com. Yeah. Like Amazon was doing hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. They had a, they had, they had product market fit. There was a real business. It wasn't profitable on a P and L basis, but they had people using it in a legitimate way. Um, and I think what seems to be different about the crypto boom is there isn't, there is no revenue other than speculation. Right. And so that's what I want to see. I want to see someone do a real revenue. And I don't know why that hasn't happened. When I talk to smart developers, they often say, yeah, it's called a database. Um, we've had these for a long time. And I think that's a little glib, but I'm just waiting. I think it's very interesting, but I'm just waiting to see how it plays out. And then we're lucky to own a lot of businesses where if cryptocurrency take hold, we can implement them on our various SPEAKER_21: platforms. Uh, we were talking a little bit about, I don't agree with you. I think cryptocurrency is SPEAKER_91: fascinating and just waiting for somebody to actually make something beyond speculation as well. Uh, yes, I know steam. It is, uh, steam. It was like the Reddit version of. You know, SPEAKER_21: crypto and I don't think it's gone anywhere. It's still very niche and it doesn't really work. And then, you know, Reddit itself did Reddit gold that didn't work core. I did its own version of, SPEAKER_30: you know, uh, I guess what we used to call virtual currency and that didn't work. Uh, Amazon today, as we're, we're taping this podcast acquired cells, which is an e-commerce SPEAKER_21: business out of Australia. Amazon obviously sees Shopify as a threat. What do you think? SPEAKER_24: Well, I think the big issue is that Shopify has no incentive to compete with its independent SPEAKER_12: retailers. Whereas, uh, Amazon, you know, if you go on Amazon marketplace and you sell a laptop stand SPEAKER_24: that you've made very quickly, a everybody sees that your success and copycats you and then sells against you uses, uh, they hack the ratings and reviews to make sure they outrank you or they outspend you or whatever it is. And it's kind of a race to the bottom where the cheapest, highest quality product wins. So the consumer wins, but you as a retailer suffer. Um, and then SPEAKER_12: Amazon often also competes against you directly. So that's Amazon's incentive. Amazon, Amazon, in Amazon world, you know, it's all about maximizing, uh, the best product at the cheapest rate. Um, and, you know, basically cutting out anyone making any margin. And I don't think that really works well for independent retailers, which is why they don't want to sell on Amazon. So if Amazon goes and creates a, uh, you know, Shopify competitor, I think a lot of people in the back of their head will be going, well, what are they doing with my data and what's their plan for me? And, you know, am I just kind of making a bed with a wolf? Right. And, and I don't know, I don't know how they're going to roll this out. They just announced the, uh, the, uh, acquisition, SPEAKER_07: but, uh, that, that would be my quick take. Yeah, it is interesting. Amazon made this really bizarre and inspiring or confounding move to allow third party sellers on their platform, which is kind of like allowing a flea market in the, you know, in half of your parking lot at SPEAKER_100: Walmart. It's like, okay, why would people go inside and buy stuff if you can buy it cheaper outside in this flea market? And it's like, well, inside you have some sort of standard and you can put 20 things SPEAKER_07: in a shopping cart and leave at once. And out there, maybe not. I don't know what the analogy is perfect, but it really is interesting what Amazon did. It's almost as if they don't care about SPEAKER_40: the profitability of the Amazon store and they just care about the scale of it. And they realize SPEAKER_12: it's far more, it's almost like they have the store, they have the Walmart and they have all these empty shelves and they've said, well, we could go buy the inventory or we could let other retailers come in, pay for the inventory, uh, and store it on our shelves. And then we'll do the fulfillment, which they can make a profit on. Um, so I think it actually is, I think at this point, SPEAKER_80: it's a more profitable business than the core retail business or e-commerce business. SPEAKER_30: Yeah, there's something about scale, which is worth doing, right? Like scaling in and of itself SPEAKER_07: works for so many reasons, because once you have all the people there, there are the ways to be profitable will emerge, right? You know, and you don't need to make a profit off of everything. As we wrap here, what have you learned from Charlie Munger? And, you know, if you could get into specifics and Warren Buffett's business approach, you know, top three or four things, SPEAKER_30: take a moment to think about it. But if there were heuristics that, you know, just seared into your SPEAKER_92: memory, what are they? Well, Charlie Munger likes to say, uh, fish where the fish are, which really SPEAKER_12: stuck with me. So our approach, you know, a lot of Silicon Valley is about trends. And so it's like, you find this huge, uh, fishing hole and there's a ton of big fish in it, but there's a thousand SPEAKER_24: fishermen all elbowing each other out of the way, using the newest lures and competing. And Munger SPEAKER_12: advocates finding a quiet fishing hole off the beaten path with two old fishermen and, you know, a couple of fish and, you know, you go and, uh, you do okay. By default, you have a 98% chance of SPEAKER_80: success versus a 5% chance of success. That's really stuck with us. And that's really informed SPEAKER_12: our approach to business. Um, then the other is inversion. So thinking about not about what could go right, but what could go wrong and kind of trying to work around that. So in my own life, uh, I always ask, well, what makes me most miserable and how do I avoid it? And I know what is, what is my worst possible day look like? It's a day full of meetings. I've got people demanding things of me. I've got deadlines. Uh, you know, my wife is angry at me, et cetera, et cetera. And so I take that and I work backwards and I try and figure out how do I avoid all that stuff? Yes. It's the opposite for me. I just SPEAKER_167: like to know like what could, in my investment thesis, at least what could go right, but I do like SPEAKER_70: the idea of what could go wrong and just eliminating from that. So I understand your counter. Uh, and I did SPEAKER_12: the similar thing. We're still, I'm, I'm very optimistic and I'm very excitable and I love ideas and stuff, but I always try and flip it on its head to make sure that I'm not doing something SPEAKER_100: really stupid. Yeah, that's, I mean, I'm always trying to not do the things I hate every day, SPEAKER_21: which would be like legal accounting and other nonsense. And I figured out ways to make it really, really like a small amount of my time and outsource that stuff. All right, listen, SPEAKER_07: great job on the pod today. Andrew Wilkinson, you can follow him on Twitter. He's a good follow. A Wilkinson, uh, W I L K I N S O N, uh, founder of metal lab, uh, which is owned by tiny, SPEAKER_172: not tiny capital, just tiny, but the website is tinycapital.com. Correct. SPEAKER_07: Couldn't get tiny.com. Yeah. So you refer to it as tiny, but it's tiny capital. So if you have a business that, uh, you want to sell, uh, Andrew's looking for businesses. All right, we'll see you all next time.