How Andrew Wilkinson Runs a $180M Company Working 4 Hours a Day

**Andrew Wilkinson** (0:00)
There's a lot of people that are suffering. So many entrepreneurs create prisons of their own making, and one of the prisons you can make is your own narratives. The areas where you can make the most money are not the sexy ones. That was the moment where I was like, I need to be an investor.

**Wouter Teunissen** (0:13)
When you're investing in a business, is it now one of the questions you ask yourself, like, how can AI disrupt this?

**Andrew Wilkinson** (0:17)
People have so much scaffolding protecting them from real connection. When I talk to most entrepreneurs, it's about freedom. I think all businesses should be lifestyle businesses ultimately, because what is a business if it's not improving your lifestyle? I was pouring my heart out and saying, oh my god, I'm running five businesses and I hate my life. Just so stressed out, I almost break. And my friend just stops me and he looks at me and he goes...

**Wouter Teunissen** (0:41)
I think let's just continue talking about what we just left off. Like, how do you use money in interesting ways? You've got the People Conference. You probably do a lot of other interesting things. Like, let's talk about that. I think that's fascinating.

**Andrew Wilkinson** (0:50)
Yeah. So, I mean, when I first started making money, I went out and did all the things that every 22-year-old wants to do, right? I went and bought big screen TV and a sports car and a house and all that stuff. And I found, ultimately, it was really hollow. Don't get me wrong, driving a nice car is nice and having a house is nice and stuff, but total diminishing returns. And when I actually pulled the thread on why do I like business, business for me is a way to tweak things and make them better. So I'm the kind of person where, here's an example, I have a cafe I go to every day and I'm always looking at it and being like, why is the lighting not better? Why is that art on the wall?
Why isn't the food better? I just want to make everything 20% better. I'm always a little dissatisfied. And so that's really fun. But the real reason I like business is that I get to meet interesting people and connect with others. And so I think business is a really great hack to make friends, basically. And fortunately, you get to because business is this universal language, you can apply it to almost anything. You know, you could do restaurants, you could do journalism, you can do software companies, AI, like whatever you're interested in, you just kind of go down the rabbit hole. And so I've used it a lot in that way. And one of the things that I've done to invest in meeting interesting people is just basically creating events where I can connect with people. Like I basically, one of the things I started doing about six or seven years ago is I would just find people that I thought were fascinating, and I would just cold email them, and I'd say, hey, look, if I donated $25,000 to the charity of your choice, would you come and speak to me and some friends in Victoria? And so it's great. I get all my friends together, so I get to hang out with all my friends. We get to meet an amazing person. Often, because it's an amazing person, I can get even more interesting people who I have never met to come to the event and meet them. And then, usually, I have dinner with the person who comes to speak or whatever. And so, for me, that's actually been this incredibly enjoyable way of using money to just meet all these fascinating people, and it's resulted in this very broad network of friends. And when I was younger, so that's a later stage, when I had more money to throw around to do that kind of stuff.

**Wouter Teunissen** (3:12)
How did you do that initially? Are there stages to... Now you're throwing conferences and events, right? What are those stages?

**Andrew Wilkinson** (3:17)
Well, at first, it was going to rooms that I didn't deserve to be in.
So when I had a $1 million a year business, I think I spent $20,000 or something to go to the TED conference. And I was a nobody. I was shocked I got in. And through that, we were talking earlier before we started recording about Derek Sivers, who, if people don't know, they need to look him up. He's such a fascinating character. But when I was at the TED conference, I was lucky enough to sit next to Derek and I said, hey, I've read your blog for a long time. And he was so incredibly sweet. He showed me to all his friends, and we went out for lunch, and I made more great friends from that. And I just started going to TED every year. And through that, again, it's just if you put yourself in a room of interesting people, you naturally, A, you get business opportunities. And we were talking about, you know, you increase your opportunity surface area. But then you also just make all these incredible friends. So now I have friends in the world of science and, you know, AI and music and all these places I never would have before.