Thread by Jeremy Giffon

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Tiny announced its IPO with a near $1 billion valuation.

I was the first employee.

Here’s what I learned:
First, some background: @awilkinson & @_Sparling_ created a billion dollar fortune in their thirties. They never took VC or gave up control. Today, it does over $110mm of revenue and $50mm of EBITDA and they own 98% of it.

Now, let’s talk about how they did it:
The best deals are so obviously good they should smack you in the face. It only took a few sentences to get the team excited about our best deals. The ones that required heaps of justification were never as good.
The better the investor, the simpler the questions. When I started, I was obsessed with jargon, complex questions and spreadsheets. Now I ask things like “what does it do?”, “why do people buy it?”, and “why are you selling?”. And I never do more math than I can fit on a napkin.
Buy your way in. Andrew paid $57k to have lunch with Bill Ackman and now he is the largest outside shareholder in Tiny. You can meet anyone. No one is as busy or hard to reach as you think and good company is always scarce.
Just send an email or make a donation and be interesting
To get started, give it a name. A great thing I learned from Andrew is when you have an idea, take action right away by giving it a name, buying a domain and throwing up a website.This transforms it from an idea into something real.
If you’re selling something for 0 marginal cost you should be printing money. If not, you better have a good reason. It’s possible to have VC like growth while being profitable. Just because a company spends a lot and grows a lot doesn't mean the two are casually related.
The most successful people respond the fastest. This is because they are routers. Their job is to make sure the right task for the business gets to the best person in the business. They never Not work on the task or try to be the best person themselves.
If it's considered an ‘asset' it’s too late. When we started investing everyone would look at us like we were crazy and ask if what we were buying was even a ‘real asset’. Job boards, plug-ins, Shopify apps, you name it.

Easier to find a new pond than to be the best fisherman.
Have a villain. We started Tiny after getting jerked around for 6 months by traditional private equity firms. It was easy to figure out what Tiny should be by looking at who we didn’t want to be. This meant no steak dinners, suits, lawyers, investment bankers or complicated terms
Put up or shut up. You can’t call yourself an investor unless you lose money when things go wrong. Every investor at Tiny has put a material amount of their own money into each deal. If you win, you win big and if you lose it hurts. You make more money and it’s more fun.
Let your people get burned. Putting someone in charge means you can’t come to their rescue if they screw up. If you do, they’re not actually in charge. It was only once we let our CEOs make mistakes, botch hires and waste money that the businesses really started to take off.
After hiring tons of CEOs there’s only one question that really matters. After you have a convo, do you both leave feeling energized or drained? We’ve never regretted hiring someone we look forward to talking to but have made many mistakes hiring otherwise great people we did not
Fly people in. There is tremendous power in being based somewhere obscure and having people come to you. It changes the power dynamic in your favor, you both get a much better sense of each other and you don’t have to waste your life on terrible Zoom calls.
Everything is negotiable.
Legal bills, fees, contracts, offers, compensation.
Contract? Strike out the terms you don’t like and send it back.
Can’t get the deal done? Offer to buy the seller a Ferrari.
Don’t like quarterly board meetings? Make them annual.
It's all made up!
Know if your business dies from errors of commission or omission. If you die from missing out on something, make sure you take a lot of action. If you die from doing something you shouldn’t, get a hobby that keeps you occupied.
All advice cancels out. When someone says you have to do something a certain way I just laugh. Tiny did the opposite of what all the conventional 'success' advice would tell you.
Don't take it too seriously. There are no rules.
As for me, I'm working on a new company. I'll be tweeting a bunch more about this stuff. If you're buying or selling a company and want advice, feel free to DM me as I always love chatting about it.
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