Interview: Tim Ferris

March 11th, 2008

At SXSW 2007 Tim Ferris presented the concepts of his book The Four Hour Workweek, and it was one of the most popular sessions of the conference. Since then he’s been invited to speak to some of the most successful companies in the world. Tim has an ecclectic background that ranges from mixed martial arts to acting. I caught up with him at SXSW 2008.

Your popularity in the tech world right now is very high. How do you plan to keep your personal brand growing?
My highest priority right now is converting book readers into blog readers, and generating additional audiences on the web, and using the internet to have a 1-to-1 relationship with them. The blog is really the lever to do just about anything else I’d like to do in the future, such as social media, raising money for companies, or writing another book. Although I don’t have any plans to write another book for the next 6-12 months. I’m not really concerned with my personal brand reaching the next level, but I think my blog will perpetuate whatever I want to do.

For the people who do speak at 100 engagements a year, does it support their personal brand, or do people get burned out on their personalities?
I think it’s both. I tend to get labelled as an author, and creates baggage and assumptions about what I should do. But speaking that frequently creates a hotel check-in check-out lifestyle, which has zero interest for me. As a matter of fact, I’ve only committed to 3 speaking gigs this year. Let’s do the quick math on being a professional speaker. If you have a best seller and you make $20,000 per speaking gig, and do 20 gigs per year that’s $400,000 per year. Which is a good lifestyle. But if I’m doing angel investing, I have the opportunity to earn much more than that, but of course the investments are extremely speculative and more interesting. At the age of 30, I’m inclined to take the speculative route.

With the contacts you have in the industry, you’d be a valuable investor and board member. Can you talk about any current companies you are involved with?
I can’t talk about anything specific right now, but I’m working on something in the online storage space that has some social applications. I don’t buy into the concept that everything has to have a social media aspect, but this company has already had some success in that arena. The other one is in the online identity space, and it’s exploring the next generation of that technology. I’m not personally investing huge amounts of money in each company, and I’m co-investing with others who are bringing a lot more capital. So I have to bring more value to those companies than the other investors in a deal. In one case I invested in a company one day, and the next day got them written up in 2 different “top 100” blogs. So I think I have some value to add to companies.

For traditional venture capital, there are deal filters about market space, geography, and investment size. What is your deal filter?
I look at the potential for profitability and rapid growth, and a model that has the ability to scale. I really like bootstrapped architectures, like I describe in The Four Hour Workweek, but I look for streamlined elegant business models that are already showing clear trends towards scalable growth.

Do you think first mover advantage is valid in today’s marketplace?
I don’t think it’s always best to be first. The iPod certainly wasn’t the first to the market, but they were able to learn from the first movers. So it’s not absolutely necessary in all cases. It can be helpful if you play that card right, but it’s definitely not necessary to be successful.