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

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
His company, which is called Tiny, which buys businesses, it's going public.
And Andrew owns roughly 71% 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 at what they want it to trade at, that's about 700 to 800 million dollars that Andrew will have from it, all starting with a bootstrap agency. And I wanna walk through his journey. And I think this is amazing. It's pretty mind blowing.
All right, let's do it.

**Sam Parr** (0:36)
I'm fancy shirt, fancy shirt.
All I gotta say is fancy shirt. 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 they got a haircut. I'm not subtle about it. I'll just, I act like a dog barking. I'm just like, nice haircut, you got you, you changed your face.

**Shaan Puri** (0:58)
The thing that the audience is gonna call me out on is I couldn't find my other glasses, so I have to wear these glasses. The problem with them is that asshole Jeffrey Dahmer decided to wear the same ones.
It looks like I'm gonna ask you like, do you wanna come back to the apartment to take some tasteful pictures and have some beers? They'll be real nice that you ruined it for me.

**Sam Parr** (1:21)
Some people are into that.

**Shaan Puri** (1:23)
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 16th, so if you wanna come see us live.
He basically, by the way, I gotta 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 it's guesses, but not all of it.
He basically had a company that was publicly traded called WeeCommerce, and it was not doing great. It like peaked at like 500 million, went down to 80 million. Anyway, he's doing a reverse takeover. No, sorry, he's doing a merge. And his company, which is called Tiny, which buys businesses, it's going public.
And Andrew owns roughly 71% 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 at what they want it to trade at, that's about 700 to $800 million 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.

**Sam Parr** (2:36)
Okay, by the way, the billion dollars, is this one problem by the way, is that all of his numbers were in Canadian dollars, it was all CAD instead of USD. So is this a billion CAD or is this a billion USD?

**Shaan Puri** (2:46)
Everything I'm gonna say is Canadian. And I don't know what the conversion rate is of monopoly money to USD, but it's somewhere close enough that we're still in the same ballpark.

**Sam Parr** (2:56)
Yeah, so I think it's a little bit more like 700 million is the number that basically just discounted something like 20, 30%.

**Shaan Puri** (3:03)
Yeah, Andrew's in CAD is Canadian, Andrew's in Canada.

**Sam Parr** (3:06)
If you ever really wanna inflate something, right? Like if you're 5'9, you're 5'11 CAD.
So just go CAD and you'll get that little extra that you feel you've been missing your whole life.

**Shaan Puri** (3:20)
So dude, this story, it's really impressive. Andrew comes in the pod and we mess with him, but like this is, we treat him like he's one of us.
What he's pulled off is like not one of us, man. It's pretty epic.

**Sam Parr** (3:32)
He's actually more like 20 of us if you add it all up.

**Shaan Puri** (3:36)
He's the Brian Scalabrini of rich guys. Like this is the Scallenge.

**Sam Parr** (3:41)
He's the worst billionaire I know, but he's the best millionaire I know. Yeah, for sure.

**Shaan Puri** (3:48)
I mean, he's killing it. So listen to this. So basically the company that is taking public, at this point has, now this stuff is actually public.
It's doing about 150 million in revenue, 50 million in EBITDA. And so here's the story. So 2006, Andrew was, I think 19 He started a web design agency called MetaLab. And MetaLab is like the core of all this. In year one, it had $250,000 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 Butterfield, he reached out to Andrew and 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 whole scope of that work, but like more than logos, but including logos, I believe, right?