Author of 5 #1 NYT/WSJ bestsellers, early-stage investor (tim.blog/portfolio), Tim Ferriss Show podcast (1B+ downloads), founder of saiseifoundation.org
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NEW podcast episode is up!
"The Random Show with @kevinrose — AI Super Assistants, Boner Pills, Dream Engineering, Wizards, Supplements, Books, and More"
Please enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss retweeted
"There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling.”
— Aldous Huxley
via the 5-Bullet Friday newsletter (tim.blog/fbf) from @tferriss
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Tim Ferriss retweeted
For its first 2 years, Neko Health didn’t have a website, merch or even an official name.
“The rule was kind of like, ‘Hey, if you're joining Neko, it's because you would love to reinvent the technology of tracking health and diagnostics. That's why you're joining,” says CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne (@hjalmarnilssone).
“If you wanna join the hot new startup, if you wanna brag to your friend about whose money we're spending, you can't do it, because we don't have a website. We don't have a name. Nobody knows we exist.”
So how did @Neko manage to hire and keep top employees while in stealth?
The biggest challenge, Hjalmar says, is motivation.
“From the outside, people always think, ‘Oh, it must be so cool to be at OpenAI and work on AGI.’ And you're like, in reality, most of these places, people are half depressed," he says.
"Because you're like, ‘Hey, this AGI is 30 years away, and we're here reading papers, doing stuff that's not really gonna matter.’”
Instead, high achievers need checkpoints they can reach along the way.
“The name of the game when you run a moonshot business is coming up with really credible milestones that are close enough that everyone can focus like crazy. And if we hit those milestones, that's real progress.”
Thanks to Neko backer and podcast pro @tferriss for suggesting the question 🙏
Neko CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne was licking his wounds after "crash landing" a climate startup. Then he got a fateful DM from Spotify's Daniel Ek
Together, @HjalmarNilsonne and @eldsjal co-founded @Neko, a $7B startup that calls itself "the most valuable hour you can spend on your health."
After years operating in Europe, Neko recently launched in NYC, where it's quickly built a waitlist of 50,000 people, and started work on 3 more locations. Miami, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. are next.
“People sometimes think that there’s some machine, and you go in, and you get a kind of paper receipt telling you if you’re gonna die or not,” Hjalmar tells me. “In reality, it’s the exact opposite.”
On The Upstarts Podcast, Nilsonne talks about the fateful Twitter DM from Ek that got Neko going; why the doctor visit hasn’t changed much in 100 years; and how to keep a startup team motivated while chasing a long-term “moonshot.”
Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: a bet-the-company pivot driven by an internal memo he wrote, “Free Is Not Enough.”
A big thanks to this season's sponsors @Atlassian and @chargebee for supporting unfiltered founder interviews like this 🫡
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Introduction
01:48 Mapping Your Body In One Hour
03:54 Why The Doctor’s Visit Hasn’t Changed In 100 Years
07:31 Building Four Businesses In One: Devices, Hardware, Software, Clinics
09:22 Breaking Down A Neko Visit First-Hand
12:58 Why Half of Neko’s U.K. Members Never Had A Health Check
16:59 ‘Brutally Efficient With Your Time’: Why Every Second Counts
19:04 Helping Human Doctors, Not Replacing Them
22:40 Delivering Outcomes For the 92% Of Members Not At Risk
26:47 A Climate ‘Crash Landing’ And A DM From Daniel Ek
33:12 Motivating A Team To Chase A Moonshot
37:42 Neko’s Upstart Moment: The ‘Free Is Not Enough’ Memo And Pivot
41:30 Pricing Neko Accessibly For The 99.9%
45:44 What The Tesla Roadster Can Teach Founders About Change
48:33 Space-Age Scan, Old-School Advice: Cut The Coffee
Thanks for watching!
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Tim Ferriss retweeted
Rich Roll (@richroll) on how to commit to the path of sobriety.
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Tim Ferriss retweeted
Great advice from Tim Ferriss.
I bought Roger Dawson’s Power Negotiating CDs about 20 years ago and must have listened to them 20-30 times over the years.
I need to check out the other titles mentioned in this.
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Tim Ferriss retweeted
Tim Ferriss won't let AI write his next book. His reason: “If I do that, I'm done.”
He still uses it for everything around the writing.
Developers need the same line. Pick the skills you want to keep in your head. Do those by hand. Hand off the rest.
piped.video/X9nfEE8DJeI
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Rich Roll (@richroll) on how to commit to the path of sobriety.
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Watch my full conversation with Rich here: piped.video/watch?v=bR6JHIZK…
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Tim Ferriss retweeted
My Productivity Strategy to Reset, Get Unstuck, and Focus on the Right Things
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Tim Ferriss retweeted
Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5.
I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38.
He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters.
His work has benefited millions of people all across the world.
Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations.
0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders.
55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.
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Ditch Your To-Do List and Do This Instead — @SamCorcos
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