Andrew Wilkinson is the co-founder of Tiny Capital, which owns companies including AeroPress, MetaLab and Dribble. Tiny Capital is often called the “Berkshire Hathaway of Tech Companies” and went public in 2023 with a billion dollar valuation.
Guest Author: Andrew Wilkinson
I started my company 16 years, 3 months, and 5 days ago. Today, it went public. But let’s rewind for a second… 5,939 days ago, I was a barista at a small cafe called @2percentJazz2, in Victoria, Canada.
I made $6.50 an hour. Two guys, Chris and Jeff, started coming into the cafe. They’d sit there all day drinking espresso and typing away on their laptops, using the wifi.
After weeks of this, I asked them what they did for a living. Didn’t they have jobs? They told me they were “web designers” and this — sitting on their laptops — was their job. As I dug in, they told me how it worked: They asked local businesses if they needed a website, then charged them a couple thousand bucks to make one. They could whip a website together in a few days, and each make $1,000. Simple. This blew my mind.
And at that moment, I realized something: I wanted to be the guy drinking the espresso, not the one serving it. Chris and Jeff were clearly smart, but I knew some basic HTML and figured I could do the same.
I decided to try it out. When I got off my shift, I took the bus over to a book store downtown and bought a book called ‘Bulletproof Web Design’ by Dan Cederholm (@simplebits) to hone my skills. Then, I googled “freelance web design jobs” and found a tech job board called Authentic Jobs made by this guy in Utah, @cameronmoll.
There were hundreds of posts, mostly from startups in San Francisco, looking for freelance web designers. I decided to try to win one of these contracts, but I had a critical insight: Nobody wants to hire an 18-year-old barista to build their website.
So, I decided I’d create a fake design agency. Using tricks from Dan Cederholm’s book, I whipped together a slick looking site and called my “agency” MetaLab (after the <meta> tag in HTML). The website was very vague as to what exactly MetaLab did, who worked there, or where we were located. It also featured a cringe-inducing tagline “We Help People Make Cool Stuff.”
Like an email spammer, I started sending emails to every single web design job post I could find. I was met with crickets, until I got an email from a guy named Kavin Stewart (@kavinstewart). He worked at a startup called Offermatica in San Francisco and told me he needed an interface designed for a web app. I barely understood what a web app was, but I assured him I could do it.
He proposed a $2,000 USD budget and my eyes went wide. This was more than I earned in a month, and the project was just a few days of work. I walked into the cafe the next day and quit my job. I told myself that if I could just make enough money to wake up whenever I wanted and comfortably make rent, I’d be good.
The rest is history. But I slightly overshot. I still own MetaLab, but along the way me and my business partner @_Sparling_ started dozens of companies, then began buying wonderful businesses, including one (Dribbble) — amazingly — from Dan Cederholm, the designer whose book I bought when I first started.
Today, Tiny went public, and as of this moment has a market capitalization of just under $800 million. I can’t even begin to explain how mind boggling this is to me. This has not been a feat of entrepreneurial genius.
My key skill has been choosing incredible people to work with, both internally and externally, and I wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who has worked at Tiny and our various companies over the years.
And a special thanks to @simplebits, @cameronmoll, and @kavinstewart for helping with my first step
Watch for us on the TSX Venture Exchange under the ticker TINY (how cool is that ticker?).
Check out the original tweet here.
