#143 - Interview with Andrew Wilkinson

PODCAST

Buying Wonderful Internet Businesses with Andrew Wilkinson (Founder of Tiny)

Favorite Quote: "As soon as I start doing something I don't enjoy, I want someone else to do it and it turns out that's a really good quality for an entrepreneur. It's what makes an entrepreneur. Very quickly when I started my business I started delegating. And If you follow that progression over decades, the ultimate form of delegation is investing and hiring others to run your businesses."

Topics Covered:

- Business models for internet companies

- How Tiny is organized as a holding company

- Structuring incentives for executives

- Why to avoid competing with venture-backed companies

- The podcasting industry

- A local news experiment in Victoria, Canada

Listen: iTunes, Spotify

Frameworks

The Paradox of Choice

There’s a glitch in the human mind: if you offer only one or two things, people assume you do those few things very well. Maybe even the best. If you took your car in for an oil change and the auto shop also did hair cuts, would you expect them to be very good at either service? You want to make it easy and unambiguous for them to form associations about what you’re good at. - The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman

Most people and most businesses do too much, and it's counterintuitive to recognize that the greatest value-add opportunities often arise via subtraction, rather than addition.

Consider this: how might your overall results change if you eliminated the things you weren't great at and reallocated resources towards the areas where you really excel?

To see all of our business frameworks, click here.

To see the rest of the resources for the Personal MBA, click here.

Links

Ethereum: a new model for money (oldie, but goodie by David Hoffman)

+ Great intro to Ether / Ethereum. "Ethereum is a foundation for building an alternative internet-based financial system. This financial system has the capacity to be completely open and trustless. This new financial system needs a native money to operate. Financial applications in this new landscape need a trustless form of collateral for their operation, and the only truly trustless asset on Ethereum is Ether."

To See the Future of Competition, Look at Netflix (Harvard Business Review)

+ "Big data is powerful, but big data plus big ideas is transformational. Netflix is a technology juggernaut whose analytics, algorithms, and digital-streaming innovations have changed how customers watch movies and TV shows."

The Battery Is Ready to Power the World (Wall Street Journal)

+ "After a decade of rapidly falling costs, the battery has reached a tipping point. No longer just for consumer products, it is poised to transform the way the world uses power."

The next big energy showdown is over all-electric neighborhoods (Sidewalk Talk)

+ "In just the last couple years, dozens of U.S. cities have pushed for natural gas bans in new development, including several major municipalities like San Francisco, Denver, and Seattle. The immediate goal of this rule is to enable all-electric neighborhoods that rely on cleaner energy sources than exist today."

Cushman Wakefield's office, industrial, and data center outlook