#65 - Q&A with Andrew Wilkinson, Co-founder of Tiny

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, everyone, we have a quick ad for HubSpot. Sales super teams aren't built overnight. They require unicorn level talent, endless training, huge budgets, and lots of luck.
Or you could just use Sales Hub from HubSpot. It's an all-in-one platform built with all the tools for your success.
Smarter prospecting, check. Faster revenue, yup. Scales with your team, sure does. But in Sam's speak, I'm gonna put it way simpler. Just go to hubspot.com/sales, and it will make selling easier, faster, and more efficient. hubspot.com/sales.
Okay, today is a special episode with Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew Wilkinson is the founder of Tiny, which is a holding company, a venture capital firm. I don't know exactly what you want to describe it, but he'll tell you. But basically, they own about 10 different software companies, and Andrew was on the show a few days ago, and people loved him, including Shaan and I. We really liked him a lot too.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:51)
Yeah, he was such a popular guest that the only way to do better was to just remove me and Sam from the podcast altogether and let Andrew sit with a microphone and your questions and do an AMA. So, enjoy an AMA with Andrew Wilkinson.

**Andrew Wilkinson** (1:17)
Okay, so this is my first ever Ask Me Anything. I've never done one of these before. And I was supposed to be on a different podcast, but it ended up getting rescheduled. And so I decided to go on Twitter and see if anybody had questions for me.
And Shaan and Sam, from My First Million, have kindly said that they're going to put this on their feed.
So happy to answer everybody's questions. And if this goes well, maybe I'll keep doing these.
Let's get started.
So Rand asks, I know that you outright buy majority stakes in companies and hire CEOs to manage them. How do you find these CEOs that you can trust?
There's two things that we do. Generally, we start by sourcing people through our network. We're typically looking for people who we have some connection to already, which is a great way to vet people.
So what we'll do is go to our existing CEOs and executives across all of our companies and say, hey, we're acquiring a company. It's in this space. Who do you know? Who's the best executive or CEO that you know in that space? And that usually yields a lot of really interesting candidates. The other thing that we do is we try and recruit people that have already done the thing that we want. If you were going to go and build a new deck on your house, you wouldn't hire somebody who you thought could probably figure it out. You would go and hire a red seal carpenter who had built hundreds of decks, who is super confident. And so what we look for in a CEO to run one of our businesses is somebody who's already done it before, somebody who's been at a larger business and a similar industry and can come in and basically follow the same repeatable pattern that they used to grow the other business where they've already lived through that stage of growth. And then we put them in place. And when someone's done something a million times, they know exactly what to do. And you really don't have to oversee them that much.
Kevin asks, I've heard you mention Warren Buffet often. Are there any other leaders that you emulate or look up to? I love Warren Buffet. I'm a huge fan of his, and that's how I discovered investing. But I actually find his business partner, Charlie Munger, far more fascinating than Buffet. I mean, Buffett's amazing and everybody should read Warren Buffet letters and stuff. But Munger is kind of quietly in the background. He's his minority partner. Munger has what he calls a lattice work of mental models. It's a large collection of rules and ideas and heuristics kind of ways of thinking about problems that help you shortcut your thinking so that you can say, oh, that's one of those. An example of that would be availability bias. So if I have just been defrauded, I'm going to apply that experience to all my experiences in the short term. For the next month, I might be far more suspicious of everybody because it's available in my brain or I might apply that and see that everywhere. I might think everybody's trying to steal from me. Incentive caused bias. So an example of that would be all these CEOs who have done all these crazy share buybacks are now left with no money in the bank. A nice interpretation of that would be that they're simply just trying to return capital to their shareholders in a more tax-efficient manner than dividends.