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[1] Ryan Norbauer [2] [mail_icon]
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Keyboard Academy 2025-03-24

The Outsider Option: Why I Sold Half my Company to Tiny

by [8]Ryan Norbauer

MY DESIGN WORK

I create escapist [9]luxury computer keyboards at Norbauer & Co.

Fairmont Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC near Tiny HQFairmont Empress Hotel in
Victoria, BC near Tiny HQ

I had the most curious sensation when I was working the other night: I was kind
of happy.

You know, not just in the I find this work satisfying kind of way, but in the
and I don’t also want to walk out a window kind of way. This latter is, in my
professional life at least, something of a novel experience.

It is often said that founding a business is like “staring into the abyss and
eating glass.” I concur with this analysis.

But I would go one further. As someone with a chronic serial entrepreneurship
problem, I can vouch that the life of a founder is actually also often quite
painfully lonely—a feeling that somehow, paradoxically, gets worse the more
employees and clients one has.

'Twas ever thus, I used to think, and ever would be. It all just seemed like
part of the entrepreneurial bargain, the cost of creative freedom. It’s a price
I myself have been willing to pay at times, but at other times not so much.

Just over a year ago, in fact, I very nearly shuttered my latest business,
Norbauer & Co. (We make very fancy [10]luxury computer keyboards—yes, that is a
thing; I’ll explain.) It wasn’t that we had any actual problems. Quite the
contrary. We were enjoying a commercial success far exceeding anything I had
ever hoped for or intended. It was just that this success required so very
frequently dining on glass, as I bounced from one annoying-but-important
logistical challenge to another.

But let’s advance one year forward, to just last week. I found myself at the
end of a long day grappling with a hard operational problem for the company
(which indeed I did not shutter). It’s the sort of manufacturing setback that
would previously have sent me down a vortex of despair, as I felt the latest
shards shattering between my teeth. Yet in that moment the other night as I was
wrapping up my work I caught myself smiling like an idiot, oddly untroubled.

(Sometimes we get these rare glimmers of insight in life, when we briefly
stumble off the hedonic treadmill. The perspective zooms outward, and we
perceive that our past selves would be astonished and delighted by our
situation in the present. It’s a beautiful thing.)

I now have at my disposal an executive team of a caliber and competence I would
never previously have thought within my grasp, leaving me never facing a
problem alone. We have, moreover, just launched a product of enormous ambition
and complexity that has been a lifelong creative dream of mine. Until these
facts suddenly occurred to me at once the other night, they had somehow crept
up on me over the past year without my quite noticing.

I very intentionally capitalized and bootstrapped Norbauer & Co. in such a way
as to never need outside investors, and at no point (now or in the past) have
we ever been in want of cash. Indeed, I have spent my entire entrepreneurial
life resisting investor-oriented management. So, as I now find myself more
tranquil and satisfied than I have ever been in all my working life, I’m
reluctant to admit what made it all possible.

I sold nearly half of my company to a publicly-traded investment fund run by a
Canadian billionaire.

History of a Great Deal, and a Great Deal of History

This is the story of my accidental luxury brand and our eventual deal with the
very unusual investment firm [11]Tiny.

I tell it in detail here not only for keyboard enthusiasts who may care about
the past and future of Norbauer & Co. (or fans of Tiny who may wish to peer
behind the curtain of one of their deals) but for any entrepreneur who
struggles with the desire to bring a singular creative vision into the
world—and who worries, quite rightly, about the perils of working with
investors to make it happen.

Tiny counts in its portfolio well-known cool-kid brands like [12]Aeropress, 
[13]Letterboxd, [14]Dribbble, [15]Serato, and more than a hundred others—many
of them design-centric businesses that, like mine, are deeply rooted in
communities of passionate nerd enthusiasm. They also own quite a few creative
agencies (such as [16]Metalab and [17]Frosty), which do tasteful projects for
luxury and luxury-adjacent brands such as Prada, Apple, Burberry, Calvin Klein,
and many others. This all makes Tiny an improbably good spiritual fit for my
company, but my reasons for the deal actually ran far deeper.

Many founders, especially those in the VC sphere, tend to view outside
investment as a path to an “exit” payday, allowing them to cash out and ride
off into a tropical sunset. Tiny has, to be sure, facilitated numerous
embarkations of this type. But in my case, the short-term financial aspects of
the sale were, for both sides, actually something of an afterthought. Far from
exiting anything, I continue to serve as CEO of Norbauer & Co., and, as
majority voting shareholder, I retain absolute control—creative and
otherwise—over the business.

Even though we closed the deal a year ago, I intentionally waited until now to
write about it publicly, because I wanted to proceed from actual experience
rather than the blind fact-free optimism of an early-day press release. The
result, happily, turns out to be something of a love letter to a very unusual
investment fund and the singular philosophy (and integrity) of the people
behind it.

A Keyboard Snowball

The Heavy-9 in titanium, a popular one of our aftermarket keyboard housings,
which sells for $3800 (not including the keyboard that goes inside).The Heavy-9
in titanium, a popular one of our aftermarket keyboard housings, which sells
for $3800 (not including the keyboard that goes inside).

In an article published a few weeks ago, [18]Hodinkee (a magazine quite
influential in the luxury world) described Norbauer & Co. as the brand
“defining the world of high-end analog keyboards,” which is very kind, and
perhaps even true in a way, but is mainly just amusing to me given how much I
dragged my feet in letting it even become a business in the first place—to say
nothing of an industry-defining one.

Norbauer & Co. is in fact an entirely adventitious business and the unintended
byproduct of an aborted attempt on my part at retirement. In 2010, having sold
the last of three tech companies I had founded, I resolved to take a little
breather from crippling stress and life-destroying workaholism to throw myself
instead into frivolous, low-stakes creative pursuits. The effects were so
salutary that I quickly swore off ever starting a company ever again. But among
those fun creative projects was one that would end up quickly undoing my
resolve: figuring out how to make my own retro keyboards.

On obscure forums like [19]GeekHack, I began organizing group buys for my
designs among fellow hobbyist enthusiasts. These offerings were originally
intended just as a way to help offset the cost of making a few units for
myself. From my very first such sale almost a decade ago I kept swearing that
it would also be the last, intent on keeping my resolution never to get sucked
into running another business and letting the stress ruin my life again. And
yet I found myself nudged along at every turn (albeit gently and kindly) by an
eager crowd with whom my work seemed to be resonating. One offering led to
another. And things just sort of snowballed from there.

The Norbauer brand has since managed to accumulate a base of thoughtful and
loyal clients all around the world (from South Korea to the UAE, South Africa
to Mongolia), and I’ve somehow never quite been able to keep up with demand.
Most of our offerings sell out within hours—sometimes minutes—of being posted.
(Communities of collectors have even set up bots to track our inventory and
broadcast availability to private channels on Discord.) For waitlist items, we
have clients who preorder and patiently wait for models with production lead
times sometimes exceeding a year—including bespoke orders running into the tens
of thousands of dollars.

At some point or another, with millions of dollars of keyboards sold—and
without my quite meaning or realizing—it had turned into a real business.

Retro-techno-futurism, and a Rationally Irrational Trade

The Heavy Grail in Veracity Steel (mirror polished), one of our most
sought-after offerings. Price $2000.The Heavy Grail in Veracity Steel (mirror
polished), one of our most sought-after offerings. Price $2000.

While I have been obsessed with keyboards my whole life, I chose a
serendipitous moment (around 2014) to become interested in actually making
them. Here is subscribership of the MechanicalKeyboards subreddit over the past
decade:

MechanicalKeyboards subreddit subscribers over time (via subredditstats.com)
MechanicalKeyboards subreddit subscribers over time (via subredditstats.com)

Plenty of other enthusiast-led keyboard brands sprang up at the beginning of
this upward curve along with Norbauer. But the vast majority, including some of
the most prominent and prestigious ones, have since either spectacularly
imploded or faded into the internet mists.

If any one thing has allowed us to enjoy a relative longevity, I believe it’s
that our products are fundamentally sentimental—and thus slightly irrational.
When other makers seemed to be climbing over each other to be the Lexus of
keyboards (converging on a single technical paradigm and competing on
checklists of “premium” features), I was far off in one isolated corner, making
weird Ferraris.

The thing with a Ferrari—as, like, a car—is that it really isn’t the most
logical purchase. They’re loud, difficult to maintain, and not particularly
comfortable. I’m happy to report that our keyboards don’t have those
shortcomings, but my point is that the unique (and obviously very potent) thing
a Ferrari offers is to be an object with a soul—the product of a very specific
worldview and set of values. This makes it non-comparable and thus somewhat
resistant to direct competition. (Despite, for example, a vibrant market of
counterfeit Norbauer keyboards coming out of China—some of which even brazenly
copy our packaging—clients still eagerly prefer to pay a multiple to get the
genuine articles from us.)

What is it, then, that gives Norbauer products their particular soul? It comes
from a profound emotional attachment to the spirit of 20th century
techno-optimism. Part of this is our retrofuturist design language, which
explicitly evokes midcentury and 80s modernism. Another is the deep and clacky/
thocky sound profile, which is intentionally redolent of keyboards from the 80s
and 90s. But above all is a headlong dive into the sort of breathless
over-the-top optimism that characterized that earlier era of computing—when
everyone seemed to believe that personal computers and the Internet were going
to break down international barriers and make for a wiser and more peaceful
world. A time when we all believed in The Future, with a capital F.

Computers were held to be objects of enormous promise back then—rarer and more
valuable devices than they now are—so manufacturers were willing to invest far
more into hardware that was both durable and satisfying to use. Norbauer & Co.
simply pretends that the trend never stopped—taking finishes, materials, and
engineering to extremes to build objects that feel at once worthy and symbolic
of those hopes.

But by the mid-2010s when I started making keyboards, the hopes that had been a
part of cyber-culture in its early days (decentralization, anonymity, lack of
concern with social status or authority, peaceful mutual understanding across
cultures, free speech) were already fading away. The charmingly anarchic early
Internet was being supplanted by various walled social-media gardens controlled
by a few megacorporations, with ill effects that are by now all too
familiar—and are largely the opposite of all those things we had hoped.

I think it’s not a coincidence, then, that the upsurge of cultural interest in
vintage-style keyboards happened right around this time. For those of us who
came of age during the golden era of personal computing (or those who wish they
did), vintage-style mechanical keyboards are a small act of defiance—a way to
physically reconnect with a time when technology seemed to offer a tomorrow
that would always be better than today.

An image that captures our brand pretty nicely.An image that captures our brand
pretty nicely.

At some point I realized that this meant I was essentially building a luxury
brand: one whose value proposition is emotional valence, technical
perfectionism, artistic design, and artisanal knowhow rather than serving any
obvious practical necessity. (Contrary to popular conception, I believe that a
true luxury brand isn’t about monetizing social status but rather enabling
low-volume manufacturing of weird and creatively interesting goods.)

I admire many examples in this space—Leica, Teenage Engineering, Hermès—that
flagrantly disregard economies of scale, mass appeal, and micro-efficiencies in
favor of a quirky creative vision, sold to a tasteful and passionate few who
are simply very excited about and believe in what the creators are doing.

I knew that if I were going to continue operating a consumer electronics
company, this would be the only kind that I would find interesting to build.

The Withering Gaze of Uncle Scrooge

The growing Norbauer & Co. Los Angeles team in 2021The growing Norbauer & Co.
Los Angeles team in 2021

By 2021 we had opened a [20]workshop in Downtown Los Angeles and I had hired a
small team. We had just launched our most popular product, the Heavy Grail
(shown in the video below), and our revenue was on an insane parabolic
year-over-year upward trajectory.

This was all quite gratifying in a way, but the feelings of avoidant stress
from my early entrepreneurial days started to come back. I just wanted to focus
on giving our clients what they wanted, doing it well, and making functional
art that facilitated a bit of happy escapism. But with increasing success came
a whole host of unwelcome burdens and concerns that I was disinclined to manage
optimally. Shards of glass again.

I keep a statue of Scrooge McDuck next to my desk as a reminder that making
money is something a person running a business should endeavor to do. (Milton
Friedman and Jack Donaghy action figures were unavailable.) It is a general
entrepreneurial failing of mine that profit is not always foremost in my mind,
but this has been more true for me in this “fun little retirement project” than
with any other preceding venture.

My museMy muse

Having so many people throwing money at us made it easy to do what I was
naturally inclined to do anyway: to focus on the product and client experience
above all else, while avoiding hard decisions about capital allocation. (More
money, more Parkinson’s Law problems.)

Part of the premise and competitive advantage of a luxury brand like ours is
being willing to spend way more money on quality and subjective artistic
matters than a rational manager would seemingly ever do. But, critically, these
expenditures should be focused only on things that affect the client
experience. Through my general avoidance of the subject, our profligacy was
often directed, utterly un-strategically, by random chaos instead.

By the end of 2023, to cite one example, I had unwittingly flushed a quarter of
a million dollars down the toilet in a self-imposed boondoggle project to
rework our e-commerce infrastructure. It was a frog-boiling situation; the
development team kept assuring me something shippable was just around the
corner—probably actually believing this themselves—until I eventually paid some
close attention, dug into the details, and realized (years in) that no such
thing was forthcoming and had simply to kill the project.

Around the same time, I had a suspicion that our warehouse and client support
operations had become wildly inefficient, so I decided to take a look at what
it was costing us (in labor alone) to ship an order. I discovered that we had
gone from $8 per order in 2019 to $104 per order in 2023, an order of magnitude
jump in costs with no appreciable improvement in the client experience.

[image-7]

These were just two rare examples where I diverted my attention briefly away
from what felt like my most important responsibilities (design, engineering,
and brand), and I immediately stumbled into raging cash incinerators. There was
reason to believe that others were lurking around every corner. This was
manifestly unsustainable, and I knew it would eventually start threatening our
ability to allocate capital to important things that actually did matter to our
clients.

There are a million little trivial but non-optional tasks in running a physical
goods business: complicated bookkeeping, logistics coordination, inventory
tracking and valuation, customs clearances, regulatory compliance, endless tax
filings, insurance, payroll processing, accounts payable, etc. Attending to
tasks like these tends to drain my will and energy, leaving me with very little
enthusiasm for more optional (but no less essential) management tasks like the
ones where I discovered us pointlessly hemorrhaging cash.

Spending more time being strategic about management seemed urgent. But I got
into this business because I liked making fancy keyboards and connecting with
our clients. Diverting my attention even further from those goals seemed
horrible to me. This is why, on the day I made those charts and realized all
this, I very nearly decided to fold up shop.

The Seneca Moonshot

[image]the Seneca

If it were just a question of going on selling my existing product lines and
optimizing the business for short-term profitability, I definitely would have
put the company in the garbage right then. What we were making up to that point
were essentially “aftermarket upgrades” for keyboard internals made by other
companies. Although the community was still clamoring for those products and
there was unquestionably money still to be made, I simply felt like I had
solved all the interesting design problems in that domain. But I had something
else in my back pocket.

I’ve often said that Norbauer products are more than just backward-looking
nostalgia. They’re actually meant to feel like they come from an alternate
universe that split off from our own in something like the 1980s—an imaginary
timeline where technological evolution continued in parallel to ours but where
both the sensual quality of computing hardware and its broader social effects
just kept getting better and better (rather than, say, what actually happened).
This is why my long-term goal has always been not just to recreate
vintage-feeling keyboards, but rather to make new keyboards in a
retrofuturistic design language that are actually better than any that exist in
our real universe, now or in the past.

And so in the preceding years I had been quietly working on a crazy (and crazy
expensive) multi-year moonshot project to develop our own in-house
ready-to-type keyboard—something that a client who wants the best typing
instrument obtainable in the world could acquire from us, plug in, and
immediately enjoy. Every component would be custom, right down to the screws. I
called this project [21]the Seneca, and by the time I was thinking seriously of
shuttering Norbauer & Co., it was actually very near completion.

This put me at a crisis: I didn’t want to go on running the business any
longer, but I also didn’t want to give up on the creative vision either; I had
become sentimentally attached to the idea of seeing the Seneca out into the
world.

This is where a normal entrepreneur would look to outside partners or
investment. But I was so profoundly allergic to this prospect that I remained
blind to it, probably for far longer than I should have. Then again, for a
founder like me—whose priorities are creativity and the client experience—I
think the hesitation was quite warranted.

Effing the Ineffable (MBAs Ruin Everything)

There is a natural tension between the pecuniary concerns of the investor and
the creative urges of the builder-entrepreneur, and I am certainly
temperamentally much more aligned with the latter. But my complaint about
investors is not that they’re somehow too obsessed with making money; it’s
that—in the long term at least—they’re just generally so bad at it. (And this
coming from a guy who has to keep a Ducktales figurine by his desk as a
reminder to think about profit occasionally.)

The Swapping of Cerebrum for Spreadsheet

Because the core premise of investing is “sit at computer, make number go up,”
it seeks above all else things that can be easily measured and thus optimized.

The folly generally takes one of three forms:

  • Venture Capital. For VC firms, the target is meteoric growth, typically in
    things like size of user base (profit unimportant) in order to hype the
    share value for the next round of speculators. This can and often does doom
    innovative companies that would have been great profitable businesses at
    smaller scales.
  • Private Equity. Here it’s the value of underlying assets to be carved up
    for leverage and/or quick sale to the highest bidder, even if the source of
    the company’s value generation is itself obliterated in the process.
  • Public markets. Here the focus is typically juicing quarterly accounting
    numbers and massaging narratives for modest ticker jumps at the next
    earnings call.

There seem to be no good options.

The startup trajectory is typically as follows: a company starts out doing
something good, which catches on and becomes profitable. A core community of
enthusiastic and happy customers grows up around the brand. Success attracts
investment and a concomitant push to scale. Loath to rise from their computers,
the investors seek numbers that can be upwardly coaxed on the screen, and their
armies of MBAs are deployed to find them. Things that are easy to measure and
control like costs and revenue growth get over-optimized, focusing on easy
paper-based wins 📈 over the gestalt of the business and its reputation. Quality
degrades, and customer loyalty with it. The brand undertakes a slow march
toward mediocrity and eventual death, its pricing power ebbing away, all while
the MBA managers and consultants (and often the investors themselves) have long
since gotten their payouts and moved on.

This is an unseen homogenizing force in the world of commerce, draining every
last wisp of human dignity and aesthetic joy from some of the world’s greatest
brands and institutions—eventually, and ironically, also destroying their
economic value in the process. And it leads to the opposite of the very reason
I ever wanted to start companies to begin with, which is to make the world look
a little less boring.

MBAs are why we can’t have nice things.

Sure, I may be slow to undertake performance analysis and optimization when
running a business, but I’d far rather have that problem than these.

Oops

    …many managers attempt to reach their targets simply by cutting costs. This
    can be fatal. Any fool can cut costs anywhere at any time. For one shining
    moment it will look as if he or she is a genius at increasing the bottom
    line. Then the moment will pass … and quality will collapse.

    —Felix Dennis, [22]How to Get Rich

Although excessive cost-cutting is among the most common, it’s just one example
of the investor-driven impulse to focus on metrics— and how this can
insidiously erode the foundations of a business over time.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” as
Goodhart’s Law states, although that formulation actually puts it a little too
modestly. I prefer the [23]Strong Version of Goodhart’s Law, as expressed by
machine learning researcher Jascha Sohl-Dickstein: “as you over-optimize, the
goal you care about won't just stop improving, but will instead grow much worse
than if you had done nothing at all.”

This applies across many domains of human endeavor (standardized testing making
students dumber being the most obvious one) but let’s consider a few examples
from the world of business.

  • Facebook seeks to improve the world by fostering human connection, choosing
    engagement with the platform as the proxy metric to guide its algorithms;
    the result is that people’s “social” feeds fill up with attention-grabbing
    viral content and virtually no posts from actual humans or friends.
  • An e-commerce brand seeks to increase cashflow and chooses average order
    value (AOV) as its proxy metric; managers make offerings like free shipping
    at certain order total thresholds, causing customers to order things they
    don’t really want, leading to decreased customer satisfaction and increased
    returns (with a net negative effect on cashflow relative to baseline).
  • A streaming service seeks to optimize customer enjoyment and chooses time
    spent watching video as its proxy metric; the result is that managers focus
    resources on building auto-play, infinite scroll, and low-value ambient
    content that spikes the numbers while actually just pissing customers off.

I could go on. Jerry Muller’s [24]The Tyranny of Metrics is an entire volume
dedicated to this phenomenon, as is much of Nassim Taleb’s brilliant [25]
Incerto series, a nearly 2,000-page screed against what he rightly calls naïve
rationalism and the frequent backfiring of over-reliance on quantitative models
and targets.

The Hard-nosed Economics of Emotional Attachment

So, yeah, metric optimization is dumb. But it is even more often the case that
the most important things can’t even be measured at all.

Despite much quantitative window-dressing to the contrary, business is actually
an inherently social and thus profoundly subjective, psychological, and
qualitative phenomenon. The real earning potential of a company emerges not
primarily from its book assets but its brand and reputation, for it is only by
that reputation that it is able favorably to undertake the transactions that
make those assets worth anything. The goods and services of an untrustworthy
(or, worse, hated) transaction partner will trade at a significant discount to
what they would be from a favored one. As Danny Meyer (founder of Shake Shack)
is often quoted, “business, like life, is all about how you make people feel.
It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.”

Social and emotional matters are thus of paramount importance in business, yet
they cannot meaningfully be quantified, and, as we’ve seen, attempting to use
proxy metrics to optimize them can easily have the opposite of the intended
effect. Customer enjoyment and loyalty are slippery things. A company must
always be obsessively imagining and empathizing with the totality of the
customer experience, which is a matter of great nuance and subtlety, hard to
characterize and dynamically changing across time and multiple dimensions of
interaction. A constant attention to this kind of empathy must be embedded deep
in a company’s culture—and no amount of net-promoter-score surveys will do the
trick.

The Founder’s No (Protecting the Extraneous Essential)

    We only want to make great products and when you don’t focus only on making
    money and have reached a certain level, everything becomes about quality.
    Right now, there is a certain cultural fascination with fast growth, IPOs
    and so on, but I want to go slow, really slow and think long-term. It takes
    time to do good things. You see, this cultural phenomenon of speed and
    growth at all costs is displayed in every startup, they all look the same….

    —Jesper Kouthoofd, founder of [26]Teenage Engineering

Measuring things isn’t always inherently bad; trying to optimize naïve proxy
metrics almost always is. Cost-cutting is often inherently good; doing it in a
way that degrades the customer experience (the ultimate generating function of
profit) is almost always bad. The incentives to stray into short-sightedness
are many. Somebody has to be empowered to say no.

Founders typically have a deep intuitive sense of the ineffable factors that
make people love their brand, along with a well-honed sense of the company’s
core value proposition and competitive advantage—the things that led it to
flourish in the first place, which they by nature tend to foster and protect.

    Founder-led operations often keep an edge ... because when there’s someone
    at the top who actually gives a damn about cars, watches, bags, software,
    or whatever the hell the company makes, it shows up in a million value
    judgments that can’t be quantified neatly on a spreadsheet.

    —[27]David Heinemeier Hansson (dhh) of 37signals

Indeed, the finest case studies in holding the line against the depredations of
MBAification typically involve the stubborn will of a founder. To build a
company for the very long term requires an enormous amount of discipline,
vision, and patience—and some large measure of real control. Among the greats
in this pantheon: Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia), George
Lucas, James Dyson, and the Dumas family (Hermès). While more than half of
those enforced control against investors through private ownership, the others
took great pains to insulate their companies from the pressures of Wall Street
myopia. All of them were at one time or another dismissed with eye-rolling
contempt by managerial-minded executives in their industries. Yet they built
some of history’s greatest companies, which were not only creatively and
culturally successful but also financially so.

Steve Jobs insisted that even hidden internal faces of Apple products be
beautiful. One of Jobs’ heroes, Walt Disney, pursued a kind of otherworldly
perfection at Disneyland to such an extent that I’m hard pressed to pick which
examples to mention here. Perhaps the midcentury science fiction author (and
friend of Walt) Ray Bradbury put it best. Describing a totally unnecessary
fanciful architectural flourish added to the castle at Disneyland some time
after it was built: “It cost $100,000 to build a spire you didn't need. The
secret of Disney is doing things you don't need—and doing them well—and then
you realize you needed them all along.” My favorite example is the Sisyphean 
[28]polishing of every brass drinking fountain in Disneyland every single
night. These things are hard to justify on paper, but Walt correctly [29]
observed: “people can feel perfection.”

Brass fountains at Disneyland. One afternoon on the left, next morning on the
right.Brass fountains at Disneyland. One afternoon on the left, next morning on
the right.

Cost control is important in any business, but it is the job of the founder to
understand and protect the extraneous essential. Creating a feeling of
perfection in the eyes of your clients is a vastly under-appreciated moat.

This is why I believe, especially in the early decades of a company’s
existence, founders must seek always to keep their brands free from the
excessive influence of investors and their short-sighted MBA emissaries. One
should work only with investors who think for the very long term—and plan to
hold the company for just as long. Such investors are much more likely to defer
to the brand-protective vision of a founder, because they’ll have more to lose
by destroying what made the business successful merely for short-term wins.
This requires some large measure of control, if you can manage it, but just as
importantly an even greater degree of personal trust in the values and
judgement of the investor.

The trouble for me at my crisis point with Norbauer & Co. was that not only was
I not aware of any such investors but that, as far as I knew, the things I
needed and cared about just seemed antithetical to the very premise of
investing itself.

On one of those dark days in 2023 when I was wallowing in despair, ready to
walk away from Norbauer & Co, I pointed all of this out to my husband Alan, who
said something along the lines of “Wait a minute. Wasn’t Andrew Wilkinson one
of your all-time favorite human beings? And didn’t I read recently that he runs
some kind of investment thing now?”

Palm Pilot

Way back in 2007, I was in Chicago for [30]the SEED conference, an event hosted
by my longtime tech and business idols, David Heinemeier Hanson and Jason Fried
of 37signals (another duo of unconventional founders who managed to maintain
control over a very profitable long-term company).

I was stepping off the L train after the conference, returning to my hotel
several miles away in a city where I knew no one, so I was startled to hear my
name. I turned to find a lanky kid, whom I remember looking like an unlikely
hybrid of awkward geek and hipster aesthete. He had recognized my name from the
conference badge still dangling from my neck (Tiny’s empire, incidentally, now
includes [31]a conference badge company) and asked if I was the Ryan Norbauer
who at the time wrote a [32]guest column for 43folders—a now mostly forgotten
website about productivity that was widely read in those days of a much smaller
and nerdier Internet. I reported that, regrettably, I was indeed the personage
in question. After a brief friendly chat, we swapped email addresses and went
on our way. That skinny kid was Andrew Wilkinson (who would go on to co-found
Tiny), and over the following weeks and years, we struck up a long
correspondence. I still fondly remember his beguiling habit of vicious
self-deprecation—and of calling businesspeople who took themselves too
seriously “wieners.”

We were two insecure, upstart kids in our twenties, running two non-competing
Web 2.0 agency businesses. Mine was doing back-end development, just as his was
doing front-end—the now-famous Metalab that, among many other impressive
projects, was pivotal in the design of Slack. (The full history of Metalab is
excellently detailed in Andrew’s memoir, [33]Never Enough: From Barista to
Billionaire). This led to an obvious and easy bond—and a lot of commiseration.

Hipster Andrew from back in our agency days.Hipster Andrew from back in our
agency days.

Being fellow 37signals acolytes also made us feel like members of a furtive
club of contrarian outsiders, a new guard of folks in the tech world who were
questioning the orthodoxies of Silicon Valley, venture capital investing, and
“enterprise software” with a kind of [34]scorched-earth sarcastic rationalism.
Andrew and I both have always been deeply skeptical of consensus narratives
about how one is supposed to live a happy and successful life (a trait I find
common among serial entrepreneurs). This line from Andrew’s memoir is one I
could very easily have written about myself:

    To this day, if anyone tells me what to do—no matter how reasonable—I will
    dig my heels in and resist, flashing back to being a kid.

In our teens, we had also both turned to computers and entrepreneurship as ways
of answering and escaping uncomfortable aspects of our youth. We had come of
age at that brief time when being part of internet culture made one feel
special and weird—like humanity was on the cusp of something wonderful, and we
were early to the party—in a way that I think shaped both our young identities.
(That same spirit of the early web that is still a central feature of my own
aesthetic life all these years later.) Another quote from his memoir:

    My [tech] obsession was so severe that my unfortunate nickname in school
    was “Palm Pilot” because I walked around taking notes on a little
    black-and-white PalmPilot personal organizer, an early precursor to the
    iPhone. As you can imagine, the girls at school found this irresistible.

Not only did I excitedly carry one of these very same devices around at my own
school but occasionally complemented it with a chirping Star Trek combadge on
my shirt. We were clearly both cut from the same ridiculous cloth.

Knowing someone who shared so many of my values, goals, and neuroses simply
made me feel less alone during a very stressful period of company-building, and
our conversations became a kind of animating force for me in those days of
drudgery and stress. Andrew was, as Alan would remind me nearly twenty years
later, one of my favorite humans.

Mini-Buffett

Although I spoke with Andrew less often as the years passed, I was peripherally
aware that he had become a professional investor, which—not knowing any of the
details—is a fact I would of course normally have been disposed to meet with
mild scorn. But knowing Andrew, I figured he must have found some charmingly
idiosyncratic and benign take on it; I just never troubled to find out what it
was.

It was only after my husband’s suggestion about reaching out to Tiny that I
looked seriously into what Andrew had been doing with his fund these past
years.

The first encouraging sign was the company’s unpretentious name. As Andrew
explains:

    We felt that all these private equity and investment firms had ridiculous,
    self-important (or borderline evil-sounding) names like BlackRock,
    Greywolf, and Maverick. We liked Tiny because it felt down to earth and
    friendly and, frankly, kind of ironic and funny.

Trying to learn as much as I could about how they operated, I started listening
to [35]Andrew’s many popular interviews on the My First Million podcast and
elsewhere, where it became clear that he had indeed found his way into a
characteristically nerdy and, to my mind, surprisingly inoffensive way of
thinking about investing.

I was particularly pleased to observe that deep thinking, rationality, and
reading all seemed to be explicitly baked into Tiny’s culture. Andrew,
incidentally, has my all-time favorite [36]Tweet on business or investing:

[DraggedImage-8]

The many books I heard him mention in interviews sent me down a long reading
journey that introduced me to the mental framework behind his particular weird
corner of the investing world, which I found in itself to be a rewarding
brainiac adventure. There was the douchey-sounding but actually quite excellent
[37]How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis (in which the affluent author undertakes to
convince his reader that pursuing the goal mentioned in the title is a bad
idea). There was [38]Invention: A Life of Learning Through Failure, by James
Dyson (of cyclonic vacuum fame), a magnificent portrait of a founder who
doggedly pursued a quixotic creative vision in a way that no naively rational
manager or investor would ever abide. There was [39]The Outsiders: Eight
Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success, a
masterpiece on business strategy and capital allocation, showing how managing
companies in certain unorthodox ways actually leads to better results for
shareholders. But surely the most instructive of these was [40]The Snowball:
Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, an incredibly dense and exhaustive
biography of the man who inspired Andrew’s second professional life as an
investor.

Tiny is often called “the Berkshire Hathaway of the Internet” due to their
modeling their philosophy on that of Buffett and his business partner the late
Charlie Munger. So earnest is their admiration that they run a little side
business selling a $2,598 set of [41]bronze busts of the duo. (Not quite as
cool as Mr. McDuck, but not bad.)

Munger and Buffett busts from Berkshire NerdsMunger and Buffett busts from
Berkshire Nerds

The Berkshire approach focuses on acquiring profitable entities with a strong
brand moat and loyal customer base, keeping out of the way of what originally
made the company successful, supporting operations with ethical and experienced
executives, and holding the purchased shares indefinitely. (Insanely, but
tellingly, this is somehow considered a eccentric and contrarian take in the
world of institutional investing—and an approach that, despite its prominent
success, has rarely been copied.) Andrew and his co-founder at Tiny, Chris
Sparling, have extended Buffett’s model to the world of technology and
design—areas that they know well but in which Berkshire has historically been
reluctant to operate. (It is outside their “circle of competence,” as Munger
would have put it.)

Two really important and relevant recurring themes of The Snowball are
Buffett’s very long time horizon when it comes to investing (“buy and hold
forever”) and the paramount importance of reputation in business. Note that
these are both explicit counterpoints to the things that I said I dislike most
about the typical investor mentality (namely, short-termism and an indifference
to brand erosion).

As Buffett famously once said in a briefing to employees, “Lose money for the
firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and
I will be ruthless.” There are countless other examples in his biography of an
obsession with reputation. He stresses that, even when misbehavior in any one
transaction could be financially advantageous, it is not worth the potentially
catastrophic damage to one’s brand—personal or otherwise.

This has often accrued to very real business benefits for Berkshire. Buffett
drafts up very short and simple (1-2 page) offer letters to potential
acquisitions, predicated on good faith rather than legal constraints.
Berkshire’s goal is, by cultivating a reputation for fair-dealing, integrity,
and zero bullshit, to be a preferred buyer and thus to avoid getting into
bidding wars. Founders proactively want to sell to Berkshire, because they want
to see their good names endure and their companies flourish over the long haul,
and they can trust Buffett to keep his promise to do just that.

My Tim Cook

In my study of both the Berkshire and Tiny approaches (to which, I must
confess, I dedicated some months of reading and rumination) there was one other
critical idea I encountered. Buffett rarely gets too deep into the operational
weeds of the companies in which he invests. He buys firms that he believes have
strong market positions and then stays largely out of the way, collecting
dividends while waiting patiently for the next good opportunity to come along.
“Lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style,”
as he wrote in a shareholder letter.

As a first order of business on an acquisition where the founders wish to
change or diminish their role, Tiny seeks to bring in an executive. This was a
lesson Andrew learned by chance before he even became aware of Buffett’s
philosophy. He asked his old friend Mark to look after Metalab while he was
away on vacation and discovered, upon his return, that things were actually
operating more smoothly than when he was micro-managing the company before his
departure. It’s a lesson I wish I had been forced to learn much earlier in my
own entrepreneurial career, and it’s frankly one I still have trouble
internalizing to this day.

    In hindsight, it made all the sense in the world to do this, but at the
    time it was an anomalous thought that I almost felt guilty about. It’s a
    decision that many entrepreneurs fear making. I was embracing what I came
    to call Lazy Leadership: the idea that a CEO’s job is not to do all the
    work, but more importantly to design the machine and systems.

In all the stories of visionary founders I’ve read over the years, there was a
subtle theme present for every one whom I admire: each had a trusted executive
who handled the financial and operational side of things while the founder
focused on the equally essential matters of brand and customer experience. Walt
Disney had his brother Roy, who fronted for him with banks, struck legal deals,
and made sure all of his little brother’s grand dreams were actually
financially feasible. Gene Roddenberry notoriously had his rapacious attorney
Leonard Maizlish strike the business deal with the studio that gave him
ironclad creative control over Star Trek: The Next Generation (the only way a
wonderfully crazy show like that could ever have been made) along with an
usually strong financial stake in any resulting revenues. I once heard an
interview with billionaire luxury shoe designer Christian Louboutin about how
he rarely looks at financial statements and trusts his business partners to
handle everything other than the creative work; he just thinks about shoes all
day. George Lucas had a similar arrangement at Lucasfilm. Dyson has a CEO
running things in Singapore so he can tinker around with wacky R&D projects in
England. And, of course, Steve Jobs had Tim Cook.

I heard Andrew tell many stories of companies either that he had run or that
Tiny had acquired where the founder was essentially holding the company back by
not delegating to a trusted executive. Tiny’s strategy, immediately on buying a
business (if not before), is typically to find someone who has run a similar
company but at approximately double the size of the current business—the idea
being that they’ll know from direct experience how to take the business to the
next level. For example, when they bought Aeropress (and the founder wanted to
step out of the picture), Tiny hired the former President of SodaStream to run
it. That CEO massively grew the business in a few short years, leaving Andrew
able to luxuriate in the results idly from afar. Something similar happened
with Dribbble, where its founders had grown a huge base of happy users but
weren't sure where to take the business next on their own. Under Tiny’s new
CEO, the community saw explosive growth, while still allowing the founders to
hang around and keep doing the bits they enjoyed.

I started to get excited imagining what it might look like for me to be off in
my keyboard playground all day like Dyson or Louboutin—focusing only on making
amazing product and building the brand. I would have been quite happy to get
out of the way so that someone who actually knew what they were doing could
keep an eye out for those cash incinerators, tax filings, bank nonsense, and
all the little logistical minutiae that gobbled up my creative energy (and, for
that matter, my will to carry on in the business at all).

I can’t stress enough how transformative this simple shift in thinking was to
me. While I had often sought, here and there, to outsource simple tasks as
cheaply as possible in the past (such as hiring a warehouse crew to put things
in boxes), the thought had never occurred to me to find someone actually to run
my company for me. I think I had also somehow implicitly felt a (stupidly)
moralizing obligation to do all those things myself in order to be a worthy
founder. But, of course, there is no virtue in soldiering on through something
at which your skills are only middling at best, especially when you could be
focusing instead on areas where you actually have some unique value to add.

Here is how Andrew puts it in his book:

    …there is always somebody else who loves the job you hate. You might find
    accounting boring, for example, but I promise you there is somebody whose
    idea of a great night is eight hours of pivot tables in Excel. You might
    find coding to be the most laborious and painstaking job on Earth; someone
    out there can’t believe you’re going to pay them to write code. And you
    might hate running a company, which was someone’s dream job.

It’s basically the idea of comparative advantage from economics: a non-zero-sum
game where all parties win by contributing what they do best. Presumably there
was a spreadsheet jockey out there who needed someone like me to create the
artistic product that generated numbers to populate his or her pivot tables. I
realized I needed my Tim Cook.

And so I decided to approach my old buddy Palm Pilot to see if he might have
any interest in partnering up with the world’s nerdiest luxury business to make
exactly that happen.

Money that I didn’t need

    The business world has many people playing zero sum games and a few playing
    positive sum games searching for each other in the crowd. —Naval Ravikant

Getting an offer from Tiny was, oddly, much easier than getting a quote from
many manufacturers I’ve worked with. I simply gave them a little writeup on the
history of my business (way shorter, in fact, than the one you’re currently
reading) along with a login to our Shopify so they could check some basic
financials. Tiny only ends up investing in far less than 1% of the
opportunities that come across their desk, but apparently the analysts whom
Andrew put on the task of evaluating Norbauer were compelled by what they
found.

The offer was extremely short and simple, in classic Berkshire style. They
would make an investment into the business that would leave me fully
financially de-risked (even if the company went to zero), and they would bring
in a talented executive to function as a kind of COO. (At some point we just
took to calling this role “Norbauer’s Tim Cook.”) In exchange, they would get a
49% minority share in the business and a commensurate portion of any future
profits.

Incidentally, if it were merely a matter of a share in future profits, I would
readily have taken less than 51%, but I felt that retaining control was
important to assure the keyboard community that I wasn’t ceding the business to
the money people. This also gave me the power to ensure that no cost
efficiencies would ever get in the way of the client experience: my Founder’s
No.

Our shared long-term strategic vision was to launch the ready-to-type line I
had been building for years, starting first with the Seneca, and in doing this,
to give us a shot at building a great luxury brand that could endure for
decades.

I knew it was a good idea to accept the offer when, on sharing the details with
all my friends in the VC world, every single one of them told me I shouldn’t
take it. Many suggested that I should get competing offers from private equity
firms (not something I would ever in a million years consider). But some did
raise one reasonable objection. The funny thing is that Norbauer has always
been actually perfectly well capitalized. So, as they pointed out, I could
actually in theory just have figured out how to hire an executive entirely on
my own using cash in the bank.

But that sounded really hard, and I frankly just didn’t know how to do it. I’ve
historically been awful at hiring and extracting the best performance out of
employees—and especially letting people go when it’s obvious that things aren’t
working out. (I’m simply too polite—another area where I could do to be a bit
more like my desk-side mentor.) This failing of mine is costly and problematic
enough when it’s a low-paying menial job, but with something as high-stakes as
a well-paid executive there just seemed like so many things that could have
gone wrong, and I didn’t trust myself to get it right on the first try. Tiny,
by contrast, does this kind of strategic hiring all day long; it's their
superpower, and their secret sauce.

Anti-goals

I likely could have negotiated for more money than Tiny offered, but I didn’t
really care. I figured if these guys know what they’re doing, the company will
do well and we’ll probably make some money eventually together. I was looking
for long-term incentive alignment with smart people rather than a quick payday,
and my goals were primarily subjective and psychological.

Andrew, borrowing from Munger, stresses the importance of anti-goals in
business. Taleb calls this the via negativa: the fact that it’s often easier to
arrive at what you want by eliminating bad things rather than adding new
theoretically good ones. I’m a big via negativa kind of guy.

Here was my anti-goals list for a potential Tiny deal:

  • Ever touching a spreadsheet The main thing I needed was someone to do the
    important business analysis for me, attending to the low-hanging fruit but
    without optimizing the client experience into the ground.
  • Drowning in “little tasks” While productivity and hard work have (to a
    fault) never been scarce commodities for me, I’m really only effective when
    I can serially hyper-focus on things. The only things I’m any good for
    require me to go off into the wilderness, as it were, for weeks at a time
    so I can think clearly and deeply on problems. I needed to get the endless
    little administrative to-dos off my desk so I could actually effectively do
    that.
  • Feeling alone This last is perhaps the most important. I was just sick of
    not having anyone to validate or sanity-check my strategic choices and
    plans—to encourage me in the things I was doing right, and to help me
    realize when I was putting my attention on the wrong things. As a solo
    entrepreneur I’ve always been prone to anxious freak-outs when little
    hiccups arise in a business, because I know if I’m not taking them
    seriously there is nobody else to do so. I had increasingly come to realize
    that facing problems like this entirely on my own simply feels bad. Maybe
    it’s a kind of weakness and I should be embarrassed, but in any case I had
    at least reached the level of maturity to acknowledge that, at this point
    in my life, I wanted something else.

Optionality

In addition to anti-goals, another really important thing for me is
optionality. I reached out to Andrew to clarify some edge-case scenarios before
agreeing to the deal, and he gave me the following (astonishing) assurances:

  • If the business failed, no big deal. It happens, he said; we share the risk
    and just suck it up together and move on if so, no hard feelings.
  • I could walk away whenever I wanted. I really am a contrarian bitch; it’s
    deep in my veins. I basically find it impossible to do something if I have
    to do it, and even if I can whack up the ginger under those circumstances
    the work becomes slow and painful. (At the very least, I have to be tricked
    into believing it was my idea.) Andrew told me early on that I wouldn’t be
    shackled to the business, and if I ever wanted to walk away they would just
    find someone to replace me. That’s not going to happen, but only because I
    know it could if I wanted it to.
  • The big red FUCK OFF button on my desk Knowing how I bristle at being
    constrained, Andrew volunteered another point of optionality. He recounted
    the story of another company in which Tiny had made a majority
    (controlling) investment. The founder had stayed on running the business
    and Tiny occasionally made managerial recommendations. That founder
    eventually got annoyed, telling Tiny to fuck off and stop telling him what
    to do. And they actually did as instructed, trusting that he knew his
    company better than anyone. The founder sold the company for some healthy
    multiple just a few years later, creating a huge payday for Tiny. Andrew
    said he considered this a fantastic outcome and wouldn’t have done anything
    different. He offered this as an example that I could tell his team to get
    out of my hair at any time as well.

Yes

As we were nearing finalizing things, the Partner at Tiny who was putting the
deal together reached out to me to make one last clarifying point. He said he
just wanted to check in with me to make sure I didn’t have revenue growth
expectations that were too high for the first few years.

Yes, you read that right; this was a potential investor who was checking with
me, a creative founder, that I wasn’t going to expect them to MBA the shit out
of my company right off the bat, because if so they weren’t sure they could
deliver.

I happily signed on the dotted line.

Caleb and Year Zero

    Do not seek a replica of yourself to delegate to, or to promote. Watch out
    for this, it is a common error with people setting out to build a company.
    You have strengths and you have weaknesses in your own character. It makes
    no sense to increase those strengths your organization already possesses
    and not address the weaknesses.
    —Felix Dennis, [42]How to Get Rich

The executive whom Tiny proposed to be my Tim Cook was Caleb Bernabe, who is
now our Executive in Residence (a position he shares among a few portfolio
companies that don’t yet require a full-time executive). He acts essentially as
our COO, but his job description is basically doing all the things that I
hate—a skillset at which he inexplicably but admirably excels.

Like me (and Andrew), Caleb is a fellow refugee from both startups and
university education, a founder who sold his company and ended up where he is
now through a series of accidents during a listless period of existential
crisis—essentially as a solution to boredom.

When it comes to being a hipster aesthete, though, Caleb puts even Andrew to
shame. He’s into 90s hip hop, vintage Porsches, and Leica cameras (film only,
of course). Purely for fun, he runs a fashionable [43]natural wine bar in
Victoria, BC.

Tourist Wine Bar (exterior)Tourist Wine Bar (exterior)Tourist Wine Bar
(interior)Tourist Wine Bar (interior)

But my favorite fact about him is that, when he came to Utah to offer moral
support at a conference talk I gave, he showed up in a streetwear hoodie and
newly bleached-blond hair, looking like he had just rolled out of a Santa
Monica skate park. Yet I knew that the very next day he was on his way to New
York to negotiate on Tiny’s behalf in a high-stakes bidding war against one of
the richest men on earth and an army of slick-haired suit-wearing MBA
consultants. (He showed up in the hoodie.)

He’s exactly the sort of person I’d expect Andrew to pick as an analytical and
operational wizard.

Caleb personally co-invested in Norbauer & Co. as part of the Tiny deal,
following the general ethos of maximum skin-in-the-game incentive alignment. He
makes sure the lights stay on, projects stay on track, bills get paid, papers
filed, and that I never have to monitor things like cashflow or other
accounting details. Whenever financial modeling is required, he dives into
those pivot tables with abandon but otherwise just leaves me alone to make the
keyboards nice—with some welcome cheerleading from the sidelines when required.

Caleb is without question one of the smartest and most competent people I’ve
ever had the pleasure to work with. There is approximately zero chance I would
ever have hired so well if I had opted to go it alone.

It’s part of a broader trend I’ve noted: everyone at Tiny is just so
ridiculously smart, competent, and rational. One presumes that such people
exist in the world, but I’ve rarely had occasion to interact with them in my
professional life. It’s all the rarer to find so many all in one place, and
seemingly happy no less. (I vividly remember my first video call with Aman, the
Partner assigned to evaluate a potential deal with Norbauer. I saw a bunch of
insanely obscure books on his shelf that I thought nobody on earth had ever
read other than me, so we spent half the call excitedly geeking out about that,
rather than troubling too much about any details of the deal.)

The best part of my collaboration with Caleb in this past year is that we are
so consistently on the same page about strategy, cost/quality tradeoffs, and
vision for the brand. Of course, I was very careful when weighing the deal (and
Caleb as an executive) to ensure that this would be the case. But he quickly
put me at ease on that front. To also demonstrate my point about the articulate
intelligence of the people at Tiny, I might as well quote at length from his
pitch email to me:

    As a frequent participant in hobbies and interests centred around extreme
    devotion to detail and artistry, I resonate with your approach to building.
    What’s even more striking to me, however, is your philosophy around luxury
    and brand. My existential issue with fashion, cars, even art and dining to
    some extent, is the misplaced idea of status that many casual participants
    (conspicuous consumers) attach to items and experiences. I often lament the
    mass adoption of status symbols, and search intently for those with a
    legitimate devotion to craft. You called this approach an antidote to late
    stage capitalism, as opposed to a result of it. I love that.
    I’ve long wondered what would result if I were able to apply my ability and
    passion for building businesses towards an opportunity that exists more in
    this realm, rather than that of spreadsheets and sales optimizations (as
    much as I genuinely love those things, too). Usually, I end up thinking
    that this seems like too big of an ask for the universe, having my cake and
    eating it too. I feel genuinely, however, that working with Norbauer may be
    an opportunity to do just that.

What more need I say.

I can also report that Tiny as a whole has been ridiculously respectful of my
role as founder and guardian of the brand. Well into the partnership, I asked
Aman for his perspective on a video script I was working on, and here is the
beautiful message he wrote me:

    I want to be careful about giving too much of my take. Norbauer is an
    extension of you. And I’d be careful of questioning your instinct too much
    especially when it comes to the less tangible things about the business. It
    could compromise authenticity. Ideally, people listening hear your voice.

Caleb also once pointed out that various folks at the fund have been very
interested in and curious about Norbauer since the acquisition—enthusiastically
following along with the more subjective accomplishments we’ve been
accumulating in the past year—but nobody at the head office has ever quizzed
him on how many keyboards we’ve sold yet. Everyone remains far more interested
in the long-term prospects for the brand and just diligently doing what we need
to make it happen.

Psychological effects

While my motive for seeking a deal with Tiny was fundamentally psychological
(i.e., wanting to walk out the window a little less), there have been a number
of other unexpected—but very welcome—changes in my emotional relationship to
the business.

It turns out that completely financially de-risking for a founder is pretty
transformative. Even though I had always been fully prepared to lose every
dollar I had put into the business, I think some part of me always worried that
if things went to zero and I couldn’t return our personal capital I’d be
letting my family down, which probably made me overly cautious. Now that I’m
playing with the house’s money, as it were, I have a kind of emotional distance
that makes it easier to reason dispassionately about risks.

In fact, I would say that the emotional voltage around decision-making in
general is much lower for me. When you’re a sole founder who is making all
executive decisions, each one carries a massive emotional weight. It’s not just
a question of the financial consequences, but for me at least it has often been
intimately bound up with a sense of self-worth and identity. If anything goes
wrong, there is nobody else to blame but me. Something about stepping back and
becoming a partner with others in the business helps me think about the company
more like an investor (the good kind), thinking about the business at a
slightly higher level of abstraction. Together, we all just try to do our best
and approach things rationally.

Interestingly, I’ve also noticed an increased cadence and cost-consciousness
has coalesced in my daily engagement with the business. There is something
about having other people whom I like and respect who have a reason to care
that helps me feel motivated to pay attention to those things that actually
serve the business. Before, when it was just me, I had nobody to harm other
than myself—which somehow made it much easier for me to indolently inflict that
harm.

Since the deal, the business has already been more profitable than it ever has.
Or so I’m told. (Louboutin-style, I usually don’t even look at the financial
reports Caleb sends.)

Production on the Seneca proceeded beautifully, as I had hoped, through 2024.
And we sold out our private “Edition Zero” offering almost instantly. We were
awarded two patents for head-turning advancements in keyboard tech, with others
in the pipeline. I have my Tim Cook, and my anti-goals have been kept far at
bay.

Things in Year 0 have played out exactly as Andrew puts it in his book:

    I realized that [Tiny] appealed to founders who didn’t relish the idea of
    selling their beloved company to some private equity firm run by people who
    viewed their business as a spreadsheet and would chop it up for parts then
    flip it to the highest bidder. Founders like us. We could come in, give the
    founders a huge payday, and do our best to solve all of their problems.
    Problems we’d learned to solve the hard way. It didn’t mean they had to
    leave, either. We could offer deals where the founders stayed on and kept
    running the business, taking some chips off the table. Or, if a founder
    wanted, they could just advise the business and leave the day-to-day to us.

Year 1, and Straight on to the Retrofuture

Now it’s 2025 and I’m moving into my second year with Tiny’s help.

We just brought on a new member of our executive team to head up Client
Experience, Taeha Kim, who is also now an incentive-aligned investor in the
business. Taeha has long been the leading tastemaker and influencer in our
industry and, as part of our deal, [44]his half-million-subscriber YouTube
channel came to Norbauer & Co. with him. There is probably no single person on
this planet better poised to do this critical job for us, and I’m certain that
this deal would never have happened without Tiny’s involvement (I would simply
not have had the ambition or risk tolerance even to explore it.)

The Seneca is now a real thing in the physical world, and it has been [45]
generating enormous [46]buzz, both within the keyboard world and beyond, as we
moved towards our more public [47]First Edition launch this week.

The product and brand are stronger than ever. I have an amazing crew to dream
alongside me. We’re doing cool shit together and having a great time.

And not once have I even had to turn the key to open up the little protective
acrylic cover over the big red FUCK OFF button on my desk. But it has brought
me great comfort to know it was always there.

I used to think that building something great required carrying all the
significant burdens on my own. That the price of creative freedom was solitude.
And that those shards of glass were just a necessary part of the meal.

At least with respect to one rather exceptional investment firm, I was wrong.

I just had to find investors who think for the long term—and who respect the
art of business at least as much as the business of business. People who could
run the spreadsheets for me, but also see beyond them. And find them I did.

For the first time in my life as a founder, I’m not staring alone into an
abyss.

I’m looking into The Future.

And I’m smiling like an idiot.

Get my future dispatches delivered directly to your inbox.

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Further reading

[50]
Keyboard Academy

The Outsider Option: Why I Sold Half my Company to Tiny

[51]
The Berm

Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness in Work

[52]
The Berm

A Forgotten Future

© 2010-2025 Ryan Norbauer
[53]Visit my luxury keyboard design studio.

References:

[1] https://ryan.norbauer.com/
[2] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/the-outsider-option-why-i-sold-half-my-company-to-tiny/#/portal
[3] https://ryan.norbauer.com/
[4] https://ryan.norbauer.com/biography/
[5] https://ryan.norbauer.com/reading-list/
[6] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/
[7] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/the-outsider-option-why-i-sold-half-my-company-to-tiny/#/portal
[8] https://ryan.norbauer.com/biography
[9] https://norbauer.co/
[10] https://www.norbauer.co/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[11] https://www.tiny.com/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroPress?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterboxd?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dribbble?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[15] https://serato.com/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[16] https://www.metalab.com/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[17] https://frosty.inc/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[18] https://www.hodinkee.com/magazine?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[19] https://geekhack.org/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[20] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDDBU8kkJZw&t=69s&ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[21] https://www.norbauer.co/pages/the-seneca?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[22] https://amzn.to/3CpskYQ?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[23] https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[24] https://amzn.to/4g32Gag?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[25] https://amzn.to/40lJC1a?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[26] https://teenage.engineering/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[27] https://world.hey.com/dhh/beans-and-vibes-in-even-measure-8eff819c?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[28] https://youtu.be/wG1BrdzirnU?si=oDYY_1cyZVsbdf4O&t=106&ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[29] https://www.forbes.com/sites/disneyinstitute/2020/02/04/what-do-tiki-birds-have-in-common-with-customer-experience-learn-why-intentionality-matters/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[30] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/610-announcing-the-seed-conference-featuring-jim-coudal-jason-fried-and-carlos-segura?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[31] https://www.conferencebadge.com/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[32] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/death-and-underachievement-a-guide-to-happiness-in-work/
[33] https://amzn.to/4gbRLed?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[34] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/347-youre-not-on-a-fucking-plane-and-if-you-are-it-doesnt-matter?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[35] https://www.youtube.com/@MyFirstMillionPod/search?query=andrew+wilkinson&ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[36] https://x.com/awilkinson/status/1646990916408995840?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[37] https://amzn.to/40BYWa4?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[38] https://amzn.to/4gj4FXZ?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[39] https://amzn.to/3WBS6QD?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[40] https://amzn.to/4jFDg5g?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[41] https://www.berkshirenerds.store/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[42] https://amzn.to/3CpskYQ?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[43] https://touristwinebar.com/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[44] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u11-pBP9GA0&ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[45] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/20/the-seneca?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[46] https://www.theverge.com/keyboards/633344/norbauer-seneca-3600-keyboard-peek?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[47] https://www.norbauer.co/products/the-seneca?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
[50] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/the-outsider-option-why-i-sold-half-my-company-to-tiny/
[51] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/death-and-underachievement-a-guide-to-happiness-in-work/
[52] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/a-forgotten-future/
[53] https://norbauer.co/