Andrew Wilkinson

Andrew Wilkinson is a Canadian entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Tiny, a Victoria, British Columbia holding company that buys profitable internet and consumer businesses and holds them for the long term. He started out in 2006 as a college dropout working as a barista, taught himself web design from a book, and began cold-emailing startup CEOs, launching what became the digital design agency MetaLab.

MetaLab grew into one of the best-known product design studios, credited with work for companies such as Slack, Coinbase and Uber. In 2009 he recruited Chris Sparling, then a young bank financial advisor, as CFO, and the two used MetaLab's profits to start business after business, from a project management app to designer cat furniture. By their own account only one of the nine companies they started together became a real success, and a painful sale of another business pushed them toward a different model.

Inspired by The Warren Buffett Way, Wilkinson and Sparling stopped starting companies and began buying them, keeping founders' teams in place and letting them run. Tiny's portfolio has included Dribbble, Creative Market, Serato, AeroPress, Letterboxd, Pixel Union and Meteor. In April 2023 Tiny Capital was combined with the listed company WeCommerce to become Tiny Ltd on the TSX Venture Exchange, and later that year Tiny took a majority stake in Letterboxd.

Wilkinson writes candidly about business and money. His memoir Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire, published in 2024, covers both the lessons and the costly mistakes of building Tiny, and he sends a monthly newsletter on buying businesses to tens of thousands of founders and investors.