Investing Archives - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

Revisiting Warren Buffett’s Advice to Me in 2008 (Plus: 7 Lessons for Young Investors)

Tim Ferriss — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 00:17:37 +0000

“The four most expensive words in the English language are ‘this time it’s different.’”
— Sir John Marks Templeton, dubbed “the greatest global stock picker of the century” in 1999

An old video recently resurfaced on social media. It’s yours truly asking Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger a question at the 2008 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting:

“Hi, my name is Timothy Ferriss, and I’m a Guest Lecturer at Princeton University twice a year…”

Before @tferriss was “Tim,” a slightly nervous “Timothy” asked Charlie & Warren in 08 to advise a newly successful 30-yr old, non-investment professional how best to invest.
1/x pic.twitter.com/qVurnTIM8v
— Compound248 (@compound248) February 18, 2023

I was intensely nervous, as the quavering voice makes clear.

This clip went viral, and a number of media outlets (Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, etc.) reached out to me for comment, asking questions like “What advice would you give a 30-year-old now who’d just amassed their first million?”

Given space constraints, my full answers couldn’t be included.

I decided to write this blog post to share some expanded thoughts.

First things first: how on earth did I actually get a coveted mic and ask the Oracle of Omaha a question? It took some planning. Here’s the full story and strategy. For those interested, I also shared my highlighted notes from the event.

The first headline and subhead of the recent WSJ piece looked like this when I saw it:

Fair enough. I’ve studied Warren for a long time, read nearly all of his letters, and invested a lot according to his principles, so this made sense.

But then we have this curious development…

Since the above headline was used in the print edition, I’ll quickly clarify a few things.

The WSJ piece makes some great points and highlights hubris we all need to watch for in ourselves, but I do not identify as a Warren Buffett wannabe.

In fairness, the piece doesn’t directly describe me as such, but casual readers might conclude that based on the headline. I have indeed modeled him for a lot, and I highly recommend the books Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger and A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers from Warren Buffett, even if you don’t consider yourself an investor. But I don’t aspire to be Buffett in all things. I’ve also strongly advised against anyone trying to copy my investing approach with tech, so I’m more anti-cheerleader than cheerleader.

But perhaps most important, the print edition stated, “Mr. Ferriss ignored these pearls of wisdom [to invest in low-cost index funds].” The WSJ was kind enough to update the digital version, but in case you missed it, here’s the correction: I did put a decent portion of my money into low-cost index funds, as I fully accepted I was an amateur in public equities and had no competitive advantage. For me, this is true in almost all asset classes.

There is one exception. I decided to “go pro” with early-stage angel investing in tech. That ended up returning far more than if I had put all of my savings in a low-cost index fund in 2008.

I would highly advise against this for 99.99% of people, but I did approach it systematically, and I’ll share more on that below. It’s also worth reading The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, which will give you an idea of how this world functions, how the economics work or don’t work, and what assumptions are made with investment strategies. Particularly for angel investors who don’t have the benefit of receiving management fees, “wins” generally mean that you end up with a substantial portion of your net-worth in 1–3 companies.

Is that anti-Buffett? Nope. In the same 2008 meeting, Buffett repeated a few things that he’s said and written many times in some form, including:

“Diversification is for the know-nothing investor.”
“There have been several times I had 75% of my net worth in one situation.”
“I mean, you will see things that …—if you’re working with smaller sums—it would be a mistake not to have half your net worth in.”

But… these only apply if you are willing to do a lot of heavy lifting.

If someone asked me to give investing advice to a 30-year-old today who had just made their first million, I would first point them somewhere else. I’m not a financial advisor and don’t think I’m qualified to give anyone financial advice. The particulars matter too much. But if they insisted, I might say:

(1) If you want to play in early-stage tech investing (or anything high-risk, high-reward), ensure you have a plan for developing an ENORMOUS informational advantage. Aim to develop new skills and relationships through portfolio companies so that you can win over time, even if you “fail” with many bets going to zero. Only bet what you are comfortable losing and what you can recoup in other ways. Though my angel investing snowballed, I began with $10K checks and advising for sweat equity. Think of this as tuition for a real-world MBA. Are you willing to move to the hub of activity to ensure the best possible information and deal flow, as I did when I moved to SF lifetimes ago? Or make commensurate commitments or sacrifices to ensure you are in a position to win? If not, I’d suggest choosing a different game. Other people will take the initiatives that you won’t, and they will beat you. Much of early-stage investing is cooperative, but let’s not kid ourselves, a lot of it is competitive, and not everyone will podium finish.

(2) For the rest—which could be everything—follow Buffett’s advice. Keep it simple.

One cautionary example of doing the opposite: I spotted the COVID curve ball early, and I made a lot of very “sophisticated” (complicated) decisions related to investing, and the associated research, diligence, phone calls, and so on chewed up an unbelievable amount of time and energy. Eighteen to twenty-four months later, I’d done very well but decided to look at how passive S&P 500 returns would’ve added up over the same period, and… they were roughly the same. Of course, you can’t always bank on this outcome, but beware of seeking complexity if you’ve been rewarded for problem-solving throughout your life. Looking back over the last 15+ years, the handful of investment decisions that made all the difference have been simple and were somewhat obvious to me, no major gear-grinding required.

(3) Knowing when to buy isn’t enough. Have policies and rules for when you will sell, or the universe will punish you with very bad and very expensive decisions.

(4) Don’t discount luck, including lucky timing. I started angel investing seriously in 2008 and hit a golden window of converging trends, cheap valuations (by today’s standards), and an uncrowded playing field. The financial crisis had culled the herd of a ton of investors and fair-weather founders. It was a target-rich environment, even for someone with very little to invest. Micro-VCs were just cracking out of their shells, and the big players hadn’t started assailing the seed stage stuff. In retrospect, it was a wildly rare combo of things. I don’t believe I could replicate what I did in 2008–2012 now.

(5) Personally, I’ve largely stepped back from angel investing to double down on writing and the podcast (The Tim Ferriss Show, soon to hit 1B downloads). This comes from a desire for more predictability and less stress. I love the excitement of startups, and I’ve had some lucky wins, but I don’t find it nearly as interesting as developing creative muscles that bring in forecastable revenue year after year. For me, that has compounded more reliably than the all-or-nothing bets. Massive ups and downs in sectors like crypto also take a toll that reduces my creative batteries. In this chapter of my life, I think simplicity is the name of the game (e.g., finding one decision that removes 100 decisions).

(6) Over-optimizing is just as bad, if not worse, than under-optimizing. Past a certain point, buying extra Skittles just doesn’t fucking matter. So, a note to self: stop fiddling around with your goddamn spreadsheets and get more interesting hobbies on the calendar. What hobbies? Exactly.

(7) If we assume the point of investing is ultimately to improve your quality of life and the quality of life of those you most care about, investments that consistently add stress over long periods of time probably don’t make sense. Money is traded for things or experiences that catalyze certain feelings. If your investments are generating the opposite spectrum of feelings, it might be time to reassess.

It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. Money is a means, not an end.

And in the end, most things matter very, very little. Do what helps you sleep at night and wake up with a low heart rate. To me, those are the hallmarks of a world-class investor who gets the big picture.

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The post Revisiting Warren Buffett’s Advice to Me in 2008 (Plus: 7 Lessons for Young Investors) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Finding "Unicorns:" Questions to Ask Before You Invest in a Startup

Tim Ferriss — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 11:19:42 +0000

Many people ask me about startup investing and how to get started.

This post — while for informational purposes only and not investment advice — is intended to show you how one successful investor approached the early-stage game.

Jason Calacanis (@jason) has made 125 early-stage startup investments and picked 6 “unicorns” (startups to exceed $1B in valuation) — one out of every 21. Based on his AngelList profile, Calacanis’ investments includes: Tumblr, Cozy, Thumbtack, Rapportive, Uber, Chartbeat, Groundcrew, Evernote, Pen.io, Nimble, Crossfader, Signpost, Calm, many many more. He’s accelerating his deployment of capital and plans to invest in an additional 150 startups over the next 30 months.

The following guest post is an exclusive excerpt from his new book, Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000. Using stories from his own angel investing career, Jason wrote this book as a playbook for aspiring angel investors.

In particular, this post focuses on questions to ask founders before you invest, but it also serves as a tutorial on how to ask better questions in life and in business.

Enter Jason

A THOUSAND FIRST DATES

The life of an angel is all about managing a deal funnel, which includes three distinct steps: sourcing deals, evaluating deals, and, finally, picking which founders you’re going to fund.

Meeting with founders for an hour is the most frequent technique for angels to decide who to invest in, but certainly not the only one. There are some angels whose primary technique for selecting investments is to follow other smart investors, drafting off of their meetings and deal flow.

Another technique is simply to review the core metrics and decide based on those. This can be done by reviewing a deck or by checking public information sources, like the App Store rankings, and traffic monitoring services, like Alexa and Quantcast.

Some investors have a huge Rolodex and simply invest in the founders they already know, a technique that worked extremely well for investors who knew Elon Musk (Zip2 and PayPal before Tesla and SpaceX), Evan Williams (Blogger before Twitter), and Mark Pincus (Freeloader and Tribe before Zynga).

Of course, the “invest in who you know” approach would mean you missed the biggest startups in history: Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Evan Spiegel, and Larry Page, who all hit the ball out of the park on their first try—at the ages of nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-five, respectively.

Meetings are important and free. You should take a lot of them. Ten one-hour meetings a week is a good target for a professional angel. Half that if you’re doing this part-time.

My best advice to you as you start dating is to be promiscuous with meetings—but a prude when it comes to writing checks. Don’t be a tramp like I was.

I’m going to take you through the four most important questions I ask all founders. The goal of asking these questions is not just for you to understand the business but also so you yourself can answer four critical investor questions:

Why has this founder chosen this business?
How committed is this founder?
What are this founder’s chances of succeeding in this business—and in life?
What does winning look like in terms of revenue and my return?

HOW TO ASK QUESTIONS

Your job in these meetings is to play Columbo, the unassuming and always underestimated detective from the classic TV show that started in the ’70s and ran for more than three decades. Your job is not to show off or demonstrate how smart you are by explaining to the founder what they’re doing wrong or by bragging about your heroics as an investor or, even worse, as a founder yourself.

You want to have big ears and a small mouth in these meetings. You want to ask concise questions that take no more than a couple of seconds and then listen deeply to the answers, considering them with every fiber of your consciousness as you write your notes on paper—just like Columbo.

Listening like this will serve two virtuous goals, the first being that the founder will feel heard and understood by you.

If people believe they are being deeply listened to, they will talk more.

This is why, when you talk to your therapist about your mom, they say “hmm…” while tilting their head and looking at you with sympathy. Then they add, “Tell me more about your mother,” or “Unpack that some more,” or simply “Your mother…”

There are six words, four words, and two words in those responses. The last one is the most powerful because it just hangs there, inviting you to build on the topic.

You want to be Dr. Melfi, Tony Soprano’s therapist, sitting patiently while the passion and pain pour out from the boss you’re meeting with. If you’re a great listener, you will be a great investor, as well as a great friend, a great parent, and a great human being.

Second, if you are hyper-present in the meeting, thinking deeply about the founder and why they are taking on the irrational pursuit of starting a company, which comes with a greater than 80 percent chance of failure and a 100 percent chance of suffering, then you will be able to make a better decision on whom to invest in.

Basically, if you shut your trap and listen like a detective or a therapist, you’ll be able to uncover the answers to those four questions better than other angel investors.

You’ll have more hits and fewer misses.

QUESTION ZERO

When you are starting a founder meeting, ask one icebreaker question to get your subject warmed up.

How do you know Jane?

If you were introduced to this founder by a mutual connection, you can quickly establish common ground by asking these five simple words. Listen to the answer you are given and construct a follow-up question based on their answer. So, if the founder said that they worked with Jane, your next move is to say, “You worked with Jane? What was that like?”

I have a game where I try to say things with as few words as possible because it reminds me that this meeting is not about me, it’s about them. It also makes me sound wise, like Obi-Wan or a Toshiro Mifune character.

These are the exact four questions I ask every founder. The answers to these questions will give you most of what you need to make your investment decision. We spend the first half of our hour-long meeting exclusively on them. Then we go deeper.

1. What are you working on?

The reason I phrase this question as “What are you working on?,” versus something more company-specific, like “What does Google do?” or “Why should I invest in Google?” or the supremely horrible “Why do you think Google is going to succeed after eleven search engines have already failed?,” is that it celebrates the founder (the “you”) and what founders do (the “work”). It shows that you have deep empathy and you recognize that this isn’t about what the thing does (Google helps you find stuff), but rather it’s about people (Larry and Sergey write software that helps people find information faster).

2. Why are you doing this?

Again, five simple words that are focused on the founder. When I ask these first two questions, I almost universally see founders melt into their chairs. They relax, let their guard down, and feel like I care about them, which I do. Just like Columbo cares deeply about the suspects he’s interviewing when he asks, “So, what do you do here?” when he walks into their office, as opposed to leading with “Where were you on the night of the murder?”

Just like Columbo, I’m looking for killers and I’m trying to eliminate suspects.

There are some really, really bad answers to the question “Why are you doing this?” The worst two answers, which you’ll hear often, are “To make money” and “Because INSERT-SUCCESSFUL-COMPANY-NAME-HERE doesn’t do it.” If folks are building a startup for money, they will eventually quit when they realize there are many better ways to make money faster and with more certainty. If you want to make a lot of money, you’re better off being a world-class programmer on a very esoteric and in-demand vertical and getting Google or Facebook to give you $1 million-plus a year in stock and cash for ten years in a row. You have no downside, you can work a couple of hours a day, and you get unlimited free food.

If you’re building something because another hugely successful company doesn’t already have that feature, well, you’re wildly naive or, more often than not, plain old stupid. For years people pitched me on startups that were supposedly going to be Google search for news, Google search for video, and Google search for books and magazines. We all know how that turned out.

More recently I’ve been pitched hard on “Uber for food,” “Uber for helicopters,” and “Uber for shopping.”

While there have been some successful startups built by running ahead of market leaders, in general, those kinds of startups get crushed or bought for small dollar amounts. Summize was a search engine for Twitter, back when Twitter was so technologically incompetent that they could barely keep the service online. They bought Summize to catch up, as well as TweetDeck, a more advanced client for reading multiple feeds at once, but the return to the investors in Summize and TweetDeck for these acquisitions were minor when compared to the returns of the company that bought them.

The big problem with “founders” who build a feature that a market leader will inevitably get to—and I use quotes here for a reason—is that they lack vision. The act of selecting a feature as their life’s work, as opposed to a full-blown product or a mission, disqualifies them from being a true founder.

Elon Musk didn’t build a battery pack: he built a car and eventually an energy solution that included solar, home batteries, and, perhaps when you read this, a ride-sharing service like Uber.

It’s okay to start small, but it’s not okay to be a small thinker.

The right answers to “Why are you building this?” tend to be personal. Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp built Uber because they couldn’t get a cab in Paris at a technology conference. Elon Musk built SpaceX because he wanted a backup plan for humanity. Elon’s earlier idea, that no one knows about, was to put a series of greenhouses in space to back up the biosphere— just like the Bruce Dern movie Silent Running—which, as an interesting aside, came out five years before Star Wars and featured drones that were an inspiration for R2-D2.

Zuckerberg was awkward with the ladies, so he built a social network that would show him their relationship statuses.

Think about that for a second: Is there anything more important than procreation? Not according to Darwin or Freud, so Zuck’s lack of game led to the fastest-growing consumer product in the history of humanity, largely based on people needing to find a mate or to connect with previous lovers (as demonstrated by the number of divorces that mention Facebook in their filings).

3. Why now?

This question has been floating around the Valley for a while, and the first time I heard it was from my friend, Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha—the venture capitalist who convinced me to become a “Scout” for their firm, which led to my two greatest investments to date: Uber and Thumbtack.

If you unpack this question, you’re really asking, “Why will this idea succeed now?”

For Uber it was simple: mobile phones were becoming ubiquitous and they had GPS. In fact, another company had already tried to help you order a cab via SMS messages a year before Uber came on the scene. Their “why now” was simply “text messaging,” but that, frankly, wasn’t enough. Without advanced mobile CPUs (central processing units) to power big beautiful touch screens with military precision GPS (global positioning system), there would be no Uber.

For YouTube, which had Roelof Botha as its first investor, the “Why now?” was a confluence of factors and breakout successes that tend to be born during these perfect storms. First, bandwidth costs plummeted after the dot-com crash. Second, storage costs were dropping due to this new thing called cloud computing. Third, blogging was taking off. Millions of folks were writing tens of millions of posts every week and YouTube offered a clever way to embed their videos on other people’s sites—reaching a massive audience for free.

There were dozens of video companies before YouTube, but they all charged people for bandwidth and storage, which meant that if you wanted to post a video on the internet, your reward for going viral was a ten-thousand-dollar server bill. Instead, YouTube sends you a thousand-dollar check from the ads they run on your hit video.

Dropbox, which launched onstage at the first year of my LAUNCH Festival and was also funded by Sequoia Capital, had the same “Why now?” as YouTube: plummeting bandwidth and storage costs.

Founders tend to have these “Why now?” insights without recognizing how profound they are. When I started my blogging company, Weblogs, Inc., in 2004, I had a very simple thesis: I believed that great new writers publishing five short, unfiltered posts a day would get more readers than established journalists writing one story, edited by a half dozen people, once a week.

When I had this realization, it was perfectly clear to me, but even the New York Times journalists didn’t see it. I remember running into legendary tech journalist John Markoff at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas when our blog Engadget was covering it for the first time. He asked me how many people we had at the show and I said fifteen. His jaw dropped and he asked me how often they were filing, and I said four times.

He replied, “You’re going to do sixty stories at CES?”

I said, “Actually they’re posting four times a day. So sixty stories . . . per day. How often is your team filing?”

He said they had three journalists at the show and they would do two or three pieces each over the next month. So, they were doing six stories and we were doing sixty a day for five days— three hundred total.

In some ways, “Why now?” is the most important question about the business you can ask because there are so many folks constantly trying the same ideas over and over again in our business.

Google was the twelfth search engine. Facebook was the tenth social network. iPad was the twentieth tablet. It’s not who gets there first. It’s who gets there first when the market’s ready.

4. What’s your unfair advantage?

Founders with breakout startups often have an unfair advantage. Google had their Stanford connections, filled with talented algorithm-writing engineering geniuses. Facebook launched while Zuckerberg was still a student at Harvard, and they used their understanding of campus culture and directories to figure out the dynamics of building online social networks that scale. Mark Pincus launched Zynga with a multi-year cross-promotion deal with Facebook, which allowed Zynga to tag along with Facebook as it grew at an astounding rate. Mary Gates was on the board of United Way with the CEO of IBM, which led directly to IBM hiring her son Bill’s new company, Microsoft, to build the operating system for their first personal computer.

Said another way, this question is asking, in just four words, “What makes you uniquely qualified to pursue this business? What secrets do you know that will help you beat both the incumbents and your fast followers?”

Sometimes, founders will not have an answer for this question. And that’s okay. This is one you often end up answering while looking in the rearview mirror.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

After asking these four founder questions, which in total are sixteen words, you should have an excellent idea of what this person is building and why.

These four founder questions give you a great starting point for answering the four investor questions every angel needs to ask themselves before investing. Remember, we want to figure out:

Why has this founder chosen this business?
How committed is this founder?
What are this founder’s chances of succeeding in this business—and in life?
What does winning look like in terms of revenue and my return?

After thirty minutes and four questions, you’re going to have a strong sense of why the founder picked this business, why it might work right now, and, of course, what they are building.

What you probably won’t know are the tactical details of how they plan on executing on their vision, including their go-to-market strategy, what kind of team they have, the competitive landscape, and the nuances of their business model.

You are going to find out the answers to those questions in the second half of your meeting. But this is the foundation.

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To learn more about Jason’s approach to investing, and the stories behind his greatest wins, check out Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000.

The post Finding "Unicorns:" Questions to Ask Before You Invest in a Startup appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

How to Say No When It Matters Most (or “Why I’m Taking a Long ‘Startup Vacation'”)

Tim Ferriss — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 02:06:27 +0000

(Photo: Michael Matti)

The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
— Lin Yutang

Discipline equals freedom.
— Jocko Willink

This post will attempt to teach you how to say “no” when it matters most.

At the very least, it will share my story of getting there. It’s a doozy.

Here’s the short version:

I’m taking a long break from investing in new startups. No more advising, either. Please don’t send me any pitches or introductions, as I sadly won’t be able to respond. Until further notice, I am done. I might do the same with interviews, conferences, and much more.

Now, the longer version for those interested:

This post will attempt to explain how I think about investing, overcoming “fear of missing out” (FOMO), and otherwise reducing anxiety.

It’s also about how to kill the golden goose, when the goose is no longer serving you.

I’ll dig into one specifically hard decision — to say “no” to startup investing, which is easily the most lucrative activity in my life. Even if you don’t view yourself as an “investor”—which you are, whether you realize it or not—the process I used to get to no should be useful…

[Warning: If you’re bored by investment stuff, skip the next two bulleted lists.]

Caveat for any investing pros reading this:

I realize there are exceptions to every “rule” I use. Most of this post is as subjective as the fears I felt.
My rules might be simplistic, but they’ve provided a good ROI and the ability to sleep. Every time I’ve tried to get “sophisticated,” the universe has kicked me in the nuts.
Many startup investors use diametrically opposed approaches and do very well.
There are later-stage investments I’ve made (2-4x return deals) that run counter to some of what’s below (e.g. aiming for 10x+), but those typically involve a discount to book value, due to distressed sellers or some atypical event.
Many concepts are simplified to avoid confusing a lay audience.

Related announcements:

I will continue working closely with my current portfolio of startups. I love them and believe in them.
I will be returning all unallocated capital in my private Stealth Fund on AngelList. If you’re an investor in that fund, you’ll be getting your remaining money back. My public Syndicate will remain in place for later re-entry into the game.

So, why am I tapping out now and shifting gears?

Below are the key questions I asked to arrive at this cord-cutting conclusion. I revisit these questions often, usually every month.

I hope they help you remove noise and internal conflict from your life.

The Road to No

ARE YOU DOING WHAT YOU’RE UNIQUELY CAPABLE OF, WHAT YOU FEEL PLACED HERE ON EARTH TO DO? CAN YOU BE REPLACED?

I remember a breakfast with Kamal Ravikant roughly one year ago.

Standing in a friend’s kitchen downing eggs, lox, and coffee, we spoke about our dreams, fears, obligations, and lives. Investing had become a big part of my net-worth and my identity. Listing out the options I saw for my next big moves, I asked him if I should raise a fund and become a full-time venture capitalist (VC), as I was already doing the work but trying to balance it with 5-10 other projects. He could sense my anxiety. It wasn’t a dream of mine; I simply felt I’d be stupid not to strike while the iron was hot.

He thought very carefully in silence and then said: “I’ve been at events where people come up to you crying because they’ve lost 100-plus pounds on the Slow-Carb Diet. You will never have that impact as a VC. If you don’t invest in a company, they’ll just find another VC. You’re totally replaceable.”

He paused again and ended with, “Please don’t stop writing.”

I’ve thought about that conversation every day since.

For some people, being a VC is their calling and they are the Michael Jordan-like MVPs of that world. They should cultivate that gift. But if I stop investing, no one will miss it. In 2015, that much is clear. There have never been more startup investors, and–right along with them–founders basing “fit” on highest valuation and previously unheard of terms. There are exceptions, of course, but it’s crowded. If I exit through the side door, the startup party will roll on uninterrupted.

Now, I’m certainly not the best writer in the world. I have no delusions otherwise. People like John McPhee and Michael Lewis make me want to cry into my pillow and brand “Poser” on my forehead.

BUT… if I stop writing, perhaps I’m squandering the biggest opportunity I have—created through much luck—to have a lasting impact on the greatest number of people. This feeling of urgency has been multiplied 100-fold in the last two months, as several close friends have died in accidents no one saw coming. Life is fucking short. Put another way: a long life is far from guaranteed. Nearly everyone dies before they’re ready.

I’m tired of being interchangeable, no matter how lucrative the game. Even if I’m wrong about the writing, I’d curse myself if I didn’t give it a shot.

Are you squandering your unique abilities? Or the chance to find them in the first place?

HOW OFTEN ARE YOU SAYING “HELL, YEAH!”?

Philosopher-programmer Derek Sivers is one of my favorite people.

His incisive thinking has always impressed me, and his “hell, yeah!” or “no” essay has become one of my favorite rules of thumb. From his blog:

Those of you who often over-commit or feel too scattered may appreciate a new philosophy I’m trying: If I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then I say no.

Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than, “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then my answer is no. When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!”

We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.

To become “successful,” you have to say “yes” to a lot of experiments. To learn what you’re best at, or what you’re most passionate about, you have to throw a lot against the wall.

Once your life shifts from pitching outbound to defending against inbound, however, you have to ruthlessly say “no” as your default. Instead of throwing spears, you’re holding the shield.

From 2007-2009 and again from 2012-2013, I said yes to way too many “cool” things. Would I like to go to a conference in South America? Write a time-consuming guest article for a well-known magazine? Invest in a start-up that five of my friends were in? “Sure, that sounds kinda cool,” I’d say, dropping it in the calendar. Later, I’d pay the price of massive distraction and overwhelm. My agenda became a list of everyone else’s agendas.

Saying yes to too much “cool” will bury you alive and render you a B-player, even if you have A-player skills. To develop your edge initially, you learn to set priorities; to maintain your edge, you need to defend against the priorities of others.

Once you reach a decent level of professional success, lack of opportunity won’t kill you. It’s drowning in 7-out-of-10 “cool” commitments that will sink the ship.

These days, I find myself saying “Hell, yes!” less and less with new startups. That’s my cue to exit stage left, especially when I can do work I love (e.g. writing) with 1/10th the energy expenditure.

I need to stop sowing the seeds of my own destruction.

HOW MUCH OF YOUR LIFE IS MAKING VERSUS MANAGING? HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE SPLIT?

One of my favorite time-management essays is “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” by Paul Graham of Y Combinator fame. Give it a read.

As Brad Feld and many others have observed, great creative work isn’t possible if you’re trying to piece together 30 minutes here and 45 minutes there. Large, uninterrupted block of time — 3-5 hours minimum — create the space needed to find and connect the dots. And one block per week isn’t enough. There has to be enough slack in the system for multi-day CPU-intensive synthesis. For me, this means at least 3-4 mornings per week where I am in “maker” mode until at least 1pm.

If I’m in reactive mode, maker mode is all but impossible. Email and texts of “We’re overcommitted but might be able to squeeze you in for $25K. Closing tomorrow. Interested?” are creative kryptonite.

I miss writing, creating, and working on bigger projects. YES to that means NO to any games of whack-a-mole.

WHAT BLESSINGS IN EXCESS HAVE BECOME A CURSE? WHERE DO YOU HAVE TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING?

In excess, most things take on the characteristics of their opposite. Thus:

Pacifists become militants.

Freedom fighters become tyrants.

Blessings become curses.

Help becomes hinderance.

More becomes less.

To explore this concept more, read up on Aristotle’s golden mean.

In my first 1-2 years of angel investing, 90%+ of my bets were in a tiny sub-set of startups. The criteria were simple:

Consumer-facing products or services
Products I could be a dedicated “power user” of, products that scratched a personal itch
Initial target demographic of 25-40-year old tech-savvy males in big US cities like SF, NYC, Chicago, LA, etc. (allowed me to accelerate growth/scaling with my audience)
<$10M pre-money valuation
Demonstrated traction and consistent growth (not doctored with paid acquisition).
No “party rounds”—crowded financing rounds with no clear lead investor. Party rounds often lead to poor due diligence and few people with enough skin in the game to really care.

Checking these boxes allowed me to add a lot of value quickly, even as relatively cheap labor (i.e. I took a tiny stake in the company). Shopify is a great example, which you can read about here (scroll down).

My ability to help spread via word of mouth, and I got what I wanted: great “deal flow.” Deals started flowing in en masse from other founders and investors.

Fast forward to 2015, and great deal flow is now paralyzing the rest of my life. I’m drowning in inbound.

Instead of making great things possible in my life, it’s preventing great things from happening.

I’m excited to go back to basics, and this requires cauterizing blessings that have become burdens.

WHY ARE YOU INVESTING, ANYWAY?

For me, the goal of “investing” has always been simple: to allocate resources (e.g. money, time, energy) to improve quality of life. This is a personal definition, as yours likely will be.

Some words are so overused as to have become meaningless. If you find yourself using nebulous terms like “success,” “happiness,” or “investing,” it pays to explicitly define them or stop using them. “What would it look like if I had (or won at) ___ ?” helps. Life favors the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.

So, here: to allocate resources (e.g. money, time, energy) to improve quality of life.

This applies to both the future and the present. I am willing to accept a mild and temporary 10% decrease in current quality of life (based on morale in journaling) for a high-probability 10x return, whether the ROI comes in the form of cash, time, energy, or otherwise. That could be a separate blog post, but conversely:

An investment that produces a massive financial ROI but makes me a complete nervous mess, or causes insomnia and temper tantrums for a long period of time, is NOT a good investment.

I don’t typically invest in public stocks for this reason, even when I know I’m leaving cash on the table. My stomach can’t take the ups and downs, but—like drivers rubbernecking to look at a wreck—I seem incapable of not looking. I will compulsively check Google News and Google Finance, despite knowing it’s self-sabotage. I become Benjamin Graham’s Mr. Market. As counter-examples, friends like Kevin Rose and Chris Sacca have different programming and are comfortable playing in that sandbox. They can be rational instead of reactive.

Suffice to say — For me, a large guaranteed decrease in present quality of life doesn’t justify a large speculative return.

One could argue that I should work on my reactivity instead of avoiding stocks. I’d agree on tempering reactivity, but I’d disagree on fixing weaknesses as a primary investment (or life) strategy.

All of my biggest wins have come from leveraging strengths instead of fixing weaknesses. Investing is hard enough without having to change your core behaviors. Don’t push a boulder up a hill just because you can.

Public market sharks will eat me alive in their world, but I’ll beat 99% of them in my little early-stage startup sandbox. I live in the middle of the informational switch box and know the operators.

From 2007 until recently, I paradoxically found start-up investing very low-stress. Ditto with some options trading. Though high-risk, I do well with binary decisions. In other words, I do a ton of homework and commit to an investment that I cannot reverse. That “what’s done is done” aspect allows me to sleep well at night, as there is no buy-sell choice for the foreseeable future. I’m protected from my lesser, flip-flopping self. That has produced more than a few 10-100x investments.

In the last two years, however, my quality of life has suffered.

As fair-weather investors and founders have flooded the “hot” tech scene, it’s become a deluge of noise. Where there were once a handful of micro VCs, for instance, there are now hundreds. Private equity firms and hedge funds are betting earlier and earlier. It’s become a crowded playing field. Here’s what that has meant for me personally:

I get 50-100 pitches per week. This creates an inbox problem, but it gets worse, as…
Many of these are unsolicited “cold intros,” where other investors will email me and CC 2-4 founders with “I’d love for you to meet A, B, and C” without asking if they can share my e-mail address
Those founders then “loop in” other people, and it cascades horribly from there. Before I know it 20-50 people I don’t know are emailing me questions and requests.
As a result, I’ve had to declare email bankruptcy twice in the last six months. It’s totally untenable.

Is there a tech bubble? That question is beyond my pay grade, and it’s also beside the point.

Even if I were guaranteed there would be no implosion for 3-5 years, I’d still exit now. Largely due to communication overload, I’ve lost my love for the game. On top of that, the marginal minute now matters more to me than the marginal dollar.

But why not cut back 50%, or even 90%, and be more selective? Good question. That’s next…

ARE YOU FOOLING YOURSELF WITH A PLAN FOR MODERATION?

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

– Richard P. Feynman

Where in your life are you good at moderation? Where are you an all-or-nothing type? Where do you lack a shut-off switch? It pays to know thyself.

The Slow-Carb Diet succeeds where other diets fail for many reasons, but the biggest is this: It accepts default human behaviors versus trying to fix them. Rather than say “don’t cheat” or “you can no longer eat X,” we plan weekly “cheat days” (usually Saturdays) in advance. People on diets will cheat regardless, so we mitigate the damage by pre-scheduling it and limiting it to 24 hours.

Outside of cheat days, slow carbers keep “domino foods” out of their homes. What are domino foods? Foods that could be acceptable if humans had strict portion control, but that are disallowed because practically none of us do. Common domino foods include:

Chickpeas
Peanut butter
Salted cashews
Alcohol

Domino triggers aren’t limited to food. For some people, if they play 15 minutes of World of Warcraft, they’ll play 15 hours. It’s zero or 15 hours.

For me, startups are a domino food.

In theory, “I’ll only do one deal a month” or “I’ll only do two deals a quarter” sound great, but I’ve literally NEVER seen it work for myself or any of my VC or angel friends. Sure, there are ways to winnow down the pitches. Yes, you can ask “Is this one of the top 1-2 entrepreneurs you know?” to any VC who intro’s a deal and reject any “no”s. But what if you commit to two deals a quarter and see two great ones the first week? What then? If you invest in those two, will you be able to ignore every incoming pitch for the next 10 weeks?

Not likely.

For me, it’s all or nothing. I can’t be half pregnant with startup investing. Whether choosing 2 or 20 startups per year, you have to filter them from the total incoming pool.

If I let even one startup through, another 50 seem to magically fill up my time (or at least my inbox). I don’t want to hire staff for vetting, so I’ve concluded I must ignore all new startup pitches and intros.

Know where you can moderate and where you can’t.

YOU SAY “HEALTH IS #1″…BUT IS IT REALLY?

After contracting Lyme disease and operating at ~10% capacity for nine months, I made health #1. Prior to Lyme, I’d worked out and eaten well, but when push came to shove, “health #1” was negotiable. Now, it’s literally #1. What does this mean?

If I sleep poorly and have an early morning meeting, I’ll cancel the meeting last-minute if needed and catch up on sleep. If I’ve missed a workout and have a con-call coming up in 30 minutes? Same. Late-night birthday party with a close friend? Not unless I can sleep in the next morning. In practice, strictly making health #1 has real social and business ramifications. That’s a price I’ve realized I MUST be fine paying, or I could lose weeks or months to sickness or fatigue.

Making health #1 50% of the time doesn’t work. It’s absolute — all or nothing. If it’s #1 50% of the time, you’ll compromise precisely when it’s most important.

The artificial urgency common to startups makes mental and physical health even more challenging. I’m tired of unwarranted last-minute “hurry up and sign” emergencies and related fire drills. It’s a culture of cortisol.

ARE YOU OVER-CORRELATED?

[NOTE: Two investors friends found this bullet slow, as they’re immersed in similar subjects. Feel free to skip if it drags on, but I think there are a few important novice concepts in here.]

“Correlated” means that investments tend to move up or down in value at the same time.

As legendary hedge fund manager Ray Dalio told Tony Robbins: “It’s almost certain that whatever you’re going to put your money in, there will come a day when you will lose 50 percent to 70 percent.” It pays to remember that if you lose 50%, you need a subsequent 100% return to get back to where you started. That math is tough.

So, how to de-risk your portfolio?

Many investors “rebalance” across asset classes to maintain certain ratios (e.g. X% in bonds, Y% in stocks, Z% in commodities, etc.). If one asset class jumps, they liquidate a part of it a buy more of lower performing classes. There are pros and cons to this, but it’s common practice.

From 2007-2009, during the “real-world MBA” that taught me to angel invest, <15% of my liquid assets were in startups. I was taking a barbell approach to investing. But most startups are illiquid. I commonly can’t sell shares until 7-12 years after I invest, at least for my big winners to date. What does that mean? In 2015, startups comprise more than 80% of my assets. Yikes!

Since I can’t sell, the simplest first step for lowering stress is to stop investing in illiquid assets.

I’ve sold large portions of liquid stocks—mostly early start-up investments in China–to help get me to “sleep at night” levels, even if they are lower than historical highs of the last 6-12 months. Beware of anchoring to former high prices (e.g. “I’ll sell when it gets back to X price per share…”). I only have 1-2 stock holdings remaining.

Some of you might suggest hedging with short positions, and I’d love to, but it’s not my forte. If you have ideas for doing so without huge exposure or getting into legal gray areas, please let me know in the comments.

In the meantime, the venture capital model is mostly a bull market business. Not much shorting opportunity. The best approximation I’ve seen is investing in businesses like Uber, which A) have a lot of international exposure (like US blue chips), and B) could be considered macro-economically counter-cyclical. For instance, it’s conceivable a stock market correction or crash could simultaneously lead fewer people to buy cars and/or more people to sign up as Uber drivers to supplement or replace their jobs. Ditto with Airbnb and others that have more variable than fixed costs compared to incumbents (e.g. Hilton).

WHAT’S THE RUSH? CAN YOU “RETIRE” AND COME BACK?

I’m in startups for the long game. In some capacity, I plan to be doing this 20+ years from now.

The reality: If you’re spending your own money, or otherwise not banking on management fees, you can wait for the perfect pitches, even if it takes years. It might not be the “best” approach, but it’s enough. To get rich beyond your wildest dreams in startup investing, it isn’t remotely necessary to bet on a Facebook or Airbnb every year. If you get a decent bet on ONE of those non-illusory, real-business unicorns every 10 years, or if you get 2-3 investments that turn $25K into $2.5M, you can retire and have a wonderful quality of life. Many would argue that you need to invest in 50-100 startups to find that one lottery ticket. Maybe. I think it’s possible to narrow the odds quite a bit more, and a lot of it is predicated on maintaining stringent criteria; ensuring you have an informational, analytical, or behavioral advantage; and TIMING.

Most of my best investments were made during the “Dot-com Depression” of 2008-2009 (e.g. Uber, Shopify, Twitter, etc.), when only the hardcore remained standing on a battlefield littered with startup bodies. In lean times, when startups no longer grace magazine covers, founders are those who cannot help but build a company. LinkedIn in 2002 is another example.

HOWEVER… This doesn’t mean there aren’t great deals out there. There are. Great companies are still built during every “frothy” period.

The froth just makes my job and detective work 10x harder, and the margin of safety becomes much narrower.

[Tim: Skip this boxed text if the concept of “margin of safety” is old news to you.]

Think of the “margin of safety” as wiggle room.

Warren Buffett is one of the most successful investors of the 20th century and a self-described “value investor.” He aims to buy stocks at a discount (below intrinsic value) so that even with a worst-case scenario, he can do well. This discount is referred to as the “margin of safety,” and it’s the bedrock principle of some of the brightest minds in the investing world (e.g., Seth Klarman). It doesn’t guarantee a good investment, but it allows room for error. Back in the startup world…

I want each of my investments, if successful, to have the ability to return my “entire fund,” which is how much capital I’ve earmarked for startups over two years, for instance. This usually means potential for a minimum 10X return. That 10X minimum is an important part of my recipe that allows margin for screw ups.

For the fund-justifying ROI to have a snowball’s chance in hell of happening, I must A) know basic algebra to ensure my investment amounts (check sizes) permit it, and B) avoid companies that seem overpriced, where the 10x price is something the world has never seen before (i.e. no even indirect comparables, or tenable extrapolations from even an expanded market size).

If you throw low-due-diligence Hail Mary’s everywhere and justify it with “they could be the next Uber!”, you will almost certainly be killed by 1,000 slow-bleeding $25K paper cuts. Despite current euphoria, applying something like Pascal’s Wager to startups is a great way to go broke.

Good startup investors who suggest being “promiscuous” are still methodical.

It’s popular in startup land to talk about “moonshots”—the impossibly ambitious startups that will either change the world or incinerate themselves into star dust.

I’m a fan of funding ballsy founders (which includes women), and I want many moonshots to be funded, but here’s the reality of my portfolio: as I’ve signed the investment docs for every big success I’ve had, I’ve always thought, “I will never lose money on this deal.”

The “this will be a home run or nothing” deals usually end up at nothing. I’m not saying such deals can’t work, but I try not to specialize in them.

These days, the real unicorns aren’t the media darlings with billion-dollar valuations. Those have become terrifyingly passé. The unicorns are the high-growth startups with a reasonable margin of safety.

Fortunately, I’m not in a rush, and I can wait for the tide to shift.

If you simply wait for blood in the streets, for when true believers are the only ones left, you can ensure come-hell-or-high-water founders are at least half of your meetings.

It might be morbid, but it’s practical.

My Last Deals For A While

It’s still a great time to invest in companies… but only if you’re able to A) filter the signal from the noise, B) say no to a lot of great companies whose investors are accepting insane terms, and C) follow your own rules. Doing all three of these requires a fuck-ton of effort, discipline, and systems. I prefer games with better odds.

There are a few deals you’ll see in the upcoming months, which I committed to long ago. These are not new deals.

They are current companies in which I’m filling my pro-rata, or companies postponing funding announcements until they’re most helpful (e.g. launching publicly). Separately, I work closely with the Expa startup lab and will continue to do so. They are largely able to insulate themselves from madness, while using and refining an excellent playbook.

Are You Having a Breakdown or a Breakthrough? A Short How-To Guide

“Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.”
— Greg McKeown, Essentialism

If you’re suffering from a feeling of overwhelm, it might be useful to ask yourself two questions:

– In the midst of overwhelm, is life not showing me exactly what I should subtract?

– Am I having a breakdown or a breakthrough?

As Marcus Aurelius and Ryan Holiday would say, “The obstacle is the way.” This doesn’t mean seeing problems, accepting them, and leaving them to fester. Nor does it mean rationalizing problems into good things. To me, it means using pain to find clarity. Pain–if examined and not ignored–can show you what to excise from your life.

For me, step one is always the same: write down the 20% of activities and people causing 80% or more of your negative emotions.

My step two is doing a “fear-setting” exercise on paper, in which I ask and answer “What is really the worst that could happen if I did what I’m considering? And so what? How could I undo any damage?”

Below is a real-world example: the journal page that convinced me to write this post and kickstart an extended startup vacation.

The questions were “What is really the worst that could happen if I stopped angel investing for a minimum of 6-12 months? Do those worse-case scenarios really matter? How could I undo any potential damage? Could I do a two-week test?”

As you’ll notice, I made lists of the guaranteed upsides versus speculative downsides. If we define “risk” as I like to—the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome—we can see how stupid (and unnecessarily painful) all my fretting and procrastination was. All I needed to do was put it on paper.

Below is a scan of the actual page. Click here for an enlarged version.

Further below is a transcribed version (slightly shorter and edited). For a full explanation of how and why I use journaling, see this post. In the meantime, this will get the point across:

Transcription:

“The anxiety is mostly related to email and startups: new pitches, new intros, etc.

Do a 2-week test where “no” to ALL cold intros and pitches?

Why am I hesitant? For saying “no” to all:

PROS:

– 100% guaranteed anxiety reduction

– Feeling of freedom

– Less indecision, less deliberation, so far more bandwidth for CREATING, for READING, for PHYSICAL [TRAINING], for EXPERIMENTS.

CONS (i.e. why not?):

– Might find the next Uber (<10% chance) — Who cares? Wouldn’t materialize for 7-9 years. If Uber pops (IPO), it won’t matter.

– Not get more deals. But who cares?

* Dinner with 5 friends fixes it.

* One blog post fixes it. [Here’s an example from 2013 that helped me find Shyp and co-lead their first round]

* NONE of my best deals (Shyp, Shopify, Uber, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Alibaba, etc.) came from cold intros from acquaintances.

If try 2 weeks, how to ensure successful:

– I don’t even see interview or [new] startup emails

– No con-calls. [Cite] “con call vacation” –> push to email or EOD [end-of-day review with assistant]

– Offer [additional] “office hours” on Fridays [for existing portfolio]?

I ultimately realized: If I set up policies to avoid new startups for two weeks, the systems will persist. I might as well make it semi-permanent and take a real “startup vacation.”

What do you need a vacation from?

My Challenge To You: Write Down The “What If”s

“I am an old man and I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

– Mark Twain

“He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.”

– Seneca

Tonight or tomorrow morning, take a decision you’ve been putting off, and challenge the fuzzy “what if”s holding you hostage.

If not now, when? If left at the status quo, what will your life and stress look like in six months? In one year? In three years? Who around you will also suffer?

I hope you find the strength to say no when it matters most. I’m striving for the same, and only time will tell if I pull it off.

What will I spend my time on next? More crazy experiments and creative projects, of course. To hear about them first, sign up for my infrequent newsletter. Things are going to get nuts.

But more important — how could you use a new lease on life?

To surf, like this attorney who quit the rat race? To travel with your family around the world for 1,000+ days, like this? To learn languages or work remotely in 20+ countries while building a massive business? It’s all possible. The options are limitless…

So start by writing them down. Sometimes, it takes just a piece of paper and a few questions to create a breakthrough.

I look forward to hearing about your adventures.

The post How to Say No When It Matters Most (or “Why I’m Taking a Long ‘Startup Vacation'”) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Chris Sacca on Being Different and Making Billions (#79)

Tim Ferriss — Sun, 31 May 2015 00:29:31 +0000

Goofing around with Sacca and his afro.

“Fuck it… I’m just not going to play this traditionally anymore.”

– Chris Sacca

Chris Sacca was recently the cover story of the “Midas Issue” of Forbes Magazine.

The reason: He is a newly-minted billionaire and the proprietor of what will likely be the most successful venture capital fund in history: LOWERCASE I of LOWERCASE Capital.

He’s an early-stage investor in companies like Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Kickstarter, and many more.

In this interview, we discuss unfair advantages, how Chris chooses founders and investments, stories of missed opportunities, the styles that differentiate Wall Street from Silicon Valley investors, and how keg parties can liberate law students from the tyranny of class (Chris completed law school without attending any classes).

Enjoy!

You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

#79: Chris Sacca on Being Different and Making Billions

Listen to it on iTunes.
Stream by clicking here.
Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as”.

This episode mentions the incredible Matt Mullenweg. Matt, who’s also been on this podcast, was a lead developer behind WordPress, which runs about 23% of the Internet. You can listen to our booze-infused conversation here, in which we discuss polyphasic sleep, tequila, and building billion-dollar companies like his current gig (stream below or right-click here to download):

Ep 61: The Benevolent Dictator of the Internet, Matt Mullenweg

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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What’s the best investment advice you ever received? Or worst? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

Selected Links from the Episode

A partial list of Chris Sacca’s investments.
Want to skip an MBA program? Check out Feld Thoughts
Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived by Laurence Shames and Peter Barton
Watch Chris Sacca’s commencement speech to University of Minnesota
I Seem to be a Verb by Buckminster Fuller
The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz
The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert by Richard Betts, Wendy MacNaughton and Crystal English Sacca
Follow Chris on Twitter – @Sacca

Show Notes

What is Chris Sacca best known for? [6:10]
Total Immersion swimming and how to invest like Chris Sacca [8:40]
Pieces of advice given to Chris Sacca on early-stage investing [11:55]
What disqualifies startup founders in Sacca’s mind [16:05]
Travis Kalanick and Nintendo Wii Tennis [18:55]
Traits of founders for whom success, at massive scale, is predestined [22:00]
The whales that got away: GoPro, Snapchat, and more [27:40]
On letting the negative case dominate one’s analysis for whether to invest or not [29:55]
Differences between venture capitalists and private equity [35:15]
Books for investing and cultivating emotional intelligence [41:00]
Thoughts on modeling what it is to be successful [49:30]
What Chris Sacca’s parents did when he was a kid [53:50]
What Sacca looks for when hiring [58:25]
What historical figure Sacca most identifies with? [1:01:15]
Early collecting habits [1:04:25]
The story of the prophetic notebook [1:10:10]
The two differentiators that shifted the nature of Sacca’s business [1:19:10]
Advice to founders or would-be entrepreneurs [1:27:40]
Most readily quoted movie [1:31:10]

People Mentioned

The post Chris Sacca on Being Different and Making Billions (#79) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Tony Robbins on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (#37 & #38)

Tim Ferriss — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 07:35:41 +0000

“Our revenues are now over $5 billion annually. Without access to Tony and his teachings, Salesforce.com wouldn’t exist today.”

– Marc Benioff, Founder of Salesforce.com

“[Tony] distills the concepts of the best investors in the world into practical lessons that will benefit both naïve investors and skilled professionals.”

– Ray Dalio, Founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund

Tony Robbins is the world’s most famous performance coach. He’s advised everyone from Bill Clinton to Serena Williams, and from Leonardo DiCaprio to Oprah (who calls him “superhuman”).

For years, you’ve also asked me to interview him in-depth — so here it is! I flew to Florida to spend time with Tony in his home, and what ensued was an epic two-part conversation. It covers just about everything imaginable. Special thanks to Joe Polish and Peter Diamandis for re-introducing us.

Ep 37: Tony Robbins on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money

Ep 38: Tony Robbins (Part 2) on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money

My visit coincided with his first new book in 20 years: Money–Master the Game.

I love Tony’s work and it helped me start my first company, but when I got an early draft of the book, I thought to myself–really? Another book on money? Ugh. I prepared to be bored, especially since I think of myself as an experienced investor [pats self on back]. Instead, and very surprisingly, I was blown away. Before I knew it, I was pushing off other work, letting my dinner get cold, and staying up hours past bedtime each night, all because I couldn’t stop reading.

Why?

First off, he saved me years of my life! Over the last 10 years, I’ve been approached by several top hedge fund managers, who’ve suggested I write The 4-Hour Investor by collaborating with them and their friends. Tony has written that book perfectly, so it saves me the trouble. I can just point people to this book. Which leads me to…

Reason number two, he goes DEEP with many of the investing icons I’ve always wanted to meet, including Paul Tudor Jones (who he’s coached for 10+ years), Ray Dalio, Carl Icahn, David Swensen, Kyle Bass, and many more. These are the hard-to-interview “unicorns” who consistently beat the market, despite the fact that it’s called impossible. In this book, they disclose details and examples I’ve never seen anywhere else, and I’ve read A LOT of books on investing. For me, the interviews alone were worth the entire book.

In the following interview, we dig into everything: Tony’s morning routines, his diet, how we works with the world’s highest-performing athletes and traders, common misconceptions about him, the most typical money mistakes he’s uncovered, and on and on. I even ask him to palm my entire face (Here’s the pic!).

Enjoy!

You can find the transcript of Part 1 (Episode 37) here. You can find the transcript of Part 2 (Episode 38) here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

Tons of links and goodies in show notes below…

If you can’t see the above embedded players, here are other ways to listen:

Listen to it on iTunes.
Stream by clicking Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Download both as MP3 by right clicking (Part 1, Part 2) and choosing “save as”.

This podcast is brought to you by 99Designs, the world’s largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results.

Also, how would you like to join me and Sir Richard Branson on his private island for mentoring? It’s coming up soon, and it’s all-expenses-paid. Click here to learn more. It’s worth checking out.

QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What is the best piece of investment advice you ever received or read? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for all show notes, and thank you for listening!…

Do you enjoy this podcast? If so, please leave a short review here. It’s very important to keep the show going.

Subscribe to The Tim Ferriss Show on iTunes.

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Selected Links from the Episode

Money — Master the Game
Tony’s breathing routine — Here’s Fast Company’s link to Tony’s “Hour of Power,” which includes breath work at about 1:10:30 http://tr-training.s3.amazonaws.com/UEDay2HrofPwr.mp3.
Myelin
Cryotherapy (Wikipedia); Cryohealthcare Inc. (from Tony)
Evernote
Inside Job
Stronghold Financial

Show Notes

Note: “Ep1” = Part 1 and “Ep2” = Part 2.

What it’s like to coach (and question) the worlds top 1%? [Ep1-10:07]
Tonys advice for ‘How to get out of a slump’ [Ep1-14:25]
Tony’s morning routine – including using cyrotherapy [Ep1-19:08]
Tony’s daily priming ritual [Ep1-26:16]
The biggest misconceptions people have about Tony [Ep1-32:20]
How 2 millimeters can change your life [Ep1-41:14]
What inspired Tony to write his first book in 20 years [Ep1-45:30]
How Tony’s new book is feeding 50 million people this year [Ep1-55:01]
The first questions Richard Branson always asks before going into a business [Ep1-59:14]
What a 50% investment loss actually means [Ep1-60:04]
Why a nickel costs 5 cents but is worth 6.8 cents. [Ep1-63:01]
What “average rates of return” actually do to your money [Ep2-3:40]
Nobel Prize winners’ advice on automating your investing [Ep2-5:16]
Why investing is just like monkeys playing with apples [Ep2-5:54]
One of the nine biggest lies in our investment lives [Ep2-6:23]
How mutual funds are driven not by rates of returns, but marketing [Ep2-9:10]
Why most mutual funds underperform the market [Ep2-9:54]
Ray Dalio’s “All Weather” Investing Principles [Ep2-12:51]
Why losers react and winners anticipate [Ep2-27:07]
What exactly is “diversification”? [Ep2-30:10]
Why investing should be maximising quality of life, not maximising returns [Ep2-34:08]
What you need to ensure against your lesser instinct [Ep2-39:23]
The story behind Tony wanting to punch Obama [Ep2-42:20]

People Mentioned

The post Tony Robbins on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (#37 & #38) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars (#29)

Tim Ferriss — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 02:12:32 +0000

(Photo: Ariel H.)

“One of the rare noncharlatanic books in finance.”

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Antifragile

“There is more to be learned from Jim Paul’s true story of failure than from a stack of books promising to reveal the secret formula for success…this compact volume is filled with a wealth of trading wisdom and insights.”

– Jack Schwager, author of Hedge Fund Market Wizards

The newest book in The Tim Ferriss Book Club (all five books here) is a fast read entitled What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars. It packs a wallop.

This book came into my life through N.N. Taleb, who has made several fortunes by exploiting the hubris of Wall Street. Given how vociferously he attacks most books on investing, it caught my attention that he openly praises this little book.

My first dinner with Nassim was in September of 2008. It was memorable for many reasons. We were introduced by the incredible Seth Roberts (may he rest in peace), and we sat down just as Lehman Brothers was collapsing, which Taleb had — in simple terms — brilliantly shorted. We proceeded to drinking nearly all of the Prosecco in the restaurant, while talking about life, business, and investing. Lehman Brothers would end up the largest bankruptcy filing in US history, involving $600+ billion in assets…

The next day, I had a massive hangover and a hunger to study Nassim. Step one was simple: reading more of what he read.

I grabbed a copy of What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, and I’ve since read it many, many times. For less than $20, this tool has helped me avoid multiple catastrophes, and I can directly credit its influence to roughly 1/2 of my net worth (!). The ROI has been incredible.

The book — winner of a 2014 Axiom Business Book award gold medal — begins with the unbroken string of successes that helped Jim Paul achieve a jet-setting lifestyle and land a key spot with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It then describes the circumstances leading up to 7-figure losses, and the essential lessons he learned from it. The theme that emerges: there are 1,000,000+ ways to make money in the markets (and many of the “experts” contradict one another), but all losses appear to stem from the same few causes. So why not study these causes to help improve your odds of making and keeping money?

Even if you don’t view yourself as an “investor,” this book can help you make better decisions in life. Also, the stories, similar in flavor to Liar’s Poker, are hilarious and range from high-stakes baccarat to Arabian horse fiascos. For entertainment value alone, this book is worth the time.

I hope you enjoy — and benefit from — the lessons and laughs as much as I have.

You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

For those who enjoy both audio and Kindle, as I do, the above editions are synced with Whispersync. This means that if you get both the audio and Kindle, you can switch between the two. For instance, I like to read Kindle books on my iPhone on the subway, then pick up and listen to the audio while walking outside.

Would you be interested in interviewing the co-author, Brendan Moynihan? Brendan is a Managing Director at Marketfield Asset Management ($20 billion of assets under management) and the Senior Advisor to the Editor-in-Chief of Bloomberg News, among other things.

If you’re a journalist, blogger, podcaster, etc. interested in the book’s lessons, feel free to reach out to him at bmoynihan [at] bloomberg {dot} net.

I recently interviewed him myself for an hour about investing, how he met Jim Paul, and much more. Click below to listen to the conversation, or (if reading via email) you can click here to stream/download the MP3:

Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan

For those who want a short synopsis of the book, here you go:

Jim Paul’s meteoric rise took him from a small town in Northern Kentucky to governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, yet he lost it all — his fortune, his reputation, and his job — in one fatal attack of excessive economic hubris. In this honest, frank analysis, Paul and Brendan Moynihan revisit the events that led to Paul’s disastrous decisions and examine the psychological factors behind bad financial practices in several economic sectors.

Paul and Moynihan’s cautionary tale includes strategies for avoiding loss tied to a simple framework for understanding, accepting, and dodging the dangers of investing, trading, and speculating.

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The post What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars (#29) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

You'd Like to Be an Angel Investor? Here's How You Can Invest In My Deals…

Tim Ferriss — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 16:09:35 +0000

Most deals get done in informal settings. Now, I’m inviting you to join me. (Photo: Russell Yip)

Please note that my syndicate investing in Shyp has now closed. You can still back me on AngelList to gain priority access to future deals. More updates will be posted here later in the round.

On September 23, 2013 (that’s today), the world of startup financing changes forever. It’s a truly historic moment.

Previously, I couldn’t publicly share deals with you. Now, thanks to an unprecedented legal change, I can offer a portion of my start-up investments to any of you who qualify as “accredited investors.”

Previously, you had to be part of a small club to see such deals. Not any more.
Previously, you might even need to be in Silicon Valley, drinking wine and having coffees around the clock, to see good deals before they filled up. No longer.

Starting today, I’ll share some of my favorite deals with you, beginning with a start-up called Shyp.

Notable companies I’ve advised include Uber (pre-Series-A), Evernote, Automattic (WordPress.com), Shopify, and TaskRabbit, among others. Early investments include Twitter, Facebook, Reputation.com, etc.

In this case, I used a “Spearhead Capital” blog post to my ~1.4M monthly blog readers to find promising startups. Nearly 400 companies applied, many of which are producing millions in revenue. Out of all of them, and with the help of Naval Ravikant (CEO/co-founder of AngelList) to interview finalists, I chose Shyp.

Shyp is the fastest and easiest way to ship packages. More on that shortly.

Investing alongside me–and potentially you–in this round are:

David Marcus (President of PayPal)
Brian McClendon (Founder of Google Earth)
Daymond John (Founder of FUBU, Shark on ABC’s “Shark Tank”)
Joshua Schachter (Founder of Delicious, Tasty Labs)
Aaron Batalion (Co-founder of LivingSocial)
Homebrew (Hunter Walk and Satya Patel)
Naval Ravikant (CEO/co-founder of AngelList)
Scott Belsky (Founder and CEO of Behance)
Sherpa Ventures (Scott Stanford & Shervin Pishevar)
Antonio J. Gracias (Board Member at Tesla and SolarCity)
XG Ventures (Andrea Zurek and Pietro Dova)
Osama Bedier (Former head of Google Wallet)

…and more

So, how can you join us?

Before I tell you, remember:

Startups are speculative, and this is gambling. You shouldn’t invest anything you’re not comfortable kissing goodbye. Treat it as casino money.
If you are going to invest in startups despite this high risk, plan on building a portfolio of dozens, very slowly and carefully. This should be just one of many. Read more on approach here.

The Short Version

If you’d like to invest in Shyp, simply click here. A description of the company is in “The Longer Version” below.

You’ll need to set up an AngelList profile (free), and the minimum investment is $2,500. We’re only able to accept $250,000 from everyone.

For more on the team and concept of Shyp, click here.

If you miss this one, not to worry–you can automatically join my deals in the future, which puts you first in line next time.

Can’t invest right now? No worries. If relevant, I’d love for your to consider any of the below actions. Shyp and I would really appreciate it!

– Apply to be a Shyp Hero (Heroes are Shyp’s drivers). Click here.

– Apply for a job on Shyp’s core team. Click here.

– Interview the co-founders of Shyp: Kevin, Josh, and Jack. They’re clever gents. Just email: founders at shyp dot com.

– Tell Shyp which city you live in so they can launch there before others!

The Longer Version

I’m putting my name and network behind Shyp and personally investing $25,000. I’ll also be providing oversight and advising the company on product/conversion optimization, national launch strategy, etc.

I’m using a new AngelList feature called “Syndicates” to share my $250,000 allocation of Shyp.

Unlike venture capitalists (VCs), I am charging zero management fees. If you don’t win, I don’t make a dime. If you invest alongside me, the only expense is a 20% “carry” (roughly 20% of the profits) if there’s a good outcome.

DESCRIPTION OF SHYP

Shyp is the fastest and easiest way to ship packages.

Through the Shyp iPhone app, you take a photo of what you want to send, specifying destination and pick-up time. You’re done.

A “Shyp Hero” (driver) arrives at your home or office at the specified time, takes your unpackaged item away to be packaged, then sends it on its way via the optimal carrier (i.e., Fedex, UPS, etc.). Shyp automatically optimizes for speed and cost, and Shyp charges no more than Post Office prices, plus a $5 pickup fee for sending solo items. If you send more than one item, the company waives the $5 pickup fee.

How to Get In First

Would you like first access to my future deals, right alongside my close friends?

To see things before I post them on the blog, you can automatically back me on AngelList, as Naval (CEO of AngelList) and others are doing. Click here for more details. This will ensure you don’t miss anything.

###

DISCLAIMERS — DON’T SKIP:

Startups make big plans a lot, and most don’t follow them. Shyp might run out of money; customers might not like using a third party to ship things; UPS, Fedex, or some upstart could start competing; or the team could simply fall apart tomorrow. Any statements about their future plans, margins, etc., are pure speculation on my part. That’s why startup investing is very risky, so again: don’t invest anything you aren’t prepared to write off 100%. Last but not least, I’m not necessarily planning on sending frequent updates or notices of Shyp’s change in plans (if any), as startups change on a weekly or daily basis.

The post You'd Like to Be an Angel Investor? Here's How You Can Invest In My Deals… appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Exclusive Warren Buffett – A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers

Tim Ferriss — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 19:19:12 +0000

“This [drawing] looks good — as close as I’ve ever look to George Clooney.” – Warren Buffett. (Illustration credit: Monica Bevelin)

“It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”

-W. Somerset Maugham

English dramatist & novelist (1874 – 1965)

I have long been a fan of Warren Buffett, who is widely considered the most successful investor of the 20th century. His net worth is currently estimated at $44 billion.

The fascination with his approach to value investing started with Buffett: The Making of An American Capitalist, which led me to devour all of Buffett’s incredibly readable annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. My fervor culminated in early May of 2008, when I made the pilgrimage to Omaha, Nebraska to elevator pitch Buffett and Charlie Munger directly in front of 20,000+ people (See: “Picking Warren Buffett’s Brain: Notes from a Novice”).

Prompted by all the “Mr. Market” manic-depressive excitement about Facebook, tech, and the world at large, I’m thrilled to offer an exclusive excerpt from a new 81-page book: A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers from Warren E. Buffett.

In it, author Peter Bevelin distills hundreds of pages of annual reports and Berkshire’s An Owner’s Manual into bite-sized principles and key quotes. Of this lightweight handbook, Buffett himself says, “It sums up what Charlie and I have been saying over the years in annual reports and at annual meetings.”

Net proceeds from sales of A Few Lessons are donated to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. It can be bought at the publisher’s site, which is their preference, or it can be found on Amazon.

For this post, I’ve chosen one of my favorite chapters, which relates to Buffett’s criteria for investments (and acquisitions): Business Characteristics: The Great, the Good, and the Gruesome…

The bolded headlines and text are Peter’s.

Enter Buffett – Business Characteristics: The Great, the Good, and the Gruesome

Our acquisition preferences run toward businesses that generate cash, not those that consume it. (1980)

And those are:

The best businesses by far for owners continue to be those that have high returns on capital and that require little incremental investment to grow. (2009)

A. THE REALLY GREAT BUSINESS: High returns, a sustainable competitive advantage and obstacles that make it tough for new companies to enter

A truly great business must have an enduring “moat” that protects excellent returns on invested capital. (2007)

“Moats”—a metaphor for the superiorities they possess that make life difficult for their competitors. (2007)

Moats can widen or shrink

Long-term competitive advantage in a stable industry is what we seek in a business. (2007)

Leadership alone provides no certainties: Witness the shocks some years back at General Motors, IBM and Sears, all of which had enjoyed long periods of seeming invincibility. (1996)

The dynamics of capitalism guarantee that competitors will repeatedly assault any business “castle” that is earning high returns. Therefore a formidable barrier such as a company’s being the low cost producer (GEICO, Costco) or possessing a powerful world-wide brand (Coca-Cola, Gillette, American Express) is essential for sustained success. Business history is filled with “Roman Candles,” companies whose moats proved illusory and were soon crossed. (2007)

One question I always ask myself in appraising a business is how I would like, assuming I had ample capital and skilled personnel, to compete with it. (1983)

If a business requires a superstar to produce great results, the business itself cannot be deemed great. A medical partnership led by your area’s premier brain surgeon may enjoy outsized and growing earnings, but that tells little about its future. The partnership’s moat will go when the surgeon goes. You can count, though, on the moat of the Mayo Clinic to endure, even though you can’t name its CEO. (2007)

A great business has pricing power or the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor

An economic franchise arises from a product or service that:

(1) Is needed or desired; (2) Is thought by its customers to have no close substitute and; (3) Is not subject to price regulation. The existence of all three conditions will be demonstrated by a company’s ability to regularly price its product or service aggressively and thereby to earn high rates of return on capital. Moreover, franchises can tolerate mis-management. Inept managers may diminish a franchise’s profitability, but they cannot inflict mortal damage. (1991)

The best protection against inflation is a great business

Such favored business must have two characteristics: (1) An ability to increase prices rather easily (even when product demand is flat and capacity is not fully utilized) without fear of significant loss of either market share or unit volume, and (2) An ability to accommodate large dollar volume increases in business (often produced more by inflation than by real growth) with only minor additional investment of capital. (1981)

As inflation intensifies, more and more companies find that they must spend all funds they generate internally just to maintain their existing physical volume of business. (1980)

Any unleveraged business that requires some net tangible assets to operate (and almost all do) is hurt by inflation. Businesses needing little in the way of tangible assets simply are hurt the least. (1983)

The dream business—“sweet” returns

Let’s look at the prototype of a dream business, our own See’s Candy. (2007)

In our See’s purchase, Charlie and I had one important insight:

We saw that the business had untapped pricing power. (1991)

At See’s, annual sales were 16 million pounds of candy when Blue Chip Stamps purchased the company in 1972… Last year See’s sold 31 million pounds, a growth rate of only 2% annually. Yet its durable competitive advantage, built by the See’s family over a 50-year period, and strengthened subsequently by Chuck Huggins and Brad Kinstler, has produced extraordinary results for Berkshire. (2007)

We bought See’s for $25 million when its sales were $30 million and pre-tax earnings were less than $5 million. The capital then required to conduct the business was $8 million. (Modest seasonal debt was also needed for a few months each year.) Consequently, the company was earning 60% pre-tax on invested capital. Two factors helped to minimize the funds required for operations. First, the product was sold for cash, and that eliminated accounts receivable. Second, the production and distribution cycle was short, which minimized inventories. (2007)

Last year See’s sales were $383 million, and pre-tax profits were $82 million. The capital now required to run the business is $40 million.

This means we have had to reinvest only $32 million since 1972 to handle the modest physical growth—and somewhat immodest financial growth—of the business. In the meantime pre-tax earnings have totaled $1.35 billion. All of that, except for the $32 million, has been sent to Berkshire (or, in the early years, to Blue Chip). After paying corporate taxes on the profits, we have used the rest to buy other attractive businesses. (2007)

Customer goodwill creates economic goodwill

See’s has a one-of-a-kind product “personality” produced by a combination of its candy’s delicious taste and moderate price, the company’s total control of the distribution process, and the exceptional service provided by store employees. (1986)

It was not the fair market value of the inventories, receivables or fixed assets that produced the premium rates of return. Rather it was a combination of intangible assets, particularly a pervasive favorable reputation with consumers based upon countless pleasant experiences they have had with both product and personnel. (1983)

Such a reputation creates a consumer franchise that allows the value of the product to the purchaser, rather than its production cost, to be the major determinant of selling price. Consumer franchises are a prime source of economic Goodwill. (1983)

A company like See’s is a rarity

There aren’t many See’s in Corporate America. Typically, companies that increase their earnings from $5 million to $82 million require, say, $400 million or so of capital investment to finance their growth. That’s because growing businesses have both working capital needs that increase in proportion to sales growth and significant requirements for fixed asset investments. (2007)

A company that needs large increases in capital to engender its growth may well prove to be a satisfactory investment. There is, to follow through on our example, nothing shabby about earning $82 million pre-tax on $400 million of net tangible assets. But that equation for the owner is vastly different from the See’s situation. It’s far better to have an ever-increasing stream of earnings with virtually no major capital requirements. Ask Microsoft or Google. (2007)

B. THE GOOD BUSINESS: Earn good returns on tangible

invested capital

One example of good, but far from sensational, business economics is our own Flight Safety. This company delivers benefits to its customers that are the equal of those delivered by any business that I know of. It also possesses a durable competitive advantage: Going to any other flight-training provider than the best is like taking the low bid on a surgical procedure. (2007)

Nevertheless, this business requires a significant reinvestment of earnings if it is to grow. When we purchased FlightSafety in 1996, its pre-tax operating earnings were $111 million, and its net investment in fixed assets was $570 million. Since our purchase, depreciation charges have totaled $923 million. But capital expenditures have totaled $1.635 billion, most of that for simulators to match the new airplane models that are constantly being introduced. (A simulator can cost us more than $12 million, and we have 273 of them.) Our fixed assets, after depreciation, now amount to $1.079 billion. Pre-tax operating earnings in 2007 were $270 million, a gain of $159 million since 1996. That gain gave us a good, but far from See’s-like, return on our incremental investment of $509 million. (2007)

High capital intensity requires high profit margins to achieve a

decent return

At FlightSafety…as much as $3.50 of capital investment is required to produce $1 of annual revenue. With this level of capital intensity, FlightSafety requires very high operating margins in order to obtain reasonable returns on capital, which means that utilization rates are

all-important. (2004)

Consequently, if measured only by economic returns, Flight Safety is an excellent but not extraordinary business. Its put-up-more-to-earn-more experience is that faced by most corporations. (2007)

C. THE GRUESOME: Require-a-lot-of-capital-at-a-low-return-business

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. (2007)

Asset-heavy businesses generally earn low rates of return—rates that often barely provide enough capital to fund the inflationary needs of the existing business, with nothing left over for real growth, for distribution to owners, or for acquisition of new businesses. (1983)

A depressing industry equation—undifferentiated products, easy to enter, many competitors and over-capacity

Businesses in industries with both substantial over-capacity and a “commodity”product (undifferentiated in any customer-important way by factors such as performance, appearance, service support, etc.) are prime candidates for profit troubles. (1982)

What finally determines levels of long-term profitability in such industries is the ratio of supply-tight to supply-ample years. Frequently that ratio is dismal. (1982)

If…costs and prices are determined by full-bore competition, there is more than ample capacity, and the buyer cares little about whose product or distribution services he uses, industry economics are almost certain to be unexciting. They may well be disastrous. (1982)

In many industries, differentiation can’t be made meaningful

Hence the constant struggle of every vendor to establish and emphasize special qualities of product or service. This works with candy bars (customers buy by brand name, not by asking for a “two-ounce candy bar”) but doesn’t work with sugar (how often do you hear, “I’ll have a cup of coffee with cream and C & H sugar, please”). (1982)

Some make money but only if they are the low-cost operator

When a company is selling a product with commodity-like economic characteristics, being the low-cost producer is all-important. (2000)

A few producers in such industries may consistently do well if they have a cost advantage that is both wide and sustainable. By definition such exceptions are few, and, in many industries, are non-existent. (1982)

With superior management, a company may maintain its status as a low-cost operator for a much longer time, but even then unceasingly faces the possibility of competitive attack. And a business, unlike a franchise, can be killed by poor management. (1991)

Or find a protected niche

Someone operating in a protected, and usually small, niche can sustain high profitability levels. (1987)

Or when supply is tight

When shortages exist…even commodity businesses flourish. (1987)

But it may take time

Over-capacity may eventually self-correct, either as capacity shrinks or demand expands. Unfortunately for the participants, such corrections often are long delayed. (1982)

And it usually doesn’t last long

One of the ironies of capitalism is that most managers in commodity industries abhor shortage conditions—even though those are the only circumstances permitting them good returns. (1987)

When they finally occur, the rebound to prosperity frequently produces a pervasive enthusiasm for expansion that, within a few years, again creates over-capacity and a new profitless environment. In other words, nothing fails like success. (1982)

But in some industries, tightness in supply can last a long time

Sometimes actual growth in demand will outrun forecasted growth for an extended period. In other cases, adding capacity requires very long lead times because complicated manufacturing facilities must be planned and built. (1982)

Berkshire’s unfortunate experience with the textile industry

The domestic textile industry operates in a commodity business, competing in a world market in which substantial excess capacity exists. Much of the trouble we experienced was attributable, both directly and indirectly, to competition from foreign countries whose workers are paid a small fraction of the U.S. minimum wage. (1985)

And whatever improvements Berkshire did, competitors did

Slow capital turnover, coupled with low profit margins on sales, inevitably produces inadequate returns on capital. Obvious approaches to improved profit margins involve differentiation of product, lowered manufacturing costs through more efficient equipment or better utilization of people, redirection toward fabrics enjoying stronger market trends, etc. Our management is diligent in pursuing such objectives.

The problem, of course, is that our competitors are just as diligently doing the same thing. (1978)

Over the years, we had the option of making large capital expenditures in the textile operation that would have allowed us to somewhat reduce variable costs. Each proposal to do so looked like an immediate winner. Measured by standard return-on-investment tests, in fact, these proposals usually promised greater economic benefits than would have resulted from comparable expenditures in our highly-profitable candy and newspaper businesses. (1985)

I see the immediate but illusory benefits of the cost reductions. I don’t see competitive actions and that all the benefits go to the customer

But the promised benefits from these textile investments were illusory. Many of our competitors, both domestic and foreign, were stepping up to the same kind of expenditures and, once enough companies did so, their reduced costs became the baseline for reduced prices industry wide. Viewed individually, each company’s capital investment decision appeared cost-effective and rational; viewed collectively, the decisions neutralized each other and were irrational (just as happens when each person watching a parade decides he can see a little better if he stands on tiptoes). After each round of investment, all the players had more money in the game and returns remained anemic. (1985)

Thus, we faced a miserable choice: Huge capital investment would have helped to keep our textile business alive, but would have left us with terrible returns on ever-growing amounts of capital. After the investment, moreover, the foreign competition would still have retained a major, continuing advantage in labor costs. A refusal to invest, however, would make us increasingly non-competitive, even measured against domestic textile manufacturers. (1985)

This devastating outcome for the shareholders indicates what can happen when much brain power and energy are applied to a faulty premise. The situation is suggestive of Samuel Johnson’s horse:

“A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse—not a remarkable mathematician.” Likewise, a textile company that allocates capital brilliantly within its industry is a remarkable textile company—but not

a remarkable business. (1985)

An important lesson

We react with great caution to suggestions that our poor businesses can be restored to satisfactory profitability by major capital expenditures. (The projections will be dazzling and the advocates sincere, but, in the end, major additional investment in a terrible industry usually is about as rewarding as struggling in quicksand.) (An Owner’s Manual)

An important truth

In a business selling a commodity-type product, it’s impossible to be a lot smarter than your dumbest competitor. (1990)

But what if I buy a gruesome business at a real bargain?

If you buy a stock at a sufficiently low price, there will usually be some hiccup in the fortunes of the business that gives you a chance to unload at a decent profit, even though the long-term performance of the business may be terrible. I call this the “cigar butt” approach to investing. A cigar butt found on the street that has only one puff left in it may not offer much of a smoke, but the “bargain purchase” will make that puff all profit. (1989)

Don’t confuse “cheap” with a good deal

Unless you are a liquidator, that kind of approach to buying businesses is foolish. First, the original “bargain” price probably will not turn out to be such a steal after all. In a difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another surfaces—never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen. (1989)

Second, any initial advantage you secure will be quickly eroded by the low return that the business earns. For example, if you buy a business for $8 million that can be sold or liquidated for $10 million and promptly take either course, you can realize a high return. But the investment will disappoint if the business is sold for $10 million in ten years and in the interim has annually earned and distributed only a few percent on cost. Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre. (1989)

In some businesses, not even brilliant management helps

I’ve said many times that when a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is

the reputation of the business that remains intact. (1989)

Good jockeys will do well on good horses, but not on broken-down

nags. (1989)

When an industry’s underlying economics are crumbling, talented management may slow the rate of decline. Eventually, though, eroding fundamentals will overwhelm managerial brilliance. (As a wise friend told me long ago, “If you want to get a reputation as a good businessman, be sure to get into a good business.”) (2006)

My conclusion from my own experiences and from much observation of other businesses is that a good managerial record (measured by economic returns) is far more a function of what business boat you get into than it is of how effectively you row (though intelligence and effort help considerably, of course, in any business, good or bad). (1985)

Should you find yourself in a chronically-leaking boat, energy devoted

to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks. (1985)

Turnarounds seldom turn or take longer than I expect

Both our operating and investment experience cause us to conclude that “turn-arounds” seldom turn, and that the same energies and talent are much better employed in a good business purchased at a fair price than in a poor business purchased at a bargain price. (1979)

But separate a general and permanent problem from an isolated and correctable problem and temporary setback—assuming it’s a great or good business

Extraordinary business franchises with a localized excisable cancer (needing, to be sure, a skilled surgeon), should be distinguished from the true “turnaround” situation in which the managers expect—and need—to pull off a corporate Pygmalion. (1980)

A great investment opportunity occurs when a marvelous business encounters a one-time huge, but solvable, problem as was the case many years back at both American Express and GEICO. Overall, however, we’ve done better by avoiding dragons than by slaying them. (1989)

All earnings are not created equal—Restricted earnings must often

be discounted heavily in capital intensive businesses

In many businesses particularly those that have high asset/profit ratios—inflation causes some or all of the reported earnings to become ersatz. The ersatz portion—let’s call these earnings “restricted”—cannot, if the business is to retain its economic position, be distributed as dividends. Were these earnings to be paid out, the business would lose ground in one or more of the following areas: Its ability to maintain its unit volume of sales, its long-term competitive position, its financial strength. No matter how conservative its payout ratio, a company that consistently distributes restricted earnings is destined for oblivion unless equity capital is otherwise infused. (1984)

Let’s turn to the much-more-valued unrestricted variety. These earnings may, with equal feasibility, be retained or distributed. In our opinion, management should choose whichever course makes greater sense for the owners of the business. (1984)

Unrestricted earnings should be retained only when there is a reasonable prospect—backed preferably by historical evidence or, when appropriate, by a thoughtful analysis of the future—that for every dollar retained by the corporation, at least one dollar of market value will be created for owners. This will happen only if the capital retained produces incremental earnings equal to, or above, those generally available to investors. (1984)

D. OTHER TOUGH BUSINESSES

I-have-to-be-smart-every-day-business

Retailing is a tough business… In part, this is because a retailer must stay smart, day after day. Your competitor is always copying and then topping whatever you do. Shoppers are meanwhile beckoned in every conceivable way to try a stream of new merchants. In retailing, to coast

is to fail. (1995)

In contrast to this have-to-be-smart-every-day business, there is what I call the have-to-be-smart-once business. For example, if you were smart enough to buy a network TV station very early in the game, you could put in a shiftless and backward nephew to run things, and the business would still do well for decades. (1995)

Fast changing industries can also be troublesome—even if I understand their products, it may be close to impossible to judge future competitive position and what can go wrong over time

Our criterion of “enduring” causes us to rule out companies in

industries prone to rapid and continuous change… A moat that must

be continuously rebuilt will eventually be no moat at all. (2007)

In the past, it required no brilliance for people to foresee the fabulous growth that awaited such industries as autos (in 1910), aircraft (in 1930) and television sets (in 1950). But the future then also included competitive dynamics that would decimate almost all of the companies entering those industries. Even the survivors tended to come away bleeding. (2009)

A business that constantly encounters major change also encounters many chances for major error. Furthermore, economic terrain that is forever shifting violently is ground on which it is difficult to build a fortress-like business franchise. Such a franchise is usually the key to sustained high returns. (1987)

And this includes technology—a few will make money but many will lose and it’s hard to see who does what in advance

A business that must deal with fast-moving technology is not going to lend itself to reliable evaluations of its long-term economics. (1993)

At Berkshire, we make no attempt to pick the few winners that will emerge from an ocean of unproven enterprises. We’re not smart enough to do that, and we know it. (2000)

Did we foresee thirty years ago what would transpire in the television-manufacturing or computer industries? Of course not. (Nor did most of the investors and corporate managers who enthusiastically entered those industries.) Why, then, should Charlie and I now think we can predict the future of other rapidly-evolving businesses? (1993)

Severe change and exceptional returns usually don’t go together.

Most investors, of course, behave as if just the opposite were true. That is, they usually confer the highest price-earnings ratios on exotic-sounding businesses that hold out the promise of feverish change.

That prospect lets investors fantasize about future profitability rather than face today’s business realities. For such investor-dreamers, any blind date is preferable to one with the girl next door, no matter how desirable she may be. (1987)

Just because Charlie and I can clearly see dramatic growth ahead for

an industry does not mean we can judge what its profit margins and returns on capital will be as a host of competitors battle for supremacy.

At Berkshire we will stick with businesses whose profit picture for decades to come seems reasonably predictable. Even then, we will make plenty of mistakes. (2009)

Our problem—which we can’t solve by studying up—is that we have

no insights into which participants in the tech field possess a truly durable competitive advantage. (1999)

And growth has its limits—no trees grow to the sky

In a finite world, high growth rates must self-destruct. If the base from which the growth is taking place is tiny, this law may not operate for a time. But when the base balloons, the party ends: A high growth rate eventually forges its own anchor. (1989)

For a major corporation to predict that its per-share earnings will grow over the long term at, say, 15% annually is to court trouble. That’s true because a growth rate of that magnitude can only be maintained by a very small percentage of large businesses. Here’s a test: Examine the record of, say, the 200 highest earning companies from 1970 or 1980 and tabulate how many have increased per-share earnings by 15% annually since those dates. You will find that only a handful have. I would wager you a very significant sum that fewer than 10 of the 200 most profitable companies in 2000 will attain 15% annual growth in earnings-per-share over the next 20 years. (2000)

We readily acknowledge that there has been a huge amount of true value created in the past decade by new or young businesses, and that there is much more to come. But value is destroyed, not created, by any business that loses money over its lifetime, no matter how high its interim valuation may get. (2000)

Our lack of tech insights, we should add, does not distress us. After all, there are a great many business areas in which Charlie and I have no special capital-allocation expertise. For instance, we bring nothing to the table when it comes to evaluating patents, manufacturing processes or geological prospects. So we simply don’t get into judgments in those fields. (1999)

E. THE CORRECT WAY TO LOOK AT ACCOUNTING GOODWILL

We believe managers and investors alike should view intangible assets from two perspectives: (1983)

When you evaluate the attractiveness of a business look at the return on net tangible assets

(1) In analysis of operating results—that is, in evaluating the underlying economics of a business unit-amortization charges should be ignored. What a business can be expected to earn on unleveraged net tangible assets, excluding any charges against earnings for amortization of Goodwill, is the best guide to the economic attractiveness of the operation. It is also the best guide to the current value of the operation’s economic Goodwill. (1983)

Goodwill should not be amortized, but written off when necessary

(2) In evaluating the wisdom of business acquisitions, amortization charges should be ignored also. They should be deducted neither from earnings nor from the cost of the business. This means forever viewing purchased Goodwill at its full cost, before any amortization. Furthermore, cost should be defined as including the full intrinsic business value—not just the recorded accounting value—of all consideration given, irrespective of market prices of the securities involved at the time of merger and irrespective of whether pooling treatment was allowed. (1983)

Operations that appear to be winners based upon perspective (1) may pale when viewed from perspective (2). A good business is not always a good purchase—although it’s a good place to look for one. (1983)

We will try to acquire businesses that have excellent operating economics measured by (1) and that provide reasonable returns measured by (2). Accounting consequences will be totally ignored. (1983)

F. WHAT ARE THE KEY FACTORS FOR SUCCESS OR HARM AND HOW PREDICTABLE ARE THEY?

Let’s translate the analysis into a simple question: Does the business have something people need or want now and in the future (demand), that no one else has (competitive advantage) or can copy, take away or get now and in the future (sustainable) and can these advantages be translated into business value?

Investors should remember that their scorecard is not computed using Olympic-diving methods: Degree-of-difficulty doesn’t count. If you are right about a business whose value is largely dependent on a single key factor that is both easy to understand and enduring, the payoff is the same as if you had correctly analyzed an investment alternative characterized by many constantly shifting and complex variables. (1994)

The truly big investment idea can usually be explained in a short paragraph. (1994)

Distinguish what matters from what doesn’t—Try to figure out the key factors that make the business succeed or fail. A few examples:

Insurance

Our main business…is insurance. To understand Berkshire, therefore, it is necessary that you understand how to evaluate an insurance company. The key determinants are: (1) The amount of float that the business generates; (2) Its cost; and (3) Most critical of all, the long-term outlook for both of these factors. (1999)

The most important ingredient in GEICO’s success is rock-bottom operating costs, which set the company apart from literally hundreds of competitors that offer auto insurance. (1986)

Because of the company’s low costs, its policyholders were consistently profitable and unusually loyal. (2010)

Newspapers

Within this environment the News has one exceptional strength: its acceptance by the public, a matter measured by the paper’s “penetration ratio”—the percentage of households within the community purchasing the paper each day… We believe a paper’s penetration ratio to be the best measure of the strength of its franchise. (1983)

A large and intelligently-utilized news hole…attracts a wide spectrum of readers and thereby boosts penetration. High penetration, in turn, makes a newspaper particularly valuable to retailers since it allows them to talk to the entire community through a single “megaphone.” A low-penetration paper is a far less compelling purchase for many advertisers and will eventually suffer in both ad rates and profits. (1989)

Retail

We regard the most important measure of retail trends to be units sold per store rather than dollar volume. (1983)

NFM [Nebraska Furniture Mart] and Borsheim’s [Fine Jewelry] follow precisely the same formula for success: (1) unparalleled depth and breadth of merchandise at one location; (2) the lowest operating costs in the business; (3) the shrewdest of buying, made possible in part by the huge volumes purchased; (4) gross margins, and therefore prices, far below competitors’; and (5) friendly personalized service with family members on hand at all times. (1989)

Railroads

Both of us are enthusiastic about BNSF’s future because railroads have major cost and environmental advantages over trucking, their main competitor. Last year BNSF moved each ton of freight it carried a record 500 miles on a single gallon of diesel fuel. That’s three times more fuel-efficient than trucking is, which means our railroad owns an important advantage in operating costs. (2010)

To sum up the great, good and gruesome

To sum up, think of three types of “savings accounts.” The great one pays an extraordinarily high interest rate that will rise as the years pass. The good one pays an attractive rate of interest that will be earned also on deposits that are added. Finally, the gruesome account both pays an inadequate interest rate and requires you to keep adding money at those disappointing returns. (2007)

Business experience, direct and vicarious, produced my present strong preference for businesses that possess large amounts of enduring Goodwill and that utilize a minimum of tangible assets. (1983)

—

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How to Create Your Own Real-World MBA – II

Tim Ferriss — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 03:08:47 +0000

Brainstorming in Boulder, CO with a class of founders from TechStars, where I’ve been a mentor. After this particular trip, I ended up advising Graphic.ly. (Photo: Andrew Hyde)

Disclaimer: nothing on this site is legal advice, and I am not an investing expert.

This post is continued from Part I.

Part I explained how, instead of getting an MBA, I invested the tuition dollars into angel investing. To recap, my current stats for the two-year “Tim Ferriss Fund” look like this:

15 or so total investments

0 deaths

2 successful “exits”, or sales (including my own company)

If we look at the value of my remaining start-ups on paper, based on subsequent funding and valuations, the portfolio is probably up well over 4x. This means nothing (remember Webvan?), but it’s fun to look at the spreadsheet.

This post will look at how I’ve found deals, how I filter deals, and the rules I’ve set for myself. The latter can teach broader business lessons, even if angel investing never enters your life…

Before we get started: you almost always need to be an “accredited investor” to angel invest. If you aren’t comfortable lighting your money on fire, you shouldn’t invest in start-ups–period. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t learn a few things from the sidelines.

Before we get started – part deux: angel investing can be complicated. I’ll be using some fuzzy math and simple examples to get the point across. This is intended as a primer, not as a guide to the intricacies of investing.

Last but not least, I’ll use a gender-neutral “he” for the sake of simplicity instead of “he or she”, which is cumbersome. Both sexes can play well in this game (check out Esther Dyson), and both can screw it up equally badly.

For those who want some resources upfront, here are a few:

If you want to be an angel investor:

Read – How to Be an Angel Investor

Read – Is it Time for You to Earn or to Learn? by Mark Suster – this is a must-read reality-check that takes into account dilution and other nasties. Though written for people thinking of joining start-ups as employees, it applies to angels.

If you want to recruit/be an advisor:

Read – Everything you ever wanted to know about advisors, Part 1

Read – the above Suster piece if you think advising a few start-ups will make you rich. Run the numbers first.

If you want to find angel investors:

AngelList (go here to pitch me or anyone else in their roster)

Consider applying to a “seed accelerator” program that will cultivate you. For a complete list of such programs and upcoming application deadlines, visit Kaljundi’s site. Here are few well-known examples:

Y-Combinator (Mountain View, CA)

TechStars (Boulder, CO)

LaunchBox (Washington, DC)

LaunchPad (Los Angeles)

SeedCamp (London)

Capital Factory (Austin)

i/o Ventures (San Francisco)

Investors vs. Bootstrapping – Some Warnings

As exciting as I find the start-up game in Silicon Valley, it can also be depressing.

I see capable first-time entrepreneurs, full of piss and vinegar, run into fundraising and get their asses kicked by seasoned venture capitalists (often affectionately called “vulture capitalists”). Two or three years later, their start-up baby is either dead or their ownership has dwindled to the point where their enthusiasm is gone.

Here are some questions and warnings that might help avoid this:

1) Why do you need funding?

If you can bootstrap to profitability and one of your goals is to work for yourself, I’d suggest thinking twice. If you take a few million dollars, you will–on some level–be working for investors. If you make a mistake and allow investors to have board control, which can happen if you spend funding faster than expected, you no longer run your start-up.

2) Avoid angel investors with few or no prior start-up investments.

The family dentist wants to put in $50,000 and will give you whatever terms you want? Sounds great! Don’t do it. Ditto for the successful CEO who’s never done angel investing, as seductive as it will be.

One good friend just had her start-up implode (after millions of investment) because her primary investor, a former tech CEO, didn’t have the stomach for start-up investing. He panicked when things deviated from the business plan (um, welcome to start-up land), and began doling out funding in two-week increments and insisting on near-weekly board meetings. He became the micromanager from hell. No longer was the real start-up CEO able to make CEO decisions, and the company was doomed.

Only take investment from people who have invested in a few start-ups. Having run a start-up doesn’t qualify one as risk-tolerant enough for start-up investing.

3) Don’t take a ton of money just because the valuation is sexy, or because you give up less ownership.

This problem is more common with venture capital (VC), but it worth learning early: it’s a bad idea to take money from someone simply because they offer a high valuation. Let’s say two investors want to be your lead investor. Investor A thinks your start-up is worth $3 million and offers to buy 33% of the company for $1 million — to fund you with $1 million. Investor B thinks you’re worth $10 million and offers to also give you $1 million, but you’ll only give up 10% of the company!

Go with Investor B, right? Well, not so fast. If you come out of the gates with very little to show but a $10 million valuation, things can blow up in your face a few ways:

– Your exit options become fewer. If Investor B needs a 10x return for his portfolio and has the ability to block your sale for less, this means you have to sell for at least $100 million. If you’re a first-time founder, putting $1-2 million in your pocket with an early sale for $10 million could have changed your life forever and given you “f**k you” money to do anything you wanted. Now it’s home run or nothing.

– You run the real risk of a “down round”. If you don’t make it to profitability with that $1-million round, you’ll need to raise more money later. If you haven’t made a ton of progress, including a ton of new customers, the fundraising community will be skeptical and probably insist your $10-million valuation was too high, or that you’ve lost value since that round. Now you’ll need to do what’s called a “down round” (some examples here). In most cases, this spells the end for your start-up.

OK, with those warning out of my system, let’s look at some definitions and how I’ve done things so far.

Investor vs. Advisor, and Some Definitions

When dealing with tech start-ups, the following terms are important to understand. Below are some very general definitions, keeping in mind that almost everything is negotiated and on a case-by-case basis:

“Seed” or “Series-A” = two early rounds of financing common in the start-up world. “Seed” is first, and often either family and friends or $100,000-$1,000,000 from angels. “Series-A” might be around $1,000,000-$5,000,000 and comprise primarily angels and perhaps 1-2 venture capitalists from larger firms that could later participate in larger “Series-B” or “Series-C” rounds, if needed for profitability or to compete. These “B” or “C” rounds usually involve many millions of dollars, which few angels will put up as individuals.

“Dilution” = Having your percentage ownership lowered when new investors come in. If, for example, you own 1% of a start-up at seed stage, if there are any future rounds of financing, your portion of the pie will almost always shrink–you will be diluted. This is critical to keep in mind when calculating potential outcomes as an investor or advisor.

“Investor” = someone who writes checks in exchange for equity (a certain % ownership) in the start-up.

“Advisor” = someone who advises a start-up in exchange for equity over time. “Advising” can include key introductions (to customers, partners, important hires), “syndicating” financing (getting other investors on board), developing/improving the product, helping with PR/marketing/customer-acquisition, or anything else a start-up might need.

So what percentage do advisors get? For someone who’s just doing a few intro’s, or whose name you’re using to get investors, it might be 0.10 – 0.25%. For someone who’s investing real time and helping to build the company, or someone whose involvement could make the difference between success and failure, it could be as high as 2%… or even more. There are start-ups who think giving more than 0.25% is ridiculous, and there are start-ups who find 2% a steal if they can get the right person.

Advisors generally receive their equity over a period of time, often 12-24 months.

This means that if an advisor signs an agreement for 1% that “vests” over 12 months, he would get 1/12 of one percent each month, and the start-up can cancel the deal at any time. If the start-up gets fed up with this advisor after six months, it means he gets the 0.5 percent that vested, but no more.

Different strokes for different folks, but all-star advisors generally = better investors, better investment terms, and faster outcomes. To me, that’s a legitimate no-brainer.

If I were to found a tech start-up and aim for the fences (IPO or sale), I would do what several successful tech CEOs I know are doing right now: give 3-5 bad-ass advisors 1-2% each, depending on time required, and self-fund until you hit break-even or profitability. Then, go out to raise $500-750,000 from key angels who can open doors to potential acquirers and help you get to “scale”. “Scale”, in this context, meaning the point at which you can go big, as in millions of users or nationwide, with the simple addition of money: the costs and revenues of your customer acquisition are predictable. Money in = more money out.

Last, you go to potential acquirers (often potential competitors) to see if they’d like to discuss “partnerships” or funding you; both approaches are used to start conversations that hopefully end with “why don’t we just buy you instead?” from their side.

If that doesn’t work, you get more funding, grow a lean monster, and eat their lunch.

The Start-Ups and Deal Flow

Here are the start-ups I’m involved with, whether as an investor or advisor, in no particular order:

[TIM UPDATE FROM 2013: OK, three years later, here is a more current list. Hilarious that Uber was called “UberCab” back in the day!]

Twitter (investor) – micro-blogging platform

Digg (investor) – see what’s most popular on the web

StumbleUpon (advisor) – Pandora for the coolest content on the web (this is how I find much of my most popular Twitter material)

Evernote (advisor) – capture anything in the world you want to remember

Posterous (investor, advisor) – the simplest blogging platform in the world

CrowdFlower (advisor) – crowd-source just about anything for pennies; 500,000 workers in 70+ countries.

SimpleGeo (investor) – on-demand geodata infrastructure

Graphic.ly (advisor) – the next (gorgeous) evolution of comic books

Foodzie (investor, advisor) – find and buy incredible artisinal food in the US (my favorite cookies in the world are here)

Shopify (advisor) – beautiful and easy e-commerce for selling anything

RescueTime (investor, advisor) – time and productivity tracking

ReputationDefender (investor) – monitor and repair your reputation online

TaskRabbit (advisor) – get any task done, from dry cleaning to research (use code “FERRISS10” for $10 off your first task)

UberCab (advisor) – Fully automated car dispatch with built-in reputation system – ride like a European diplomat.

Badongo, DocumentHosting.com (investor) – file and document hosting/sharing

DailyBurn (investor, advisor) – exercise and diet tracking

iMarket Services (advisor) – creating hubs for niche markets like stand-up comedy

Samasource (not-for-profit – advisor) – outsource your tasks to those most in need (refugees, etc.)

Donorschoose.org (not-for-profit – advisor) – eBay for helping public school children in need of basic supplies.

“Deal flow” refers to how you find the start-ups you invest in, or how they find you. All of the companies except DonorsChoose.org and iMarket Services (respectively: have known the CEO for ages, chance meeting at SuperBowl party) were found through:

– Referrals from friends who are angels and tech CEOs

– Y-Combinator (Posterous, RescueTime)

– TechStars (DailyBurn, Foodzie, Graphic.ly)

– Facebook Fund (fbFund) (TaskRabbit, Samasource)

– Twitter DMs from me to the founders (Evernote, Shopify)

My Rules

What makes me interested in a start-up… or rules them out?

Let’s go through the bullet-points–general rules of thumb–first, some of which are borrowed from much more experienced folk like Mike Maples, Chris Sacca, Travis Kalanick, and others.

These are the considerations I run through when looking at start-ups, but it doesn’t mean that all of the companies in the portfolio passed all of the criteria.

In no particular order, and written as a stream of consciousness:

– If my readers won’t shut up about them, I listen (this led me to reach out to Evernote and Shopify)

– I generally look for these questions to be answered via email, but I now much prefer to have them answered through the AngelList form. If you don’t know the terms (“deck”, “traction”, etc.), you need to learn them before pitching Silicon Valley types.

– Does it offer the possibility of at least a 5x return? Good angel investors in Silicon Valley do not invest in lifestyle businesses or profit shares–they want to turn their $100,000 into millions. 5x return potential is just the entry point for working with decent angels at the seed or Series-A level. Many will be filtering for 20-30x potential, depending on the size of their fund.

– If it’s a single founder, the founder must be technical. Two technical co-founders are ideal.

– Have the founders ever had crappy service jobs, like waitering or bussing at restaurants? If so, they tend to stay grounded for longer. Less entitlement and megalomania usually means better decisions and better drinking company.

– I must be eager to use the product myself. This rules out many great companies, but I want a verified market I understand.

– I must understand their customers and be able to recruit, in military terms, HVTs–High Value Targets.

– Do the founders actually test some of what I’m recommending? My data is based on 15+ start-ups and more than $1M in direct response advertising–there are a few things I understand very well, sign-up conversion being one example. I will usually suggest 1-2 elements for testing in an initial meeting, well before investing, and if at least one element isn’t tested within a week, they’re out. If the product (usually a website) isn’t split tested or “iterated” fast enough, it usually foreshadows death for tech start-up. Speed is often the only competitive advantage smaller guys have.

– They need to understand the eco-system in which they play. What recent companies have sold for what amounts? Who are the most likely acquirers? Who are the most formidable competitors, and what types of funding (even investors) and resources do they anticipate needing to compete? It it a winner-takes-all market where only one company will reign supreme (e.g. businesses dependent on network effects), or can many large profitable companies co-exist?

– Founders must pass the “mall test”: if you were to see them in a mall, would you walk in a different direction, would you walk over to say “hi” and move on, or would you invite them to join you for coffee or whatever you’re doing next? If the founders don’t fall in the last group, don’t invest. This is a close cousin of the simpler “would you invite them out for beers just to catch up” test.

– Am I following my rules, but are other investors turning them down? These days, I take this as a positive sign. Mike Maples explained this to me: breaking your rules to co-invest with well-known investors is usually a bad idea, but following your rules when others reject a start-up can work out extremely well. DailyBurn, my only exit to date, was a mild example of this. They hit my checklist boxes, but the majority of the investors (but not all) I asked to participate declined. It thrills me that this start-up–from Alabama!–has so far outpaced most in Silicon Valley. Bravo.

Now the rules that require a little explanation:

1. Don’t do it solely for the money, but know your minimums.

Investing in start-ups has to be, on some level, a labor love. You need to love helping entrepreneurs. That said, don’t actively waste your money and life by failing to do basic math.

Set a minimum threshold for each start-up investment. The minimums could be what a success should cover, or a minimum dollar amount. For example:

A. Each start-up, if it exits at 5x its current valuation, should be able to cover 2/3 of your total fund.

Most entrepreneurs think their start-up will be the next Google, but you can’t base your investment strategy on the assumption that each company has the potential to exit for a billion dollars. Look at comparables (similar companies) that have sold, and their average purchase prices. If you want to keep it simple, you might use 5x at Series A round as your assumed “success” multiple.

What this means:

Let’s say a company is raising $500,000 in a Series A. Investors decide it is currently worth $1,000,000, so–after receiving the $500,000 infusion–it will have a $1,500,000 “post-money” valuation. (For sake of simplicity, we assume that Investors don’t require an option pool for new employees to be set aside in the pre-money valuation. For more on that, read this) Let’s also say that you put in $15,000, so you “own” 1% of the company post-money.

Remember the rule of the header: “Each start-up, if it exits at 5x its current valuation, should be able to cover 2/3 of your portfolio.”

Most of your start-ups will fail, so the successes need to make up for losses.

If we’re using the “2/3” rule, and your fund (like mine from 2007-2009) is $120,000, you shouldn’t invest $15,000 in this start-up, as 15K x 5 = $75,000. 2/3 of $120,000 is $80,000, so you’d either have to invest slightly more, lower the valuation, or add in advising and get more equity in return. This isn’t even accounting for dilution, which is likely in most cases.

B. Each start-up, if it exits at 3x its current valuation, should allow you to walk away with $300,000.

This is one of my preferred methods for qualifying or disqualifying a start-up.

As much as I might love them, I’m not going to take another part-time job for 1-3 years for a $50,000 pay-off. This is where first-time entrepreneurs who refuse to give advisors more than 0.25% often lose the forest for the trees.

Let’s say a start-up ends up with a 3-million (3M) post-money valuation. If I help them more than triple the value of their company to 10M, how much do I walk away with if there are no more rounds of funding? If they offer me 0.5%, I walk away with $50,000. If, considering the time invested, I could earn 5x that doing other things, it makes no sense to do the deal if this is my rule.

Woe is the angel who bases his or her decisions on all start-ups having the potential for a billion-dollar exit. Rule #1 in angel investing is, as far as I’m concerned, the same as Warren Buffett’s first two rules of investing:

Rule #1: Don’t lose money.

Rule #2: Don’t forget Rule #1.

2. Move from investor –> investor/advisor –> advisor

Let’s assume you have committed to spending $60,000 per year on angel investments, just as I did. This means two things:

– You aren’t going to be able to satisfy the above rule of “2/3” or the $200,000 minimum for many companies. At best, you’ll have 1-3 investments.

– 1-3 investments doesn’t work in angel investing, where most pros would agree that 9 out of 10 (on a good day) will fail.

– It’s therefore impossible for you to get a good statistical spread with $60,000 per year. The math just doesn’t work.

The math especially doesn’t work if you f*ck it up like I did (see Part I) by getting over-excited and dropping $50,000 on your first investment. Oops!

Here’s how I dealt with this problem:

First, I invested very small amounts in a few select start-ups, ideally those in close-knit “seed accelerator” (formerly called “incubator”) networks like Y-Combinator and TechStars. Then I did my best to deliver above and beyond the value of my investment. In other words, I wanted the founders to ask themselves “Why the hell is this guy helping us so much for a ridiculously small number of options?” This was critical for establishing a reputation as a major value-add, someone who helped a lot for very little.

Second, leaning on this burgeoning reputation, I began negotiating blended agreements with start-ups involving some investment, but additional advisory equity as a requirement.

Third and last, I made the jump to pure advising. Since the end of the first year of the “Tim Ferriss Fund,” more than 70% of my start-up “investments” have been with time rather than cash. In the last 6 months, I have written only one check for a start-up. The goal is still the same as in the first phase: deliver above and beyond the current value of my potential equity (if fully vested) as quickly as possible. The next post this week will give an example of this.

Comment from a proofreader and experienced angel, Naval Ravikant, who was also a co-founder at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), and Vast.com (largest white-label classifieds marketplace):

One thought – if someone really wants to invest $200K as an angel investor, you’re right in that they can’t spread it across enough companies to diversify it or have it be worth their time. In that case, they could do advisory work as you suggest – or they could fork it over to a super-angel fund. They’d end up paying a 15% in management fees and 20%+ of the profits in carry, but most of the super-angels have pretty good returns and they would get startup exposure for basically a $30K + 20% of the profits cost, and their time is surely worth more than that…

Moving gradually from pure investing to pure advising allowed me to reduce the total amount of capital invested, increase equity percentages, and make the $120,000 work, despite my early slip-ups. This also, I believe, produced better results for the start-ups.

The reason for the better results is related to a common objection.

Some counsel against pure advisors, the belief being that pure advisors have no “skin in the game.” To address this, start-ups might insist on an investment before advising can be discussed. The logic isn’t bad–that an advisor will do more if they have something to lose–but this argument has never compelled me, and I don’t know many good advisors who are compelled by it.

Why?

I feel more compelled to help companies that I have pure advising relationships with for two reasons.

First, if I’ve given a start-up capital, I’ve already given some value. If it’s pure advising, I need to prove my value within the small world of start-up investing or my reputation goes downhill. Second, because my reputation is at stake, I do more due diligence than with pure investments to ensure an excellent fit (their needs + my capabilities) before signing up. Just as important: before offering real equity for advising, a start-up will do likewise, and our marriage–if we get to that point–ends up better as a result.

The start-ups that aren’t great fits, those who haven’t mapped my strengths and weaknesses to their own, look at me, laugh, and ask themselves: “Tim Ferriss wants what?!?”

They’re right, I’m not a good fit. If their desire for me as an advisor is contingent upon an investment, they probably haven’t thought enough about how I’d be able to help (or not help). Either I really can’t help much, in which case I shouldn’t be offered advisor equity at all, or I can really help, in which case they should get me on board with a compelling arrangement for everyone. Start-ups often forgot that the advisor equity vests monthly–advisors still have to earn it or they can be fired.

It’s a hell of a lot of fun advising start-ups with good product and personality fit, even if the companies don’t become the next Google.

But, I do miss a lot of great opportunities by focusing on advising and tight fit. This doesn’t bother me. I haven’t yet lost any money. Rule #1.

Let’s be clear on one point: if you don’t deliver real results for your start-ups, you do not deserve to be an advisor. If you can’t point to a track record of some sort, you haven’t earned the right to ask for advising equity. Pull out the checkbook and pay your dues.

How to Create Your Own Real-World MBA

Tim Ferriss — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 06:08:50 +0000

(Photo: DavidDMuir)

It’s fun to think about getting an MBA.

They’re attractive for many reasons: developing new business skills, developing a better business network, or — most often — taking what is effectively a two-year vacation that looks good on a resume.

In 2001, and again in 2004, I wanted to do all three things.

This post is the first of two that will share my experience with MBA programs and how I created my own…

In the process, it’s my hope that these writings will make you think about real-world experiments vs. theoretical training, untested assumptions (especially about risk tolerance), and the good game of business as a whole. There is no need to spend $60,000 per year to apply the principles I’ll be discussing.

Last caveat: nothing here is intended to portray me as an investing expert, which I most certainly am not.

Beginnings

Stanford University Graduate School of Business (GSB). Ah, Stanford, with its palm tree-lined avenues and red terra cotta roofing, always held a unique place in my mind.

But my fantasies of attending GSB reached a fever pitch when I sat in on a class called “Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital,” taught by Peter Wendell, who had led early-stage investments in companies such as Intuit. The class is now co-taught by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, and Andy Rachleff, founding general partner of Benchmark Capital.

Within 30 minutes, Pete had taught me more about the real-world inside baseball of venture capital than all of the books I’d read on the subject.

I was ecstatic and ready to apply to GSB. Who wouldn’t be?

So I enthusiastically began a process I would repeat twice: downloading the application to get started, taking the full campus tour, and sitting in on other classes.

It was the other classes that got my panties in a twist. Some were incredible, taught by all-stars who’d done it all, but others — many others — were taught by PhD theoreticians who used big words and lots of PowerPoint slides. One teacher spent 45 minutes on slide after slide of equations that could be summed up with “If you build a crappy product, people won’t buy it.” No one needed to prove that to me with differential calculus.

At the end of that class, I turned to my student guide for the tour and asked him how it compared to other classes. He answered: “Oh, this is easily my favorite.”

That was the death of business school for me.

How to Make a Small Fortune

By 2005, I was done chasing my tail with business school, but I still ached to learn more.

Then, in 2007, I started having more frequent lunches with the brilliant Mike Maples, a co-founder of Motive Communications (IPO to $260,000,000 market cap) and a founding executive of Tivoli (sold to IBM for $750,000,000).

Our conversations usually bounced between a few topics, including physical performance, marketing campaigns (I’d just launched The 4-Hour Workweek), and his latest focus: angel investing.

“Angel investing” involves putting relatively small amounts of money — often from $15,000 to $100,000 — into early-stage start-ups. In Mike’s world, “early-stage” could mean two engineers with a prototype for a website, or it could mean a successful serial entrepreneur with a new idea. The angels usually have relevant business experience and are considered “smart money” — their advice and introductions are just as valuable as the money they put in.

After several lunches with Mike, I’d found my business school.

I decided to make (in my mind) a two-year “Tim Ferriss Fund” that would replace Stanford business school.

Stanford GSB isn’t cheap. I rounded it down to $60,000 a year, for a total of $120,000 over two years (these days, it’s $100,000+ per year).

For the “Tim Ferriss Fund,” I would aim to intelligently spend $120,000 over two years on angel investing in $10-20,000 chunks, so 6-12 companies in total. The goal of this “business school” would be to learn as much as possible about start-up finance, deal structuring, rapid product design, initiating acquisition conversations, etc. as possible.

The curriculum could be thought of as “The Start-up Lifecycle from Birth to Acquisition/IPO or Death.” But curriculum was just part of business school; the other part was getting to know the “students,” preferably the most astute movers and shakers in the start-up investing world. Business school = curriculum + network.

The most important characteristic of my personal MBA: I planned on “losing” $120,000.

I went into the “Tim Ferriss Fund” viewing the $120,000 as sunk tuition costs, but also expecting that the lessons learned, and people met, would be worth that $120,000 investment. The two-year plan was to methodically spend $120,000 for the learning experience, not for the ROI.

I would not suggest mimicking this approach:

1) Unless you have a clear informational advantage — insider access — that gives you a competitive advantage. I live in the nexus of Silicon Valley and know many top CEOs and investors, so I have better sources of information than the vast majority of the world. I don’t invest in public companies precisely because I know that professionals have better access to information than I do.

2) Unless you are 100% comfortable losing your “MBA” funds. You should only gamble with what you’re very comfortable losing. If financial loss drives you to even mild desperation or depression, you shouldn’t do it.

3) Unless you have started and/or managed successful businesses in the past.

4) Unless you limit angel investment funds to 10% or less of your liquid assets. I subscribe to the Nassim Taleb school of investment, with 90% in conservative asset classes like AAA bonds and the remaining 10% in speculative investments that can capitalize on positive “black swans”.

The problem is often that, even if the above criteria are met, people overestimate their risk tolerance. From my previous post, ‘Rethinking Investing: Common-Sense Rules for Uncommon Times’:

I’ve come to realize that the questions most investment advisers (and investors) ask are the wrong questions, or incomplete. Even if you have only $100 to invest, this is important to explore.

Most advice and decisions center on one question: what is your risk tolerance?

I had one wealth manager ask me this, and I answered honestly: “I have no idea.” It threw him off.

I then asked him for the average of his clients’ responses. The answer:

“Most answer that they would not panic, up to 20% down in one quarter.”

My follow-up question was: when do most panic and start selling low? His answer:

“When they’re down 5% in one quarter.”

Unless you’ve lost 20% in a quarter, it’s hard—nay, impossible—to predict your response.

It’s not dissimilar from a common boxing maxim: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

To would-be angel investors, I suggest the following: go to a casino or racetrack and don’t leave until you’ve spent 1/5 of a typical investment and watched it disappear.

Let’s say you’re planning on making $25,000 investments.

I’d ask you to then purposefully lose $5,000 over the course of at least three hours, and certainly not all at once. It’s important that you slowly bleed losses as you attempt to learn the game, to exert some control over something you can’t control. If you can remain unaffected after slowly losing your $5,000 (or 1/5 of your planned typical investment), consider making your first angel investment.

But proceed with caution.

Even among brilliant people in the start-up world, there is an expression: “If you want to make a small fortune, start with a large fortune and angel invest.”

The First Deal and First Lesson

So what did I do? I immediately went out and broke my own rules.

There was a very promising start-up which, based on comparables using Alexa ranking correlations to valuations, was more than 5x undervalued! If it hit even a “base hit” like a $25,000,000 exit, I could easily recoup my planned $120,000!

I got very excited — it’s the next Google! — and cut a check for $50,000. “That’s a bit aggressive for a first deal, don’t you think?” asked one of my mentors over coffee. Not a chance. My intuition was loud and clear. I was convinced, based on other investors and all of the excitement surrounding the deal, that this company was on the cusp of exploding.

Two years later, it still hasn’t popped.

[TIM UPDATE, 2013: This start-up is now dead, so I lost that $50K.]

Following the Rules

Lesson #1: If you’ve formulated intelligent rules, follow your own f*cking rules.

I learned many more important lessons over the following two years, most of which I’ll share in the next post. Thus far, following the rules, the stats look something like this:

15 total investments (some of which are listed here)

0 deaths

1 successful exit

The one successful exit thus far, DailyBurn, guarantees that I will not lose money on my two-year fund. But, as they say, “Once you’re lucky. Twice you’re good.” I’m still not convinced I know what I’m doing.

My hope, and that of most angels, is that each start-up will “exit”, or be bought within 3-5 years. I’ll therefore have a more complete view of the “Tim Ferriss Fund” two-year portfolio by 2013 or 2014. There will be fatalities, no doubt.

[TIM UPDATE, SEPT. 2013: Now, I’m in 20+ investments, and I’ve made (cash in bank account) about 3-5x back what I invested. I have several million dollars on paper with investments like Twitter, Uber, Evernote, and others. If half of them pan out, I will make more in angel investing than all of my books combined. Only time will tell. Still plenty that could go wrong. Oh, and there have been more startups “deaths,” too. It’s a full-contact sport.]

But recall that the learning was my main reason for doing all of this.

I had one other exit: my own company. Using what I learned about acquisition deal structures through angel investing, I became less intimidated by the idea of “selling” a company. It need not be complicated, as I learned, and BrainQUICKEN was sold in late 2009. This means the ROI on my personal MBA is, so far, well over 2x and could end up more than 10x.

Creating Your Own MBA

How might you create your own MBA or graduate program? Here are three examples with hypothetical costs, which obviously depend on the program:

Master of Arts in Creative Writing – $12,000/year

How could you spend (or sacrifice) $12,000 a year to become a world-class creative writer? If you make $50,000 per year, this could mean that you join a writers’ group and negotiate Mondays off work (to focus on drafting a novel or screenplay) in exchange for a $10-15,000 salary cut.

Masters in Political Science – (same cost)

Use the same approach to dedicate one day per week to volunteering or working on a political campaign. Decide to read one book per week from the Georgetown PoliSci department’s required first-year curriculum.

MBA – $30,000 per year

Commit to spending $2,500 per month on testing different “muses” intended to be sources of automated income. For an example of such, see “How I Did It: From $7 an Hour to Coaching Major League Baseball MVPs.”

If you’re interested in experimenting with angel investing, whether as an angel or as a start-up, here are a few of my favorite resources:

AngelList (I’m now an advisor; here is my profile)

AngelSoft [Ed. note: AngelSoft is now Gust]

VentureHacks

Commit–within financial reason–to action instead of theory. Learn to confront the realities and rewards of the real world, rather than resort to the protective womb of academia.

Question of the day (QOD): what would you like to learn specifically about start-ups, angel investing, or start-up financing? Please let me know in the comments with “QOD”.

Continued in Part II…

The post How to Create Your Own Real-World MBA appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Investing Archives - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

Revisiting Warren Buffett’s Advice to Me in 2008 (Plus: 7 Lessons for Young Investors)

Finding "Unicorns:" Questions to Ask Before You Invest in a Startup

A THOUSAND FIRST DATES

HOW TO ASK QUESTIONS

QUESTION ZERO

1. What are you working on?

2. Why are you doing this?

3. Why now?

4. What’s your unfair advantage?

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

How to Say No When It Matters Most (or “Why I’m Taking a Long ‘Startup Vacation'”)

The Road to No

My Last Deals For A While

Are You Having a Breakdown or a Breakthrough? A Short How-To Guide

My Challenge To You: Write Down The “What If”s

Chris Sacca on Being Different and Making Billions (#79)

Selected Links from the Episode

Show Notes

People Mentioned

Tony Robbins on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (#37 & #38)

Selected Links from the Episode

Show Notes

People Mentioned

What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars (#29)

You'd Like to Be an Angel Investor? Here's How You Can Invest In My Deals…

Most deals get done in informal settings. Now, I’m inviting you to join me. (Photo: Russell Yip)

Please note that my syndicate investing in Shyp has now closed. You can still back me on AngelList to gain priority access to future deals. More updates will be posted here later in the round.

The Short Version

The Longer Version

How to Get In First

Exclusive Warren Buffett – A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers

Enter Buffett – Business Characteristics: The Great, the Good, and the Gruesome

How to Create Your Own Real-World MBA – II

Investors vs. Bootstrapping – Some Warnings

Investor vs. Advisor, and Some Definitions

The Start-Ups and Deal Flow

My Rules

Related Reading

How to Create Your Own Real-World MBA

Beginnings

How to Make a Small Fortune

The First Deal and First Lesson

Following the Rules

Creating Your Own MBA