
Why I'm taking a long startup investing vacation - rmason
http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/10/29/startup-vacation-2/
======
cyberferret
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.

~~~
sputknick
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.

~~~
Taylor_OD
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.

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corndoge
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.

~~~
enraged_camel
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.

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

~~~
enraged_camel
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.

~~~
sandmansandine
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.

~~~
enraged_camel
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.

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mojoe
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.

~~~
mevile
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.

~~~
paulsutter
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.

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jasonlaramburu
"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 :)

~~~
jsprogrammer
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.

~~~
Ftuuky
Story of my life.

~~~
jsprogrammer
:(

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bparanj
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?

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

~~~
taneq
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.

~~~
spacehome
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.

~~~
taneq
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.

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dismal2
Is 2015 a worthy tag? This is from October.

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

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

~~~
amasad
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.

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tacos

      - 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.

~~~
andy_ppp
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.

~~~
BenderV
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.

~~~
CuriouslyC
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.

~~~
55555
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.

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

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reasonattlm
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.

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teslaberry
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.

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jsprogrammer
Flagged for back button marketing hijacking.

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

~~~
jsprogrammer
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.

~~~
SeanLuke
Me as well. Chrome 51, OS X.

