Metalab's Billion Dollar Evolution

A story about how Andrew Wilkinson built Metalab from a small design agency into Tiny, a billion-dollar holding company that's going public.

"In 2006, Andrew started a web design agency called Metalab when he was 19. In year one, it had $250,000 in revenue doing design work. One of his big famous clients was Stuart Butterfield - he reached out to Andrew to help design Slack.

In year 2-3, they were making a couple hundred thousand in profit. They doubled for a couple years, then grew by 30% annually. By 2012, six years in, they were at $3 million in revenue. With 30% annual growth, by 2020 they hit around $20 million revenue, and by 2023 they're in the $40-50 million range.

The reason Metalab worked so well is they're based in Victoria, British Columbia. They charged Silicon Valley prices but paid Canadian wages, so the margin was fat. Andrew started taking those profits and tried launching companies, but it didn't work well. He launched a software company called Flow, an Asana competitor, but it didn't work out.

Then he read a book on Warren Buffett and thought 'What if I just buy companies instead?' He bought a couple that did okay, but then he bought Dribbble, which became the crown jewel. Dribbble is like GitHub for designers. I imagine he bought it for $5-10 million and turned it into something worth $200 million or higher.

Now Tiny owns about 15 companies and is going public at nearly a $1 billion valuation. Andrew owns roughly 71% of the shares. The whole thing was bootstrapped using Metalab's profits. He hired CEOs to run Metalab while maintaining 90% ownership, which allowed him to build this empire where he and his partner Chris own 80% of this publicly traded company."