Ferriss, who was born premature, grew up in East Hampton, New York, and graduated from St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire. He graduated with an A.B. in East Asian studies from Princeton University in 2000 after completing an 128-page-long senior thesis, titled "Acquisition of Japanese Kanji: Conventional Practice and Mnemonic Supplementation", under the supervision of Seiichi Makino. After graduation, Ferriss worked in sales at a data storage company.
Career
In 2001, Ferriss founded BrainQUICKEN, an internet-based nutritional supplements business, while still employed at his prior job. He successfully sold the company, then known as BodyQUICK, to a London-based private equity firm in 2010. He has stated that The 4-Hour Workweek was based on this period.
Current Projects
Podcast
The Tim Ferriss Show covers topics ranging from personal and character development, to morning routines and meditation habits of celebrities, CEOs and sportspeople like LeBron James, also covering occasional posts about writing, venture capital, metaphysics and even acting/movies.
Investing
Ferriss is an angel investor and advisor to startups. He has invested or advised in startups such as StumbleUpon, Posterous, Evernote, DailyBurn, Shopify, Reputation.com, Trippy, and TaskRabbit. He is a pre-seed money advisor to Uber, co-founded by Garrett Camp, the founder of StumbleUpon, which Ferriss also advises. In 2013, Ferriss raised $250,000 in under an hour to invest in Shyp by forming a syndicate on AngelList. Ferriss ended up raising over $500,000 through his backers, and Shyp raised a total of $2.1 million. In 2018, Shyp shut down and laid off all its employees. The New York Times listed Ferriss among their "Notable Angel Investors" while CNN said he was "one of the planet's leading angel investors in technology." In November 2013, Ferriss began an audiobook publishing venture, Tim Ferriss Publishing. The first book published was Vagabonding by Rolf Potts. Other books include The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday, Daily Rituals by Mason Currey, and What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars by Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan. In 2015, Ferriss declared a long vacation from new investing. He cited the stress of the work and a feeling his impact was "minimal in the long run", and said he planned to spend time on his writing and media projects. In 2017 he stated one of the reasons he moved from Silicon Valley was that, "After effectively 'retiring' from angel investing 2 years ago," he had no professional need to be in the Bay Area.
Books
Ferriss has written five books, The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors.
Television
The Tim Ferriss Experiment
In December 2008, Ferriss had a pilot on the History Channel called Trial by Fire, in which he had one week to attempt to learn a skill normally learned over the course of many years. In the pilot episode he practiced yabusame, the Japanese art of horseback archery. In December 2013, his television seriesThe Tim Ferriss Experiment debuted on HLN. In the show, Ferriss attempts to learn notoriously punishing skills in record time, such as surfing, professional poker, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, parkour, and foreign languages. Ferriss also hosted the 2017 TV show Fear with Tim Ferriss, in which he interviews people from different industries about success and innovation.
In a Forbes article, media and marketing strategist Michael Schein suggested Ferriss's success is due in large part to his skills as a self-promoter and self-marketer, and his methods have been criticized as exploiting technicalities, sometimes in unethical or dishonorable ways, and then attractively packaging those shortcuts and fake-outs. Jacobin magazine said Ferriss capitalizes on dissatisfaction of middle-income deskbound workers by recycling self-help and time-management cliches and combining them with the advice to become a "fake expert". In his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Ferriss states "Expert status can be created in less than four weeks if you understand basic credibility indicators."
