My First Million Live Event With Andrew Wilkinson (Austin, Texas) (Part 1)

Episode 454: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) are joined by Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) in Austin, TX for a live MFM event. Here's part 1 of the show. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter ----- Links: * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ----- Show Notes: (8:05) - Who has a business? (12:10) - Andrew Wilkinson's Tiny story ------ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Wilkinson?

  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 Metal Lab 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 three months."

• 0:57Sam Parr?

  Alright.

• 0:59Sam Parr?

  So we're 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. 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?"

• 1:18Sam Parr?

  There's like, "Is this like a rich guy's birthday party? What is this?"

• 1:21Shaan Puri?

  I think they thought it was a graduation happening.

• 1:24Sam Parr?

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

• 1:27Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:34Sam Parr?

  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. But this is awesome. What do you think?

• 1:45Andrew Wilkinson?

  Working?

• 1:45Sam Parr?

  Fuck you, sound guy.

• 1:46Andrew Wilkinson?

  Is this working? Come on, guys.

• 1:49Shaan Puri?

  You can tell who the real podcasters are up here.

• 1:52Andrew Wilkinson?

  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."

• 2:13Sam Parr?

  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 gotta talk about Nick Gray. Does anyone here, has anyone here met Nick Gray? That was the guy that was just talking.

• 2:28Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 2:37Andrew Wilkinson?

  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.

• 2:45Shaan Puri?

  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 gonna 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.

• 3:11Sam Parr?

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

• 3:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so we weren't gonna 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.

• 3:33Sam Parr?

  He runs into this place, and he's like, "Hey, is this a event space?"

• 3:38Shaan Puri?

  It's soaking wet.

• 3:39Sam Parr?

  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 in an event space? What do you do?" He goes, "We wax women." He goes, "Oh."

• 3:52Shaan Puri?

  "I got 15 dudes outside."

• 3:53Sam Parr?

  "Do you have an event space or not?"

• 3:56Shaan Puri?

  But he did, he found us this like, abandoned shack, almost, this amazing place. And he got us.

• 4:04Sam Parr?

  It was really like a shed.

• 4:05Shaan Puri?

  It was an abandoned shed, but it was like, I don't know, it was perfect. It was exactly what we did, it was outside the rain. We were all in, there 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 like, 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.

• 4:40Andrew Wilkinson?

  So Nick is looking around and he walks up to me and he goes, "Hey, are you all good? Everything good?" And I say, "Okay, I want to 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. He looks like that scene in Gary Glenn 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.

• 5:10Sam Parr?

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

• 5:15Shaan Puri?

  To be clear, we like him.

• 5:16Sam Parr?

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

• 5:25Shaan Puri?

  Who's here for the graduation?

• 5:26Sam Parr?

  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 heard about, and this one is probably the weirdest one. 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 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

• 6:07Sam Parr?

  company for $650 million. It was insane. 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 person who has a bunch of, owns a bunch of car washers that does tens of millions in profit. What else? We have anything else that was weird?

• 6:37Shaan Puri?

  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 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.

• 7:04Andrew Wilkinson?

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

• 7:07Shaan Puri?

  Get a hand up.

• 7:08Andrew Wilkinson?

  So keep your hand up if you own a business. And if you do over a hundred thousand.

• 7:11Shaan Puri?

  Raise them high. Raise them up. Raise them like you're proud.

• 7:14Andrew Wilkinson?

  If you do over a hundred thousand dollars, keep it up. If you do five hundred thousand, keep it up. One million, five million.

• 7:23Shaan Puri?

  Okay, we got a few. Hold on.

• 7:24Andrew Wilkinson?

  Twenty million, anybody? No? Okay, back to five.

• 7:27Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no. We got them over here.

• 7:29Andrew Wilkinson?

  We got a couple. Okay, twenty million, twenty million and up.

• 7:31Shaan Puri?

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

• 7:34Andrew Wilkinson?

  Any of those, any of them profitable?

• 7:38Andrew Wilkinson?

  Okay, all right. Okay, Nick, we want to talk to these guys. I want to know what their businesses are.

• 7:43Speaker 03

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

• 7:48Shaan Puri?

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

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Kelsey Larrick, 365 Holdings, we're an e-commerce roll-up.

• 7:53Andrew Wilkinson?

  Sorry, can you say that one more time?

• 7:54Shaan Puri?

  In slow motion, please.

• 7:56Speaker 03

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

• 8:03Andrew Wilkinson?

  You don't, trust me.

• 8:05Shaan Puri?

  He's blushing up here.

• 8:06Andrew Wilkinson?

  It's very sad.

• 8:07Shaan Puri?

  It sounds like a good idea. Okay, great. Who's the guy next to you?

• 8:11Speaker 04

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

• 8:17Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 8:24Shaan Puri?

  Sean Puri, Puri, dad of, dad of the house, changed diapers.

• 8:31Shaan Puri?

  Like you just said an awesome thing, but with such like, yeah, you're probably right about me. That's the vibe I got.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  We sell like thirty seven million dollars worth of equipment that fire departments use and firemen use every day.

• 8:43Sam Parr?

  Like a hose? Like, like?

• 8:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, hoses, nozzles.

• 8:47Andrew Wilkinson?

  Uniforms?

• 8:48Speaker 04

  Uniforms.

• 8:49Andrew Wilkinson?

  And why is, okay, so and 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?

• 8:57Speaker 04

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

• 9:04Sam Parr?

  How much profit on thirty seven million in revenue?

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Uh, it's about ten percent margin.

• 9:08Sam Parr?

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

• 9:14Speaker 04

  There's only one way to find out.

• 9:17Sam Parr?

  All right, what else? And who else?

• 9:19Shaan Puri?

  Who's got a weirder story than that? Anybody got a weirder story than that?

• 9:22Andrew Wilkinson?

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

• 9:24Shaan Puri?

  She immediately was like, weird? Yes.

• 9:26Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 9:27Shaan Puri?

  Hold on one second, please.

• 9:30Speaker 05

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

• 9:40Shaan Puri?

  Not these small boy koozies that we hand it out.

• 9:43Andrew Wilkinson?

  How long you been running your business for?

• 9:44Speaker 05

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

• 9:49Andrew Wilkinson?

  Did you become a millionaire selling beer koozies?

• 9:51Speaker 05

  That was my first largest e-comm store that I created, yeah. Selling koozies, because I'm from the Midwest and we drink a lot of beer and that's.

• 10:00Sam Parr?

  You look like you're from the Midwest.

• 10:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I just.

• 10:03Sam Parr?

  You and I like.

• 10:04Speaker 05

  I'm close to St. Louis, actually.

• 10:06Shaan Puri?

  Is that your sister?

• 10:06Sam Parr?

  What's going on here?

• 10:09Sam Parr?

  We can be cousins.

• 10:10Andrew Wilkinson?

  Anyone else have a really, really weird business? Like Dog Ramp level weird business?

• 10:15Shaan Puri?

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

• 10:20Andrew Wilkinson?

  Oh, there it is.

• 10:22Sam Parr?

  The capital V neck shirt.

• 10:23Shaan Puri?

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

• 10:28Speaker 06

  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.

• 10:38Andrew Wilkinson?

  And why wouldn't they just use normal dog treats?

• 10:40Speaker 06

  Because ours have their branding on them.

• 10:41Andrew Wilkinson?

  Oh, very smart. How big is that?

• 10:43Speaker 06

  Um, we started ten months ago and we've grown it to half a million in ten months at Front Rate.

• 10:47Andrew Wilkinson?

  Wow, that's cool.

• 10:49Shaan Puri?

  This is cool. We're gonna, we're gonna hear more businesses because a little bit later, we're gonna do like a Shark Tank-y type of thing with a bunch of, uh, bunch of pitches. Yeah?

• 10:56Sam Parr?

  And we can put, we can put the lights on.

• 10:58Shaan Puri?

  Two times. Okay, there we go.

• 11:01Sam Parr?

  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. But, speaking of a big success, Andrew over here took his company public.

• 11:15Shaan Puri?

  I thought you were pointing at me.

• 11:17Sam Parr?

  No.

• 11:19Sam Parr?

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

• 11:25Shaan Puri?

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

• 11:29Sam Parr?

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

• 11:37Shaan Puri?

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

• 11:39Andrew Wilkinson?

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

• 11:42Sam Parr?

  By the way, if you don't know, I gotta do the intro. Andrew started this thing called Metallab. 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 or hold co 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 bucks in real money. Uh, no, but it was, it's a huge success. But it all started because he had this agency called Metallab where he was, um, you know, like I said, doing stuff for tech people. But you were saying earlier that how that

• 12:23Sam Parr?

  was like the foundation for the success of everything else. But you, it, you almost did something crazy early on.

• 12:30Andrew Wilkinson?

  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. It, you know, you, when, 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, sexy business. And so I started one. I started this productivity, uh, business called Flow. It was like a sauna, except we didn't raise any money and we... We had a great product, but it just didn't go anywhere.

• 13:03Sam Parr?

  Like task management software?

• 13:04Andrew Wilkinson?

  Task management.

• 13:05Sam Parr?

  Which is like one of the hardest things to do.

• 13:06Andrew Wilkinson?

  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 three months.

• 13:32Sam Parr?

  How big was Flow at the time?

• 13:33Andrew Wilkinson?

  Flow was doing like 300K of revenue.

• 13:35Sam Parr?

  And how big was MetaLab?

• 13:36Andrew Wilkinson?

  And MetaLab was like 2 million or something like that. And so Chris-

• 13:39Sam Parr?

  How big was MetaLab when you were-

• 13:41Andrew Wilkinson?

  2 million maybe at that point?

• 13:42Sam Parr?

  So 2 million in revenue versus 300,000?

• 13:44Andrew Wilkinson?

  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 Chris and I, 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 eight or nine years ago, almost 10 years ago.

• 14:09Sam Parr?

  15, 1, 5?

• 14:11Andrew Wilkinson?

  15, 1, 5. And we actually went through the whole process, you know, spent four months going back and forth with this private equity firm. We signed the documents, you know, my lawyer calls me in, quivering hand, I signed the documents and the wire is 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 going to 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 is not done. So I legally sold the business and if the wire had come in, I would, my business would

• 14:54Andrew Wilkinson?

  be worth maybe nothing at this point because this was the entire foundation of the business. And we would be, we would be tiny. So we almost lost it all.

• 15:01Sam Parr?

  What do you think it's worth now, MetaLab?

• 15:03Andrew Wilkinson?

  I don't know, hundreds of millions for sure. But I don't, I don't know.

• 15:07Shaan Puri?

  And didn't you try? It all could have just one decision. Actually, you made the decision.

• 15:11Andrew Wilkinson?

  And it's, and it was all driven by anxiety, right? It's panic. Every, I'm sure every one of you that runs a business, everyone knows how miserable it is inside, right? I've, 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 B. Shore. 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.

• 15:38Shaan Puri?

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

• 15:46Sam Parr?

  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 flew, 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 a, an office to have the meeting and I look in the windows of each office

• 16:26Sam Parr?

  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. Um, and so they get me in a room, they like send me a term sheet and they're like, "Well, 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, 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, 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.

• 17:04Shaan Puri?

  The sexual harassment seminar almost saved you.

• 17:06Sam Parr?

  It did, yeah.

• 17:08Shaan Puri?

  You're a survivor.

• 17:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah.