Why I'm taking a long startup investing vacation | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm taking a long startup investing vacation

fourhourworkweek.com

81 pointsrmason65 comments

I am a fan of Tim's, but must say that I am a little bemused when he (along with people like Guy Kawasaki and Noah Kagan etc.) who made their fame by hustling and cold calling people when they were still unknown, now say that they hate and avoid unknown people cold calling and hustling them!

A refreshing change from this sort of "Well, I've made it now by using other people so I can make even more money by talking about how I made it using other people and ignore others who are trying to make it" attitude is Derek Sivers - at least Derek still takes time to respond in a meaningful way to every email sent to him. I had a couple of good interactions with him, which is more than I can say for the others I have mentioned on here.

EDIT: In an ironic twist, the 2 part podcast where Tim Ferriss interviews Derek Sivers is one of my all time favourites.

I'm not Tim, but my counter argument to that is that in both cases Tim took advantage of inefficiencies in the concept of "cold calling". First it was to cold call when secretaries weren't around, now it's to avoid them altogether, because they have such a low success rate.

That's the most basic tacit of any successful sales person. Anyone who works in sales knows if you call before 8am, during lunch, or after 5:30PM you are more likely to get directly to the person you are looking for. I'm a big fan of Tim's but his innovation certainly hasn't been in cold calling.

Man, who cares? Does this satisfy anyone's intellectual curiosity or is it just that anything a VC says is automatically relevant and interesting? I don't care what this dude does with his money and time.

Maybe he is erlich bachman?

The great thing about Tim's writing is that he challenges "obvious" beliefs and fundamentals, and is very introspective.

My life was changed, and remains changed by reading 4 Hour Work Week pretty much when it came out. Am I living his definition of it? Absolutely not. Did it challenge me to make large changes in the parts of my life I wasn't happy with? It did. I've found the same with his other writing too.

Including this piece?

I've saved the criteria he mentions for deciding if you're coasting or not for later review

Please refrain from posting "who cares" type comments. They add nothing to the discussion. If you aren't interested in a submission, simply skip over it.

Just downvote and move on. No need to lecture (I realize the hypocrisy of this comment).

I think they do add something, granted it could be phrased differently, but sometimes "Who Cares?", full stop, is a perfectly valid question.

It's not a valid question when something reaches the front page, which requires quite a few votes within a specific timeframe. If no one cared, it wouldn't reach the front page.

Right, so people care, but the question is who, not a binary of whether or not people care, obviously people do if it's on the front page, the new question posed is who and an implied why.

At least in American English, the phrase "who cares" is not meant to be interpreted literally. It's not a question, but rather a (flippant) way of saying "I don't care" or "no one cares." Note that the poster in question expands on this and ends their post with, "I don't care what this dude does with his money and time."

The people who do care about the article have upvoted it. Other than the ones who have commented, it doesn't matter who has found it interesting. The only thing that matters is that enough people have.

He mentions that 80+% of his assets are now in startups. Having that much money tied up in assets that have no scheduled exit events seems like a pretty strong argument by itself.

I wonder if he invested 80% of his assets or if the startups he's invested in (like Uber) rose in valuation so that they became that valuable.

The latter, it's due to unrealized gains.

Early investments in Uber are up something like 10,000x. That's such a large gain that only a super wealthy person could have 20% of that in liquid assets. He probably has much more than 80% tied up in unrealized paper gains. And those gains are dominated by Uber.

Seems very likely, and since they're illiquid startups, it's probably hard to rebalance the portfolio.

"If I sleep poorly and have an early morning meeting, I’ll cancel the meeting last-minute if needed and catch up on sleep."

Must be nice :)

Must suck to have been the one to arrive on time for an early morning meeting, just to have it canceled at the last minute because someone just realized they aren't going to make it.

Yeah, what an incredible dick move. Cancel it the night before so some other person doesn't bust their ass to show up.

I'd rather have my time wasted and the meeting rearranged than have a bad meeting. The outcome is the same - you make no forward progress either way - but rescheduling means you still have the opportunity to have a good meeting with some positive outcomes.

Story of my life.

I read it as he's no longer excited about what he's doing. So even the smallest excuse like being slightly tired is enough for him to blow something off. I don't think he's trying to justify that behavior as much as show that he feels worn down from saying yes to everything.

Maybe you can write an article on how you traveled the world with free miles during your investing vacation? Where do cheapos like this guy get money to invest in startups? Money laundering?

He made his initial money selling a quack nutritional supplement called "BrainQUICKEN": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ferriss#BrainQUICKEN

Since then, he's made his money selling books and programs that claim to teach you how to make money (a.k.a. the Robert Kiyosaki method).

I enjoyed both of the books of his I've read, but you're not wrong. They're classic get rich quick schemes and get skinny fast schemes...not always based on the best science, or based on anything other than one data point (often his own personal experience). The value in them is more likely to be in maybe convincing someone to do something toward their goals, rather than providing a useful blueprint for what that something should be.

I followed his page on facebook years ago, and he trots out the "eating wheat causes you to have poop in your blood" article every year or so (there is no reason to believe "leaky gut syndrome" is a real thing, and Ferriss treats the guy who espouses that theory as though he is some kind of expert on health and nutrition). That's enough for me to take everything he says with a huge grain of salt.

The thing that always gets me about people who sell "success" and "wealth" products is that there would be no need to sell them if the product was truly that good. They'd just use it to become successful/wealthy themselves. But, they claim to just want to help other people? Awesome. Then, give it away.

Likewise with books that promise to teach you how to make a trillion dollars in the stock market. Really? You've found a way to do this, yet you want to sell me a book for $9.95?

Likewise, Kiyosaki started with a small amount of capital and made most of his early money haunting mortgage foreclosures and flipping foreclosed houses. At one point in Rich Dad, Poor Dad he gloats about making some obscene amount in an afternoon ($50k or so?) by buying a family's home out from under them and selling it. That's an asshole move no matter how you cut it, and I'd rather be poor than be a scumbag.

That's not an asshole move. You can't "buy a family's home out from under them". The bank owned the home. Kiyosaki made sure the owner of the home got repaid for their initial investment.

And banks have never foreclosed on mortgages unfairly, right? He made it easy for the bank to cash out at a huge loss to the mortgage holder. If it wasn't easy then the bank would have been more motivated to reach some agreement with the mortgage holder.

To be fair, 2/3 of his books are about health, the body and cooking.

Yeah--I think he's not a great dude, but The Four Hour Body was a pretty good kick in the ass for me to lose a bunch of weight and take better care of myself. I'm glad I came across it.

Is 2015 a worthy tag? This is from October.

Well, he shoots assault rifles with scopes and tosses poker chips in your face. How can you argue with that?

It doesn't look like his YouTube interviews are getting many views. Is he still popular?

I think his podcast is insanely popular. I find it to be either great interviews (e.g. the one with Jamie Foxx) or really just obsession with the minutiae of "successful" people days.

Those are his podcasts that are uploaded to youtube. Relatively few people listen via youtube videos instead of via a podcasting app.

  - I'm really good at it, promise
  - Did I mention I'm good at it?
  - [random name drop]
  - It was *lucrative*
  - Have I established that I was good at it and that I made money off it?
  - [random quote]
  - Rules are made to be broken
  - Catchphrase
  - Platitude
  - [random Feynman reference]
  - The new people don't like me or vice versa

Gee Tim, I wonder why.

I generally like Tim (and have genuinely found some of the tips, particularly stoic philosophy, really useful) but I wish he'd take a break from the marketing bullshit.

I listened to a dozen or so of his podcasts and read a few articles of his. Unless I'm missing something I've never found anything of value in what he speaks about. It's always general topics that, much like horoscopes, could be seemingly applied in every situation.

I'm curious what his contributions are that are not just him marketing himself.

Exactly. He just vaguely talks about cool stuff with supposedly cool people. I tried his podcasts and just can't get into him.

You think he's worthless and yet you listened to "a dozen or so of his podcasts". Mmmmkay.

What of it? I think lots of stuff is terrible and pay attention to it to better understand it. Both to insure against the possibility that I'm wrong and, if I'm not, to better understand why it exists and how it came to be.

So you've never tried something multiple times before deciding it wasn't for you?

He does a lot of interviews so after I determined I wasn't the biggest fan I decided to download just the episodes with interviews of people I was interested it. Then I unsubscribed.

Seems reasonable to me.

If i consume 12+ episodes of something it means there is some value there. Otherwise I would have stopped earlier. I don't really understand all this negativity towards Ferriss. He's an honest guy who provides a lot of value to people. No one is forced to listen to him.

> If i consume 12+ episodes of something it means there is some value there

Not really. As I said I tried a few then just downloaded the interviews of people I as interested in thinking he might be as good as Mixergy. Ultimately I found out nothing new was really asked in any of the interviews I listened to.

So I thought there would be redeeming value in the interviews of guests I was interested in but at least for me there was not.

> I don't really understand all this negativity towards Ferriss. He's an honest guy who provides a lot of value to people. No one is forced to listen to him.

I'm not really negative towards him I just find his content spammy / of little value. It's terribly generic and I find the examples of comparing him to horoscopes pretty apt.

I recently discovered Tim with his podcast. While I usually like the podcast, I'm curious, what are the arguments against Tim? What opinions do you strongly disagree with him?

I'm also looking for others thinkers that have usually different opinions with him.

One thing that I dislike about Tim is that he claims to be very accomplished. If you look at most of his accomplishments, he basically is exploiting a flaw in the rules to achieve a very narrow definition of "success."

For example, his "kickboxing world championship" was actually a small san-shou (a fairly low popularity Chinese version of kickboxing) federation's "championship". In addition, the way he won was by clinching with his opponents and pushing them out of the designated combat area; basically, exploiting the letter of the rules. This was facilitated by the fact that competitors weren't very athletic, and didn't typically cut weight for competition, so by aggressively cutting weight he was able to come in 15-20lbs heavier than his opponents.

Additionally, he claims to have gone from a 300lb deadlift to being able to deadlift 650lbs in an incredibly short period. Buried away in the notes he mentions that this 650lb deadlift is actually done in a smith machine, with the weight starting just above his knees - so missing the hardest three fifths or so of the movement.

Don't get me wrong, some of Tim's accelerated learning techniques are legit, but in general he is more interested in doing something that he can brag about at cocktail parties than legitimately mastering things.

I was going to defend him by pointing out that he holds a world record in Tango, but then I watched the video and now I realize he basically just paid $10,000 for an honorable title. But then I remembered that he competed in the Tango world championships, but then I watched _that_ video and it's equally unimpressive. It's like competing in the world series of poker...

I like the guy, but he's a hell of a marketer.

Was he the guy who made a video titled "impossible is nothing" or something like that?

Tim is becoming more like the Robert Kiyosaki of the startup/techie crowd, rather than a store of knowledge about strange and obscure ways scoured from unconventional or overlooked sources like in the early days of the four hour work week

His early audience was attracted to his deep research into geeky things and hacking his way into things, but that has been heavily watered down as he expanded into writing multiple books [1], a mailing list, a TV series, a podcast, ... the list goes on. Although given his growing audience I wouldn't blame him for this. Another criticism is that Tim is by far not a primary or even secondary source for any of the things talks about religiously. He often touts books that fail to cite sources themselves, which just snowballs into misinformation. And this isn't about highly opinionated issues, it's usually about well studied regiments like weight lifting, nootropics, sleep, and memory. Why keep relying on Tim if I can go to bodybuilding.com, longecity, or bluelight and read cited reports firsthand?

[1] There was also added controversy to his character with speculation that Tim heavily relied on ghost writers, and even "hacked" his way to Best-Sellers lists [2]

[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873238643045783161...

While I am most decidedly not a fan of his books the podcasts are excellent. In the last two weeks he's had Mark Andreessen and Kevin Kelly and for me that is as good as it gets. I'd also recommend checking out the Naval Ravikant one which has become almost legendary.

many friends let him invest in their company, not one (that I know of) found any use for him outside of dumb money and maybe a shout out on his podcast.

>many friends let him invest in their company, not one (that I know of) found any use for him outside of dumb money

little-known fact: money can be exchanged for goods and services.

thanks for that, explains why my local market won't take bushels of corn as payment.

seriously though, sometimes investors are also given terms that assume said investor will help out in ways other than writing a check.

first world problems. "man, all I got from my investor is a bunch of money to build my dream with. useless."

Good summary. Downvoters gonna hate. Doesn't change the truth.

My suspicion, based on limited experience, but still, is that investing in startups purely for the potential gains is the road to a bad end comprising one part disinterest and one part disconnection. Startups are a tool to achieve an end, which is to say some form of change in the world. If you have a very clear view of the change you wish to achieve, that can be useful, and indeed I'd argue it is essential if you want to avoid the aforementioned bad end.

For me, the goal is specific new capabilities in medicine, with a fairly strong opinion on which strategies are worthwhile when it comes to achieving those goals. Everything else flows from that point: I care about getting research done, answering specific questions about whether X works or Y does not work, and then moving working research closer to the clinic.

From the point of view of where the money goes, there is actually little difference between investing in an early stage biotechnology startup and making charitable donations to a late-stage laboratory group. In both cases those funds buy research: use of laboratory resources, the ever-expensive reagents needed for modern research, mice for animal studies, the efforts of scientists, and all the other essentials. There is no rule that says a particular research project has to be carried out before or after the point at which non-profit labwork transitions to for-profit labwork; where the work happens in the typical chronology of the clinical translation of science to medicine is very much a matter of circumstance and the character of those involved.

When you are putting money into research with this philosophy, where the for/non profit split isn't as important as getting the job done, you'll find yourself better placed in the for-profit side.

Investing is something that investors do moderately well - there is a method and a discipline and a body of tradition and knowledge. But it isn't the only thing that investors can do to speed the development of medical science. What the investment community should do, attempts to some degree, but remains very poor at accomplishing, is the process of nudging along pre-commercial scientific efforts, of strategically funding specific research projects in order to produce a new crop of biotech/medtech companies. This seeding of the field can be highly effective, yet for the most part even personally interested investors leave philanthropy in their field to other people. Thus funding for truly radical, high-risk, high-reward new research is next to non-existent. The other side of the coin, targeted funding for medical research projects with excellent prospects, or that are only a few years and a million dollars away from the leap to a candidate therapy and a startup, nudging them into the target zone, is also very thin on the ground.

All of this is to note that the launch of a company happens a long way after the start of the development process, and investors should become involved well before that point if they want to better achieve their goals. Building on what has been learned so far, better and more organized ways to meld philanthropy and investment might be assembled. A community with deep pockets that can build the intricate networking tools and the energetic, highly networked approach to for-profit investment that presently exists should be able to make the leap over the barrier to organize and assist the non-profit research pipeline as well.

i wonder how the hackern news and the peasantry of the startup community at large will respond to the next major blowout of this tech bubble.

it will be interesting.

Flagged for back button marketing hijacking.

I can back button just fine. /e what browser are you using?

Standard Chrome (new tab change sucks, btw) on Android. The back button still worked, but the first press displayed a full screen form to sign up for a mailing list, or other such spam. Then, I had to push the back button again to get away from the site.

Me as well. Chrome 51, OS X.

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