What is wrong with this picture???

It costs $10.17 to print a new copy of Chris’s book on dead trees, bind it with glue, put it in a box, and drive it across the country to my door in a gas burning mail truck driven by a real human being.

The Kindle Edition delivered instantly over the internet costs $12.99. WHY?!

Because Penguin Publishing says so, that’s why. In fact, if you click on the Kindle price, you’ll see the following note:

This price was set by the publisher. Amazon actually goes out of the way to tell us that Penguin has specifically mandated higher Kindle prices for many of its books. It’s called “agency pricing”, which means the publisher (Penguin) sets the prices for Kindle Editions, not Amazon.com. Paperbacks are not subject to agency pricing, which means their prices are set by the retailer (Amazon) and fluctuate with market supply and demand. We can see the same situation with lots of other popular Penguin books, for example (not affiliate links):

• Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help” – $9.00 in paperback, $9.99 on Kindle
• Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love” – $10.17 in paperback, $12.99 on Kindle
• Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” – $9.38 in paperback, $13.99 on Kindle

There are plenty more examples you can dig up yourselves. The bottom line is this – the content licensing industry is broken. Consumers want cheap, clean, instantly delivered digital content, and publishers are holding prices artificially high. The days of paper, vinyl, and cellulose are coming to an end. What practical reason is there to make the far less environmentally impactful digital version artificially expensive? Oh right, it’s to protect classical business models and supply chains that don’t work in a digital world.

This is a telling microcosm of how broken the content licensing industry is as a whole (books, music, movies), as well as how much work still has to be done to adapt content creators’ business models to the digital age. I hope it happens quickly.

Over the past 25 years, nobody will argue that we have seen an incredible explosion in information and communications technology. Consider the iPhone that so many of us have in our pockets – more storage, more processing power, and exponentially faster connectivity than almost any computer that existed in 1985. Consider that the internet hardly existed outside the government in 1985, yet now the answer to any conceivable question is available within 0.27 seconds on Google. Consider all the ways that cheap, widely available microprocessors and wireless connectivity has changed business, our inter-personal lives, and even politics (witness Twitter-fueled revolutions in Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt in just the past year). The rate of change and progress is mind boggling. Today’s world was inconceivable just 25 years ago.

It is my belief that over the next 25 years, we will see that same type of transformative change in medicine, genetics, and biology. Synthetic organs, genetically tailored therapies, cognitive enhancement through drugs or implanted technology, and more may be as widespread and seemingly “normal” as that iPhone in your pocket. Diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart disease and more may be cured. Life expectancy could increase by 25% or more. In 50 years, it’s not totally inconceivable that some type of immortality or near-immortality may be within the grasp of the rich.

On Immortality

On the surface, it sounds like a bright future. However, I think the concept of “immortality” or greatly increased life expectancy has the potential to radically restructure our society and break down a lot of things we take for granted. Consider how much about society is predicated on the fact that humans live approximately 80 years. When people stop dying, the world population will explode overnight. The birthrate will increase as people remain fertile longer. Where will we put all the people? Will our food supply be able to handle it? Our water? Our cities? Our hospitals? What happens to the traditional concept of retirement at 65 if you suddenly have to support yourself for another 65 years after that? Consider the implications for our social programs and our economy.

Cognitive Enhancement

Let’s take another example and consider the extrapolation of cognitive enhancers like Adderall and modafinil. Consider that one day, it’s very likely that humans might never forget anything, or anything that we do forget could be instantly accessible through some sort of neural internet link. Sounds great right? Take a few more seconds and consider the societal implications. What would it be like if “time heals all wounds” didn’t hold true anymore – if you could remember every word of that vicious fight with your wife like it was yesterday? If the pain of a family member’s death never faded? If every participant in every business deal could remember everything that was ever promised? If consumers remembered all the different ways they’d been advertised to? The implications are far broader than just having an encyclopedic knowledge of art history at cocktail parties. Perfect human memories would remake society dramatically.

It’s coming sooner than you think

This isn’t speculation. The timeframe may be a guess, but I don’t think anyone will deny that one day the science will arrive. It’s not just about remaking your own body – as our race begins to transcend biology, it’s going to radically alter our interpersonal relationships, our governments and institutions, and society as we know it.

The always thoughtful Ben Horowitz doesn’t think so. Ben argues that 2011 is very different from 2000 for several reasons:

1. Public market valuations are presently much more in line with rationality.
2. Venture funds today have raised only about 25% of the money they raised in the late 90′s, and have deployed less than half of the cash they did last time around.
3. This time, the Internet boom has actually arrived.

Are these fair arguments? Is there a bubble in startup land? Let’s break it down.

Public market valuations are more rational today than in 2000, so there is not a bubble

On the surface, this seems to make a lot of sense. Looking at the table above (borrowed from Ben’s post), you’ll see that valuations of large public tech companies are certainly more in line with reality than they were in 2000. However, I don’t think that public market valuations of large companies with thousands of customers and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue are necessarily a proxy for startup valuations (often pre-revenue, pre-customer base). Startups are notoriously difficult to value on objective metrics. Startup valuation is as much of an art as a science, and quality of the founding team or competition between venture firms is as often a driver of valuation as underlying financial fundamentals. I just think there are different dynamics at play in private early stage valuations than there are in the public markets.

Venture firms have deployed a smaller amount of capital, so there is not a bubble

Again, this stat is compelling on the surface. There can’t be a bubble if 2008-2010 saw such a relatively small amount of venture capital dollars deployed vs. 1998-2000 right? Sure, there may have been less capital invested, but into how many deals, and in what types of deals? In 1999, we saw tons of companies like Kozmo, WebVan, eToys, Pets.com, and more that raised and burned hundreds of millions in venture capital trying to build online businesses. They spent their money on expensive servers, bandwidth, and traditional media advertising. That’s no longer the case – startups are cheaper to start than ever before now that we have things like on-demand cloud computing, commoditized bandwidth and hosting, and the viral spread of hot ideas through social media. As Fred Wilson puts it, “you can now bootstrap yourself into existence”. In a world of less capital intensive startups, it makes sense that less VC money would be deployed. It doesn’t preclude those investments that are made from being at bubble-like valuations.

This time, the Internet boom has arrived, so higher valuations are justified

This one might hold a little more water. I agree with Ben that last time people’s expectations of the speed and scale of the internet’s takeover were vastly overinflated, which led to some crazy valuations that were based on a hope and a prayer rather than hard data. Ten years later, we have a much more realistic mental map of how internet technologies are developed, adopted, and integrated into existing industries. Today there are over 2 billion people in the world with internet access (30% of the world), and that number is growing by about 15% per year. Compare that with a worldwide internet user base of only about 360 million in 2000. It’s clear that maybe finally in 2011, the internet has begun to reach the global scale investors expected from it ten years earlier.

So, is there a bubble or not?

It depends on how you define “bubble”. Is there a bubble in the 1999, economy-wide, dotcom boom sense? I don’t think so. As Ben proves above, valuations for large public companies remain relatively rational. Retail investors are not betting their life savings on companies that have never earned a dime of revenue. At least in the public markets, signs of a technology bubble are tough to find. However, the private markets are another story. During the financial downturn of 2009 and 2010, tons of private equity and venture capital money sat on the sidelines in cash. Eventually though, that capital needs to be deployed so investment firms can deliver a return to their limited partners. As the economy has thawed a bit in 2011, a lot of that capital has started to come back into the market. This has led to a lot of capital chasing the same number of deals, and that drives valuations up as investment firms compete to get into the hottest deals. Are some of these valuations reaching bubble-like levels? I think so. However it’s important to remember that this bubble is specific to a small segment of investors, unlike the one in 2000. If/when startup valuations come back down to earth, a lot of venture guys and their limited partners may lose a fair chunk of change, but there’s very little danger of contagion to the greater public markets and economy. If anything, we’re seeing a bubble in the venture capital and angel investing communities, not the tech industry as a whole. So in the end TechCrunch will get all worked up for several more months, but in my opinion, the sky remains firmly in place.

Like FoxyWire, Shipiro offers an out-of-the-box, point and click integration with Shipwire. Shipiro is a little more advanced however, in that it makes it easy to push tracking numbers from Shipwire back into BigCommerce. That allows things like inventory management and customer notification of shipments, all using built-in BigCommerce functionality.

Here’s a bit of background on how each service works, and how you can stitch them together quickly with Shipiro to build an enterprise class e-commerce supply chain.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is one of the web’s most popular e-commerce solutions (over 10,000 live stores). BigCommerce is extremely full featured – everything from custom templates to inventory management to eBay integration to marketing and analytics is included. Just about the only thing BigCommerce didn’t have was fulfillment. Enter Shipwire with Shipiro.

Shipwire

Ah, how the world has changed. Advanced logistics and fulfillment used to be reserved for large, international companies with sophisticated supply chain managers. Not anymore. Shipwire brings professional-grade fulfillment within the price range and sophistication level of an individual entrepreneur. Shipwire has warehouses in LA, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, and London. To get started, you can ship your inventory to any or all of Shipwire’s warehouses. When a new order comes in, simply send the SKUs and address information to Shipwire (automatically via their API if you’re using Shipiro), and they’ll use intelligent business rules to ship the order for the lowest cost possible, dynamically selecting the closest warehouse and cheapest shipping carrier. Check out this interview with their CEO to learn a bit more about how they are trying to help entrepreneurs build supply chains to rival Fortune 500 companies.

Shipiro

Shipiro.com reaches out to the BigCommerce API with each user’s credentials a few times a day and requests the orders list, which is then parsed for “physical” items only (so we don’t ship e-books for example) and passed over to Shipwire. Then nightly, Shipiro hits the Shipwire API and pulls tracking numbers back into Shipiro. Lack of write capability in the BigCommerce API prevents me from pushing those numbers back to BigCommerce, but Shipiro is able to export a CSV of all orders with tracking numbers that easily imports back into BigCommerce with their import tool. Shipiro keeps an auditable log of every single piece of XML that goes back and forth to make the above steps happen, which can be viewed order-by-order inside of the Shipiro interface.

The folks at Shipwire have listed Shipiro on their website as the only currently available method for BigCommerce/Shipwire integration. Shipiro is also featured on the BigCommerce blog. If you’re running an e-commerce store on BigCommerce and are looking to automate your supply chain and fulfillment, give Shipwire a try with Shipiro.

Until today, if you wanted to use FoxyCart and Shipwire together to run your business, you needed to either transfer orders manually by uploading spreadsheets, or do some custom coding to connect the two APIs. I went ahead and did the hard work for you – now you can use a (free) FoxyWire account as a “universal connector” to funnel FoxyCart orders directly into Shipwire and build an end-to-end automated supply chain without leaving your desk.

Here’s a bit of background on how each service works, and how you can stich them together quickly with FoxyWire to build an enterprise class e-commerce supply chain.

FoxyCart

FoxyCart is different than any other online shopping cart software in that it’s designed to be lightweight, easy to setup, and not require the customer to jump through tons of hoops to check out. It’s the last point that drew me to FoxyCart – every additional “Next Step” click is a chance for cart abandonment. The checkout page is a single screen that can be completed in under a minute. Very slick, very easy. I’ve used FoxyCart to power several side projects, and have gotten explicit feedback from customers that “your checkout is the easiest I’ve ever used.” FoxyCart also doesn’t have any software at all you need to upload to your own server – orders are simply passed into their hosted cart via forms, links with parameters, or even a JSON API. Check out their 2-minute tour of FoxyCart for a deeper dive into their features.

Shipwire

Ah, how the world has changed. Advanced logistics and fulfillment used to be reserved for large, international companies with sophisticated supply chain managers. Not anymore. Shipwire brings professional-grade fulfillment within the price range and sophistication level of an individual entrepreneur. Shipwire has warehouses in LA, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, and London. To get started, you can ship your inventory to any or all of Shipwire’s warehouses. When a new order comes in, simply send the SKUs and address information to Shipwire (automatically via their API if you’re using FoxyWire), and they’ll use intelligent business rules to ship the order for the lowest cost possible, dynamically selecting the closest warehouse and cheapest shipping carrier. Check out this interview with their CEO to learn a bit more about how they are trying to help entrepreneurs build supply chains to rival Fortune 500 companies.

FoxyWire

FoxyWire acts as a connector and translator between FoxyCart and Shipwire. FoxyWire simply listens for new transactions from FoxyCart, performs some error checking and logic (to be sure we don’t try to ship e-books for example), translates the orders into a format Shipwire can understand, then pushes the address and line item information to Shipwire. I couldn’t have built FoxyWire without the great APIs provided by both FoxyCart (API docs link) and Shipwire (API docs link). The Shipwire API is extremely handy in that it takes only an XML file containing address information and the order’s line items – no specific shipping instructions are required. Shipwire intelligently selects shipping options based on the rules laid out in the user’s Shipwire account.

The kind folks at both FoxyCart and Shipwire have listed FoxyWire on both their websites (here and here) as the only currently available method for FoxyCart/Shipwire integration. Over the next few months, I hope FoxyWire is able to help a lot of people launch new businesses without jumping through manual spreadsheet hell or expensive upfront coding. If you’re a new entrepreneur looking to launch an e-commerce business selling physical goods, I don’t know of any quicker way to get started taking orders and sending them to your customers than by using FoxyCart, FoxyWire, and Shipwire.

What will I really be doing as an intern at an investment bank?

A lot of people don’t have a good grasp of what investment bankers actually do. There are a ton of definitions out there, but a simple summary is that investment banks help companies to raise capital (through debt or equity offerings) or sell themselves (M&A). In both cases, bankers prepare all the marketing materials and help to broker the deal (similar to a real estate agent selling a house). As an intern, your job is to help out with things like industry research and PowerPoint slide creation, with occasional runs to pick up takeout or coffee for the team.

Are the hours really as long as I’ve heard?

That depends what you’ve heard – and it also depends where you work. Your hours will vary a lot based on the deals you are staffed on, and some groups at some banks are notorious sweatshops. However, most full time (post-college) investment banking analysts will spend between 70 and 90 hours each week in the office. That’s roughly equivalent to 9am-midnight on the weekdays (65 hours), and then variable hours during the weekend depending on your workload. When a deadline is looming, hours can get crazy – I once caught an hour of sleep sitting up in a bathroom stall at 4am before returning to my desk to finish cranking out a pitch book. As an intern your hours might be a little shorter, but never leave the office until you’re sure the analysts you’re working with don’t need any more help, and never complain – you’re there to work for the summer and get that return offer, not to see the city (sorry).

What questions are they going to ask me in the interview?

A lot of students freak out before interviews for an investment banking internship, expecting to be peppered with technical questions about bond math and fixed charge ratios. The reality is that your interviewer knows you’re still a junior in college and haven’t been exposed to a lot of this stuff – they’ll tailor their questions accordingly. The key things you want to demonstrate are an understanding of the job, a strong work ethic, and that you’re a generally normal and social person.

However, since I know you want more specific details, here are three questions you can be almost certain will come up:

Q: Why are you interested in investment banking?
A: If the best thing you can come up with is “I want to make a lot of money” you might as well cancel your interview now. The correct answer here is dependent on the group you’re interviewing for (M&A, industry coverage, etc) but the thesis is the same. The key is to convey an understanding of what the job entails – contrary to what you may see in the movies, it’s not all power ties and screaming pit traders. One of the most interesting things about investment banking is the opportunity to learn a ton about your clients – in an M&A group, you might spend 3 months selling a defense contractor, then the next 3 months diving into the quick oil change industry. If you’re interviewing for an industry coverage group, make sure you emphasize your interest in that specific sector.

Q: Why do you want to join our firm specifically?
A: Here’s another one where you need to have done your homework. Now’s a good time to parrot back some of the things you learned about the firm in the information session (you did attend their information session didn’t you?) You can also prep for this question by using your career services office to contact alumni that work at the bank – ask them what makes their firm unique.

Q: What are 3 ways to value a company?
A: Ah, finally a “technical question”. Despite what you may have heard, this is about as hard as it’s going to get for internship interviews. You covered the first valuation method in your introductory finance class – discounted cash flows. Use the time value of money to obtain a present value for the firm’s future cash flows. If you’re a little rusty on this, click here for a refresher.

The other two methods are comparative – we’ll compare the company you’re trying to value with others that are similar to it. There are two different types of yardsticks – public comparables and precedent transactions. “Comps”, as they’re called in the industry, are publicly traded companies that are similar to the one you’re trying to value. “Deals” are completed acquisitions of public or private companies. These externally validated valuations give you an idea of what your similar company is worth. The key concept to understand here is called the “multiple” – you don’t compare the values of the comps and deals directly, you compare their EBITDA multiples. Divide a company’s market capitalization (comps) or sale price (deals) by its EBITDA, then apply that multiple to your company’s EBITDA to get the expected valuation.

What part of the interview do students mess up most often?

Far and away, the most common reason prospective interns get dinged is for personality. Even if you nail all of the above questions, you’re not getting the spot unless you click with the interviewer. It sounds unfair, but it’s true. If I’m going to hire someone and then spend 90 hours a week with them, we need to click personality-wise. More students just need to relax and be themselves – connect with your interviewer and show them you’re a normal person who’d be fun to have a beer with. That’s the secret that career offices never tell you.

Wrapping It Up

So there it is prospective junior masters of the universe – get the above concepts down cold, and you’ll be more prepared than 99% of your classmates (assuming they haven’t also read this post). Make sure you grasp basic financial concepts, and relax. The most important things are to show a genuine intellectual curiosity for the job and to connect with your interviewer on a personal level.

Hopefully this helps a few people out – I’m more than happy to answer additional questions in the comments.

But how much information can we even consume? Just look at all the new things we are measuring today about our world, our systems (markets, economies, servers, transactions) and our bodies that we never have before. I think as a society we have recognized that there is value in measurement (manage what you measure), but now we’re confronted with the difficultly of actually deriving meaning from all the data we are collecting. There is simply no way to understand and absorb all of that information using traditional methods.

The phrase “traditional methods” is important, because it gets to the unique way that human brains process information. To a computer, a byte is a byte, whether it’s text, image, or video. But humans process data differently. Consider – How long does it take you to absorb a picture of your parents? How long to read and understand “War and Peace”? It’s about the same number of bytes, but the visual information is much more rapidly consumed and categorized by our brains. The number of bytes we are able to consume varies greatly with modality. A megabyte of text (about 500 pages) is harder to consume than a megabyte of HD video (less than a second).

I believe that the key to understanding and deriving meaning from the exponentially growing amount of information in our world is to exploit efficiencies in the way our brains process data. With the help of computers, we are able to translate vast amounts of raw data into visualizations that allow us to consume it more efficiently. I think that’s why we’ve seen an explosion recently of investments in so-called “big data” companies like Palantir Technologies, Recorded Future, and more (you can see the IA Ventures portfolio for even more examples). We’re going to need new ways to summarize and interpret data in the future if we want to gain value from all the things we are now recording and measuring.

So in essence, we are experiencing a race between the volume of data that is being generated and the systems that allow us to consume it all in manageable modalities (summary charts, images, video, etc). The systems we devise must evolve rapidly to aggregate and present increasing amounts of data, allowing human users to arrive at the holy grail – “answers”.

Special thanks to Dave Peck for inspiring this post after our conversation on Namesake.

Kiva borrowers are people that live in impoverished and war-torn areas, and instead of looking to the government or the Red Cross for a hand out, they’ve decided to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and start a business. Their ventures are nothing complicated – I’ve funded cafes, agriculture, electronics repair, tailor shops, grocery stores, and construction businesses. They aren’t world changing projects, but they are life changing enterprises for these people and their local communities. Your loan could be the difference between a person literally breaking rocks for a living or working in a skilled profession – both for the entrepreneur you back as well as the local employees they hire.

The picture attached to this post is of Elva Pineda, a 43 year old entrepreneur living in Choluteca, Honduras. Elva runs a general store out of her home, selling consumable items to many of her neighbors that work at nearby okra plantations. Elva’s Kiva loan of $650 will be used to buy inventory that will allow her to serve more customers and eventually move the store out of her home and into a dedicated building.

Kiva can put you in touch with entrepreneurs across the globe like Elva who simply need a little startup capital to get on their feet. When you loan to a Kiva entrepreneur, you can see their picture and have a chance to read their background and their business plan. You’ll get updates as they build their business and gradually repay their loan. I’ll be able to follow Elva and several other entrepreneurs I’ve funded as they put my loan to work.

Since Kiva is a non-profit, the entire sum of the loan is delivered directly to the entrepreneurs – over 470,000 of them so far in 57 countries have received over $180 million in microloans. You can start lending with as little as $25. So I hope you’ll take some time this Christmas to reflect on ways you can give back to those around the world who are trying to lift themselves up and break their own cycle of poverty. You can get started in 5 minutes at Kiva.org.

I believe that the key to success in life is overcoming your fears and eliminating the excuses that keep you in your comfort zone. Action almost always brings more fulfillment than the status quo. “Ready Fire Aim” (the title of this blog) is an expression of that ethos. I also believe it’s very applicable to entrepreneurs thinking of starting a company – the starting is often the hardest part.

Think of all the “armchair entrepreneurs” in the world – everyone has an idea. And yet nobody executes. There always seems to be a reason to delay actually starting an entrepreneurial venture. I don’t have enough startup capital. I need to refine my idea a little more. I should save some more money first. I need to finish college first. I don’t know if anyone will use it. There are one thousand and one excuses for putting off starting until tomorrow.

So why do we do this to ourselves? What is it about human nature that makes us manufacture endless justifications for inaction? I want to mention two authors who’ve written about it specifically, one classic and one contemporary.

Sigmund Freud called these nagging doubts the Death Drive, or Thanatos – the destructive force inside human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough, long-term course of action that might do good for ourselves or others. The opposite of Eros (the drive for life), Thanatos is the natural drive in all of us to give in to the status quo and seek a state of calm, non-action, and death.

Stephen Pressfield (author of “Legend of Bagger Vance” and “Gates of Fire”) has a wonderful contemporary description of Thanatos. Pressfield calls it “Resistance” in his new book “The War of Art” and defines it this way:

Have you ever bought a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is. Look in your own heart. Right now a small voice is piping up, telling you as it has ten thousand times, the calling that is yours and yours alone. You know it. No one has to tell you. And you’re no closer to taking action on it than you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.

So how do we overcome Resistance and accomplish our dreams? To put it simply, “JFDI” (think Nike).

People and ideas have inertia. That which is at rest tends to remain at rest, that which is in motion tends to remain in motion. I think the key to starting anything is to actually start. Take the tiniest first step. Get off the couch. Put out an ad for a web designer on Elance. Draw out a mockup in pencil. Make that first phone call. After you’ve started, I think you’ll find the second step comes much more easily. Make that inertia work for you.

The truth is that the only way someday turns into today is by getting off your butt and starting. Starting makes things real. Starting builds momentum. Starting gets you excited. Starting eliminates all your excuses and all the reasons you’ve invented in your head to rationalize your inability to overcome your inertia. Starting makes you an entrepreneur.

I also want to point out that in order to succeed with a “JFDI” philosophy, you must also excel at correcting course along the way – what some call pivoting. It is the final and most important term in the phrase “Ready Fire Aim”. Too often we all forget to aim. Most successful business are not perfect incarnations of the founder’s first business plan, they require a lot of adaptation along the way. Very rarely is it purely a brilliant concept that makes a startup successful. Success is a sustained, long term drive, and that’s far rarer than a good idea.

Twitter is a perfect example – it started as a side project inside a company called Odeo (also founded by the Twitter guys). They soon noticed that Twitter was far more popular than Odeo’s main product offering, a podcasting web app. They scrapped the Odeo idea entirely and focused all their time on Twitter, which now has over 150 million users. Good aim.

In summary, success is action plus agility. Get the ball rolling, put inertia to work for you, and correct course along the way. Jump out of the airplane. I’d like to leave you with a quote from Machiavelli that I have printed out and hanging above my desk. Hopefully it helps remind you to go out there and JFDI.

“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli

Tim has written about fitness before, posting two articles with similarly outrageous headlines on his blog – one called From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs of Muscle in 4 Weeks and another titled How to Lose 20lbs of Fat in 30 Days – Without Doing Any Exercise. These two posts together give us a glimpse of the principles Tim fleshes out in “The 4-Hour Body”. Is it really possible that Tim has cracked the code on fitness? One year ago, I decided to find out by combining Tim’s published writings into a comprehensive fitness plan and measuring my results. My goal – to determine whether Tim’s methods actually work in real life. This is what I discovered.

Let’s set the scene – back in high school I was an athlete and in decent shape, about 6’1″ and 180lbs. After 4 years of college and too many beers, I graduated in May 2008 at 205lbs and started a job in investment banking. The next 18 months of takeout dinners and 90 hour weeks at a desk pushed me up to 217lbs, with had back pain, acne, and very low energy. I regret now that I didn’t have my body fat analyzed, but I expect I was pushing 30%. I needed to make a change, and quickly. And so in November 2009, I began “The Ferriss Fitness Experiment” to see if Tim could deliver on his promises.

The fitness plan I developed is based directly on Tim’s posts, which are themselves a modification of the Paleolithic Diet (Tim’s modified version is called “The Slow Carb Diet”), combined with exercise methods based on The Colorado Experiment. For the Cliffs Notes crowd, Tim’s methods can be summarized in 4 bullets:

• Avoid white carbohydrates. If it is white or can be white (bread, noodles, rice, cookies, crackers, etc) – cut it out completely.
• Focus your diet on lean proteins (chicken, fish, sirloin, etc) and vegetables.
• Don’t drink calories. No sodas or juices. In combination with the above, that also means (gasp) no beer. We’ll allow wine and hard liquor (straight or with diet soda) because a guy’s got to have a life.
• Exercise to exhaustion. Two or three 30 minute high-intensity workouts are more valuable for building muscle mass than 5x weekly moderate sessions.

I’ll break down the diet and exercise strategies in a lot more detail below. If you’re impatient, you can skip directly to the results of my experiment.

Diet – “Eat Real Food, Not Too Much. Mostly Vegetables.”

The basic idea behind Paleo eating is to consume only foods that our ancestors from the Paleolithic Era had access to (lean red meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, nuts, vegetables, fruit, etc), and exclude foods that developed in the more recent Neolithic, post-agricultural era (processed grains and dairy, sugar, and other “fake” foods). Focus your diet on proteins and vegetables, avoid processed carbohydrates. Volumes of literature have been written about the reasons this makes sense, particularly the ways that carbohydrates and simple sugars are metabolized – they are literally killing you by spiking your insulin, damaging your small intestines, and more. If you want to dig into the science behind how carbohydrates are digested, read this article by Robb Wolf on Tim’s blog. Robb is the former review editor for the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism, so he knows his stuff.

One note – this is not the Atkins diet. You don’t have cart blache to eat anything as long as it’s not a carbohydrate. Ribeyes are delicious, but if you think you’re being “healthy” just take a look at an uncooked ribeye – it’s nearly all marbling (fat). Beef isn’t off limits, but be aware of what you’re eating. Hamburger meat is rarely, if ever, a good idea. Focus on lean cuts (filet, sirlion) or other lean meats like buffalo or pork.

Tim and I both make an exception to the above diet so it is both less miserable (more sustainable) and more practical. I allow for 1 “cheat day” each week when I can eat whatever I want. No only does this help keep me sane and disciplined the other 6 days, but spiking caloric intake once per week increases fat loss by preventing your metabolic rate (thyroid function, etc) from down-regulating due to extended caloric restriction.

Exercise – High Intensity, Elevated Heart Rate

Now let’s discuss exercise. The two things you’re shooting for are consistent elevated heart rate and lifts to failure. You can accomplish this with cycle training – begin with 15 minutes on the treadmill to get your heart rate up, then move around the gym lifting several muscle groups to failure, with no rest in between. Do all your sets slowly (5 up, 5 down cadence) and to failure. It will burn, but you’ll build muscle mass very quickly.

During your workouts, make an effort to focus on compound movements like squats, pull ups, bench press, lunges, etc. People avoid these exercises because they hurt, but there’s a reason they burn – all of the above target large muscle groups in your body. When your muscles are torn down and rebuild, they release testosterone, which helps build extra muscle, puts hair on your chest, and is generally beneficial for a lot of other reasons. Larger muscle groups release more testosterone. Your biceps is a tiny muscle, you’re not burning many calories or releasing much testosterone doing curls. Do an ass-to-ankles squat on the other hand, and you’re activating your entire lower body, as well as your stabilizing core.

Another benefit of a high intensity workout with minimal rest is that you can be in and out of the gym in under 45 minutes, including locker room time. Do this 2-3 times a week, and you’ll get maximum impact with minimum gym time. This was a huge benefit for me while working in investment banking, when I didn’t have the time to fit in long workouts.

The Results – Do Tim’s Fitness Methods Really Work?

So now we come to the important part – results. Do Tim’s fitness and diet methods actually work? Tim promises his methods can result in either a 34lb muscle gain or 20lb fat loss in 30 days. So how did a combination of the two turn out for me?

When I began my Ferris Fitness Experiment, I tipped the scales at 217lbs. After 3 months of Slow Carb/Paleo eating and 3x weekly 45 minute workouts, I was down to 200lbs. My skin was clear, and my energy level was noticeably higher. After 3 more months I was at 180lbs, with no lower back pain at all, and in the best shape of my life at 15% body fat. Because pictures are worth 1,000 words, I’ve included before and after shots (click the picture for full size). On the left is me at 217lbs before the start of my “Ferriss Fitness Experiment”, and on the right is me in the same outfit at 180lbs. A dramatic improvement.

Based on my own experience, Tim’s methods blow away every fitness plan I’ve ever tried. I lost 37 pounds, 4 inches on my waist, and reduced my body fat by over 10%+ in 6 months. While that’s significantly longer than the 30 days Tim promises in his posts, I recognize that I didn’t singularly focus on weight gain or fat loss – I aimed instead for general fitness and overall health by combining high intensity strength training with the Slow Carb diet. All in all, I highly recommend Tim’s methods to anyone looking to improve their health and fitness level. If the content of Tim’s blog posts on fitness so far are any indication, “The 4-Hour Body” is a must read – you can order your own copy here.