My First Million Live Event With Andrew Wilkinson (Austin Texas)

Keep standing, put your hands together for Webby Award-winning Sean Puri, Sam Parr, and special guest Andrew Wilkinson. Come on out, you guys. Extra mics.

Alright!

So we are backstage and we saw like all the bands that have played here. It's like Franz Ferdinand and like The Killers and all these cool things. And I heard the sound guys— first of all, sound guys, I want to apologize. I heard them talking before this and they're like, "What the fuck is this?" Like, there's like, "Is this like a rich guy's birthday party?

What is this?" I think they thought it was a graduation happening.

So sound guys, sorry, but it is what it is.

You always wanted to be a star. You wanted to walk out to a sold-out venue, and, uh, I guess this was— it's one way to do it.

Yeah, it's one way to do it. So sound guys, it's gonna be the lamest thing you're gonna see this week, but maybe you'll learn something. I don't know. Uh, but this is awesome. What do you think?

Working?

Fuck you, sound guys.

It's working.

Come on, guys.

You can tell who the real podcasters are.

So, so So we did this huge event in Vancouver. We had like 1,200 people in this massive theater. And Sam sneaks out on the stage. And I'm like, what are you doing? And he's peering around the corner taking photos. And he goes, I'm posting this on Facebook. And I was like, who the fuck uses Facebook? That's so weird. And he goes, all the people I went to high school with.

And so we wanted to start off by saying, we were laughing backstage. And we were like, right before we came on, we're like, we got to talk about Nick Gray. Does anyone here— has anyone here met Nick Gray? That was the guy that was just talking.

Nick, I just met him for the first time last night. He is— I don't know if he's the most interesting man in the world, but he's like the most interesting man in Texas for sure. I'll give him that.

I feel like on this show we always talk about billionaires and there's a lot of money billionaires, but Nick is a friend billionaire.

Yeah, last night. So we hosted a dinner last night with like, I don't know, 15 people. And Sam had set it all up. It was going to be perfect. He had this like high-end restaurant, table for 14. The time was locked in. We got reminders. We show up. It's supposed to be beautiful, you know, just a first-class dinner. Everything was taken care of. And we get there and immediately the plan was blown up. It was raining outside.

It starts raining like crazy and our seat was like half outside.

Yeah.

So we weren't going to be able to do it immediately. Nick Gray improvises. He's like, hold on, you six to the bar. And then he sprinted because I pulled up, I saw him running, and I was like, Nick Gray, where are you going? And he was like, I'm scoping out a venue.

And he—

I don't know where he went.

He runs into this place and he's like, hey, is this an event space?

And it's soaking wet.

Yeah. And the women look at each other and they're like What? And he goes, what's the name of this place? And they go, it's called Miss Kitty's. And he's like, are you guys an event space? What do you do? He goes, we wax women.

He goes, oh, I got 15 dudes outside. Do you have an event space or not? But he did. He found us this like, like abandoned shack, almost this amazing place. And he got us—

it was really like a shed.

It was an abandoned shed, but it was like I don't know, it was perfect. It was exactly what we needed. It was outside the rain. We were all in there. It was quiet. We could talk. And he hosts this thing. So what Nick does is he has this book called, I think, The Two-Hour Cocktail Party. And he's basically perfected the art of a two-hour party. And I got to see it firsthand. He takes out his harmonica to get everyone's attention. And then he has this way of getting everybody to open up, to talk, to sit in the right places, do the right things. And it was incredible. The best part though was he saved you.

So Nick is looking around and he walks up to me, he goes, "Hey, are you all good? Everything good?" And I say, "Okay, I wanna go to the shed. I'm excited. I'm a little bit cold though. Is it gonna be heated?" And he goes, "Hold on, I'll be right back." And he runs outside and like Sam said, it's like pouring rain. I don't know if you guys witnessed this yesterday, but it was insane. He comes back, he's soaking wet. Soaking wet. He looks like that scene in Glengarry Glen Ross when the guy's like at the doorstep, and he brings me this sweatshirt which he had paid like $70 for. That's who Nick Gray is.

And the reason we're bringing this up is not because we like him.

To be clear, we like him.

To be clear, we like him, but that's not why we're bringing this up. But on our pod, My First Million, uh, and by the way, is everyone here— is anyone who doesn't listen to MFM here?

Who's here for the graduation?

Yeah, okay. And who here actually listens to us regularly? All right, that's good enough. And so we bring up all these like weird businesses that a lot of people haven't, um, heard about. And this one is probably the weirdest one. He, he told me he was gonna write this book about a cocktail party. I thought it was a horrible idea. And so far he's sold 11,000 copies of this book, which is insane. And he, um, and so we have this dinner and we meet all these interesting people at this like 14-person dinner. I think we had a guy there. Who sold a company that sold dog supplements, which is like the greatest business ever because who knows if it works, right? Like you have no idea. He sold his company for $650 million. It was insane. And he was telling us a story about this. We had another guy who sells also dog-related dog ramps. So like, so your old or small dog can like go up on the couch and he does $18 million a year in sales. There was another guy there. That has a website that is like a marketplace so you can rent a tractor and it's killing it. We had a, a person who has a car— a bunch of— owns a bunch of car washes that does tens of millions in profit. What else we have? Anything else that was weird?

It was, it was crazy. It was different than San Francisco. If you go to San Francisco or New York, you get one type of entrepreneur. You get the, you know, AI, crypto, you get that in SF. In New York, you get something else. And in Austin, you get mustache, hat tilt, and like, I sell tractors online, or I'll sell your dog some vitamins. You know, you get a different type of entrepreneur. I bet in the crowd right now, we gotta have some interesting businesses.

Who here has a business? Let's get a sense of who's here.

Get a hand up.

So keep your hand up if you own a business. And if you do over $100,000—

Raise 'em high, raise 'em up, raise 'em like you're proud.

If you do over $100,000, keep it up. If you do $500,000, keep it up. $1 million, $5 million.

Okay, we got a few.

Okay, $20 million, anybody? No? Okay, back to $5 million.

No, no, no, we got them over here. We got a couple.

Okay, $20 million, $20 million and up.

Couple of—

we got one over here, two here, one in the back.

Any of those, any of them profitable? Okay. All right. Okay, Nick, we want to talk to these guys. I want to know what their businesses are.

Put your hands up. Hand is up. I'm coming over here. All right, stand up please. Let's hear from you.

What's your name and what's your business?

Kelsey Larick, 365 Holdings. We're an e-commerce roll-up.

Sorry, can you say that one more time in slow motion, please?

365 Holdings. We roll up e-commerce businesses. I want to be Andrew Wilkinson when I grow up.

You don't, trust me.

He's blushing up here.

It's very sad.

It sounds like a good gig. Okay, great.

Who's the guy next to you?

Justin Turner, Traction Capital. We have a business that sells equipment to fire departments.

What do you mean?

I love the way you said all that, but I'm gonna, can I just try being you for a second? Sean Puri, Puri, dad of the house, change diapers. Like you just said an awesome thing, but with such like, yeah, you probably read about me. That's the vibe I got.

We sell like, $37 million worth of equipment that fire departments use and firemen use every day.

Like a hose?

Yeah, hoses, nozzles.

Uniforms?

Uniforms.

And why is— OK, so what about competition? Is it just like you're the only one in town, there's only one place to buy them? Or do you have a moat of some kind?

We have exclusive distribution relationships in 9 of the western states in the US.

How much profit on $37 million in revenue?

Uh, it's about 10% margin.

Does it feel uncomfortable when I ask you these questions? Should I ask like, what do you look like naked? Like, what was it like when you lost your virginity?

There's only one way to find out.

This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa, I can see the client's whole history— calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a test from 3 days ago. I took Totally missed.

HubSpot, grow better.

Um, all right, what else? And who else, uh, who's got a weirder story than that?

Anybody got a weirder story?

Yeah, put your hand up if you got a really weird business.

Okay, it was like weird. Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Hold on one second, please.

Okay, so this is a paper koozie, but I own a 40,000 square foot printware shop warehouse and we print real koozies. So like it's really niche and it's really random.

Not these small boy koozies that we handed out.

Not these like, just like— How long you been running your business for?

I've been in business for 8 years, but we do a lot of different types of printing.

Did you become a millionaire selling beer koozies?

That was my first largest e-com store that I created.

Yeah.

Selling koozies 'cause I'm from the Midwest and we drink a lot of beer and that's—

You look like you're from the Midwest. Yeah, I just moved to Austin though. You and I look—

I'm close to St. Louis actually.

Is that your sister? What's going on here?

Yeah. We can be cousins.

Anyone else have a really, really weird business? Like dog ramp level weird business?

Tell them to let the freak flag fly. Oh, here we go. Guy with the Austin stache.

There it is.

The capital V-neck shirt.

You just grow those when you fly in. As soon as you cross the border, the mustache just pops up.

We make custom dog treats for hospitality businesses. So like when the Ritz-Carlton has guests come with dogs, we provide the dog treats that they give to their guests. And why wouldn't they just use normal dog treats? Because ours have their branding on them. Oh, very smart.

How big is that?

We started 10 months ago and we've grown it to half a million in 10 months at run rate.

Wow.

That's cool.

This is cool. We're going to— we're going to hear more businesses because a little bit later we're going to do like a Shark Tank type of thing with a bunch of— a bunch of pitches. Yeah, you're—

we can put— we can put the lights down.

2 times. Okay, there we go.

So the cool part about like doing this stuff is we get to meet all these interesting people who are succeeding and some are failing, which is actually just or more interesting. Um, but speaking of a big success, Andrew over here took his company public.

I thought you were pointing at me.

Uh, Andrew over here just took his company public. It's called Tiny. It's not that tiny.

Yeah, that should be the tagline. It's not that tiny.

And you were telling, he was telling us a story that we had not heard about almost selling the company like 6 years ago.

This was a backstage story. Can we tell it? I think we can.

Yeah, we can, we can tell it. So there's, there's really 2 stories.

So one, by the way, If you don't know, I gotta do the intro. Andrew started this thing called Meta Lab. It was an agency that made a bunch of tech stuff for big companies. Using the profits from that company, he then started buying and investing in other companies, which that hold company— that hold company was— or holdco was called Tiny. He recently took it public last week. It's now trading at $850 million Canadian dollars, which is Only like $600 million in real money. Uh, no, but it was, it's a huge success, but it all started because he had this agency called Meta Lab where he was, um, you know, like I said, doing stuff for tech people, but you were saying earlier that how that was like the foundation for the success of everything else, but you, it, you almost did something crazy early on.

Yeah. So I almost wasn't sitting, wouldn't be sitting here. So, uh, we were sitting at dinner the other night and talking about this and, uh, There's two stories. So one, I got very excited. When you have a business, you always know how much it sucks, how hard it is to run, and you always admire other people's businesses. And so I always wanted like a SaaS business, a sexy business. And so I started one. I started this productivity business called Flow. It was like a sauna, except we didn't raise any money. And we had a great product, but it just— Didn't go anywhere.

So it's like task management software.

Task management, which is like—

One of the hardest things to do.

One of the hardest businesses in the world. And I got so excited about it at one point that I was up at like 11 o'clock at night, I was feeling all manic, I'd probably had a couple beers, and I sent this email to the entire staff and I said, guys, we're shutting MetaLab down, we're going all in on Flow. And Chris, my business partner, who's here somewhere, where's Chris? Chris is over there. Chris was the CFO at the time, and he looked at the numbers, and he was like, we will be out of business in 3 months. How big was Flow?

Flow?

I think Flow was doing like $300K of revenue.

How big was MetaLab?

$2 million or something like that.

And so how big was MetaLab when you, when, when you were—

$2 million maybe at that point.

So $2 million in revenue versus $300,000?

$300K or something. I was just like, moment of insanity. And Chris went around to all the employees quietly and was like, please don't leave, please don't leave, we'll be bankrupt in like a week, and saved the day. And then the second story was, uh, Chris and I We, you know, running an agency is really stressful and we got this offer for the business to sell it for $15 million. This is about 8 or 9 years ago, almost 10 years ago. And—

$15, one-five?

$15, one-five. And we actually went through the whole process, you know, spent 4 months going back and forth with this private equity firm. We signed the documents, you know, my lawyer calls me in, quivering hand, I sign the documents. And the wire's supposed to come in the next day. And so I wake up, I go to my local bank branch, I go to the ATM, and I look at the balance. My balance is the same. And I think, okay, it's probably gonna come in later, so I check later, nothing. Next day, nothing. Next day, nothing. I call the guy at the private equity firm, and he goes, hey man, I'm really sorry, but we weren't able to finish closing our fund, so the deal's not done. So I legally sold the business, And if the wire had come in, I would— my business would be worth maybe nothing at this point because this was the entire foundation of the business. And we would be tiny. So we almost lost it all.

What do you think it's worth now, Meta Lab?

I don't know. Hundreds of millions for sure. But I don't know.

It all could have just one decision. Actually, you made the decision.

And it was all driven by anxiety, right? It's panic. I'm sure every one of you that runs a business, everyone knows how miserable it is inside, right? You talk to people, you look at them on the outside, you go, they're an amazing operator. They have a great business. But on the inside, there's a great quote by Brent Beshore. He goes, every business is a slow motion knife fight, right? Like you just wake up in the morning, you're sweating and you're fighting, trying to survive, right? And we felt that way and we pushed through and it was okay, but we almost gave in.

Did you, before you sold The Hustle to HubSpot, did you ever almost sell? Did you come close to selling before that?

So when I was running the company, I was miserable most every time. So if you, Go on like Facebook or Instagram, look at my pictures from like 2017 and '18. I was lumpy. I was like pretty fat. Uh, and I was like, cause I was eating all the time to like make myself feel better. So I was miserable most of the time. And then this one company emailed me to, uh, they showed interest in buying. And so I fly all the way out to New York and I start talking to them and I get in their office. And like, it's empty. And I'm like, where is everyone? And they're like, oh, they're doing stuff.

And I'm—

and they take me to an office to have the meeting. And I look in the windows of each office and they're in a— every employee is in a sexual harassment seminar because the CMO had just like, you know, gone off the rails and did a bunch of bad shit. And so they get me in a room, they like send me a term sheet and they're like, we'll buy your company for $10 million. But it's going to be all in stock. And I was like, well, show me the financials and like, let me see what's going on with your business. And I got a peek in it and the company was Vice, Vice Media, which means that deal I was so close to taking, it would be worth zero. I'd probably be in debt because Vice, like the valuation has just plummeted. And so I almost took that because I was so like desperate to get out.

Sexual harassment seminar almost saved you.

It did. Yeah.

Yes.

You're a survivor.