Hello ladies and gentlemen, wookies and mages. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. I'm whispering due to two factors. Number one, I'm in an airport and I'm trying to avoid having people heckle me or other issues. Number two, I've had way too much caffeine. So, I'll try to keep this short. Number one, this episode is brought to you by the Tim Ferriss book club. I read, let's call it two to four books a week typically. Out of all of those books over the years, I've highlighted four to six of them that had a huge impact on my life. You can get samples of all of them at audible.com/timsbooks. That's audible.com/timsbooks. And if you'd like a chance to go with me on a private jet to Necker Island, this is the private island of Richard Branson to spend a week with Richard Branson, with me, with Daymond John of Shark Tank and founder of FUBU, Marie Forleo. Let's see here. Seth Godin will also be there. If you want to spend a week learning lots, there might be some debauchery. You never know. On Necker Island, you can do it and have all of your expenses paid. Check out shopify.com/tim. That's s h o p i f y.com/tim. And now onto our guest. My guest is Alexis Ohanian. And Alexis is best known perhaps as the co-founder of the social news site Reddit. It is massive as you probably know. Hipmunk, he was in the first ever Y Combinator class. Y Combinator is the best known startup accelerator in the world. Its selectivity is something like combining Harvard with the Navy Seals. Very hard to get into. Stars that have come out of that include Reddit, Dropbox, and many many others. He is now a Y Combinator or YC partner, and we're going to talk a bit about that. Good evening and thank you for US blah blah blah blah blah. So I'll try to keep this.
You know what? I'm not going to stop this recording. I'm going to keep going because they never showed up in the airport. I'm going to take a moment and I'm going to let you listen to some of this now. I like this. It's very cinema verite. Okay, you know what? I'm going to keep going. So, Alexis has a lot of stories. I ask him a lot of weird questions like when is the last time he punched someone in the face or got punched in the face and we digress all over the place. We talk about how to spot the next big company, how he chooses companies. We talk about favorite books. We talk about documentaries. We talk about everything. So without further ado, I would like you to meet Alexis Ohanian. Thanks for listening.
Hello ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. Thank you for listening. This episode we have a spectacular, charming, and altogether handsome guest named Alexis. How are you, buddy? It's good to have you on.
I'm doing really well. Doing doing very well. Very happy to be here. Thank you, Tim.
Of course. And you are in NYC at the moment?
I should be. I should be, but I'm actually in Los Angeles.
Ah, what are you doing in Los Angeles?
I'm cheating on Brooklyn. Don't tell her. You know, catching up catching up with some friends. My grandpa lives here. He is 92 years young and want to spend a little time with him and then doing some press stuff.
Got it. Love it. Like this. Well, hopefully this will be the highlight of your LA trip.
Oh, yes. Well, it's a shame. It's a shame we're doing this remotely, though.
Yeah. Well, we can. It makes me feel taller when I'm not standing next to you or even seated next to you. You have a very majestic torso.
See, it makes me feel healthier not having to sit next to you. This morning, seriously, I was like, I'm going to do some push-ups this morning. Nope. No. Went for some coffee instead.
Wait, real talk. This is totally random, but you said I could ask you questions. Is there anything you've learned since 4-Hour Body that if you were to do like the addendum or like the quick update because I'm, you know, forever a human guinea pig like what when it comes down to have you learned anything particularly new that you would add for readers or for our body they should be doing physically in order to be as efficiently healthy as possible?
I think there would be a few agenda I would add. The first would be on smart drugs and it would actually be a cautionary tale more than a prescription for smart drug use. I would also outline the point that sort of Cartesian separation of mind and body is very artificial and if you do a lot of things intended to improve physical performance or that are associated with that, whether that's dietary say elimination of starches and gluten or taking care of your microbiome, are really looking at the sort of bacterial balance or not even balance but composition of not just gut but skin flora for instance which I become very fascinated by you'll improve your mental performance and related to that I would probably delve into different types of fasting which I skim the surface of as well as a couple of other sort of fringe topics that I've become very very fascinated by. So, it's funny you should mention that. I'm actually thinking of doing an updated version of the 4-Hour Body with case studies as well as a few additional chapters on areas that I think are worth exploring. But, right on, I think as a side note that push-ups are very very underrated. I think that if you were to just take a few variations of the plank push-ups in different ranges of motion and you had a say 3 to 4ft dowel that you could put across two chairs so that you could lay on your back and do basically reverse rows like body weight rows. That's all you need along with say pistols or split squats to stay in fantastic shape when you're on the road. You really don't need anything else really.
I could get cut up I think.
Well, getting cut up has more to do with diet. Yeah, I'd say you add muscle in the gym, you lose fat in the kitchen or when you choose what you eat. So, that's definitely a major piece of the puzzle. But, so one of the things I've been trying and it's still early and I don't know if I'm ready to start promoting this, but it's the waffle diet.
That's I can see a large market for that.
Yeah. And I tell you, man, it's I haven't quite seen the results I've been looking for, but it makes me happy every time I do it. There's a twinge of remorse.
But yeah, I like this. I like this. You can sell a book. I'll shop your waffle diet and we'll gladly take a portion of that. So for those people who may not be familiar with your background, the first thing I'm going to say is Google is your friend. And we've spent time together before. I would really like to explore certain aspects of you and your experience and your projects that perhaps haven't been covered before because of course you have sort of the early days of Reddit, Hipmunk, publishing, being part of the first class of Y Combinator, now being a partner at Y Combinator, the huge bus tour, I guess it was 200 events for without your permission, your book, internet activism for SOPA, net neutrality, etc. The list goes on and on and on including 100 plus startups or so that you've invested in including at least the very partial list obviously Secret, Instacart, Coinbase, Zenefits, Teespring, etc. A lot of those areas have been covered in many fantastic interviews and articles and I don't want to replicate those but I would like to dig into how you operate and some of what has allowed you or helped you to do what you've done. And so the first question I'd love to ask you is one I often ask, but that is when you think of the word successful, who's the first person that comes to mind?
Oh wow, this one. All right, so this is something that has changed and has evolved over the years. You know, at a baseline, I really This is so cheesy. At a baseline though, I think of my own parents for whom success was measured primarily by having a happy, loving, awesome family. And I'm the product of all of that hard work and love and all that great stuff that made me who I am. When I think about it as a businessman, frankly, I think of people like Oprah and Jay-Z because if you consider the spectrum of let's just say business success, you've got to look at where you start on the spectrum and where you're at on the spectrum when you sort of finish. And obviously they're not finished, but you know, where they've arrived at this point. And you know, simply because of a life lottery ticket, my starting point on that spectrum was a lot further along than Jay's and Oprah's for all kinds of, you know, systemic reasons, frankly, beyond any of our controls. And that doesn't make my success any less cool. I'm very happy with it, but when I look at the entire scope of it, I have to be in awe and be like, 'Holy like that's next level success.' And then when I think of philanthropy, I mean, you got to think of folks like Gates and Buffett for just being able to say that they're going to take this tremendous amount of wealth and in their life, especially Gates, become so active about finding brilliant ways to use it to make the world suck less. So, it's a spectrum of it. But those are the people who I really look to and think like if only like that is a place to strive toward for me.
If we were looking at the opposite end of the spectrum, what are some of the things that you fear? And those don't have to be internal insecurities. They could be externalities, but I mean, what are the things that you're afraid of currently?
This is I don't want to get too morbid, but I am afraid of my own mortality. I mean, I guess everyone is. Who am I kidding? Everyone is. This is not a unique thing. I guess my perspective on it has always been that the way I thought about it even as a little kid was when you're playing video back when video games used to be hard you would have like a finite number of lives and when you're on your last life it would say zero lives remaining or lives remaining zero some variant of that and when you were on your last life in video games again when they used to be hard you played your best because you just realized there was nothing left obviously this is just like life notwithstanding reincarnation and I had a bunch of events happen to me pretty early in my 20s that really gave me this really imbued this perspective on me and I know how fortunate I am to be living the life I'm living and I'm so grateful for it and I just want to do as much stuff as possible while I can and while I have my facilities and while I can do stuff. So I'm only half kidding. I'm not eating a waffle diet. But like I'm 31 now, man. And I'm thinking about things like my health and I'm thinking about how I can be more effective with the time that I have and well-being is a huge part of it. So that's a very long answer of me just being afraid to be mortal. But get me that matrix, man. I need my singularity so I can upload.
Well, you know, I think that actually relates to the next question and that is a question of filtering and selection. So you said doing a ton of stuff, right? But you're at a point and many people let's reach a point where they have a paradox of choice with a menu of options they could not possibly exhaust even if they lived for 300 years of different things they could do and you've invested in a lot of startups. We'll get to the startup specific discussion a little bit later, but how do you choose what to say no to? And what are some of the ways that you've learned to say no? As opposed to the like, ah, sorry, I just don't have bandwidth right now, like maybe in 3 months. And what you really mean is no, but then they follow up in 3 months and it just snowballs into this chaotic mess. Well, how do you choose what to say no to currently? And how do you and are there any ways that you've found more effective than others to say no?
Tim, I was hoping you would tell me this. I don't know. I was actually just thinking about this this morning. One of the things working with early stage companies again that was so heartwarming was I remembered back when Steve and I were starting Reddit and like no one knew who we were. No one cared. Like I woke up every morning and I didn't have a bunch of stuff on my calendar. I didn't have a bunch of people who wanted to get coffee. It was just like I was desperate for anyone to want to talk to me or hear about Reddit. And I mean this is a gift and a curse. Obviously, I'm in a really fortunate position where my inbox has this problem. But yeah, you're right. Like, I'm still struggling. You know why it was a 200 event bus tour? It should not have been 200 events in 5 months. That is crazy. But it was because I just kept saying yes to everything. And I'm clearly not good at this. This was supposed to be my year of no and where the default setting would be no. It's been a lot better. Certainly. You know what it has been? I think and to actually answer this question, it's really been trying to listen to my gut. My initial impulse, the initial feeling of yes, if I'm not like yes, I am stoked. I absolutely I'm excited. I want to do this, then it's going to be a no. Or it's going to be let me find some other way to try to be valuable because like at the end of the day, like I want my ideas to scale. I think like you like a lot of people in our position like there is a genuine interest to want to help folks and then to also do it in the most efficient way possible and to realize like look 20 minutes with Tim Ferriss might change your life but I know that 20 minutes with me is probably not actually going to change the trajectory of something right like this isn't like false modesty I really just think there have to be more efficient ways to be scaling our knowledge and I haven't gotten really good at figuring them out yet but I'm always imploring folks to just to hopefully find in themselves to just sort of realize that it doesn't really come down to one particular person. It doesn't necessarily have to start or end with one particular door that gets open from an email because there are so many possibilities and so many opportunities and I don't know man I really I need your help with this Tim.
Well I think just a couple of points there. So the first would be I don't think 50 minutes with me will change most people's lives either. It's a hell of a lot of responsibility to feel if somebody believes that. So you have to disabuse people of that notion I think and also if you are let's just say beginning in your career or a new career or a new company and you want to reach out to someone who is getting deluged with requests like an Alexis asking to pick their brain over coffee without any context is not a good way to do it. because that often reflects a lack of focus or forethought on the part of the person making the request. So make a very very specific request a question they can answer in a handful of lines that will in fact be disproportionately valuable to you. That is I think the right place to start. Even more so if you do it in a forum where they can answer one to many like a blog post, right? because you are more likely to answer that and take the time to give a substantial answer. The second point I was going to maybe refine really is my question since you deal with so many startups and you have to be selective. Let's just say when you were angel investing and you may still be angel investing. We'll get to that. When you say no to a company, how do you say no? Because you've had to do this. You can't just string along hundreds of companies. It'll disallow you from doing anything else. How do you typically say no? What's the language that you use?
I mean, I've started a couple companies now. It is basically the language I would want to hear. Obviously, the no isn't the part I want to hear, but everything else is what I would want to hear if I were a founder. So, it's upfront, you know, I'm passing. And here's why. In a few sentences, if I can fairly concretely say what it was, right? Like, I just don't think you have enough traction yet. I mean, the growth numbers that I'm looking for are going to be like double digit week over week or month over month. like it doesn't seem like the data doesn't show that you guys have found product market fit and try to or maybe I wouldn't even say product market fit cuz I feel like that's a buzz word bingo game. But to really as concretely and concisely as possible explain like this is why I'm passing and I'm sorry and I do mean this with all sincerity. I really look forward to you proving me wrong and I really do wish you all the best because I had people who he never got I didn't name him in the book but I mentioned the story like an executive at Yahoo who basically brought me and Steve in this is early in Reddit and told us we were a rounding error because our traffic was so small we were a rounding error compared to Yahoo and he was like what are you even doing here and we're like you invited us like you brought us here what a dick to ridicule us and so like that and to that guy's credit He's provided me with so much motivation like that is he has fueled I put your rounding error on our wall in the Reddit office after that meeting just as like this wall of negative reinforcement for me and so that ended up being kind of valuable for me and helpful and I still am grateful to this day that he was such a dick because it was so motivating and but I don't want to be that guy.
You don't want to be the Ivan Drago to the startups coming to you.
No. And saying no is something you have to do a vast majority of the time as an investor if you're going to be successful and I want to be as helpful as possible and I do genuinely I will not feel any ill will. I would actually rather a company we do this at YC. We would rather a company tell us like on their IPO day email and just be like hey heads up we applied in you know summer of 2010 or whatever and you guys rejected us. So, I'd want them to email and be like, 'Hey, man. You know, we met for coffee 6 years ago and you didn't invest, but I just want you to know we IPO'ed.' And even if they want to throw a silly little animated gif in there just making fun of me for missing out, like that's great. I want to know where I got it wrong. So, hopefully I can learn from it. And I would bear no entrepreneur ill will for even rubbing it in my face a little bit, but I don't want to be a part of that wall of negative reinforcement. Even though sometimes you well, a lot of the time you have to deliver that kind of bad news.
Related to Go ahead. Incidentally, incidentally, you made that Ivan Drago reference. For viewers who can't see me, I guess no one can cuz it's audio. If you've never seen me before, I look just like Ivan Drago down to the like the nine pack or 10 pack. I guess it's only an even number.
You have an odd number. Just one cuz it was Soviet.
Just one up at your sternum.
It's a nine pack in Soviet Russia. Yeah, perfect.
Yeah, I know. You've got the tight red singlet and everything for those who haven't seen Alexis during his keynotes. All right. So, switching from the word successful, whose face pops up when you think punchable?
Ray Rice. And you know what? Here's the thing though, and this is something I feel like in tech in this little bubble, there aren't enough sports people who are paying attention to this, paying attention to sort of sporting life. But this is the one thing of course that's sort of transcended, you know, NFL. Everybody knows about this story now. And I really do hope though it gets because I'm a diehard NFL fan. I love the NFL and I know this is an extremely violent sport, but what the league has done, I don't want to get all political on this, but what the league has done to cover this up is appalling. And I really hope I don't know. I really hope some good comes out of this because some, you know, it's offensive. And yeah, Ray Rice is the guy punch in the face now that you mention it.
What kind of punch? I'm curious cuz you've got a different build. I mean, you'd have to think it through a little.
I've never Okay, let's get real. I've never hit a person. Maybe I got into some little like stupid kid fights in like elementary school, but I am a lover, not a fighter, Tim. I don't know what I would do cuz I got reach. Ray is not a tall man, so I've got the reach on him, but he's obviously much stronger than me.
So, a cross. Here's what's sad, too. I was named after a boxer. So, I'm named after Alexis Arguello, who is My dad was really into boxing in the 80s and he's this Nicaraguan fighter. Three different titles. Like, he was a baller. Good mustache, too. And I am the exact opposite of my namesake in terms of fighting prowess. But what do you think?
I think elbows. Use elbows. If you haven't punched many people, you'll probably break your hand if you And Ray has a thick skull and a big neck, so I'd say elbows.
Have you been punched since high school? When is the last time you were punched in the face?
Oh man, this was it's the only time I've been punched in the face since then. And I was walking down 16th and Mission at 4 in the afternoon and some random homeless guy punched me in the face.
Yeah. He we were just walking, you know, he was going one direction, I was going the other direction on the sidewalk and he was kind of muttering to himself and he just kind of slugged me and I looked at him and he kept walking by and I was like, 'Why the hell did you do that?' And he just looked at me and was like, and I was like, 'All right, well, he kept moving. Yeah, I'm not going to get an answer.' So, well, you know, maybe boxing's in your future if you took that and didn't flinch and just asked him why he did it. That bodes well for your burgeoning boxing career. I mean, I'm not and I am a tall guy. So I was just surprised why are you gonna pick a fight with me, man? But it wasn't I mean, let's be clear, it was, and I'm not like, it wasn't nothing. I mean, it was a haymaker. It was a wild really throwing out the boxing references here. It was a wild kind of punch. It caught me in the cheek, but you know, that Ivan Drago training obviously paid off, so it didn't hurt me too bad. So, stung. I mean, it stung.
This is good to know. All right, I won't be throwing any undirected haymakers your way at trade shows or anything now that I know you won't go down. Switching gears completely. If you had the opportunity to give, let's just call them entrepreneurs, that doesn't mean venture-backed necessarily, 18, 20 years old, you could give them two or three books or resources, what would those and only two or three, what would those what would you give them?
Wow. Okay. Oh, man. See, you've always got the really heady stuff. I am gonna be the little prince. What are you bringing out? No. Oh, well, I was thinking of a few amazing scratch and sniff books from my childhood. Okay, so number one, actually, oh, perfect. So, Y Combinator, we're teaching a course at Stanford this semester and we've got some amazing guest professors, all like from the YC network, just amazing founders, investors, just great people. And it's going to be available to anyone for free. Wonderful. It'll be podcasted, streamed, all that good stuff. So, everyone should sign up right now and take that class at Stanford. You don't have to pay Stanford tuition.
How can they find it? What's the name?
Oh, man. Hold on. It's called How to Start a Startup. If you Google How to Start a Startup Class Stanford, you should be able to find it. I am terrible with my plugs.
And then people can find it. That's good enough. They'll be good with the internets. If you can't find it, you probably shouldn't take the class cuz you're probably not good enough with the internets to search for it. Yeah, CS 183B, How to Start a Startup. So, that's the class. Silicon Valley right there all in your brain wherever you are in the world. That's one for sure. Got to give a shout out to Jessica Livingston who is one of the founders of Y Combinator, the partner who basically saved me and Steve. We were rejected from the first batch of YC and it was her input. She basically pounded the table and said, 'Their idea is terrible, but I like them, so we're gonna let them in.'
I didn't know that. Yeah, Jessica's great. She's wonderful.
Amazing. And PG was like, 'All right, all right. Okay, all right. We'll do it.' And Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, PG. But that worked out for YC. Worked out well for them. Yeah. The first company to launch and obviously the first sort of exit. But anyway, Jessica wrote a great book called Founders at Work, which has been around for a while, and it's just a bunch of really great interviews she did with a bunch of just OGs of entrepreneurship. I am begging her to do a second book because the first one is such a just a must-read. And then the final one is the book that inspired me and Steve to well let's say one of the it's probably the I'd say it was the book that inspired us to if not start a company well kind of it was really inspiring us to start a video game company which didn't quite work out. But it was called Masters of Doom and was the founding of id Software. We were huge gamers. It's one of the things we bonded over. I was a much better Quake 2 player than Steve. Let me just make that clear. He was a little better at Half-Life, but I just want to say I was much better at Quake 2. And it was amazing because those guys, you know, John Carmack and Romero and the crew didn't have any funding. You know, they pioneered an entire industry. They created a genre, right? First person shooters and all with, you know, shareware, all with a business model that was still very new and they were just kind of hacking it and they created this amazing empire. And it made us think and Steve had lent it to me my sophomore year and it really made us think well you know if these guys could do it like why can't we and yeah that was the big three and actually that was the big impetus for my own book just because like I don't know man I in 9 years in the game of startups nine 10 years which is still not a ton of experience but in the last 10 years like it's just I still am just amazed by the founders I get to meet who make me feel like I was such an amateur when I was in their position. And that's good. That makes me feel good. It makes me feel like we're all making progress here. But it also just is a sense to it's one of those things in terms of like dispelling, you know, young founders of this notion that like you or I or the people they might look at and be like, 'Yeah, they've really got it figured out. They really, you know, they're really cooking with bacon.' We're still figuring it out. like we're all still hacking it and we've made tons of mistakes and we are no different. Some of us may be, you know, a little stronger. Some of us may have some international titles in martial arts, but like at the end of the day, we're no different. And that's something I really want to get in people's heads as early as possible to not hold them back.
Well, it makes me think of a quote and I'm paraphrasing here, but from Jack Ma of Alibaba, which is slated to or expected to be the largest tech IPO in history. And I'm not even sure if I need the modifier tech. I mean, it's going to be one of the largest IPOs in history. And he said, you know, in the beginning, we had a huge advantage and that was we had no money, no experience, and no plan. And I think when you don't know what you don't know in a way obviously there are risks but when you're not aware that what you're trying to do is impossible then very often you actually pull it off. So there is an advantage to that. Do you read any fiction? Do you have any favorite fiction books?
Oh man I have not read fiction in a minute. It's mostly non-fiction. I'm trying. The last fiction I read. I can't admit to Fifty Shades of Grey on your podcast. So, let's see. It would be Oh, man. This is really bad. Last piece of fiction I have read. It's been a long time. I didn't even read Harry Potter.
I didn't either. That's okay.
Which I know some people will contest is non-fiction. But yeah, man.
If it doesn't come to mind. Yeah. No, that's all right. If nothing comes to mind, nothing comes to mind. That's I'm going to check my Goodreads account or my Amazon to see if there do you have any particular morning or evening ritual or there just patterns in say how you spend the first hour of your day or two hours of your day. What is that? And it could be a weekly thing. It could be that you spend Mondays doing A and Wednesdays doing B, anything like that. But I find that people usually have certain patterns and rituals. I have a sort of a way that I go about say doing meditation and then having tea and then whatever. But what is the first say hour or two of your day tend to look like?
Dude, real quick. What do you think? I downloaded Headspace because I don't know if you could tell me this is correlation or causation, but after I got back from Burning Man, I had it planted in my head that I should really try meditation. Which is not something I do at all and have never done but I'm intrigued by. So, we're gonna have to I want to talk about that. But my morning ritual is waking up, feeding my cat, and making coffee.
If I'm not forcing myself to exercise, it is whenever I wake up.
Which is amazing. I usually stay up probably later than I should, but I wake up whenever I kind of wake up. And that tends to be before noon.
Yeah. 10. like around 10:00.
Okay. 10, 11. Yeah. Depending on the night. And yeah, feed my cat. And then I'm a real I the hand grinder. We were talking about this on the Twitter. So I got broke down and got one of these hand grinders because it makes me feel like I'm closer to my coffee beans as I grind them. And it's Look, I'm trying to get workouts in where I can, Tim. So my right bicep, incidentally, is huge.
You're like a pincher crab. You got like a battle arm. It's good.
Yes. all for grinding coffee. And I got my little craft coffee subscription and I plow it out, make a little French press. Oh, it's great. And then usually, you know, I'll mess around, check out the front page of Reddit, obviously. And although I have been checking out a little bit of Product Hunt lately, and just like I don't know, I just kind of get into my zone. I start prioritizing what I want to do that day. And this is something I've had to be really disciplined with where I'll actually usually on Evernote. Sometimes I'll write it down when I'm feeling like a pilgrim, when I want to go old school and like get up my quill pen and I'm like major things to do today and really try to make sure I get those covered by the end of the day because I get into this work creep where I start knocking off really easy stuff like the things I shouldn't like I don't really need to do but I can get a little bit of mojo, a little endorphin rush and before I know it, it's usually like noon or 1:00 and I still haven't showered. So then I'll go do that and then carry on my day. Usually it's office hours with companies or whatever stuff might be lined up. It's a very undisciplined morning and my evenings are this is why I need more Tim Ferriss in my life, man. I should I be meditating in the evening or should I be doing it in the morning?
Here's my take on that. My take on meditation is that the less you feel you can afford the time to meditate, the more you need to meditate. So I had Russell Simmons say to me once, he said, 'If you don't feel like you have 30 minutes to meditate, you need three hours to meditate.' So you strike me as a pretty zened out, calm guy, which means you may need meditation or benefit. The delta in improvement might be less than for someone who's hardwired to be sort of neurotic and super tightly wound like I am. But I find that meditating first thing in the morning before almost anything and then ideally again mid to late afternoon is the ideal split. But realistically, if I set it up so that the pass fail requires me to meditate twice a day to pass, then I'll just quit altogether like a lot of things. And I think you want to make it easy to win the game in the beginning. So for me, I meditate 5 to 20 minutes almost every morning. And I find that to be the ideal spacing. I think Headspace is great. I think calm.com also is a competitor to Headspace is also fantastic. I meditate without guided meditation and typically approach it from a transcendental meditation standpoint although I'm very interested in Vipassana. So tm.org for people who want to check it out. I think it's very valuable. But I do suspect that the more tightly wound you are, the less you feel you can afford taking 10 to 30 minutes to meditate, the more you actually need it.
So, you know, if you're sort of rolling with your Buddha nature and like admiring the irises of your cat while it's chowing on its Fancy Feast.
Did you just call me fat because of my Buddha nature? Cuz I'm proud of that.
No, no, I'm talking about I'm talking about like collegiate sports Buddha when he was doing the pole vault. Very svelte similar look.
Not a lot of people know about that.
Yes. It's not written about a lot but the so that's my take on meditation. When do you feel you are most productive? When do you sort of hit your stride? So in other words people think of they often ask me like what does your average day look like? Right? or journalists will want to follow me for a day and I almost never do it because it would be extremely boring and they would come away writing an article that is something along the lines of like wow this guy I don't know if he works 4 hours per week at all because he seems to get even when he's attempting to work next to nothing done and you're able to get some really outsized results and returns from the things that you've put in your mind to so it would lead one to sort of conclude that it's not about how much stuff you do, but how well you do a handful of things. And so my question to you is like what is the most kind of professionally valuable time in your day like when you're hitting your stride? What are those hours? What are you know that feeling?
I love that feeling, man. It is such a drug. There's this what's the flow? They've written books on this stuff. That is my crack. like it is so incredibly addictive and I again this is part of reason I feel so fortunate to be able to do the stuff I do man cuz if it's with people okay so if it's solo stuff if this is you know I'm mapping out oh I'm mapping out this podcast I want to do or I'm helping I had already talked to a startup and I was helping them build out a launch strategy but now it's like Alexis time or I'm going to sit down in front of a blank Google doc and start typing
When I don't need to interact with other human beings, my go time is once the sun sets. I've always felt like basically the internet kind of calms down so my distractions are fewer, and more people are asleep, so I don't think about checking the inbox and falling into that trap. And pretty much once the sun sets all into the wee hours of, you know, 1, 2 in the morning. This is now harder to do because I have a girlfriend, of course, who apparently doesn't love the idea that I might spend, you know, say a Saturday night sitting in front of a computer from 7:00 p.m. until 2:00 in the morning. But this is life and it's the balancing. But that's definitely when I get the solo time going.
And I'll tell you though, you know, I do tend to stagger office hours whether it's with YC companies or portfolio companies every like say 20, 30 minutes in the late afternoon because I feel like, well, you know about what time I get up in the morning. So morning's pretty much done and there is this stride that I will find myself getting into because I'm just enough of an extrovert that it's like, all right, lunch is behind, like everyone's got their second coffee in them or what have you and it's just a good time to be talking through startup problems, having these kinds of office hours with companies. But again, like you, it's really not interesting and I would, oh man, I'd feel really bad for someone who had to watch that for an entire day, because it's just such a, I don't know, to your point, like you could sit there whether it's me alone in front of a computer for 5 hours or going through like five hours of office hour sessions. There are a few moments where, holy, we hit on something and there's something great here and there's a way to turn this into something special and that was a valuable use of the time. But it's not like there was any clear indication of, oh, that was the instance it was going to happen, it just happens. I wish I could just push a button and have great come out on demand.
Right. But you just don't know.
So those office hours, how do you schedule office hours currently?
So thanks to amazing software that engineers at YC actually originally Paul Graham built. Basically any portfolio company can come in and request office hours with any one of the partners. And so we as partners schedule blocks of time. So we just block off whatever, you know, 4-hour, 5-hour chunks in a day or whatever, or 1-hour chunks in a day when we're available for office hours just like, you know, back at college and startups can slot in to take those times and either show up and do kind of like an assembly line. I mean it's not that it's soulless, but do that kind of setup. It's not literally on an assembly line, at a cafe or at YC or over Skype. I've got notes ahead of time based on, you know, previous meetings we've had and they've got their latest sort of issues and stuff that help me prepare and we just get to it and start talking about whatever they're working on.
Do you prefer to batch, let's just say pre-YC or outside of YC, Y Combinator for people who may not be keeping track. Do you prefer to have one day or two days blocked out for say a four or five hour block of time or do you prefer to spread it out so that you have an hour or two per day, say Monday to Friday?
No, I definitely prefer the former. I think when it involves people, it's much better for me to just get it all in one burst in one four or five hour chunk. Whereas, if it's like solo work or with a sort of limited team and it's over, you know, email and all kinds of other things, I don't mind the, what's the method where you work for 45 minutes and then you're messing around on Reddit for 20 minutes and then you work for 40 minutes.
Well, there is one called the Pomodoro technique, which is, there you go.
Which is usually, a lot of people talk about 23-minute increments, but some people double that.
But like, so I'm not, say, I'm actually, I'm obviously not a student of the Pomodoro technique.
But I find myself falling into that kind of a cycle when it doesn't involve something as interactive as office hours.
Cool. No, I'm always fascinated by how people batch tasks or not. In my case, I'm the same way. I prefer to have a large block of time sectioned out for one type of task so that I don't have the cognitive fatigue of switching back and forth. For those people who don't have access to Y Combinator software, I've been using something called ScheduleOnce, which is meetme.so, and that allows people to schedule for a block of time that you make available. It's really helpful. It was first introduced to me by Andrew Warner of Mixergy who has scheduled hundreds, probably thousands of interviews at this point and it's been fantastic. When you meet with these startups, is there any agenda? Do you ask for anything in advance? Are there particular types of questions that you routinely ask them? How do you make those sessions most productive? I guess is the overlying question.
You know, I like to come into the meeting with a sense of how, like a general sense of how the company is doing. So things like growth, things like if at all possible, like the big looming, you know, every founder has, there's a million things that they could be working on, but what is the big focus for the coming week? What are the one or two big things that you're considering, worried about, wondering? And then also just even notes from our previous meeting and that's sort of, fortunately that's sort of built into the software. Other times I'll just hack it with Evernote just for my own sort of sanity, just to kind of keep up and have a sense of things.
But I find more often than not office hours are less about me saying, 'Aha, here it is. This is what you shall do.' And more about me asking questions and being skeptical and giving them feedback that they may not hear just because, right, you're obsessing over a company. You're obsessing over solving a problem. You have this kind of tunnel vision. And it helps to have someone just to gut check you and make sure that you're asking yourself the questions you may not be thinking of simply because you're so intently focused. And a lot of it comes down to just basically holding up a mirror at the right time and being like, are you really focused on getting users like you say you are or have you been doing the exact same thing for the last 3 weeks and haven't actually adapted it to the fact that it hasn't improved conversion.
The founders that I see succeeding down the road, and you could go back, and I've been lucky enough, right, I was in the first batch of YC with Steve. So I remember when Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, was the guy who like he came to some of our open events and he was working on this SAT prep software which was just a dead-end startup. And I remember the Airbnb guys when they showed up and like we all thought, 'Oh, this is really cool.' Like, you know, hope it works out. We weren't thinking, 'Oh, right, in 5 years they'll have more rooms than Hilton.' But I've seen so many of these companies now get started and the founders who tend to do well are overwhelmingly the ones who during office hours don't just take feedback and they push back, right? Every founder has to be determined and stubborn, right? You know, she has to think that she's going to win, that we just have to delude ourselves. But a great founder, she also realizes that she can be that stubborn and that determined but also adaptive and flexible.
And so that founder comes out of office hours and then two weeks later or a week later or whenever the next session is, not only has tested all the things we sort of talked about or launched or done or whatever, but also tried three other things and also comes back with a whole other set of things that they've learned and really challenged every one of her hypotheses along the way. And that's, it's an easy thing to talk about. It's a hard thing to do and it's a hard thing to teach. That's the other crazy thing is like, dude, I mean I think part of the reason entrepreneurship is so hot right now and especially voices like yourself, I think the reason people are so interested by it is because there's never really been a modern curriculum for it. There's been, you can read the old case studies and all the MBA nonsense but like there are a lot of people right now who are hacking it as entrepreneurs and there isn't a lot of a blueprint for it. And if you've grown up pretty much anywhere, I think in the country, you probably didn't get exposed to this kind of curriculum in schooling, because a lot of it's still being written right now. A lot of it can't even be written because we're still writing it. And I think that's why there's such an appetite and a hunger for it and why so many people are very quickly becoming sort of authorities on it. But a lot of what we do is really just saying like, hey, look, the brilliant idea is not necessarily going to come from us. We're just going to help you get there through these kinds of principles and practices and these sort of methodologies. It's a good cop-out. We don't actually have to have all the answers.
Well, I think that, and this is true in writing, it's true in teaching, it's true in many areas. Having the right questions is more important than having the right answers because you can have the right answer to a bad question. So I think that it's very important to have the ability to formulate the right questions, to get to the crux of the matter, right? And in office hours, just to pull out some concrete details in addition to what we already covered, what are some ways in which you challenge founders or express skepticism in a constructive way? Like what would be some examples of that?
Well, I really think a lot can be conveyed with a raised eyebrow. It's something I've really, I don't want to brag about, but I'm really good at. What are some good ways? It would be, I mean, I don't want to, I can't call out specific companies. You know what, this is, I will say, side note, this is incidentally a section I'm doing on this podcast, so people will actually get to hear me doing this with real people. But notwithstanding actually being able to magically pull a clip out of my butt, it would be, well, it's the kind of thing like, all right, I have this company, we're selling a subscription, it's a subscription widget service and they might tell me about growth rates and let's say this is a very early stage company and they're telling me about the growth rates like we're growing 50% week over week. I'm like, well, that's awesome. All right, where's that growth coming from? And again this is where you get these different shades of this, right? Some founders will tell you, okay, well 25% is coming from paid advertising. 50% is coming organically. Another 25% is coming from some other thing. And you get other founders who might be a little coy at first and they're like, you know, it's a variety of things and it's like, well, come on. This is your company. You need to know this.
And then you dig a little deeper and it turns out that, let's say a majority of it, like a significant majority of it is coming through paid. And so, you know, founders can fall into this very seductive trap where, aha, you know, money out and money in, like as long as we can just keep paying for it, like don't worry, we can have enough traction to sort of get a seed round of funding one day. And it becomes a really seductive thing in an early stage company and a kind of foolish one because you've kind of deluded yourself into thinking that you have demand where you don't actually. And as someone who, I mean whether it was early stage Reddit or early stage Hipmunk, like we didn't have budget for any ads, like it was also more important that we showed that we had built a real product people wanted, that people were actually willing to talk about it. And in an age of abundance when it comes to social media, you've got no excuses. Like if you focused obsessively on making something people want, you will have natural, you know, organic, you will have people just talking about it. You will start to see growth coming from social channels. You will start seeing growth come just organically to your domain. It's not like, oh, that's all you have to do. If you start with focusing on making an amazing product that people just love and they want to talk about, you're building a much better foundation for your company than we're just going to get a product out the door, subscription widgets, it's going to work, and then buy a ton of Google ads or whatever the next cool thing is, and artificially build that house or that business on top of something before you've actually proven that you've really made something people want. Yeah, there you go.
Oh, sure. Well, no, no, definitely. I mean, I think that a lot of folks will use paid acquisition and they'll have a fancy landing page with email capture that promises the world, but no one's actually tried it yet. And they use the signups as sort of the week-on-week growth number. And it can be really delusional. I mean, if I look at the, and I'm going to ask you a very similar question, but if I look at the companies that I've invested in or advised that have done the best, they almost always will take a dollar and put it into product development rather than put it into PR marketing. And there are some exceptions, but if you look at say Evernote or, I mean Uber's in a pretty well.
Uber's had a lot of wars, so they have, they have a war chest budget now for a lot of aggressive advertising, but for a long time it was product and it still is product, product, product, product at the end of the day because the switching costs are so low in a lot of respects. Shopify very similar. The paid acquisition came after the product had been refined over a longer period of time.
I've been sort of criticized even by some VCs, although in retrospect it's kind of funny given how well or poorly some of their funds have done, because my investing thesis, if you want to call it that, is very simple: it's can I be a power user of this product, is the market large, can I drive say 100,000 users to this service or product, and does my audience and the reach I have overlap with their target market, right? It's very simple and for the most part that's sort of how I've approached it. And when I've deviated from that and tried to invest in some cutting edge biotech company that's going to have to contend with things that I don't understand very well like FDA approvals and phase trials and whatever, that's usually when I get kicked in the balls really hard.
Can the Tim Ferriss army not help with FDA approvals?
You know, maybe on some level. Maybe I'm not, you know, fine slicing it enough. Sure. But what are the commonalities that, and I'm going to qualify it, but what are the commonalities that the revenue generating successes are that you've invested in?
So, I can't promise that kind of a sort of instant user base, but one of the things that I see these companies all find ways pretty early on in their business to, this is, make money. And I realize this is a bit ironic coming from the guy who started Reddit. But hey, look, we learned this lesson with Hipmunk because we made money on day zero. And that was important because we learned how much stronger of a position you're in if you actually make revenue from the first day.
And they knew pretty clearly what their goal was, like how they were going to be making money. And we see this, you know, I think about this now, you know, I've pretty much hung up the investor hat. I now, it's all, you know, I'm not wearing my Y Combinator outfit, but I still have my YC tattoo. And so I don't actually have a YC tattoo. And you know, I think about it as I'm sitting there in the interview room for Y Combinator. I'm thinking, all right, if this company has already not just shown traction, right? There's not only just signups. There's not only just users coming back every day. They've actually got people paying money for this thing and really have an understanding of this market. I guess that's the thing I like. They are seeing something that everyone else hasn't quite gotten yet and it's something that personally resonates with me.
And an example would be, oh, okay. So, Teespring. So, Teespring was an immediate, like as soon as the application started going around, I was giddy because I had done t-shirts for like three or, no, at that point maybe eight years, right? I started with Reddit, did all the merch stuff for us there. Hipmunk, all the merch stuff, and then even Bread Pig, we did all this merch stuff, and we had actually spun up our own janky version of Teespring just because, you know, Kickstarter had sort of changed people's perception about pre-ordering and this idea of like scarcity being brought to merchandise was amazing because it made a t-shirt even more valuable because it felt special, one of a kind, and you had this immediacy, you need to buy it before it runs out. And then it also combined that with the fact you didn't need to have inventory anymore. And this was something that I fundamentally, I knew this because I had triple extra-large shirts just lying around the apartment from like 5 years ago. Like these Reddit shirts that I just could not unload because it was a random SKU. And this just happened to be a problem for me that I knew personally in an industry that's not very sexy, right? Oh, swag, like printing stuff on a shirt. Like we've seen a lot of different varieties of this. But they had built this platform so thoughtfully and it appealed to me in a way that I got instantly just because of my own experience and were generating revenue and clearly had built something people wanted from really early on.
So I will admit, I believe I have one of your Teespring t-shirts.
Awesome. So those guys are really impressive. I've spent on a few occasions some time with the Teespring guys. Very impressive team.
Dude. Tim, when are we going to get, we should, have you not run a Teespring campaign?
I know. I know. I got to get on it. Well, I've been thinking about it a lot. So, that is pending. I've been, not to take this into the...
I'm going to buy your shirt. I mark my words right now, everyone, as my witness. I'll be the first person to buy your Teespring shirt.
I'm going to make, what it says...
I'm going to make a camouflage long slender sort of Gap Kids small for you with a snap button for the crotch. So you can, oh man. So it's a onesie. It'll be...
You can't unsee that, Tim.
I don't want to do that. No, I'm very, very impressed by these guys. And I mean really what's been sort of delaying a lot of stuff like that that I'd like to do is I've been busy sharpening the saw as it relates to my own blog, mailing list, redesigning mobile/responsive versions for the site. It's basically getting all of the architecture and armature ready for a bunch of big things that I want to do so that the net, so to speak, for conversion is much tighter mesh.
See, and that's why, dude, Tim, I love, like I don't know when that switch got flipped for you, but you were such a maven for that. Like when did that happen?
I, you know, it's, that's a good point.
You were ahead of the game and you were not in Y Combinator so I can't take credit for that.
Well, you can take credit for it anyway, but I think it really hit me in very late 2006, early 2007 when I started experimenting on WordPress and started the blog and pretty much immediately saw the possibilities even if I lacked the technical training and expertise. So I don't have a computer science background, but I remember something very early on that influenced me and I'm pretty sure it was Robert Scoble who was very helpful in the early days and continues to be a friend, but he said to me, 'Good content is the best SEO.' And I had been so preoccupied with search engine optimization and tags and metadata and all of this stuff that I've realized is extremely trivial compared to putting out good content that other influencers are happy, in fact eager, to share with their audiences.
And once the blog started to take on, and it was hideous in the beginning. It was so ugly. People can search, you know, first blog Tim Ferriss and find this hideous like fluorescent blue and yellow monstrosity that I put together, but over time just have continued to create a back catalog of evergreen content that doesn't really expire in terms of relevancy. So I now have 550 some odd live posts, the vast majority of which still receive a ton of traffic. So, I think that that was really the starting point for figuring out how to use content as an Archimedes lever to attract very specific types of audience. So, for instance, I'll sometimes write posts that I know will only appeal to maybe 10,000 of the, you know, 1.5 to 2 million monthly readers that I have. And I'll do that specifically as a honeypot basically to attract expertise that I want to have contact with. So, I might write about some weird aspect of like derivatives finance or I'll put up a tweet or a post about someone in the hedge fund world that I find very interesting like Seth Klarman for instance or Renaissance Technologies or any of these guys and I'll see who responds or who reaches out to me and I'll use the comments as a way to develop my thinking around that subject which allows me then to write something later that will appeal to a million people about a fringe subject area that not many people know about.
Yeah, so it's been pretty fascinating. But yeah, Teespring, I'm looking forward to doing a bunch of stuff with. Here's a question I've been dying to ask you, which is related to questions. If you could never sit down with the YC companies as they're coming in, and I guess the YC class is around what, 170 accepted companies at the moment?
You mean in like all time or...
No, in a batch. I mean...
Oh no, dude. 170. Man, that'd be a lot. Now, we had like 70.
70 companies. All right. I knew there was a 70. All right. Sorry. I was tagging a one on there. So, you have 70 companies coming in. If you could only choose five of those, and again, I know this isn't how it's formatted, but if you could only choose five of those to invest in personally, and the only way you could interact with these companies was sending them no more than 10 questions each, what would some of those questions be?
Whoa. Okay. And these are the 10 questions I will use to decide whether or not to invest.
That's right. You have to invest in, let's just call it 10% of the people who get accepted.
What are the questions? What are some of the questions you might ask?
Oh wow. Okay. This is bad because I'm really tempted to think about the questions on the application.
