Page 19 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 3 Spring 2014

transitioned into startup investing, an enterprise much
like that of the tinkering experimenter. Not every
investment is a winner, just as not every experiment
yields a fruitful result, and failure is all but inevitable
in many trials.
On that score, however, Tim has found remarkable
success. His early investments in Twitter and Facebook,
among others, suggest his acumen is not accidental.
His keen power of observation affords him the insight
and depth of knowledge he can then draw from when
considering investment opportunities or advising start-
ups such as Uber and Evernote,
the note-taking and archiving
service.
In order to do this, though, Tim
needs to keep closely connected
to his interests and monitor the
company’s pulse as well as the
market. Rather than a permanent
office space, Tim prefers to work
from coffee shops and at empty
desks in the various startups he
advises. Not only is this in keep-
ing with one of the pillars of The
4-Hour Workweek – liberation
– but the atmosphere of oppor-
tunity that energizes these spaces
likewise invigorates Tim.
We’re sitting at a large table in
the back of Shyp’s headquarters,
an open warehouse in the SoMa
district of San Francisco, with
about a dozen or so employees
milling about listening to the new
Vampire Weekend album. The
optimism for growth and success
fills the empty space of the facility, and Tim seems to
relish the chance to inhale this organic energy.
When a black Labrador retriever comes barreling
over to us with a tennis ball in his mouth, Tim pulls
himself away from his computer to scratch and pat
his new friend and toss the saliva-soaked ball across
the warehouse. A few minutes of catch is enough to
elicit an admission on Tim’s part that even he cannot
match the black lab’s boundless enthusiasm, and he
returns his undivided attention to the task at hand on
his computer screen.
After responding to e-mail and extinguishing a couple
of unexpected fires on the phone, Tim takes a few min-
utes to reflect on the undercurrents that cut across his
various interests. He has recently embarked upon yet
another experiment, the Tim Ferriss Book Club, “sort
of an Oprah’s Book Club for 20- to 40-year-old tech-
savvy males.” One of the e-mails to which he’s been
responding is a contract from a publisher about a book
for the club.
“The publishing industry’s approach is so antiquated,”
he says, flipping closed his laptop once he’s finished, and
transitioning his undivided
attention to our conversation.
By “antiquated,” I take it
to mean that Tim believes
the publishing industry is
inefficient, bloated . . . vul-
nerable. In other words:
ready to be hacked.
Perhaps to many, the term
“hacker” conjures the dark
arts of the Internet. But, in
keeping with the Bay Area’s
venerated tradition of turn-
ing social norms on their
heads, “hacking” in the con-
text of Silicon Valley is more
operatively a means by which
systems are deconstructed
and reassembled into more
effective models that deliver
the same – if not improved
– results, jettisoning dead
weight and friction in the
process. Put another way,
hacking is simply finding
non-obvious solutions to problems.
In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim challenged the utility
and efficacy of the typical 40 office hours. In other words,
he “hacked” conventional notions of full-time employ-
ment by dismantling the structure of a traditional work
schedule, culling it of unnecessary entanglements, and
reconfiguring it within specific constraints.
It all goes back to Tim’s unifying theory of simpli-
fication: reassess the system, minimize the friction
points, shed the inertia, implement creative restraints,
and reconstruct accordingly. Hack it.
Tim is now eager to see if his 4-hour model can be
systematized and expanded to other enterprises. With
the Tim Ferriss Book Club, he’s ready to hack a publish-
ing industry that is, by all appearances, reluctant to
adapt to emerging technology. Tim has been acquiring
. . . “hacking”
in the context of
Silicon Valley is
more operatively
a means by
which systems
are deconstructed
and reassembled
into more effective
models . . .
Tim goes over an order with Shyp founder Kevin
Gibbon at the startup’s headquarters in SoMa.
The company had its public launch a day earlier.
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