Becoming an Entrepreneur with Andrew Wilkinson
Today we have an insightful episode with Andrew Wilkinson, tech savvy entrepreneur, where he shares his success journey and emphasizes the difference between entrepreneurship and self-employment. Be prepared to discover countless business nuggets, as this is definitely an episode to relisten and reflect on.
Back in 2006, while still in high school, Andrew and his friend co-founded the first commercial website, reviewing and covering the latest Apple Inc. news. At 16, he was invited to take a tour of one of the first Apple stores and interview Steve Jobs. Eventually, what started as a passion teenage project, turned into a lifestyle business career.
Andrew decided to switch from journalism to entrepreneurship in the web design industry, taught himself enough about web and interface design, and took the big leap, founding a design agency MetaLab. Since that moment, he has been buying, starting, and investing in internet businesses for the last 13 years.
After the rapid growth of MetaLab, Andrew used the profits to diversify into a variety of businesses, but soon realized that he was miserable trying to run five businesses and taking care of everything by himself.
Inspired by Warren Buffet, Andrew decided to follow his success formula–buy businesses, invest in companies, hire talent and live life on his own terms (and schedule). In 2013, he stopped to start business, and started to buy them, and acquired 30 of them for the last seven years. Today they form Tiny, a not-so tiny holding company Andrew owns with his business partner Chris Sparling.
Key Andrew’s sayings and lessons from the episode:
“All I wanted was freedom.”
“Jump in a pool, and you will be forced to figure things out.”
“Taste can’t be taught, it can be developed throughout life.”
“No-one should become an entrepreneur unless they are desperate to become an entrepreneur or they naturally go there. If you don’t feel a compulsion to start business immediately, you are probably not an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial personality is that you have high pace, you make quick decisions, and you need to be creating and starting things.”
“When people hear me saying that I am lazy, they think I don’t work hard, but that’s not true. I don’t like doing work that I don’t want to do.”
“I hire for potential.”
“To me, remote work is really all about freedom and flexibility to work when and how you want.”
“For me, the purpose of life is to have kids. All the things that we do go back to procreation.”
In this podcast episode, we also talked about:
Approach to networking
Putting yourself into a position where you don’t have any other option than figure things out
Starting at the right time in the right place
Combination of artistic vision and entrepreneurial skills
Having entrepreneurial personality
The power of delegation
Benefits of hiring people for your businesses
Mentality of a lazy leadership
Being addicted to sense of control and freedom
Difference between entrepreneurship and self-employment
Leading and structuring team remotely
80-20% rule
The purpose of life
We hope you enjoyed today’s episode with Andrew Wilkinson. You can find out more about him here:
Andrew’s Twitter
Resources we’ve mentioned in this episode:
Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big by Bo Vurlingham
Lazy leadership by Andrew Wilkinson
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E Gerber
You can find out more about Alex and Mimi here:
Mimi’s Instagram
Alex’s Instagram
https://www.youtube.com/mimiikonn
https://www.youtube.com/alexikonn
Produced by Jason Sanderson - Podcast Tech
Show notes by Veronica Joce
