How To Grow A Small Agency Into A Billion Dollar Company, Shaan's $15M Miss, And More

his company which is called tiny which buys businesses it's going public and andrew owns roughly seventy one percent of the shares and it's going public at a nearly billion dollar valuation who knows what it's gonna actually trade at but if it trades out what they wanted to trade at that's about seven hundred to eight hundred million dollars that andrew will have from all starting with a bootstrap agency and i wanna walk through his journey and i think this is amazing it's pretty mind blowing alright let's do it i'm fancy shirt fancy shirt all i gotta say is fancy shirt jet i've i now do this thing where if somebody does anything that's like i feel like they left the house today feeling good about that or the you they got a haircut i'm not subtle about it i'll just i act like a like a dog barking i'm just like nice haircut you got you you changed your face the thing that the audience is gonna call me out on is i i couldn't find my other classes so i have to wear these glasses the problem with them hang know is that asshole jeffrey dah decided to wear the same was so it looks like i'm gonna ask you like do you wanna come back to the apartment to take some peaceful pictures and have some beers like they'll be real nice like that he ruined it for me some people are to that i have a meaty one another publicly traded company this is a big deal and it kinda has not been made a big deal in the media because it's i guess not that big a deal to them it's a billion dollar company but basically our friend andrew wilkinson friend of the pod friend of ours we're gonna be with him in vancouver on february sixteenth so if you wanna come see us live he basically by the way i got a preference this now that he's a publicly traded company everything that i'm gonna say i just googled it this is all just from google i didn't ask him anything and a lot of its guesses but not all of it he basically had a company that was publicly traded called we we commerce and it was not doing great it like peaked at like five hundred million went down to eighty million anyway doing a reverse takeover know what sorry he's doing a merge and he's his company which is called tiny which buys businesses it's going public and andrew owns roughly seventy one percent of the shares and it's going public at a nearly billion dollar valuation who knows what it's gonna actually trade at but if it trades out what they wanted to trade at that's about seven hundred to eight hundred million dollars that andrew will have from all starting with a bootstrap agency and i wanna walk through his journey and i think this is amazing it's pretty mind blowing okay the by the way the billion dollars is this one problem by the way is that all of his numbers were in canadian dollars is all cad instead of usd so is this a billion cad or is this billy to usd everything i'm gonna say is canadian i don't know what the conversion rate is monopoly money to usd but like it's it's somewhere close enough that we're still in the same ballpark yeah so i think it's i think it's a little bit more like seven hundred million is the the the number that basically just discounted something like twenty thirty bucks yeah andrew's in cad is canadian and canada if you ever really wanna inflate something right like if you're five nine you're you're five eleven cad so just just go cad and you'll you know get that x get that little extra that you feel you've been missing your all life so dude this story it's really impressive andrew comes to the pod and we mess with them but like this is we treat him like is one of us what he's pulled off is like not one of us man it's pretty epic he's actually more like twenty of us if you added it all left he's the brian sc greedy of rich guys you know what i mean like this is sc he's the worst billionaire i know what the best millionaire i know yeah for sure i mean he's killing so listen to this so basically the company that is taking public it at this point has and this now this stuff is actually public it's doing about a hundred fifty million in revenue fifty million in eb and so here's the story so two thousand six andrew was i think nineteen he started a web design agency called meta lab and meta lab is like the core of all this in year one it had two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in revenue and basically what he's doing is he's doing like design stuff so one of his big famous clients was before slack was slack stuart butter field he you know reach out to andrew said hey help me design slack and like i don't know it's web interfacing which frankly i don't even know entirely the the whole scope of that work but like more than logos but including logos i believe right more than logos that should be their tagline line no i it would it would definitely draw good we draw we draw good plus more logos and more no it was it was web interface so it was actually fairly technical but in year one it did two hundred fifty thousand in revenue with a fifty percent profit margin in year two two thousand nineteen so through were three years in it was doing about a couple hundred thousand in profit and it doubled for a couple years and then grew by thirty percent a year so two thousand twelve you're six years in only three million in revenue not like right crazy out of this league like you know he's he's kinda like what people say about us is you're relatable and whenever people say that i'm like i don't wanna i don't wanna be relatable i wanna be way on your at least yeah they say you're still you're so authentic you're so relatable like what i like about you guys is you're not successful yeah and you're pretty dumb so it just feels good if you guys that and so that that's exactly it so he he was relatable so in year six three million in revenue but after that it grows thirty percent a year which but which if you add up thirty percent annual growth by two thousand twenty you're at something like twenty million revenue by two thousand twenty three you're in like the forty or fifty range and the reason why andrew's agency works so well is and i actually think this won't work this doesn't work as much anymore is he's based out of victoria what i don't even i'm such i'm so angry i don't even know what state providence in minnesota but a little higher yeah yeah yeah he's in like yeah he's in like the boise of canada yeah idaho i guess our software is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous thanks i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better and so what that means that he's paying those wages but he's charging silicon valley still british columbia ben just corrected me there you go british columbia whatever that is i don't know what piece that is on the monopoly board but it's somewhere around there and so he's charging silicon valley prices to like the slacks of the world so these high end prices but he's paying canadian wages so that margin is fat and so that's why he's able to take make all this profit and he starts taking his profit and he starts launching companies and it doesn't work so well he launches one little software company i forget what it was called flow i think it was basically like an sonic competitor doesn't work out he's like i invested too much money he goes fuck this what if i just buy a company he reads a book on warren buffett and he's like yeah yeah yeah i could do this and that's his new hero he turns into a a buffet guy he starts buying businesses and he buys a couple that are doing okay but anybody's one that becomes like the crown jewel of this whole business so this whole thing tiny there's i think there's two crown jewels there's meta lab which we can guess is doing forty or fifty million in revenue twenty million in profit that's the cash flow engine of this whole thing of being a by these companies then he buys dr which is basically like github for designers so designers go to this website and they upload their portfolios other people's can share your portfolio you sent it to employers they can comment you get inspiration whatever now i don't have all the details on this but i if i had to guess dr was launched by two founders who weren't very business savvy and it had a lot of traffic but they're like dude we don't know how to like make money off this and andrew buys it from them i imagine buy a guess i bet you buys it for five to ten million dollars turns this thing into a behemoth making now it's making many tens of millions of dollars if i had to guess it's worth two hundred million dollars or higher i'm this is just a pure guest and that becomes a crown jewel of this company tiny and so now he's got these two agencies or a meta lab and dr and then he's also has now what do they own like fifteen other companies and he's taking it public and throughout this whole period he's bootstrapping this thing so meta lab is the one that's paying for everything he's hires as the ceo to run meta lab and because of that he basically owns like ninety percent of meta lab and now he owns what did i say seventy percent of these tiny shares and then his other partner in the business i almost was like ten percent so him and chris is his partner own eighty percent of this publicly traded company that's hoping to go public in the billion dollar range this is just a crazy fascinating story and i can't believe he's pulled this off yeah i gotta be careful what i say because i invested in tiny recently when it was private so i kind of know more of the numbers but i don't know what's public versus what was private it i a ballpark of everything yeah i think you're in the ballpark i think the maybe the dr valuation maybe a little bit high but you're right that those two things make up like you know it's like because i guess here's my here's where this kind of broke for me and this is maybe not that interesting just my personal frame broken it a again broken a good way in a good way which was up i thought he'd been around doing this for way longer is actually twenty sixteen when he started like buying other companies and that's not that long ago we we met him i don't know i met him in i wanna say twenty twenty you know that's all in and and it was what i know about him he was like a personality yeah exactly because he always like he always had this like cool looking avatar his pictures always looked cool he was like a designer so his hair was always slick back and he had this like where we all looked like do he was like kinda good looking in his pictures and stuff like that just shows what a good head of hair can do for you and you know i think that's the real takeaway number one number two number two this segment is brought to you by him number number three so so i think that that was the first thing which was wow this was actually built up in a a relatively like on one hand it's a long period of time because he'd been started med lab a long time ago so that part you gotta give credit for oh wow two thousand six and then he grind it out year after year building this service business up but on the other hand the portfolio side of things was relatively new so i thought that was really interesting the second thing i assumed that the portfolio was a lot more lot flatter a lot more parity so maybe like there were you know five to ten companies all of sort of equal value pitching in each one like you know five to ten percent of the overall value of the pie and that's how you get like you know seventy percent or something like that and the rest is med at and in fact it was kind of like like a venture portfolio in a way where a couple of the companies were really the standout ones that were driving most of the value and i think for them it was actually three there was the the one they took they originally took public so we commerce which is basically their shopify apps roll up so the shopify of a app roll up i think was was one winner dr is another winner in meadow labs another winner and to me everything else is nice but now that those are such big winners that they make up so much revenue and so much eb that the others are almost like rounding errors at the moment that's a little bit harsh i would say but you so maybe that's maybe that's a little too harsh but just comparatively it wasn't like this portfolio of a dozen equally sized companies which maybe was i never should have assumed that in the first place but when you hear somebody doing a portfolio you sort of think okay it's gonna be sort of more smoothly distributed out but but it was actually a little bit more concentrated in a few key key winners that just really kept compounding at a high rate and so yeah so i think that's that's amazing i think what he's done is amazing like to build this level of a of a sort of empire in this short of amount of time is pretty awesome and the the biggest thing is i love that he did it his way like there really wasn't anybody doing exactly what he was doing of course there's private equity right but he wasn't doing it like private because he wasn't looking to flip he's looking to buy and hold then you have sort of okay okay who's doing permanent equity who's doing a buy and hold strategy okay there's some people doing it but they all raised money he used his own company's profits to do it so that's pretty dope and then he branded it and was more public about it versus these kind of more under the radar it's like oh you you're part of like maple oak capital what is that you know i go to your website it's got two lines it just says we acquire software companies and it's like okay i i don't know what this means whereas he built kind of like a sexy brand out it so i think there was a bunch of things he did that were pretty cool like even his term sheet he's like oh i read that warren buffett basically you know we'll meet a company understand it and then write a one sheet a one page you know like term sheet for them to just you are they gonna take this deal or not it doesn't do this like complicated lawyer process if he could buy a billion dollar company with with a one or two pager then i should be able to buy this three million dollar company with a one pager and so he took you know he took that approach i think did a good job branding what he was doing along the way yeah and so here's a few more takeaways and then i wanna hear yours if you have the extra ones the first is that you said that he did this quickly yeah kinda but he also did it really slowly the acquisitions part only yeah the acquisition part but he basically started in two thousand six and then he didn't really hit his stride until two thousand sixteen so that's ten years of having an agency now he didn't run the agency the whole time he ran it for a little while and then he also hired people and so i'm i'm sure he was managing it to some extent but slow is good in some cases and the second thing is that he didn't raise money for an agency and because of that he had so much freedom the second you raised money that that your cap table is one of the few things that you can't reverse or or it's really hard and he didn't raise money for a company that meta labs should not have raised money and it did not raise money and because of that he was able to use the profits to invest in shit versus if you raise money they're like no don't use those profits to do other things reinvest them and make this thing bigger the next thing is financial maneuvering like you know i joke that i like don't know anything about finances it's kind of like his like thing i think i think he's built that skill up over time right didn't didn't know it initially but yeah has he can create a lot of value a lot of people do this now they can create a lot of better value by increasing their financial iq like taking e commerce public via back in twenty twenty when the timing was perfect required some combination of being prepared with a good business secondly you know identifying the timing and saying now is the time go aggressively and third is like just having the financial iq to go with the balls to be able to actually go pull something like that off one hundred percent the next thing is where you live it can actually matter a lot now i think that this gap of silicon valley wages and victoria canada wages might be closed a little bit it's closer at least than it was before that gap is smaller but this still exists in other places i know i have friends that have built pretty big businesses are building them right now and they're using indian talent versus american talent and they're getting great products that's what you're do with this podcast guilty and then the final thing is hiring and negotiating the way he negotiated with his ceo's and kept them happy while also retaining equity so i don't know like how he pays people like i i imagine he pays them with just tons of cash so that's like you're like well that's easy just pay over pay people but anyway it's still like really impressive how he was able to negotiate and hire and manage people i've heard from a bunch of his ceos where they're like when things are going fine i don't ever hear from them and i love that and then of course i imagine there's times when things are going fine he's like alright dude come on we gotta we gotta like push this little harder but he's done a really good job of hiring and anyway this whole thing that he's pulled off i messaged him and i was like this sounds like an insult yeah we got a clap we'll we'll clap i was like dude this sounds like an this sounds like an insult but do you ever just sit with like a shit eating g and just laugh and like a little evil laugh and be like got them i pulled up this paper because that's kinda what it feels like because he makes it look easy and of course it's never easy there's like there's times where whole message me means he's like dude i feel like i'm in the dumps or i feel overwhelmed he's human but he's done a really good job of doing it his way almost to the point where i'm like dude you gotta be sm right now like it's that feeling like when you get successful and you think about your ex girlfriends who you're like made fun of you it's like you you fuck yeah meal that thing yeah you know that thing no i got bro don't worry you know like you know don't like you know that that that shelf you have with like the names of all your enemies marked on like champagne bottles you don't like when you pop that whatever you like a lot of their hair and yeah set it a fire the liners he yeah dude what do you talking about but he's pulled it off he's let me let me let me also say another thing you know that there are people that are masters of engineering you know people that are you know fantastic leaders but you know on the dawn of storytelling and andrew is a great storyteller so people should go read his dr two point o blog post it's on medium so just google dr two point o andrew wilkinson and here okay sam how do most people announce an acquisition go just just give me your generic thing yeah they're it's like we are so we are so press release we're so pleased they built a really nice business and we're happy to be stewards of this business and we're really looking forward to the future and then like the sellers like you know we were looking for a nice home for f this is a perfect partner and we're excited for the future just nonsense not the absolute absolute soul list dr so here's here's what he he did and set so here's i'm just gonna read a little snippet this because i think people should pick up on the storytelling to i think that helps so he goes when i first started meta lab dan cedar home was my hero a great opening line a great because i don't know who this guy is and i'm like why is this person your hero he goes this bullet bulletproof web was the first book i read i used to reverse engineer his styles sheets on simple bits to learn his css anything he did i did and i drove my front end developer's nuts trying to get them to implement every little one pixel detail that i learned from dan so already you're like okay this is interesting he's basically setting the context of like that's the guy who started dr and he's like it's not just i bought dr and i'm pleased to to you know raise prices in six months he's like you know i i've admired this guy this guy is my hero i learned from him and so when he so here so let me keep you going so he goes i remain i i remember meeting another favorite designer dave dave shea at a conference back in two thousand eight he mentioned that he knew dan on my floor my jaw hit the floor wait what the css drop shadows the court logo he's the best what's he like i was gus blah blah blah i wasn't just a fan boy i was his web standards fan boy blah blah then he keeps going and he goes one of the projects that dan did was dr which you've c founded with whoever i had used it blah blah blah which is why i'm excited i'm saying excited to share the big news right so just that little paragraph of setup it it draws you in in a way that like he could've have just done a standard boring eye roll press release and instead he decided to do this way and then he he talks about kinda like that it wasn't just like therefore we've acquired it and it's done he's like i was bugging them and bugging him i kept emailing them every month asking them if they would let me in he's like this september my mo finally paid off emailed me think saying they would think to do they might do it they cared about these three things i wouldn't mess it up i have a long term view and i want them to stay involved and known a piece of the business shook hands and made a deal blah blah and then he tells the rest of the you know then need then he does the standard stuff about we're excited it's gonna be great and i just thought that was just a way better way of doing it than the average person would do it and if you add up we a lot of doing things better than the average person would do it you end up with this type of exceptional outcome dude it's just great man i i have a lot of respect from them there there's always like this little bit of envy in me when i talk to andrew because he's my friend and i consider as peers and but i'd then then he'll make jokes about like what he's doing on the weekend and then like oh it's sick and and and then but i'm proud of him i feel like i feel i feel a lot of pride like on his full kinda for him and i'm very happy that he's pulled this off and i think it's really impressive and i think that it's badass that people are that there are people that are bold enough to do things their way regardless of what the nerds invest in from stanford tell you the way you should do it and i imagine that along the way he got a lot of flack making fun of him from being in canada for not raising money for buying these little quote little things and i guess that's the fucking name of the company tiny but he just like pulled it off and i appreciate that gum and i appreciate that bold and i find it inspiring and i'm happy that like we have them in our life so that's a my little love note to andrew good job love letter to andrew wilkinson consider yeah and if you wanna if we're going to canada we're gonna be there february sixteenth and andrea if you're listening this you wanna fly us up there private that's cool if you wanna celebrate we know how much money you have now so look let's celebrate my one friend invite another over yeah yeah let's celebrate by flying private together except we'll be like you don't have to be there and sean and i will each be in different planes yeah so do we an allowance can he just sit the car with just an allowance that would be done anyway that's my breakdown of tiny he deserved it dude to i got roasted so badly by my daughter last night i was like man this is your four year old daughter roasted you so badly nice three three years old we play so so she she can't play many games we play rock paper scissors but she always throw scissors so that's like you know fun for for her not for me she plays hide and seek always hides in the same spot this like kids do this they like play the game but they they don't know how to play and then she so the so i taught her ice spy i was like oh here's a game we could play in the car i spy and so she loves ice spy so she so i'm like i buy something green she's like is it the tree i'm like how'd did you get it it's almost the tree that's right and she goes i buy something yellow and i'm like looking at around the house i'm like where that was it yellow i don't see anything yellow she goes your tea and she is not aware that that's the sickest is burned and that everybody's looking to anybody hey i buy an asshole yeah exactly i was like wow that is just like natural that's a natural burn oh that that's good can i tell you about something cool that you probably know about and i saw it and i can't stop thinking about it have you heard of the sc i don't know about this tell me about this alright this is you you know i don't pay attention to sports this is your leak so you don't you know brian is brian oh oh sc brain okay i didn't know he called at the sc that's a good name well explain who he is people don't know brian sc he played for the celtic he's like a red hat he's six nine he's huge but i think he looks like a will ferrell but actually wasn't in babe nba a player yeah so easy to make fun of but i think he was like okay right or was he always he yeah he he was okay but then like it was okay but he was he didn't take himself too seriously and over time you know like he had kind of a few years where he actually played but most of his career he's on the bench as a scrub and yeah yeah far ups his nickname you kobe was the black mama he started calling himself the white bomb and so you know he was a goofy dude who was basically a bench for like the last whatever seven years of his career but it was a great you know great locker room presence and and you know a warm body so people kept him around and i think at one point he called himself i don't know if was a joke or what the worst player in the nba obviously was a joke but anyway after he retired i guess he retired from the nba somewhat recently ish but he still six nine in athletic and whatever or athletic for you know he's a basketball player but he compared to the other guys he wasn't like that athletic but he starts playing rec leagues and like he would score you know rec he's like i had the y and on playgrounds and he scores like sixty points of game you know just crushing these guys and he doesn't like brag about a too much but then like online at one point he mentioned like yeah i i got sixty points left night directly and then just people online just start chirping at him hard and they're like dude you suck i could beat you or you i don't even know how you made in the nba you know yada yada yada they start chirping adam and he goes wait a minute no i may suck compared to derek rose but i don't suck compared to any of you guys and so he starts doing this tour where he goes to like all these basketball courts he goes i wanna go to the the the the hood of the hood basketball court i wanna go to the best y i wanna i'll go all around the country and he starts doing this and he crush these guys and he's he challenges people he says come play me one on one do you think i suck come play be one on one yeah and he and he and he destroys them and there's he he's like i even do this for social media but some people recorded a couple of these things and he would beat them like ten nothing he was like i let him get one point just to figure out what they're gonna do but i just destroy these guys and he's got this awesome quote that he goes he said this to like one of the kids it was like a eighteen year old kid who like plays to against something any any any he crush this kid he goes let's get something straight i'm closer to lebron that you are to me and i thought i read that and i go this is the greatest thing i've ever heard awesome it's such a good story and he called it the sc and i thought it was so good it just shows you know there's levels to greatness yeah there's levels to this and i think is the the perfect the perfect takeaway from that and also he's hilarious he is so good i don't remember this by the way we were when we did our our camp m m getaway the the guy who came to train us he's he trains like a bunch of nba star so he trains ky irving he trains to trade young and so he was there and his wife is in the w nba and she's like one of the best players and the w nba we're talking about the w nba and how like they're you know the players are awesome but they also don't get like high viewership it's like not like the league doesn't do that well it's kinda like subsidized by the nba it kinda loses money but you know it it it's good overall for the sport for there to be a women's league and so we're were like yeah well what we had a kind of a a impromptu brainstorm of like yeah thing everyone says which is kit can i beat her up know like it's like there so when everyone says me that be up just be happens with like wait a bunch of truck getting to get that buffalo wild wings or watching like rose units and like these female u fighters everyone thinks it can i get her ass yeah what would happen if my i found yeah exactly so basically we did a brainstorm like what would you do to get ratings up or to like if you were to launch a different women's league like how would you get people interested because the problem is i think i saw this this crazy tiktok it was like some team whoever won the championship of last year i don't i no idea maybe it's like the atlanta dream or something like that and they came home to do their parade in the city and it literally just look like you know if i walk to my bus stop here there's like three people kinda lo around there's like a bum and then you know that was the parade there was nobody there for the parade and that the team was going down in the bus and there was just like other people were like why is this what is this why is this bus here whatever oh you you guys play a sport i i didn't really realize that so this is take tiktok that went viral making fun of it and yeah the idea that that we all landed on was basically the three three four or five best players should basically go on tour like it's the end one mixtape tour and go city to city and challenge you know any five you know go play pickup up with any with dudes at any of these and live that or like cut that into clips of them basically punk pumpkin guys yeah like beating guys who think they could beat them and yeah put some respect on their name so so that was kind of the the marketing idea but got to our to if if the cmo the w is listening you're welcome did i love these challenges there is another one where like when you're watching running running on a popular sport but i love it it's my favorite sport to watch next to u and the people were like they're not that they're like a two hour marathon you do you remember that when like at el el k he ran two hours and he just looks so smooth he looks closer to an animal than he does a human like his body is just like he just you know running a hundred miles a week for probably twenty years he's just like his you're look at his calves and you're like i i can't believe that you and i are like the same we're both humans it it it's it's not even fair he looks graceful when he runs he looks beautiful and he doesn't look that fast and so they put a treadmill at the same speed and they go here's here's because he's with ease he's doing it with ease and he does it for two hours and they go see if you can do this for fifteen seconds and they have this treadmill and like people can't do it for just twenty seconds they can't even run that speed basically like four minutes and thirty seconds a mile which is like i don't know would that be like sixty miles an hour for me yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like a sprint and it's a sprint for most people and it was really funny and no one can keep up with it so i love these like that's actually one of the tenants of making content viral which is it made you have to make something made just stick and you can make it stick by comparing it to real tangible things that everyone can understand and when you put one of these treadmill at that speed you're like i can't keep up with that for ten seconds let alone two hours totally totally somebody said this about the olympics they go the olympics there should be one civilian in every event just a normal fit guy from the gym and it should just be like just as a baseline comparison here's the average person and you know here's even like above average person and then here's the olympia olympics like let them all just let them line up in the lane eleven and see what happens dude i would love that i would love this i have i've got i've got a big meaty topic what do you have alright so i this is a story of a multi million easily multi million prop and time of the chat how do the calculation of how much i i lost doing this let's see i would have invested at a company at five million and it's now a three billion ish company so you know i i basically turned i missed out on a chance it probably turns something like twenty five k into tens of millions of dollars yeah okay so here's what happened but it's it's got there's kinda some some interesting things baked into this so it's not just oh i missed it big deal everybody misses misses opportunities this is an interesting one so back in twenty fifteen which is kinda when we met i was not a angel investor but i liked the idea i thought it sounded cool i was a founder of of a company and i was making i think one hundred a hundred sixty grand a year so a hundred and sixty grand a year back then you told me you're making one sixty and i was like oh you're the richest person i know i remember you told me you're like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars i was like oh my god yeah i i i may i remember i was like man find a find somebody who looks at me the way sam looks at me right now but the way i say sam looks at my pay stub and so so yeah i i i was making one sixty year but in in california you know that you've kind of after taxes now you're at like one and ten you're netting you know and then you pay for life it's pretty expensive blah you you don't save much so i didn't have much of a bank but i like the idea of an angel investor and people because our office was so dope when a founder would come they would think that i'm a lot richer than i was but just because our office was so fancy which was only fancy because our main investor owned the building and decked it out for himself and like that's why the office was so fancy it had nothing to do with me so anyways i i meet this kid we're building a product and i meet this kid he's thirteen years old and he uses our app every day our app was like club house type of app he used to use everyday after school come home use the app and he's hanging out in the silicon valley chat rooms and we're like dude you should be like going and go try to have a kiss like you know but that should be your mission not like sitting in on this room talking about raising your series a and and so two things happen one he's like dude i wanna come work with you guys what are we're like dude you're in middle school like i can't your parents are gonna kill me i can't help you work for us but by go here's here's what you can do he goes i wanna be a scout for you i said okay go ahead k be a ex scout for me he goes he goes he goes well do you want me to do i go every week i want you to send me a company that you think is awesome and that you think i should invest in and just write why you think i should invest and send me the company now i have zero hope or really even zero plan to read this email at the time i'm just basically giving this kid a homework assignment i'm like this will help you think and most likely this is gonna be too much work for you you might do it once you might do it twice but you're gonna give up by the third time for sure so i give him the homework assignment very first company he sends me is a company called a applied and so here's this was the second and this is sorry this is the second week here hey sean here's the second company i wanna introduce apply what they do they help international students find the right university for themselves and apply their on their behalf they have eleven schools contracted to pay them a commission for every for a student that gets that signs up and they have fourteen more schools in the funnel they have over fifty hundred students signed up hundred sixty thousand facebook likes and this is all with ten dollars in paid marketing this is actually pretty interesting right like that's actually a kind of a really good analysis and that's you know simple two lines so i'm like wow this gets thirteen he's like you know he's this is a good find and he has explained it well he goes why you should invest now this where he got a little off but that's okay he goes they started four years ago with offline consulting and then pivoted into a software business they know the space well they have four c cofounder they have a very very diverse skill set blah blah blah they have an algorithm something something and he says their customer acquisition cost only a few dollars and their lt is thousands so they have sustainable growth because i'm trying to correct my shots so that one day i could hit the bull's eye for you if you have any feedback on the company i would love to hear it because the first one i didn't even respond i already said like this is bad so this is his second one and i'm like you know what this is actually pretty good i'm gonna take this meeting so guy is in san francisco he comes to my office love them super charming this guy martin you you've probably met like a bunch of these guys who are like there's there's something that's really just like i don't know charismatic or charming about dudes from like you know israel or something like that like the anyone is like israel persian turkey there's like it's like there's just so goddamn charming like they're just dripping with sauce and what's what's cliff company for what's our booty cliff cliff w cliff wei yeah it's the audio one i i i think he's middle eastern and i met him when when he was just starting and i was like it it he had oh he's israeli actually right he had that same vibe and in the office i go what's interesting about you or something and he goes i can do a back flip i go alright well over yeah i said friends yeah i said alright well move that chair over there's enough rub go do it eddie did a back flip in the middle of my office and his company now speech it's it's in the unicorn territory and i didn't invest in it but that like he had that same care charisma when he came in my office he lit up the room i i should have i should have known better yeah he's got amazing energy and and so yeah this is the so so he so i meet this guy he's got the israeli swag i'm loving it and then and again i have never at this point i've never angel invested in a company but i'm like this seems like a great idea and what they're why this a great idea for people don't know it's kind of a f up part of the system which is colleges in the us just have like surge pricing for international students so it's basically like if i'm a if i'm a state resident i get like cheaper tuition at state schools okay but if i'm a us resident i pay you know what i thought is full price so maybe i'll pay twenty five k to go to school at this place but an international school student will have to pay two or three times more than that so they'll pay fifty to seventy five thousand for the same exact thing they just charge them more it's kind of insane i don't really know even how they are able to justify this but they do and and so remember in san francisco university was that to call university of francisco i i dated the girl that went like had ties there and i remember walking around campus and was only chinese students and and it's and it's not even good schools like university universal san francisco or us or whatever it's not even that good of a school and so it's actually it's a it's actually a bit of a trick it's like international students just wanna come to america they can't differentiate between you know university of utah and you know you know columbia or whatever like these different schools they don't know the the lay of the land that well they don't know that the schools in the middle of nowhere they don't know that it's not actually considered that prestigious or whatever it is it's just expensive but so it's actually a lot of these other schools that really take advantage of this and have a huge percentage of their population coming from international which makes up a disproportionate amount of revenue so that's kind of like why the schools are so they went to him and they were we'll give you three thousand dollars if you can get somebody to sign up he's like three thousand dollars that's pretty good and and i think now they take a lot more than i think that now they take you know ten percent or something of the of the overall tuition so it's gone up since then but anyways so we pitch pitches and i'm like dude i just get yeah i get get caught up i like the idea i love this guy's personality i'm like i'm in he's like you're in i'm in he's said fantastic i haven't really talked to anybody else yet so i don't know all the round details i said brother i'm in and he's like alright love it you you're you're the first guy meant to silicon at valley you're my champion on this and i thought i'm the first guy he's meant oh wait hold on i didn't wanna i didn't i didn't really wanna be the first guy in and like you know first of the dance floor is kind of like not not exactly the position nab be so then he goes on where go starts pitching people and he starts coming back to me with and he he's a nice dude he's honest guy he trust me says man they're saying no because of this and i'm like oh these guys are idiots don't worry about them they don't get it next one nab they came back they said no because of this and as by the third one i'm like maybe i should have been saying no so i start to doubt my my conviction in this thing but i'm still like brother i told you i'm in so i'm in and anyways it takes him a little too time doing a you if the end of the story is you backed out on him and you were calling him brother i wasn't a brother in fact i think he was calling me brother because that was like you know it's like the cab be thing right they just they just say brother a lot i do just knife them in the back well i didn't actually knife from in the back i i don't know i don't know exactly what i don't know know i don't remember exactly how i played up but i definitely wu out so so basically takes them a little time to raise the round he eventually does get the round together and i'm supposed to be right of twenty five k check not even like some crazy amount of money but to me at that time that was like it's like alright well that's kind of like my entire like savings for this year is gonna go to this one random is israeli guys company alright you know i i i could lose this but i would really hate to lose this and i start thinking about you know i'm am i ready for this i don't know and so i kind of just i don't back out but i don't i from what i remember i didn't back out but i didn't reach back out either and so i think you probably emailed me once i was like yeah okay let me know when it's time and then he probably emailed me like three or four weeks later was like y it's time and i just like didn't reply to that thing and i i don't think anything really happened but anyways long story short i don't invest fast forward you know five years i get an email from that same kid so ed so is like hey remember this email yeah applied a unicorn now and you know what what do you about curious what you think about that and i was like i think i was an idiot and i i think it was a totally idiot and there's actually a few kind of like takeaways in this for me so the few takeaways are one don't be a worse if you say you're gonna do something just do it that's just a a lesson for myself and i think you know for most people yourself included that's that's rarely a problem for me that's more of a problem second i actually think i was correct that i was not ready to be angel investing at the time and so i i should either could've have done like a five thousand dollar check yes exactly so what i should have done is i should have said alright look i don't have the bank roll to place twenty bets which is kind of what you'll need you need twenty to thirty bets for you know angel investing to work and so it's like you know i don't i don't realistically i do not have the bank roll to do this but that's okay that doesn't mean i don't do what i want it means i gotta be resourceful and find a way so either let me come in at a smaller check size that make it's my version you know if angel vest twenty five k when they have five million dollars then i need to write the proportional check for me and see what happens or i should've have gone to somebody and said hey i actually found this deal i think it's really good you have the money which is what i did later with lambda school it was like hey i like this company they haven't really raised much money yet it's not proven but like i think it's worth a shot and i convince somebody else to write the check and give me some carry so that's really what i should have done to make this happen but at the time my fear over road my like you know the the not even ego the fear over road my like ability to think like from just think like with a clear hat and say okay well it sounds like there's just a little obstacle here and let's figure out how we're gonna get around it i a lot of people are embarrassed there's say like well can i do five thousand like i remember doing a deal i i did a deal for fifteen or twenty five thousand when i didn't have a lot of money thankfully on paper it's turned into a bit but i remember thinking like that's i wanna ask them if i could do five k but i don't wanna look like a punk right yeah so so i think i i should've have found a way and that's i think has been a a common theme in my life which is like a lot of good opportunities come my way and i say i don't have the time i don't have the money i don't have the skill i don't have whenever and i rule it out even though objectively i'm like this is great opportunity and the real answer is find a way to get the time or find somebody who does have the time finding way to get the money or find somebody who has the money to help you out right like do do one of those things to get there and this is not like a small thing like just doing the difference between doing that not doing that would have been again tens of millions of dollars in this case when in the result case where it it worked out so that's one takeaway the second is this guy s is like now become a general strategy for me which is i always wanna have like i don't know four or five people who are kind of like way it's like it's like an anti mentor alright like you know it's a or something like that it's like i wanna have people that are young hungry and ignorant and and naive but that's an asset for them because they're young and hungry i wanna have them more in my orbit and i need to find some ex excuse to have them in my orbit and hang out with them and and hear what they think is interesting and meet their friends and and whatever like that is you know i think that is an actual strategy that most people miss out on everybody wants to to to sort of climb up they're like oh how do i meet the person who's done more than me or is more successful to me has more money than me whatever and they're focused constantly on like reaching up and trying to like pull themselves up and instead i found so much benefit out of just having a crew a small crew of like eighteen to twenty one year olds that i'm like okay you guys just think differently to me you're worried about different things and you're excited about different things than me how do i have that in my life in some way and so that's actually become a a more core strategy do you do anything like that yeah so listen to this so we had this kid by the way thank you for not making like a epstein joke i felt like i was tread i was like what you need is like fourteen year old dudes that you hang out with all the time it's like yeah no i i so i'm thirty three i'm just now hitting the age where i'm no longer the youngest guy in the room and i'm just hitting the age where i've got fifteen years or so of experience and i'm seeing younger people and i'm like oh you're full of energy you're gonna do something but you're making an air here and i'm just gonna let i'm just gonna watch you make that air because it's good for you i'm just now getting to the point where i'm able to be a little wise and i'm seeing the importance of surrounding ourselves with young people here's an example a year ago sean and i did this thing where we offered five thousand dollars to someone who made a tiktok video from our podcast and shared it one kid in particular his name was michael at the time he made these videos that reached tens of millions of people for us and we gave him the five grand and i went to email him and i was like dude you should do this full time and i asked him what his email and it was like you know michael at university of michigan dot edu and i was like wait who are he goes yeah just recorded this in my dorm room i'm like oh you're gonna be you're you're onto to something you're gonna be a superstar just start turn this into a company it turns into a company i guess r five k was this first money he makes tens of thousands of dollars a month eventually sells it to morning brew michael what's michael the same i don't even know a can can yeah and he comes out of my house and uses the studio and i just he'll means sarah will be in the kitchen and i'll just i go mike come out to the kitchen and have a coffee with me and me and sarah won't say a word and we'll just let him talk and i'm just like i'm just here to because he's twenty two maybe i'm like i'm kitchen have some chocolate with milk yeah you went a hot coco on a lollipop pop yeah sitting on my lap too while you're at it and like he just talks and about sixty percent of the stuff that he says is nonsense forty percent absolutely nonsense not just him anybody who fits this category you have to literally just immediately throw a sixty percent of the words but what i say don't my go michael most of what you're saying is bullshit and i think you might know it but look here's the deal even a blind squirrel finds a nut a nut once in a while keep on swing and you'll hit a home run soon because you're swinging and you're in the game and i appreciate that about you and if you ever wanna know what you're saying is bullshit just ask me and i'll tell you but i'm not gonna call you i'm gonna let get away with it all because i i like i like this gum and he tweeted something the other day that was hilarious he tweeted got bad news just got back in the chiropractor they said the chick my shoulders permanent how funny is that you and i was like this is why you're gonna make something of yourself now you might ruin it i say dub stuff and you're gonna cost yourself whole lot of money and you're gonna have a lot of headache throughout the years until you learn to be calmer but you know he feeling good about that line too when he tweeted oh you feeling kid but i appreciate that this is a young so i i had he moved austin i invite him over all the time and i go just talk man just just just talk i wanna hear what you gotta say and he's telling me like and i'm just like learning about what like the younger generation feels about this and that and he's like yeah we're gonna he's like he's has a birthday party coming up on saturday and we're taking some like new weird version of uber i don't even know what it is like a party bus company i don't even know what it is and but he's like this what this is what we're all use i was alright cool i'm in i just wanna experience this stuff so yes a long story short i totally i am experiencing this i have young people around me sounds weird but let's get past that no the blood strategy is a real strategy and and actually this is my reminder to myself i need to refresh my my young gloves are now like twenty four to twenty five and rich they like made it like okay so michael is one example the other guys who set up our initial studios here and then created that agency clip they've they do over a million dollars a year revenue off their off their thing and now their their content is going going nuts their short form videos are going nuts like millions of views and i handle like rep recommend rep man henry all the time i was like hey henry just so you know you shouldn't talk like this when you're in this meeting or something and then eventually i was you know not gonna give my advice i'm just gonna let them learn but i saw the same thing where i'm like you're making a bunch of mistakes but you're taking a ton of swings you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna hit the the kid i talked about sure probably has more money to me now from crypto the guy has made an absolute killing and crypto over the last few years and so done done incredibly well the guy who was my intern to start this podcast ish sean who was just like doing the video editing and like created the initial brand name and all that stuff he like invested all his money like a short stock a short decision on a not a short not a short one he he went all in he took basically he had like a hundred grand saved up after a couple years of work me and then for for a friend i introduced him to and he took the hundred grand and he just bought there was a stock that got d listed on a stock exchange so all the shareholders were like damn it what do we do with the stock that we can't trade anymore it's like ill liquid for and so he bought it all for like ten cents on the dollar being like i don't know i still believe and then that ran up to be worth a few million dollars his his hundred k basically turned into like a two to five million dollar stake at that time now now i think it's gone down a little bit but there's articles about him in the australian post or whatever now and i'm like dude this is crazy who and another one steve bartlett hired steve when i when he was eighteen nineteen years old maybe or maybe that's a little maybe the maybe he's twentieth at the time and i was like this guy again just dripping with swag and i was like i just wanna be around this guy this guy is like cool i don't know he wears like rings and he like says words i don't know and like for some reason he his tweets go viral i don't know it like mine don't so like what does this guy know and sure enough ends up creating this social media agency ends up taking it public has this great podcast that's super popular he's a shark on the shark tank of europe like this guy's like now he's like he's the blackberry gary v now and so it's like there's a it's like dude this i just thought a six in the last fifteen seconds like i don't know there might be even more that i'm not even remembering that were like come from the same batch and i need to i need a new batch my little personal yc this is good that you're talking about this so i was talking to a friend yesterday so producer ben you can leave all this slide but you're gonna have to bleep out what i'm i'm about to say but i want trying to know what it is so my friend i was talking to he said he he just mentioned it we were talking about something totally different and he's was like yeah you know like you i made thirty million dollars from an angel investment and yeah you know so this is how i found my accountant i did this this because i'm asking him for a good accountant and i was like where like i'd be the rewind sound i was like scared like you know scratched a record reverse tell me about this like he goes yeah basically i was you know like president of like a smallest startup up that wasn't doing so well and a twenty year old got kid who worked for me he quit to start a company and i was you know frustrated at first but like he was real promising and so i invested twenty five thousand dollars at a three million dollar valuation the company went public like a year or two ago and it was a fifteen billion dollar valuation it was called a market cap it was called this is the part you gotta bleep out it was called you know that company no but okay it's a boring nothing special like b to b whatever and he's he's like yeah i had seventy five thousand dollars at the time when i was running my first start i didn't have lot of money but i decided to invest all of it into startups and i did it in sizes of ten and twenty five thousand dollars and that one check that i did twenty five thousand and dollars it turned into thirty million dollars and and i was like are you kidding me he yeah basically like i knew this kid was strong and i wanted to be part of just whatever he was in i wanted to surround myself with young people and i thought he was promising some and in fact it it it it worked out really well and i made so much money off of this one deal and he goes and then the other one he said it made like a ten x return as well and he just got super lucky on that one and it totally worked out so it it's crazy story and i'm like well i've invested in a bunch of companies i'm late for that to happen that'd be nice yeah exactly equity well what what part do i do for the thirty billion or line for that am i the right line yeah yeah so it worked out it it's a crazy story that was good alright i had another one but let's let's save it for the next let's save the next episode because this is getting a little long now alright that's the pod i think that was a bang we forgot to remind people if you made it this far there is a gentleman's agreement this con that you're listening to it is not free we're like one of the only places on youtube actually where the content not free you have to pay what do you have to pay with that's your cue sean oh oh i was ent i was ready for you to do keep going i thought you were on one go ahead keep going you have to pay something in order to listen this channel if you've listened to more than one thing you have to do me a favor go to the youtube page and click subscribe because that like helps us or you know what what i'm gonna ask people to do if you're listening to this on like apple or spotify share this share on twitter linkedin all that stuff and and we're even so you listen to us i just spent hours on this research by the way and right you spent fifteen million dollars of lost money in order to make this content to tell that story yep i tell that story i'm blocked you in in front of you so you my subscribe to the channel yeah this is not a this is not this channel is not free you happen to click subscribe on youtube because we're trying to build up our youtube and you have to click subscribe and follow on the spot podcast by the way what i like people go in the comments on youtube and they just say they honored the gentleman's agreement and i go to each one and i just say from handshakes from handshakes to you from handshakes to youtube so that's what you have to do and by the way i read every comment on those youtube things alright we're out of here