We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP540: Lessons in Life and Business from a Self-Made Billionaire w/ Andrew Wilkinson
Episode Date: March 31, 2023Trey chats with billionaire entrepreneur and investor, Mr. Andrew Wilkinson. They discuss various topics, including self-care and parenting, as well as exciting deals he collaborated on with Bill Ackm...an and Howard Marks. Andrew is the co-founder of Tiny, which has been called the Berkshire Hathaway of Tech companies. Andrew turned his first business, MetaLab, into a not-so-tiny conglomerate in a similar fashion to how Buffett turned an old textile mill into the juggernaut Berkshire is today. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN: 0:00 - Intro 04:50 - The philosophies behind Tiny and how it operates. 10:49 - How he partnered up with Bill Ackman and Howard Marks on some exciting deals. 30:07 - Andrew’s insights from his conversations with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. 35:56 - What it means to set “Anti-goals”. 54:03 - The art and science of self care, de-stressing and delegation. 59:00 - Andrew’s thoughts on parenting, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, investing and a TON of amazing resources. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets by Felix Dennis. Khan Academy Website. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber. The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns by Mohnish Pabrai. Tao of Charlie Munger: A Compilation of Quotes from Berkshire Hathaway's Vice Chairman on Life, Business, and the Pursuit of Wealth with Commentary by David Clark. Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini. The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charlie Munger Audiobook. Tiny Website. Trey Lockerbie's Twitter. Andrew Wilkinson's Twitter. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Sun Life The Bitcoin Way Range Rover Sound Advisory BAM Capital Fidelity SimpleMining Briggs & Riley Public Shopify Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
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You're listening to TIP.
My guest today is billionaire entrepreneur and investor, Mr. Andrew Wilkinson.
Andrew is the co-founder of Tiny, which has been referred to as the Berkshire Hathaway for tech
companies.
Andrew turned his first business, Meta Lab, into a not-so-tiny conglomerate in a similar
fashion to how Buffett turned an old textile mill into the juggernaut Berkshire is today.
It is truly remarkable what Andrew has built and is building, and we touch on a wide range
of topics.
In this episode, you will learn the philosophies behind Tiny and how it operates.
Andrew's insights from his conversations with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
How he partnered up with Bill Ackman and Howard Marks on some exciting deals?
The art and science of self-care, distressing, and delegation.
What it means to set anti-goals.
Andrews thoughts on parenting, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, investing, and a ton of amazing resources,
most of which I was unfamiliar with, all of that and a lot more.
Andrew is one of the clearest thinkers I've chatted with in recent memory.
He's extremely thoughtful and intentional with how he runs his life, his health, and his businesses.
There is a lot to learn from this one.
So without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with Andrew Wilkinson.
You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most.
We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.
Welcome to the Investors podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerby. And like I said at the top, I'm here with Andrew Wilkinson.
Andrew, this has been a long time coming. I wanted to do this interview for a while. So really happy to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on.
Thanks, Trey. It's great to be here. I've actually been listening for years. So it's really cool to be on.
I wanted to kick things off with a little bit of your view of the markets, only because there's a lot of noise happening all around us.
Banks are starting to fail here in the U.S., over in Europe, et cetera, et cetera.
This environment where funding has become scarce, valuations are declining, interest rates are going up,
I was just thinking to myself, I imagine someone like you might be one of the few who are
currently on offense, right?
Because these kind of scenarios might create opportunities where businesses that you've been
looking at for a while become attractive all of a sudden, either affordable or potentially
illiquid and needing help. So as an acquirer, is this something that you are kind of viewing as not a
positive, let's say, but opportunistic in some degree for it this year? Yeah. I mean, we really have
long periods of inaction. So in many ways for the last two or three years, with a few exceptions,
we've mostly been sitting on our hands. And the beauty of my business is that at the end of the
day, I don't have a ticker for every individual business. I own about 30, 30 plus companies. I don't know
what each of them is valued other than whatever Chris and I kind of do math in our head. And so we don't
get caught up in the macro. We mostly just focus on the micro. And at the end of the day, we
examine every individual business. And each business has some kind of competitive advantage or
something that we like about it. And so we're quite happy just to hold the business. We can't panic.
and freak out, you know, as someone would traditionally with a stock portfolio or something like
that. And I think that's been wonderful for us. You know, I always, whenever I talk to friends about
this, I always say, okay, what's your biggest investment? And invariably, they'll say, you know,
unless they're professional investor, that it's their house. And I say, okay, well, your house goes up
in value and it goes down in value depending on what's going on in the market, but you don't see
it every day. You never panic, sell your house. You know, you're not counting your eggs before they
hatch. You might have a rough sense that it's gone up or down, but it's not down to the penny. And so
I think that's one of the nice things about owning a lot of different businesses is you don't have
tickers like that. So yeah, we're just kind of sitting and waiting and getting excited to start
buying businesses again, which we really haven't done much of the last couple years.
For those who don't know, you're building what many have considered to be the Berkshire Hathaway
for tech. And that may or may not be evolving to different sectors, but I know that's kind of how it
originated. Using this analogy, what is your source of float? Is it simply the cash flows from the
underlying portfolio companies? Because I imagine, you know, a lot of companies who are relying on
funding, as we kind of alluded to earlier, are running into trouble, whereas your companies,
hopefully are cash flow positive and positioning you guys well to potentially pursue more acquisitions.
Yeah. I mean, with a few exceptions, almost every business that we have ever acquired or
operated has been profitable. And we started out that way, not because we set out to be bootstrappers,
but because we knew no other way. So when I started my business, I was up in Canada. I didn't know
what a venture capitalist was. I couldn't have got a bank loan if I tried. And so at the end of the
day, I had to bring in more revenue than my expenses. And in the early days, I barely understood
accounting. But what I did understand was that if my bank account balance was larger on day 30 than on the
first of the month, things were going well. And so that was where we started almost 20 years ago,
and we followed that thread. And what ended up happening was we built quite a few bootstrapped,
highly profitable businesses. But we always thought our businesses were terrible. You know,
every business internally is a dumpster fire, knife fight where you're just trying to stay
alive. And over time, as we got to know more and more business owners, we realized that many of them
actually were just not operating with best practices. They weren't operating with the same discipline
that we had learned out of necessity.
And so as we started seeing those businesses, we realized a lot of those founders were
exhausted or they wanted to sell their business.
And so we would buy them and really just implement those best practices, hire a CEO,
and have the baton pass to us.
I want to touch on that bootstrapping history of yours because I'm curious if there are
downsides to that.
I saw a tweet from our friend Alex over at Morning Brew the other day and he said,
Scrappiness is a gift and a curse.
So it's a gift because you learn every skill before you delegate it.
It forces you to default to an action mindset.
You can stretch every dollar.
But it's a curse because it creates a scarcity mindset, which is not often helpful.
You risk taking on low leverage tasks and you feel every part of the emotional roller coaster.
I don't know if that last part goes away at any point, but the risk of taking low leverage tasks is something I really resonated with when I saw that.
It's hard to be strategic sometimes when you're so reactive on the bootstrapping path.
So I'm curious, how did you grow out of that?
How did you learn to get beyond maybe the limitations of bootstrapping?
A lot of really disastrous hiring and a lot of really sleepless nights and a lot of misery, to be honest.
The way I think about this is like if you own a bakery and let's say that you're the number one place in Los Angeles selling croissants and there's a line down the block and you have one oven and you need to go and spend $200,000 to pay.
buy another oven in order to actually be able to service your customer, but your capital
constrained. Of course, it's logical in that world to go to the bank or to go to an investor
to buy another oven because you have excess demand and you need to keep your customer happy
and you can maximize the business that way. I think everybody understands that. But I see a lot of
tech entrepreneurs who have that same situation. They have the line down the block and they just
won't deploy the capital required to serve the customer or to maximize the business,
usually out of fear. You know, people get into this mindset and I used to have this mindset of,
I need to own 100% of the pie. You know, it's not worth giving up 5% because I can't have anyone
else in the business or that creates a risk or something like that. But I think it's very logical
to have a slightly smaller slice of pie in order to have, you know, a larger pie in the long run.
And so what I ended up realizing over time was that I was limiting my businesses by not investing, you know, in R&D, not buying capital assets, that kind of thing. And we kind of came to this realization over time. It's a lot easier when you're at scale. So for example, when you own five businesses and you have one that has a big opportunity where there's a lever you can pull to five exit, it's a lot easier to do that when it's one of five.
eggs. But when it's your only egg, it is terrifying. And, you know, I was sitting in a board meeting
with a SaaS software business that I'm a large investor in a couple years ago. And I remember
talking to the founder and he said, oh, we're doing really well with payper-click on Google.
And I looked at the P&L and they were spending $10,000 a month and they were getting a $20,000
payback within a month or two. And I said, well, why are you only spending $10,000 a month? And he said,
well, because that's what we budgeted to it. You know, that was their kind of conservative thing.
And I was like, hey, look, you know, there's $100 bills lying on the ground. You need to pick up as
many as possible. But for some reason, you know, that conservatism, that bootstrapper mentality
held them back from doing that. And so we see a lot of that. And I really empathize with it because
I've been there. I think bootstrapping is a bit of a blessing and a curse. But I've been surprised
by how big some of our bootstrap businesses have been able to become with very minimal reinvestment.
Another company that's been a huge success for you is WeCommerce, and there is a merger underway
where Tiny and WeCommerce will now both be public and Howard Marks and Bill Ackman and some other
folks are somehow in the mix here. I like to kind of talk through why the move to merge and go
public and how you got investors like the Titans of Industry behind you on this move?
Yeah, well, the story actually goes back to about 2010. So at the time, I was running
Meta Lab, my original agency. I was experimenting, incubating a few SaaS software businesses
and other stuff. And I was at a conference and I met Harley Finkelstein, who is the now CEO of
Shopify. And at the time, Shopify was just this tiny little Canadian software.
a company, you know, doing e-commerce. And he said, hey, we need someone to build themes. They
wanted an easy way for merchants to sign up and then select the theme. So, for example, let's say
you're in electronics, a manufacturer and you want to sell online. You'll want a different template
than somebody who's selling a skin cream. And so we would create a variety of templates and
we would sell them in the Shopify marketplace. So we were their first partner in their theme
marketplace, and that ended up turning into a wonderful business. We would build a theme in a
matter of months, and we could sell it for years. It's a digital good, very high margin,
and our only cost is really maintenance and updating it, doing bug fixes, and then doing support.
So that business took off, and in 2014, I received an offer to sell that business. And at the time,
I was not an investor. I didn't really understand finance in a major way.
And so I ended up selling what was really an exceptional business with a huge tailwind.
You know, this was the kind of dominant theme seller on the Shopify platform.
And Shopify was growing at a wild clip and it just gone public.
But I ended up selling the business.
And for the first time, I had this large sum of money.
I had millions of dollars in my bank account.
And I decided I needed to read a book, you know, about investing.
I needed to finally figure that out.
And the first book that I picked up was The Warren Buffett Way.
And as soon as I read that book, I realized, oh, my God, I've made a mistake.
I shouldn't have sold this wonderful business.
But I still own 20% of it.
I stayed on the board.
And I used the knowledge that I learned from Buffett to start tiny.
And I continued to follow along with that business as it grew.
And the folks that we had sold it to, they were a family office.
And they decided that they wanted to sell.
And so I said, okay, well, can I buy it? And so we ended up buying back the business. And I had met
Bill and Howard in passing over the, you know, the prior years. And at one point, you know,
Bill kind of pulled me aside and said, hey, if you ever want to do a deal, I would love to partner
with you. And having been a bootstrapper and having never raised money, I figured, hey, this is an
interesting experiment, you know, a great way to work with someone that I really respect and try raising
capital. And so we did that with Bill and Howard and a handful of other investors. And we ended up
buying more businesses within that platform. And then we took it public in 2021. And that business,
you know, is still a public company. And over the last year, Chris and I, meanwhile, had built this,
you know, very significant portfolio of other businesses. And we decided that we wanted to take that
public. And so we thought, hey, what better way to do so than to merge into Wee Commerce and have a
single stock where we can allocate capital across all the different entities in one place?
And so we just announced that merger about a month ago. Congratulations on that. It's very exciting.
The Buffett book is interesting for obvious reasons. He's one of my big references. And I know that we
both study him. And there's a lot about Tiny that resembles Berkshire. But something that stood out to me
that may or may not resemble Berkshire in a way is that Tiny seems to be almost agnostic to existing
management when you're looking at acquiring a company. And you seem pretty confident in the idea
of placing a proper leader at the helm if you need to. And I'm curious how many, or have you
found many founders that can make the transition from leading what they call pirates to sailors,
right? Or do you find that it's often best to find a more seasoned person to put in place to run a much
larger operation and maybe best not to leave it to the founders.
I'd say there's really no rules.
There's only experience.
And I think for myself, I realized pretty quickly that I was a great zero to one person.
I loved starting things.
And I really loved operating at large scale, but I didn't like the in between.
And for me personally, I actually didn't like managing large groups of people.
I love managing, you know, a 20-person company, but I don't really indefinitely.
enjoy managing a hundred or a thousand person company. And so it's much better for me to hire CEOs
who enjoyed that phase of growth and operations. I often think about a business like, you know,
just to use an example, Chipotle. So if you think about, you know, there was somebody invented
the burrito, right? That was one person. Another person came up with the concept of a fast,
casual burrito joint. You know, that was the founder of Chipotle. You know, somebody else scale,
or he scaled it to, you know, five locations or something like that.
And then he likely brought on a president or CEO who had experience in fast food,
who took it to 100 locations, and then perhaps handed the baton to somebody else who took it to a thousand locations.
And I think each of those baton passes, each of those different CEOs or leaders is a different skill set.
Now, are there exceptions to the rule like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg?
Absolutely.
But I think they're few and far between.
And if you look at someone like Mark Zuckerberg, he still hired Cheryl Sandberg, who is an experienced executive, who had scaled a very similar business at Google and had basically already done it.
And so effectively, what we tell founders is that if they want to stay on, they're absolutely welcome to and we'll leave them alone.
And they can keep operating the business as long as they like with minimal interference.
Some of those founders want us to help.
They'll say, hey, I really need a COO, a CFO, you know, new team members.
and we'll help them with that.
But a lot of the time, they'll just say,
hey, you know, I just want to keep running my business.
And I went with you guys because you're easy to deal with and you leave me alone.
Then there's other founders who just want to sail off from the sunset.
They want the easiest deal ever, you know, 30 day, 30 day deal,
cash in the bank on day 30, one payment, you know, sign the documents and you're done
with a little transition period.
And we do both.
So we have really great experiences with some founders who have stayed on.
grown their business significantly, and then we've also brought in CEOs to run the business.
And typically the way we think about that is just we want to find somebody who's done it before.
So like I said with the burrito example, you know, if I have, you know, a 50 location fast casual
business, I want to find someone who's grown a similar business from 50 locations to 200 locations,
you know, business with similar values.
And so we basically find people like that. We plug them in and we leave them to it.
That quick deal, a 30-day deal is super interesting to me because one thing I've really admired about Buffett over the years are how he simplifies almost everything. And there's a certain beauty to that. And I know that he's done a few deals just over a handshake. And you seem to follow the same sort of, I guess, philosophy. So I'm curious how you really ultimately decided to do that and how hard it might actually be to do that because while it all sounds very simple, that's a lot of work.
probably in a very short period of time, a lot of hard, big decisions to make pretty quickly.
So maybe walk us through what a 30-day deal really looks like.
So I'd say there's no set timeline.
At the end of the day, the founder is the one who sets that.
So if somebody comes to us and they say, look, I've got an incredible deal.
Here's everything you need to know.
I want to transact in two weeks.
My lawyer's already drafted the purchase and sale.
Here you go.
we could totally get that done if we love the business and we love the person. And then at the same time,
often the founder has advisors, they have a lawyer, the lawyer really wants to dial everything in.
Sometimes that takes three to six months. So there's really no rhyme or reason. Sometimes they take a
long time. Sometimes they go really quick. And we don't pressure people to close in 30 days. It's more
kind of an indication that if they're comfortable and they want to move quick, we can do that.
From my perspective, you can't do a good deal with a bad person.
And if you need a contract and you have to rely on a contract, that's not a good sign.
So, you know, we do have a general counsel and obviously we draft, you know, all the requisite
contracts and that kind of stuff.
But at the end of the day, if somebody is going to, you know, defraud you or something
like that, that's going to happen regardless of a contract.
And a contract, you know, it gives you legal protections, but you have to go to court.
It's a five-year process.
So to be honest, you know, while we do all that stuff, I'm really trying to examine the
quality of the person and do a lot of qualitative analysis of this person.
You know, are they authentic?
Are they nervous?
Do we have friends in common?
What's their pattern of behavior in the past?
Do we trust them?
Would we let them babysit our kids?
You know, there's a lot of these kind of qualitative checklist that we go through.
And yeah, that's how we're assessing people in terms of these deals.
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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In my recent conversation with Christoph Gleish,
He highlighted a study that showed that people are incentivized by remuneration, but more motivated
by equitable remuneration.
So in other words, people essentially weigh being paid fairly more than the actual wage itself.
From your experiences, what have you learned about incentivizing and motivating so that you
can increase delegation going back to this Berkshire model?
So I used to, in the early days of my agency business, I had this feeling like, why am I the only one that cares or why am I the only one that's excited? And I think that people obviously work for the work. You know, there's people that are intrinsically motivated that love what they do. But at the end of the day, if you are winning, I think everybody needs to win together. And so we found that as soon as we actually figured out incentives and we started, you know, bonuses.
people in line with the numbers that we cared about. So, for example, free cash flow or net profit
or EBITDA or whatever makes sense in that particular situation, that alignment of incentives,
as long as the employee or CEO understood how they won, had some control over those numbers,
and understood the numbers, we found that people all pull together and achieve whatever needs to
get done to hit those numbers. And so that's worked really, really well for us. And we try and
ensure that we don't have kind of lottery ticket incentives. So if the quarter doesn't get hit
perfectly, they're still getting paid, right? We don't want somebody to be dejected and punished by
rewards. Can you say more about that? I'm curious about the lottery system there.
Well, so for example, let's say your stock price is $20 and you issue and employ $100,000 of stock options.
And then the business, let's say the stock price drops to $15. Suddenly,
that employ went from, you know, being in the money on their options to their options being
worth absolutely zero. It's completely binary. Whereas an owner, you know, they would have gotten,
they would, you know, have the equity at $20. Their equity would become worth a little bit less as
it dropped 15, but they would still care. They'd still have something to lose. And so we try and
as much as possible avoid those kind of lottery ticket incentives. Very interesting. So Buffett
and delegation seemed to go hand in hand. Apparently, we were talking about before how we're kind of still
curious in scratching our head how he lives this very stress-free life and has nothing on his calendar
and apparently doesn't do email. So from what I've learned about you from some of the other
interviews you've done is that the latter is a bit of a struggle or still struggle on it, I think for
most of us it is. So it's not just you. I relate. What has worked and what hasn't worked for
simplifying your life and trying to de-stress it as you continue to delegate?
Well, ultimately, the number one thing that's worked for me has been taking every single piece of
responsibility for a subsidiary business and ensuring somebody who's responsible for it. At the
end of the day, there's no way I could keep all the businesses in my head. And so I have to rely on
a wonderful group of CEOs to operate those businesses. And so that covers off most of the
day-to-day buyers, right? When I was running my agency, I would get a phone call every day saying,
oh, this client won't pay us and this employee is quitting. And each of those required an actual
next action. I had to immediately that day respond to the client and get on a phone call or whatever.
My problems now are much more high level. Like it's kind of like a, you know, are we going to
buy this business or not? And I've got 30 days to decide, you know, are we going to restructure
our debt into X or Y facility? And there's a lot of time for analysis. So it's much slower.
that said, I still, as you mentioned, struggle to not have a full calendar and email.
And to be honest, I don't know how Buffett does it. I think that, I mean, I think it's real.
So I once got an introduction to Buffett via email and I got a response from his assistant the next morning.
And it just said, Mr. Buffett's in his office. Here's the number. You know, call him right now.
And he immediately picked up and he talked to me for an hour and a half. And I don't understand how
that happened or, you know, why he decided to make time for some random kid in Canada, but
he seems to be pulling it off. And I don't know what the secret to that is. Maybe it's not doing
email. From my perspective, you know, I've tried a lot of different stuff. I have an assistant who
reviews all my email and flags the most critical ones. So if I don't want to look at email,
I can just look at the three or four that are kind of burning or time sensitive. But I struggle
with this like anybody else. And I, you know, I always joke I'm Taflon for tasks. If there's
anything that comes to me, I'm allergic to it. I want to delegate it, but I still somehow
managed to have a lot of stuff to do. Can you tell us more about that call? I mean, you had
a little bit of time maybe to prep, but you knew you had a call right now. It sounded like,
so there wasn't a lot of time to think. What was going through your mind and what questions maybe
were you able to ask, Buffett, that you were maybe hoping to, and were you surprised by anything
he said in response?
I mean, I think, you know, there's that, that whole idea of not wanting to meet your heroes
because they'll let you down.
And Buffett absolutely did not.
I've met both Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett now.
And, you know, he was just so high.
I was struck by how high his EQ was, how, you know, he really listened.
He mirrored back.
You know, he clearly was listening what I was saying.
He asked a lot of really great questions.
And I got the sense he was, you know, you talked to a lot of old people.
and they're not aware of you.
They're not really kind of digging into what you want to talk about.
It's just them talking about whatever they want to talk about.
And I felt that he really took the time to see me and understand me and ask really good questions.
And I got to ask him a lot of questions primarily around raising children and money and philanthropy.
That was fascinating.
But the interesting thing about Buffett is that he's very public with his opinions.
and if you've listened to all of his public interviews,
you've read all of his letters,
you pretty much know what he's going to say on any topic.
Munger, I find,
so if Buffett is like, you know, classic rock,
you kind of know how it's going to go or 12 bar blues.
Munger is like jazz.
You know, he'll just spout off about any topic.
You never know what he's going to say.
I mean, if you've seen the Daily Journal,
annual general meeting, you'll know this, right?
You never know what he's going to say next.
And it's fascinating.
But I really enjoyed talking to both of them.
One of Buffett's quotes about raising kids that I've come across is that he wants to leave them enough to do something, but not enough to do nothing.
You're now wealthy individual raising parents.
And what have you, what philosophies have you grabbed onto, either from Buffett or others that have helped direct you with raising your own kids?
I think it's really challenging.
And to be honest, I haven't really come to a conclusion.
At this point, my kids are five and three.
And imagine if you're, you come from a long line of farmers and you are the generation that, you know, created a large industrial farm that can feed an entire town.
Is it logical for you as a someone in a farming family to then go teach your kids how to grow root vegetables?
Or is it better to say, hey, you know, here's how you can run this large business or here, help me give away the money to everyone in the town.
Or, you know, hey, go play violin and study philosophy.
Or, you know, should I say, hey, all this is mine, you go start your own farm from scratch.
And I think every single one of those has a pitfall.
And I don't really know what I'm going to do yet.
I'm still trying to figure that out.
But I'm trying to explain it to my kids.
I think that one of the mistakes that I've heard is not talking about the well, not exposing them to it, not helping them understand it.
So I'm, you know, as best I can with a five-year-old, I'm trying to explain all the different
businesses I own and how we make money. And whenever we go to a cafe and we buy something,
I try and explain that, you know, that came out of my bank account and we walked through
how I made the money. But yeah, it's a really hard decision and it has pretty serious consequences.
One thing I'm really curious about is how you're thinking about teaching them investing.
Because you mentioned earlier, you kind of had a windfall at one point and you said, okay,
what do I do with this? You went and bought a Buffett book and curious about maybe how you're
thinking about starting someone out earlier than maybe you did.
Well, I think that everything I've ever become passionate about, I was just slapped in the face
by or there was a really important reason why I wanted it. So, you know, when it came to investing
or starting businesses, I grew up in a family where we didn't have a lot of money.
We weren't super poor, but money was always a really tense topic.
house. My parents were in a lot of debt. My dad's business was failing. And so I just didn't want
everyone to be stressed out. And so, you know, I always told myself that I was going to make a lot of
money so that I wouldn't have to deal with that anxiety. So that's what fueled me starting businesses
and getting into investing, you know, really out of fear. In the same vein, I never wanted to play
a musical instrument. You know, my mom would try and set me up with piano lessons or singing or any of
that stuff. And I just didn't see why I should care. And then I had a pressure on a girl. And she really
liked this guy who played guitar. And I was like, oh, my God, I need to learn guitar. So I taught
myself guitar really, really quick to try and impress this girl. Of course, it didn't work, but I had an
incentive to do so. And with my kids, you know, I really don't want to pressure them into getting
into investing, I'd rather that, you know, maybe I talk about it passively or they just notice
that I have all those books and one day they crack one or, you know, I take them to a Berkshire
AGM or something and see if it resonates with them. But I really don't want to push it on them.
And I think that at the end of the day, they need to find their own passions and get obsessed
with something. And that's going to have to happen naturally.
That monger quote, right? Show me an incentive. I'll show your result comes to mind.
And there's another Munger quote that comes to mind too, which is it's attributed to Munger often.
I'm not sure if it's something he picked up, but it's all I want to do is know where I'm going
to die so that I never go there.
And with this in mind, everyone's familiar with this idea of goal setting.
And that seems to be a big part of what it takes to become successful.
But I know that you and your partner have developed a practice that you call anti-goals.
So can you talk to us about what an anti-goal is and how you go about doing something like
that. Yes, we read that Munger quote and it really resonated. And a couple years ago, Chris and I were
feeling really unhappy. You know, on paper, we were very successful financially. We had wonderful
businesses. We had a lot of freedom, you know, on paper, but our actual day-to-day lives were
really stressful. And so we started kind of looking around and saying, what actually makes us
miserable? It's really hard to think about what's going to make you happy. You know, you might go,
oh, when I have a Ferrari and a mansion and a private jet, I'll be happy. But in reality,
it's hard to predict. But you know for sure that you don't like being really, really tired,
overbooked on your calendar, in a, you know, back-to-back meetings and phone calls, a lot of business
travel, et cetera. And so we made this list of anti-goals of things we didn't want to do. And then
we kind of reverse engineered it from there. And that was very instructive for us in terms of
hiring. So who could we hire? For example, let's say that Chris was spending a lot of time with our
banking relationships. Who could we hire to go and do that for us? And then, you know, finding someone who
loves doing the banking relationships will do a better job than Chris. And in doing so,
we'll free us up to not have to do the things that we hate. So we found that very instructive.
I actually wrote a medium post. If you search the power of anti-goals on Google, it should come up
as the first result. So as Carl's icon is known to say, your valuation might.
terms. And a lot of people think of acquisition simply it's just the price, but there's a lot more
to it than that. And the structure of a deal is almost just as important. So a lot of nuance can go
into a deal, but I'm more curious about where you started, how you refined your approach, and what
resources you use to kind of educate yourself on how to create deal structures. Well, you know,
we were really country bumpkins. Like, we had no clue whatsoever. Chris and I were really good
operators. We knew how to read a financial statement, but we didn't know anything about deal terms or
structures or cap tables or anything else. And so in the early days, you know, the way I kind of think
about it or thought about it in the early days and I still kind of think about it is if I buy this
business, how do I pay myself back in five years? So that can be I pay five times earnings, right?
And the business just stays flat, pay myself back in five years. Let's say that I pay 10 times
earnings, let's say it's a business that's growing a little faster. I've got to double the earnings.
Well, how hard is that going to be? What levers can be pulled? So, for example, when we bought
dribble, which is our social network for designers, we looked at the business and we said,
okay, we're going to pay, I think we paid about 10 times earnings for the business. And
we identified two or three kind of low-hanging fruit opportunities within the business, where we
were confident that in the first two years, we could pull those levers and that we would
we could double the earnings. And so that's kind of how we think about it to this day. So even if I'm
paying 20x, I'm still thinking about, you know, can I grow the earnings appropriately to get
to the point where, you know, I can pay myself back in five years if I was cash flowing the business.
I noticed that there's, I think you're under what, 30 fully owned companies now and there's
something like 90 that you're a minority investor in. Is there often a path where the minorities
are something that ultimately become majority or the minorities more bigger pies already that
you're just wanting to write along with?
Well, it's interesting.
So being an entrepreneur, I have a lot of entrepreneur friends and they often start companies.
And so, you know, as they've started companies, they'll come to me and say, hey, I'm
raising money for my company and, you know, we'll throw in 50 or 100 grand.
And I kind of look at it as roulette chips.
It's not our primary business.
It's fun.
we get to engage with great entrepreneurs and we put down a whole bunch of chips and now and then
we win. I think we're up, at least on paper, you know, we're up a reasonable amount and it's
fine. And it gives us some market intelligence. We get to see kind of what's happening in the
startup world. And occasionally we will buy a majority stake or buy one of the startups. That's
quite rare. I'd say it's probably one in, you know, one in 50 that we'll do follow on or buy
a majority in. Our core business is buying majority stakes in cash flowing businesses. And I think that's
like playing poker. You know, you actually have an advantage and skill matters. So that's the primary focus.
And I think it's like 97% of our capital or something. I'm making that number up, but it's something
very significant that's in the majority deals. And it's, you know, the venture stuff is a very small
percentage of what we do. I know Buffett does this. And Tom Gainer introduced me to it as
well, they'll sometimes own tiny little pieces of hundreds of companies. And it's sort of to just
get their appetite wet. Like, they're sort of put a little bit of money into it. They're all of a
sudden that much more interested in it. So I was kind of curious. It's almost like a screener.
Right. A screener with a little bit of money on the table. Exactly. With that in mind and your
relationship with Munger, he obviously is the right hand man of Warren Buffett, but he's made his own
choices along the way and his own investments. Have you picked up anything from being around him
that has sort of informed you on where his mind takes him or why he's opposed to certain deals
or in on certain deals. He loves Costco. He loves Alibaba. He loves certain companies that
Buffett, for whatever reason, isn't invested in. Curious if you've seen something that
differentiates them that may or may not be obvious to the public.
The thing I love about Munger is just his level of patience is staggering. You know, he'll buy one.
I think he had a great quote. He said, I read Barron's magazine for 40 years and I bought one
stock from it. And on that one stock, I made 100x. He just sits on his hands year after year
after year. And he does not do anything that he does not want to do. So he does not interact
with shareholders. He runs Daily Journal exactly the way that he wants to run it. He's just
a total character. He lives a life that is truly tailored for him himself and his own interests.
From what I understand, you were moved to Victoria. You've mentioned it a couple of times. I know
you have this really deep love, it seems, for Victoria, from what I can tell.
But at first, it seemed like you were kind of kicking and screaming, being brought over there,
but you've stayed there, which is just kind of something I find really interesting,
because you've also managed to stay in Victoria, but create your own luck.
And I want to kind of explore this idea you didn't seem to feel the need to go to some major
metropolitan area and, you know, network and do things.
You've been more on almost defense, I would say, in a way.
But you've managed to create your own luck.
to see if you agree with the philosophy of creating your own luck. And one example I would bring up
is actually bidding to have lunch with Bill Ackman, right, knowing that you wanted to meet him
and taking that opportunity to put yourself out there and do that. Are there other examples
that you found have helped you create your own luck and build relationships or, especially
being based somewhere not super remote? I mean, it's across from Seattle, not too, but you know
I'm saying. Like, it's almost that Omaha reference with Buffett we brought up earlier.
Yeah, so I moved here when I was 15. I grew up in Vancouver. Vancouver is about a two and a half million person city. Victoria is about 300,000. So it was very, very small. And I hated it. You know, I was 16 years old, did not want to move here. And over time, you know, I really wanted to move to a bigger city. But I always had a girlfriend. My business was here. And I ended up falling in love with the city. And I still, you know, I still would travel to Los Angeles and New York.
in San Francisco, and I'd go to business conferences and stuff and meet all sorts of interesting
people. But I found that I got a lot of independence by being in Victoria because there's not a lot of
business people that I would be interacting with. And there's not this kind of memetic desire.
You know, I was just in Los Angeles last week. And I visited a house, this beautiful house that my friend
had rented. And I asked him how much the house was worth. And he said, $70 million. And I think that it's just
next level of competition, you know, a world where the best house costs 200 million. In Victoria,
the best house costs 10 or 12 million, which is a lot of money, but that's for the best house in town.
And so I think the level of competition is much lower. I feel that, you know, I'm quite an anxious person.
And I think that my anxiety is just lower, not having to be surrounded constantly by people
talking about business and all competing. And so I really enjoy the quiet pace of life.
In terms of networking and stuff, we've been really lucky with some of the people that we've been able to connect with.
And it's been a strategy of either really targeted reach out or it's been getting into the right room.
And so, you know, the way I would think about that would be a lot of people will kind of say, okay, I'm not going to go to Davos or I'm not going to go to TED.
I'm not ready for those.
I'm going to start at little small conferences.
And I paid $15,000 to go to TED when I was in No.
And I knew that if I put myself in a room with all those amazing people, consistently,
year after year for 10 years, eventually I would befriend people and connect with them
and do business with them.
And so via conferences like TED, I ended up meeting all these fascinating people, building
my business, meeting amazing philanthropists and billionaire business people and all that
kind of stuff.
And then otherwise, I would really study people from a distance.
So Buffett and Munger, you know, I read everything I could for seven or eight years before
I met them. You know, Ackman, I studied for years, Howard Marks, you know, all people that I've
connected with since, but I would study them. And when I really wanted to meet someone, I'd try and find a
clever way to do so. So for example, with Bill Ackman, you know, I'd, you know, followed him for ages,
and I just happened to see that he was doing a charity lunch. And so I decided I was going to
win that charity lunch. And I did $60,000 to go out for lunch with him. And I had no idea what
to expect. I had actually invested in his publicly traded company. And so I looked at it as diligence.
I had a very large position in it. And I said, okay, if Bill's a jerk, I'm going to sell at the
lunch. And if I like him, then maybe I'll buy more and I'll hold. And Bill was lovely.
You know, we spent three or four hours together. I ended up meeting his whole team at Pershing
Square. And we really connected. And, you know, at the end of the lunch, he said, hey, let's find a way
to work together. We should do business. So, you know, I've done a lot of stuff like that,
and it's worked out really, really well. But I didn't go into that lunch with Bill expecting that
something would happen. I mean, he's somebody that invests in, you know, railways and huge
real estate, you know, multi-billion dollar public companies. I just wanted to learn from him.
And that's really been the approach that I've taken with all of the people I've met is just
how do I get as much out of their brain as I possibly can? Let's take a quick break and hear from
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Talk to us about Bill Ackman, because he's not someone we've actually studied all that much on this show.
He's had, I wouldn't say spotty track record, but he's definitely been in the headlines and out of the
headlines. He's been very active. He's been more quiet. He's had losses and these massive wins,
you know, actually fairly recently. What is it about him? Maybe that sets him apart from maybe the other
people you studied.
So first of all, I'd say, Bill, if you actually look at his track record, I think it's
mostly wins with a huge, few huge losses.
And the problem is that the big losses that he's had have been very loud.
And I think that Bill, because he, you know, formerly was an activist and was quite loud,
I think the tallest blade of grass is the first to get cut.
So when things don't go well, everyone loves to dunk on Bill.
But he has an exceptional track record.
and I think he's an amazing investor.
I think what impresses me about him,
what made him stand apart from a lot of the other value investors
is most value investors,
they effectively are buying a ticket on a cruise ship.
So what I mean by that is,
let's say you want to go to Hawaii.
There's a lot of different ways to do so.
You could go and build a boat yourself by hand
with some logs on the beach and try and sail to Hawaii,
but you'll probably die or drown or get sunburnt.
and maybe you make it one and a hundred times, but it's probably not going to work.
That's like starting a business, so that's venture.
Then, you know, you could maybe go buy a speedboat or something like that.
You're going to arrive battered and bruised.
That's, you know, you find a difficult business or a turnaround or something like that.
The cruise ship would be, you know, you find a cruise ship that's sailing to Hawaii.
The course is charted.
It's a reputable cruise line.
Been operating for 20 years.
You buy your ticket, a stock certificate, and you go and suntan on the deck.
for the entire time and you enjoy the ride.
You know, that's what a lot of more passive investors like Buffett might do, or Guy Speer
or Monish Pabri.
They're really buying the business.
They're trusting that the business is going to go where management says it's going to go
and they kind of let the business do what it's going to do.
Dale, on the other hand, is much more entrepreneurial.
So historically, when Pershing Square buys into a business, they actually have a thesis around
change.
And, you know, in some instances, you know, it's been missing.
management. Historically, I think they've done a lot more of that kind of turnaround stuff like
they did at CP Rail, where they felt that the business was just not being operated well,
had the wrong board, et cetera. I think they've since evolved to seeing opportunities and businesses
that are already wonderful where they think that they can perhaps influence them in a positive
direction from the board, but in a much friendlier way. But what I like about Bill is that he'll
actually wrestle with the universe to try and see the outcome that he, you know, sees come to
fruition. And I really like that. I think that he manifests things more than other investors.
And so I find that very inspiring as someone who's an operator.
I imagine having that much spotlight on you can be difficult. We've touched on this a little
bit, but I happen to know that from some of your other interviews that you've been into self-care
in certain ways and you've gone as far as taking a month-long sabbatical, a digital detox, if you will,
a couple years ago. I'm curious if you were able to do that again late last year, if you saw the same
effect, is it becoming something you're really proving out to be helpful for you? And is there something
that you maybe even picked up from these people that you're around and learning from that's helped
you understand? Because that's one side of the equation that's not often talked about. You know,
you see these people maybe get kicked around in the headlines or every move they make is scrutinized,
but that's so stressful, I have to say. And no one talks about how they manage it.
Well, I think someone like Bill is incredibly tough, right? You know, Bill talks about falling down and just brushing yourself off and getting back up. And Munger talks about that too. I think that the people who get back up are the people who continue to do well and they learn lessons and they become better investors or better business people as a result. For my personal experience, so one of the things I realized is that at the end of the day, I've only got so much dopamine in my brain. Right. So I,
Every email you read, every decision you make, you are depleting some chemical in your brain.
And I think most people will observe that when they wake up, they're the most full of ideas and
excitement and forward momentum and quality decision making.
And that kind of fatigues throughout the day.
And so what I've tried to do is make as few decisions as possible to abstract things away
as much as possible to remove time constraints and time pressures so that there's nowhere I have
to be. I can always cancel appointments. I can make a decision later. There's no burning fires. But like
I said earlier, I still struggle with the feeling of overwhelm. Now, they're wonderful problems, right? I have
all these fascinating businesses, each with their own unique opportunities to dig into. But I feel
a little bit like somebody with a Netflix queue that's in the hundreds, right? There's too many good
movies to watch. There's too many TV shows I want to see. There's too many great books to read. So that's
what I struggle with, which I think is a good problem to have, but it's very difficult. And I,
like anyone else, swing into periods of excitement where I'm doing a lot. And then I get into
overwhelm and I dial everything back. And then I start to get busy again. And I just seem to
repeat that pattern annually. That last point resonates because when I was a musician, I was lucky
up to have this year I made enough money. And I was like, okay, I can not worry about money for a while.
and every day was actually kind of torturous because I would wake up and not know what to do with my time.
Do I practice scales? Do I read poetry? Do I, you know, you name it. And I would end up just going to get a sandwich because I was like, I don't know what else to do. So do you find at the helm when you get to this level where you've delegated and, you know, if you're not someone who just enjoys reading and maybe you are like Buffett, you know, for six, eight hours a day, how do you manage that? It's actually something that's probably harder than people even think about. You know, they think it's probably fairly easy to do. But I found it.
to be quite torturous.
Yeah, it's surprisingly hard.
So when Chris and I first started Tiny, at the time we owned about five or six businesses
that we had started, we delegated the operations to CEOs.
And really, we said to all the CEOs, look, don't call us unless you need us.
So the phone stopped ringing.
We went from getting hundreds of emails a day, solving people problems, getting texted
constantly to absolutely nothing.
And at first it was bliss.
We were thinking that we would become a young Buffett and Munger.
We had this tiny little office and we would just sit there in our lazy boy chairs reading 10Ks.
And I realized that I do not have that capacity.
I think I can read for maybe one to two hours a day and maybe if I'm really obsessed with something a little bit more.
But I am very social.
I like to meet people.
I like to be out and doing things.
And so I do struggle with that.
I find that there's currently at our scale.
There's enough going on that every single day, there's still kind of two or three priorities
or things that I'm pushing forward.
But a lot of what I'm doing is texting people and saying, hey, remember that thing.
We talked about.
How's that going?
Checking in.
And then otherwise, unless a CEO calls me with a critical problem, which doesn't happen
that often these days, I'm not getting into the actual underlying businesses.
So when you talked to Buffett, you were talking about philanthropy.
I think you mentioned as well.
And his initial game plan was to just compound until he died, basically.
And I think luckily for everybody, Bill Gates at some point convinced him to start giving back with a warmer hand.
And I'm curious what he impressed upon you with philanthropy, how you approach it and maybe what causes, if any, motivate you the most.
Well, yeah, I was talking to him about the giving pledge.
And, you know, I really like the idea that any wealth that you build is just going back to society.
because it allows you to reframe from a kind of greed mindset.
You know, I'm maximizing.
I'm getting as much as I can to go buy a super yacht to instead saying,
you know what, I'm the world's best fundraiser for philanthropy, right?
So saying that, you know, every dollar I make from this point on basically is going to go back
to society at some point.
I think there's quite a nice way to reframe because at a certain point, you know, I described
earlier in the interview that my family didn't have a lot of money.
And so I just wanted to get rich.
I wanted to solve that problem.
And I'd say probably almost 10 years ago, I had enough money where I could retire.
And then I had enough money that I could retire very comfortably.
And then I had enough money that I could have my whole family retire.
And at that point, I was like, okay, well, what's the point?
And I ended up feeling a bit empty.
So it wasn't until I actually decided to give away most of my money that I was able to reframe
and get excited again about working.
Is that around the time you, I'm trying to find the time when you spoke with Buffett
and we're seeking advice.
Were you coming from that place of what knowing or trying to figure out what to do next exactly?
Yeah, totally.
I think it was January 2021 right after we took Wee Commerce public.
And the interesting thing about that was that before that moment,
I only owned private businesses.
So while I had a lot of cash flow coming in,
you know,
I was almost constantly reinvesting the cash flow.
You know,
I never had any real sense of what my businesses were worth or how they'd be valued in the market.
it. And when we took Weecommerce public, that was actually only a very small percentage of my
net worth. And those shares, you know, very quickly were worth tens and then even hundreds
of millions of dollars depending on what the stock price was doing. And so it was kind of slapping me
in the face. I was like, okay, I got to figure this out. And I had a bit of an existential crisis.
You know, I talked to Buffett. I, you know, interviewed a ton of other wealthy people to ask them
what they were doing. And one of the frustrating parts of it is that everyone does.
something slightly different, and all the advice seems to kind of counteract one another. So, yeah,
it was quite interesting to try and figure out. What else keeps you grounded? I mean, we talked
about living in Victoria. I imagine you might have friends you've known your whole life to a degree,
you know, just from growing up there. Have those relationships changed over time? And is it hard to
relate to people, or is having that around you actually what is grounding for you? Yeah. I mean,
I still have a lot of great old friends who, you know, roast me.
and bringing back down to size.
So that works out really well.
It does change things.
And it's such a blessing and a curse.
You know,
I think that being known as a successful investor and business person
is wonderful as an extrovert because I will be sitting in a cafe
and I'll have some random business person walk up to me and say,
hey,
I heard you on a podcast last week.
Here's my business.
And wow,
I just made a new friend.
But I also find that it also can sometimes convert you into a meal ticket for
people. You know, people will, you know, email you, constantly asking for things, people wanting
loans. It just changes that stuff. Whereas before we went public, you know, the first business
went public, when we were kind of quiet and private, no one really knew. I was just some guy in a
hoodie working out of a cafe. And so it's, yeah, it's a, it's a double-edged sword. You know,
no, don't cry any tears for me. I've got a great life. But it does, it is an interesting dynamic to
try and figure out. What would be some of your favorite books or resources that you recommend to
people who are just getting started? I'm curious where you would push people to start learning either
about investing or starting a company or simply just living a good life. Okay, so I'm a dropout.
I went to journalism school for three months and then dropped out and then I became a barista.
And then, you know, there's two guys that kept coming into the cafe every day who were web designers.
and I was looking at them and they would just sit in the cafe all day, drinking espresso that I'd made and going on their laptops.
And I was like, well, that seems better.
So I became a web designer and just stumbled into it.
And then my web design agency was doing well and was profitable.
And so I kind of had to learn business.
Then I started multiple businesses.
And so it was very organic.
One of the things that I noticed was that every job I ever had, I wanted to shove my boss out of the way and take over.
I just didn't get why they were doing things the way they were.
I thought I could do it better.
I was kind of unemployable, which is the quality that so many entrepreneurs have.
When I talk to kids who say, I want to be an entrepreneur, I'm going to go to school for
entrepreneurship.
It sounds a little bit like someone's saying, I really want to be an Olympic athlete.
I'm going to go read a book about running.
And it's like, no, if you want to become a cross-country runner, you should start running tomorrow.
And that if it's not completely slapping you in the face that you don't feel the urge that you have to do it, then you probably shouldn't.
Because being an entrepreneur is a very, very difficult life, especially in the early days.
It's really hard.
It's extremely exhilarating for the right type of personality, but it's really, really hard and stressful and the failure is brutal.
So I would say, first of all, don't start a business unless you feel compelled to.
Don't do it because it sounds good or your parents want you to do it, do it because you feel you have to.
From there, the best resources for me were, you know, there's a variety of business books that I love.
The best one is a book called How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis.
The title is not great.
It's really cheesy looking.
It has a photo of him sitting on a golden throne on the front.
But it's really, he's publishing magnate from the UK who built a fortune.
And it's a fascinating book because he kind of says, here's everything you need to know in order to start a business.
and to get rich. And I'd say it's quite accurate. I'd say followed many of the steps. But then the last
quarter of the book is about why you don't want to get rich and how miserable it made his life.
So it's a fascinating book. That was kind of my first book that really inspired me. In terms of
learning, accounting and finance, like as someone progresses, Khan Academy is amazing. You could
probably spend two hours doing the finance and accounting course and learn everything you need to know.
The E-Mith by Michael Gerber is amazing about delegation. When I first started,
my business. I was kind of like, you know, imagine if I owned a bakery and I was trying to bake,
you know, bake all the bake goods in the back at two in the morning and then work the tail on the
front and then run back and forth covered in flour, trying to do a little bit of everything. And the
E myth was the book that allowed me to kind of see that my business isn't me. My business is a
machine and you have to build a machine built up of process and people in order to scale. So that was a
breakthrough for me. And then investing, the Dando investor by Monash Prabrai, I think, is the best kind of
manual on value investing, just basic value investing. And then there's, you know, the final book I'd
recommend would be the Tao of Charlie Munger, which is much more qualitative. I always think of Munger
as a wonderful qualitative investor. So Dando investor is kind of like, you know, here's how to buy a
dollar for 50 cents. Munger is much more about how to examine business quality, psychology,
and incentives, which you come to realize is far more important than any of the numbers stuff.
On that last point, I'm just curious if Munger, Buffett, Bill, anyone has put a book in front of
you that was maybe interesting. I know for me, I had dinner with Buffett once and he gave me a
couple Adam Smith books to read. And for me, that was eye-opening to this idea of owning a business
to be able in the book that they describe it as peeling off equity to create liquidity and
things like that just stuck with me, the visual. But it was this idea of,
how people grow and make a living off of a business.
And I'm curious if there's been references from anyone like that that maybe have stuck
with you as well.
The most important book that I've probably ever read is influenced by Robert Saldini,
which Munger is a huge fan of.
He was the reason why I discovered that book.
And effectively, it's like an encyclopedia of every kind of cause of psychological misjudgment.
Charlie Munger also has a really great speech that he did at Harvard called The Psychology of Human
misjudgment. He made it in the 90s. It's kind of this old crackly recording, but it summarizes
all the kind of key ways that people don't think through stuff properly. That book is incredible.
I still use all the skills I learned in that book every day. Fantastic. Well, Andrew, I've learned so
much from you today. And I have a whole laundry list now that I'm so excited to go dig into because a lot
of these I never even heard of before. So really exciting. And we will list all of these resources
in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. And before I let you
go, I would love if you could share a little bit more with the audience about how they can learn
more about Tiny, because it's a really fascinating thing you're building. And just if you want to
direct them anywhere to learn more about it, please do so. Yeah. So the best place to learn more is just
go to Tiny.com, our website. You can kind of see a high level overview of all the businesses
that we own and how we buy businesses. I've done a lot of podcast interviews and I go on my first
million very often. That's more kind of off the cuff, brainstorming, more.
entrepreneurial. I've also done a couple interviews on kind of more philosophical side with Shane Parrish
on the Knowledge Project. And then I did one on 20-minute VC, which is like a really good summary
in 20 minutes of exactly how we invest and how we constructed our business. But yeah, Tray,
thank you so much. It's great to finally come on. And as a long-time listener, it's very cool.
Thank you so much again. Of course. All right, everybody, that's all we had for you this week.
If you're loving the show, don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app. And if you'd
Be so kind, please leave us a review. It really helps the show. If you want to reach out directly,
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