This Christmas, I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to give back and help others. There are a staggering number of charitable options out there, so choosing between them can be a somewhat daunting task. This year, I want to focus on one of my favorites: Kiva.org. Kiva organizes microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world to help them start simple businesses in their local communities. I believe it’s one of the best ways you can give back this holiday season – by loaning money to those who are less fortunate as they try to change their own lives. It’s important to know that a contribution through Kiva is a loan, not a donation. It’s a way to help people get on their feet while also encouraging independence, accountability, and entrepreneurship. Kiva borrowers are required to pay their loans back over time (Kiva’s repayment rate is 98.92%). Once loans are paid back, you can re-lend the money again to help another aspiring entrepreneur – a single capital commitment can be reused again and again to help people all over the world.

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.

How is entrepreneurship like skydiving? As they say, the hardest part of skydiving is jumping out of the airplane. I think entrepreneurship is the same way.

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

Many of you are familiar with Tim Ferriss, author of the excellent “4-Hour Work Week“. Tim is a personal hero of mine (one of his productivity tips is mentioned previously in my post “The Urgent vs. Important Matrix“) so naturally I’ve been eagerly awaiting the arrival of his sophomore effort “The 4-Hour Body“. The new book promises to be “An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman” – a bold claim indeed.

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.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Go Daddy Group has hired investment bank Qatalyst Partners to facilitate a sale of the company. According to the always anonymous “sources familiar with the matter,” Go Daddy’s 2009 revenues were approximately $800 million, and the company is expected to fetch over $1 billion at auction. So the immediate follow up question becomes – who’s the buyer?

In addition to their 43 million domains under management, Go Daddy also has a very large shared hosting business. Accordingly, they may attract bids from some of the large shared hosting companies – The Planet, HostGator, 1and1, and others. Yahoo may bid as well, given that they already have a significant shared hosting and domain registration presence. I don’t expect much interest from the likes of RackSpace, Equinix, or Savvis due to their concentration on enterprise customers. Besides the obvious interest Go Daddy will receive from private equity firms (perhaps in partnership with any of the above), I want to propose an alternate, dark horse scenario – what would it look like if Google bought Go Daddy? I think it breaks down like this:

Google Immediately Controls Nearly 50% of Domains on the Internet

As mentioned above, Go Daddy currently has 43 million domains under management. There are only about 100 million domains on the internet in total, meaning that Go Daddy controls nearly 50% of the entire market. If Google acquired Go Daddy, the combined company would wield significant power and control over the domain name system, in addition to the considerable influence Google already has over the internet in general. This would allow Google to exert control over the direction of the internet infrastructure as it evolves, which could be interesting as far as inserting contextual ads into error pages, guiding the creation of new top level domains, and generally steering the evolution of the internet to be more search-focused overall.

Google’s Search Algorithm Gets a Lot Smarter by Leveraging Go Daddy Domain Ownership Data

Go Daddy already owns a patent describing “a method for presenting search engine results based on domain name related reputation data”. Imagine a spammer that owns a ring of 1,000 domains that all link to each other and distribute spam emails. Google is now able to recognize the common ownership and modify their search algorithm accordingly – search rankings for spam sites drop like rocks. Similarly, Google is able to examine domain billing data from Go Daddy and allow domains registered to legitimate businesses to rise to the top. Powerful stuff.

Google Gains a Killer “Business in a Box” Product Set

The combination of Go Daddy’s hosting and domain registration businesses with Google’s core search and SaaS products (GMail, Google Docs, etc) raises some interesting possibilities. Suppose Google offered a bundle that included a domain, basic shared hosting, Google Apps for Your Domain (GMail, Calendar, Docs, etc), a Google Voice phone number, and Google Checkout e-commerce. This is a step beyond their existing Google Sites product in that it offers a fully capable hosting environment with applications, rather than just basic WYSIWYG web design. It’s a business in a box, run entirely on Google’s infrastructure.

Google Leverages the Google Apps Suite to Create a New Paradigm – Applications as a Service

Now let’s take it one step farther. Imagine that Google exposed a robust Google Apps API to all of their hosted customers. So from your company’s hosting account, you could have a mailing list that is sent out through GMail, release a presentation for download through Google Docs, and expose a video for streaming on YouTube – all programmatically. You could do all of this without running any kind of mail server, file server, or video streaming server in your own environment. Everything would all be handled via API on an “as a service” basis, with capacity spun up and down as requested. This is similar to the scalable “cloud” hosting model that becoming so prevalent today (see VMWare, Amazon EC2, etc) – except that the scaling occurs at the application level (GMail) rather than the infrastructure level (the hosting account). Call it the next evolution after software as a service (SaaS) — applications as a service (AaaS). A customer’s hosting infrastructure hosts only the “brain”, everything else is run, scaled, and maintained as a separate application.

So suddenly, by coupling cheap/free hosting with its robust and scalable Apps universe, Google has created shared hosting on steroids. Each hosting account needs only to be powerful enough to serve pages, not run applications. It’s scalable, cloud-enabled IT infrastructure in a box, with all the heavy lifting abstracted away – a killer product. If the platform were easy to deploy and seamlessly scalable, it would send shock waves through the hosting and IT industries.

Go Daddy’s Parked Domains Are an Excellent Platform for AdSense

People often forget that at the end of the day, Google is an advertising company. Almost 90% of Google’s revenue comes from CPC ads on Google.com and AdSense partner sites across the web. Many of Go Daddy’s millions of parked domains are currently monetized through their CashParking program, though Google does offer AdSense for Domains. There may be opportunities for Google to increase revenue by consolidating the two programs and making AdSense installation a one-click process for parked domains.

Summary

Of course all of the above are no cakewalk to pull off, and there are 101 other reasons that Go Daddy is a tough pill for Google to swallow. However, if Google does come out of left field to snatch up Go Daddy, I think there are some extremely interesting ways to productize domains and basic web hosting in combination with Google Apps. I believe there’s a lot of power in offering the entire internet “stack” (domain, DNS, infrastructure, software, applications) in a neat package tied with a bow. Go Daddy would also further increase Google’s already broad influence over the structure and direction of the internet in general. Combined with increased reach for AdSense and the enhancements domain ownership data could bring to the search algorithm, Go Daddy starts to look like a very strategic acquisition for Google. I’m not saying it’s likely or even probable, but you read it here first.

Note: All of the views and opinion in this post are entirely my own and in no way reflect the views of my employer Hosting.com, our investors at Pamlico Capital, or any inside information of any kind. The above is purely speculation. Hat tips to Scott Taylor, Erik Vanthilt, Mike MacMillan, Andrew Forrest, and Will Nathan for batting this idea around with me.

My younger brother just graduated from college this year and is getting settled into a new job, life on his own, and financial independence. Along with his first paycheck, he’s also been bombarded with a lot of new financial choices and a lot of acronyms (IRA, 401k, etc). Everyone knows they should be saving money, but the reality is that nobody ever tells you exactly how to go about it short of stuffing cash under your mattress. This post isn’t going to be an in depth discussion of what stocks to buy or how much of your net worth to put in bonds – rather, I want to focus on the mechanics of how to organize your finances as a single, newly independent young adult in order to set yourself up for prosperity and success.
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