An overnight success,
20 years in the making.

Getting there took a partner, many painful lessons, and a used book.

In 2009, Andrew walked into our local TD Bank on Douglas Street to get a business credit card. The teller said a financial advisor — a “Mr. Sparling” — would like to say hello. Chris Sparling looked more like the son of a financial advisor than the advisor himself: boyish face, no facial hair, an ill-fitting suit that hung off his small frame, his office covered in “top employee” plaques. Metalab was growing fast and Andrew needed someone who actually understood money. So he blurted out a question that would change both our lives.

Chris quit a few weeks later. We’ve been partners ever since — Andrew spots the opportunity, Chris stress-tests it.

We used Metalab’s profits to start business after business. Designer cat furniture. A project management app. A newspaper. Online courses. We like to joke that we “stuck forks into electrical sockets” for a living — slowly learning through persistence and pain. Of the nine companies we started together, only one was a real success.

Then we sold one of our most profitable businesses. The price got renegotiated at the last minute. Our best people were let go. The culture we’d spent years building was optimized out of existence. It felt like handing your child to a step-parent and watching them treat them badly. We kept thinking: this can’t be how it works.

We had a few million dollars from the sale and no idea what to do with it. Andrew wandered into a local bookstore looking for something on investing and picked up The Warren Buffett Way. It blew his mind. Here was someone doing it the right way — buying wonderful businesses from founders and simply letting them run. No renegotiating. No replacing the team. No MBAs helicoptered in to “optimize” things. If Buffett could do it at huge scale, why couldn’t we do it for small tech businesses like ours?

So we stopped starting and started buying. Not to flip, not to strip for parts, and not to merge into some bloated conglomerate. Just to own them, support them, and leave the people who built them alone.

We called the holding company Tiny — because private equity firms all had ridiculous, self-important names like BlackRock, Greywolf, and Maverick. Tiny felt honest. And frankly, kind of funny. We’d be the buyer we wished we’d had.

That was 13 years ago. We’re still at it.