At twenty-nine years old, I sat in a law office at Fasken Martineau in Vancouver with my hands shaking.
Stacks of documents sat on a trolley next to the conference table. My business partner Chris and I had just signed what felt like a thousand pages. A private equity buyer named Alexander was acquiring MetaLab, our web design agency, for $50 million.
Fifty million dollars. Seven times the size of our previous deal that had fallen apart. It felt like the opportunity of a lifetime.
The deal had followed the same agonizing pattern as every other PE process I’d been through. Committees grinding on terms for months. Lawyers billing hundreds of thousands of dollars to argue over innocuous clauses. But we’d powered through it, and now we were done. Signed, sealed, waiting for delivery.
“That’s going to be a hell of a wire transfer,” the lawyer said with a grin as we walked out.
Then the wire never came.
Alexander stopped returning our calls. Days turned into weeks. It turned out his fund didn’t have the money. The whole thing was smoke.
My father had always told me: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” I’d heard it a thousand times growing up. Sitting in my apartment in Victoria, staring at my phone, waiting for a call that would never come, I finally understood what he meant.
I want to be careful here. There are good PE firms. I’ve met some decent people in the industry.
But having been on the other side of the table multiple times, I can tell you what the experience is usually like for a founder.
You get a call or an email. Flattering stuff. They love your business. They see the potential. They want to “partner” with you.
Then you enter the machine.
Committees get built to review the decision. Those committees build sub-committees. Due diligence stretches from weeks into months. You spend your nights and weekends in data rooms while trying to run your actual business during the day.
Then, right when you think you’re at the finish line, they renegotiate.
We had personally experienced private equity investors build committee upon committee to review the decision to buy one of our businesses, only to pull the rug out from under us and renegotiate key terms months later. It always felt like a hustle designed to grab the last dollar. They knew you’d already told your spouse, your accountant, your lawyer. They knew you were mentally spent. So they’d squeeze.
And if you actually close? The PE playbook is pretty straightforward: load the business with debt, cut costs (which usually means cutting people), juice the numbers for three to five years, then flip it to the next PE firm at a higher multiple. Rinse and repeat.
The founder who built the thing? They’re usually gone within a year, bound by a non-compete and an earnout that never quite pays out the way the spreadsheet promised.
I watched this happen to friends. Great founders who sold to PE, watched their culture get gutted, their best employees leave, and their customers suffer. Then the PE firm sold the husk to another PE firm, who did it all over again.
It made me sick. And it made me think there had to be a better way.
Around this time, Chris and I were deep into studying Warren Buffett.
Not the folksy Omaha stuff you read in magazine profiles. The actual mechanics of how Berkshire Hathaway bought businesses.
The more we dug in, the more stunned we were by how simple it was.
A founder would call Buffett. He’d ask a few questions. If he liked the business, he’d make a fair offer on the phone call. Sometimes the whole thing took five minutes.
He’d wire a billion dollars on a one-page contract. Then he’d leave the company alone to operate.
No committees. No six-month due diligence death march. No renegotiation at the eleventh hour. No plan to flip the business in five years.
He bought businesses to keep them. Forever.
“Search all the parks in all the cities, you’ll find no statues of committees.”
That was Buffett’s whole approach. One person making a decision, quickly, with conviction.
For a couple of guys from Victoria, BC who’d been chewed up by the PE machine, this felt like a revelation. Not because it was complicated. Because it was so obviously right, and yet almost nobody else was doing it.
Charlie Munger, Buffett’s partner, had this idea he’d borrowed from a mathematician named Jacobi: “Invert, always invert.”
Instead of asking what would make you happy, ask what would make you miserable. Then avoid those things.
Chris and I took this concept and turned it into our acquisition strategy.
When we’d meet with a founder who was thinking about selling, we wouldn’t start by asking them what they wanted. Everybody wants the same stuff. More money, good terms, a nice transition.
Instead, we’d ask: “What do you hate?”
We called these Anti-Goals. And they changed everything.
The best example is Dribbble. When we met with Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett, the co-founders, we sat down at a whiteboard and asked them to list everything they hated about running the business.
Dan hated ad sales calls. Hated them. He was a designer, not an ad salesman, and the thought of spending his days chasing ad revenue made him want to quit.
Rich hated managing a big team. He was a builder who wanted to write code and ship product, not sit in performance reviews and deal with HR headaches.
So we wrote it all down. Every Anti-Goal. Then we went through the list and said: “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll take care of the stuff you hate, so you can focus on the stuff you love.”
That was the pitch. No “synergies.” No “transformational value creation.” No 97-slide deck about our “platform.”
Just: we’ll handle your misery so you can do the work that made you fall in love with this business in the first place.
It worked. We bought Dribbble. Dan and Rich stayed involved on their own terms. The business thrived.
And that became the template for every acquisition we made after.
There’s a phrase you hear a lot in finance: “permanent capital.” Most people’s eyes glaze over when they hear it. But for a founder selling their business, it’s the most important concept in the world.
Here’s what it means in plain language: we don’t have a fund that expires.
A typical PE firm raises a fund with a 7-to-10-year lifecycle. They have investors (called LPs) who expect their money back, plus a big return, within that window. Which means every business they buy has a ticking clock on it from day one. They have to sell it, usually within 3 to 5 years, to return capital to their investors.
This creates a bunch of perverse incentives. They can’t think long-term because they’re always optimizing for the exit. They can’t leave a good team alone because they need to show they’re “adding value” to justify their fees. They can’t hold through a rough patch because their fund clock is ticking.
We don’t have a fund clock. When we buy a business, we buy it to keep it. We’ve owned MetaLab for over twenty years. We’ve owned Dribbble since 2017. We bought Letterboxd, Serato, AeroPress, Creative Market. We still own all of them.
No exit timeline. No flip strategy. The company gets a permanent home.
And for founders, this means real flexibility.
Some founders take chips off the table and keep running their business. They cash out enough to feel financially secure, then stay at the helm because they still love the work. They just sleep better knowing they’re not one bad quarter away from ruin.
Some hand over the keys completely and ride off into the sunset. They’ve built something great, they’re tired, and they want to go sit on a beach or start something new.
Some do a hybrid. They stay on for a year or two to transition things, then gradually step back.
We don’t have a preference. It’s their company. They built it. We’re just trying to be the buyer we wish we could have sold to.
A founder reaches out (or we reach out to them). We have a conversation. Not a “preliminary exploratory discussion with key stakeholders” — a conversation. Two humans talking about a business.
If we like what we hear, we make a fair offer within days. Not months. Days.
How? Because I check bank statements rather than running months of forensic accounting. I’ve bought enough businesses to know what the numbers should look like. If the bank statements match the P&L and the story makes sense, we move forward.
Our process is different. We agree on a fair price. We do confirmatory diligence (we’re not reckless — we just don’t waste everyone’s time). We close in weeks, not months.
I won’t pretend every deal is perfect. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve bought businesses that turned out to be harder than we thought. We’ve overpaid. (I wrote about losing $10 million on Flow in my newsletter. I’m not exactly batting a thousand here.)
But the founders we’ve bought from? They keep referring other founders to us. That tells me we’re doing something right.
I started Tiny because the buyer I wanted to sell to didn’t exist.
I wanted someone who’d make a decision quickly. Someone who’d pay a fair price without six months of games. Someone who’d leave my team alone. Someone who’d hold the business for the long term instead of flipping it to the next guy.
When I couldn’t find that buyer, I became that buyer.
We’ve now bought and operated over 40 businesses. Dribbble, Creative Market, MetaLab, Letterboxd, Serato, AeroPress, and dozens more. Some of them tiny. Some of them generating tens of millions in revenue. All of them held permanently, with the original culture and team intact.
If you’re a founder who’s been thinking about what comes next, and the idea of selling to a private equity firm makes your stomach turn, I get it. I’ve been on your side of the table.
There’s a better way to sell a business. One that doesn’t involve committees, consultants, and a five-year countdown clock.
If you want to talk, my email is andrew@tiny.com. No pitch deck required. No NDA to sign before we can have a conversation. Just tell me about your business and what you want.
Or, if you want the full story, read Never Enough.
