Tim Ferriss
31 statements across 2 episodes · 5 bullish · 6 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Jun 1, 2015 by Jason Calacanis · said 40 times in 19 episodes since 2015 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Tim Ferriss's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (19), Rick Marini (6), Marvin Liao (3), Jason Calacanis (3), Matt Lerner (2), Sahil Bloom (1), Mike Salguero (1), Mike Maples (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 7 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Dropbox CEO Drew Houston: How to Pick a Co-Founder; Steve Jobs' Attempt to Buy Dropbox | 20VC #938 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- How I Built a Twitter Audience of 500K+ in 18 Months | Sahil Bloom Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: Biggest Lessons and Challenges Building One of the Most Successful Seed Funds, How To Manage Investor Psychology, Self-Doubt and Insecurity & The Secret to Truly Successful Venture Partnerships with David Frankel, Co-Founder @ Founder Collective
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 7 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?
- 20VC: AngelList's Naval Ravikant on The Secrets To Success At Seed, Why Micro VC Is The Return of Traditional Series A & Why We Will See The Unbundling Of Traditional VC Brands
- 20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox
- 20VC: Khosla's Keith Rabois on How To Create Sustainability Behind Growth, How To Assess The Potential Of Individuals & Teams & The Biggest Takeaways from LinkedIn, Paypal & Square
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
- 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow
- 20VC: The 4 Required Powers For A Startup To Be A $500m Business with "The Most Powerful Woman in Startups", Ann Miura Ko, Co-Founder @ Floodgate
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
2015 12 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Jason Calacanis: The World's Greatest Angel Investor
- 20 VC 083: 500 Startups Week: New Funds, Startup Mentoring and Dave's Masterplan with Marvin Liao, Partner @ 500 Startups
- 20 VC 082: 500 Startups Week: Growth Hacking 101: How To 10x Your Conversion with Matt Lerner, Head of Distro Dojo London
- James Altucher: Ideas, Investing and Entrepreneurs
- every mention in 2015, scene by scene →
Everything said about Tim Ferriss, oldest first
Jun 1, 2015 positive
Oct 31, 2025 neutral
Oct 31, 2025
Ferriss lost $50K of his initial $120K angel budget on one startup
“So I have a 120 K for two years. I go in, I think one of my earliest investments, I was like, I'm putting in 50 K. And Mike was like, you sure you want to do that? And I was like, oh man, yeah. Yeah. This is really incredible. No, I just, I see the upside pote…”
Oct 31, 2025
Ferriss: Personal investment policy is now holding all startup equity indefinitely
“Like now my policy is just let almost everything ride. Like if they go public, if they go to zero. If they don't go to zero, they might go to a hundred X. So just like assume you do not know and just hold onto them.”
Oct 31, 2025 negative
Ferriss: Investing outside direct-to-consumer products he personally uses consistently leads to losses
“I would say whenever I stray outside of stuff, I could use myself, would want to use myself, could promote to my audience. Whenever I stray outside of that, I get my face ripped off. I mean, almost always, there are a few exceptions that keep me going back to …”
Oct 31, 2025
Oct 31, 2025
Ferriss: Selling Shopify shares immediately after IPO lockup cost him $150 million
“Shopify could have been just as big, but I sold a lot of my Shopify as soon as lockup expired because I had no experience with public markets. Yeah, you're holding your face. I mean, that would have been, that was a hundred and fifty million dollar mistake or …”
Oct 31, 2025
Oct 31, 2025
Oct 31, 2025
Ferriss built a 300,000-subscriber email list before ever sending a single broadcast
“I was collecting email starting in 2017 from fourhourworkweek.com and never emailed anybody. I was like, I get too many email. I don't want to get more email. I assume other people don't either, so I'm just not going to email these people. Had like, when I fin…”
Oct 31, 2025 neutral
Oct 31, 2025
Ferriss: The 4-Hour Workweek is about maximizing leverage, not working fewer hours
“People misunderstand, you know, the four-hour work week because it's about maximizing per hour output. If you want to work four days a week, four hours a week, four nanoseconds, or 400 hours a week, I know the math doesn't work, but that's fine as long as you'…”
Oct 31, 2025 positive
Ferriss became an advisor to Shopify when it had roughly 12 employees
“I talked to a couple of people who were doing advising, and I figured out how to begin stepping into advising, and ultimately, with Shopify becoming an advisor when they had whatever it was, 10 or 12 employees, and then becoming an advisor at Uber.”
Oct 31, 2025 negative
Ferriss: Viral video clips with 100M+ views drove zero podcast growth
“I've had clips, shorts, that have exceeded a hundred million views. The branding of the show is there. It's clearly an interview on my podcast. There's a link to the full episode, and the impact on the long-form episode has been imperceptible. You look at the …”
Oct 31, 2025
Oct 31, 2025
Oct 31, 2025
Ferriss: Morning erections are a crucial leading indicator for overall male health
“A heuristic for a lot of male health is I owe this to Kelly Starrett. He's a very famous PT and performance coach, but boner, no boner when like in the morning. Does it happen or doesn't, it does it not happen? Like that is actually like a good leading indicat…”
Oct 31, 2025
Oct 31, 2025 negative
Oct 31, 2025
Oct 31, 2025 bearish
Ferriss dislikes investing in venture funds due to unpredictable capital calls
“Generally I don't like investing in funds. It's like they last too long. The capital calls are unpredictable. So there've been multiple cases where it's like, I don't get a capital call for two years, and then a bunch of funds come in, and it, like, totally fu…”
Oct 31, 2025
Ferriss: Venture managers scale fund sizes primarily due to management fee economics
“Nobody raises a first small fund intending to stay with small funds, right? I mean, that's just not how you make the math really amazing. You have, you know, you do a 30 or seventy-five million dollar fund, then you know, double or triple that, and then you ra…”
Oct 31, 2025
Ferriss deliberately alienates 10% of his audience to preserve his authenticity
“So I will deliberately kind of routinely get rid of like 10% of my audience by just being unapologetically brazenly myself, showcasing the things that I would not be inclined to showcase otherwise, and I find that, at least for me, that has helped to keep off-…”
Oct 31, 2025 negative
Ferriss: Achieving wealth causes deeper depression by removing hope of quick fixes
“I think that the transient depression of people who are still chasing the phantom of riches is in some ways different from the depression of those who catch the rabbit on the greyhound track and have actually hit the number, and I'll explain why, because I've …”
Oct 31, 2025
Oct 31, 2025 neutral
Ferriss set an early goal to match his annual salary monthly
“I wanted to make as much per month as I was previously making per year. So at my startup job out of college in Silicon Valley, Shortly thereafter, keep in mind, this was 2000. The company imploded, everybody got fired. And I started my own company. I was like,…”
Oct 31, 2025 bearish
Oct 31, 2025 positive
Oct 31, 2025
Ferriss treated his initial $120K angel investing budget as non-refundable tuition
“Why don't I take what I would have spent on tuition, a 120 K for two years, something like that. And that would have been sunk cost. I pay out of pocket. And what's the hope with business school, what you learn and the connections you make, make it worth it th…”
Oct 31, 2025 bullish
Oct 31, 2025 positive
Ferriss invested in SV Angel primarily to receive Silicon Valley intelligence reports
“But the reason I invested 25 or fifty-k, whatever it was, in SV Angel, and their approach, I mean, it ended up being pretty smart on a lot of levels, was because I got a report card on pretty much everything in the Valley regularly. And that allowed me to go h…”