This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

So last week I did this blog post highlighting The 16 SXSW Parties You Really, Really Don’t Want to Miss. And I got a ton of email from you guys & gals saying a) “Thank you, you’re a life saver!” and b) “We want more, more, MOARRR!”

For the hardcore partier, I’ve put together the ULTIMATE Guide to all the SXSW Parties (a whopping 300+ and counting!). Print this out before your trip and you’re golden, my friend. And as you can see, there’re a ton of events that don’t even require a SXSW badge. 

For the rest of you, here are 16 More SXSW Parties that have the Gary Stamp of Approval. You’re welcome, my little tech monsters! Now go forth and RSVP away. Oh and next week when you're walking around in downtown Austin, if you notice a guy with a big 'fro in a black suit, white shirt and a Red Tie (with ads all over it), come over and say hello!

Btw, I have 2 FREE Passes to the much anticipated Rovio (Angry Birds) Pool Party! :) Its on Mar 11 @ Ashton Austin. The Mighty Eagle will be there (of course). There will be music and BBQ! I hear Rovio may be showcasing something new. Each Pass is good for 1 person + 1 guest. Interested? Apply Here.

I've also been told that there will be #BrilliantBrew Coffee Trucks from-the-future driving around, housing GE's Barista Bots that will print portraits of coffee drinkers into the foam of their latte using face-detection software! Craazzzy huh? You can find them parked on the corner of Trinity & 3rd (Mar 8), outside the Made in NY event (Mar 9), 101 Red River (Mar 10) and 301 E Cesar Chavez (Mar 11).

If you've ever wondered whether you have what it takes to become a performer on Cirque du Soleil (sure, why not), then check out their party on the 15th where their talent scouts will be present. Also, Livefyre's SXSW NewsHub will be curating tweets & photos in real-time from the hottest panels and parties.

And now--drumroll please--16 *MORE* SXSW Parties that you really, really, reeeaally don’t wanna miss… ;)

Mobi + Verizon SXSW Kickoff Party
Lots of food and refreshments, including authentic Austin BBQ, as well as live music with a scenic view!
Thursday (Mar 07), 4 p.m. @ One American Center, 600 Congress Ave, Ste 1600

Sake Bomb Party!
Sake Shot Bar, Ty Ku Premium Sake Tastings, Free Kenichi Appetizers, Beer & Cocktails and Live D.J.
Friday (Mar 08), 10 p.m. @ Kenichi, 419 Colorado St

Happy Hour at the Hackers Hostel, Presented by WeHostels
Happy Hour of handcrafted cocktails and a live jazz band!
Saturday (Mar 09), 5 p.m. @ Firehouse Hostel & Lounge, 605 Brazos St, Ste 100

Awesomest Journalism Party. Ever. III.
Featuring awesome Texas food, awesome Texas beer and an awesome photobooth from SnapFiesta
Saturday (Mar 09), 5 p.m. @ The Palm Door, 401 Sabine St

ff Massive Party
Come meet ff Venture's portfolio companies, founders, & execs. Featuring: live music & an open bar.
Saturday (Mar 09), 6 p.m. @ Empire Automotive, 604 E 7th St

TechStars Conquers SXSW 2013
DJs Fubari (TechStars' own Ari Newman), [Whoop Whoop/Cabin Fever], Part Time Chiller [CHNL - LA], and John Wander [CHNL, Roam Music LA] will be dropping beats all night long!
Saturday (Mar 09), 8 p.m. @ Cedar St Courtyard, 208 West 4th St

House Party!
Featuring DJ Sets by Viceroy with Sean Glass. Sponsored by Dos Equis and Patron XO Cafe. In partnership with Thrillist, Wired, Track, Cameo and small Girls PR!
Saturday (Mar 09), 9 p.m. @ CTC House & Garden, 1102 E Cesar Chavez St

Pop! In & Party with PayPal
Performances by Man Man, The Octopus Project and Belaire. Plus an epic Superhero surprise!
Saturday (Mar 09), 9 p.m. @ Mohawk, 912 Red River St

MRY SXSW Launch Party
2 DJ's, including LA Riots, Food by one of Austin's best, East Side King, Fire Troupe, Ice Louge, Go-Go Dancers, and a few more surprises!
Saturday (Mar 09), 9:30 p.m. @ The Belmont, 305 West 6th St

Gannett Media Lounge #GANNETTLOUNGE
Houndstooth Coffee, Peached Tortilla Breakfast Tacos, Salt Lick BBQ Lunch
Sunday (Mar 10), 9 a.m. @ Hangar Lounge, 318 Colorado St

Livefyre Presents: SXSW13 Fyrebash
3 live acts - Vacationer, (Brooklyn-based) Body Language and The Hood Internet. Open Bar.
Sunday (Mar 10), 8 p.m. @ TenOak, 409 Colorado St

The Crowdtap VIP Party III - The Legendary Cant Miss Party of SXSWi
With White Panda, Radical Something, Little Daylight, VJ Culture and NYC's top DJ Vikas. Open bar and year two of the Battle of Austin's Best Food Trucks!
Sunday (Mar 10), 8:30 p.m. @ Haven, 409 Colorado St

Spotify House
Daily live performances, artist DJ sets, local food truck flavors, ping-pong, photobooth, giveaways and more!
Monday (Mar 11), 12 p.m. @ Spotify House, 1010 E Cesar Chavez

The Barbarian Group + Vimeo present No Way Back
3 stages featuring no less than 15 illustrious band performances, over the top DJ sets + mind melting visuals!
Monday (Mar 11), 6 p.m. @ Mohawk, 912 Red River St

Geeks from Gangnam
Seven startups from Korea will be there. Live musical performances by popular Korean bands Galaxy Express and Goonam. Free drinks and delicious appetizers!
Monday (Mar 11), 6:30 p.m. @ Moonshine Bar & Grill, 303 Red River St

GroupMe Major Rager 3D
Performances by RAC, Tim Sweeney & Viceroy.
Monday (Mar 11), 8 p.m. @ Cedar Street Courtyard, 208 W 4th St

BONUS #1
#Secret_Wine_Party with Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library, Vayner Media and Author of Thank You Economy)
I can’t say when. I can’t say where. But if you follow @garyvee, All shall be clear!

BONUS #2
Conduit Corner will be playing host to a bunch of happy hours (There'll be drinks, backrubs, munchies & much more)! With Internet Week NY & StartOut (Mar 8), Tracx (Mar 9), SF Music Tech (Mar 10), Warner Brothers (Mar 12), BandPage (Mar 13) and Sweet Relief (Mar 13).
Friday (Mar 8) to Wednesday (Mar 13) @ Conduit Corner, E 7th St and N Congress Avenue

BONUS #3
#FEED Flavorpill Sanctuary Pwd By Windows 8
Yoga, cycling, bootcamp, massage, juice w/ CRUNCH, CYC Fitness, BLUEPRINT, KIND Breakfast.
Friday (Mar 9) to Tuesday (Mar 12), 9 a.m. @ AMOA Arthouse @ Jones Center, 700 Congress Ave

BONUS #4
Cats Live Here Happy Hour
And if you like watching cat videos online (and srsly who doesn't), you're gonna like this one.
Animal Planet & the Walker Art Center bring you cat-themed cocktails, live music
 and a first look at the upcoming season of "My Cat From Hell." Plus, catch a sneak peek of the all-new "Henri" video!

Don’t forget – What Happens At SXSW… Is Gonna Be All Over Twitter ;)

Dashboard for American Express OPEN Forum.

Percolate, the New York-based curation engine that helps brands source relevant content for their social media presence, just raised $1.5 million. The seed round was led by First Round Capital. Lerer Ventures and SV Angel also invested, as well as Path founder Dave Morin and Rick Webb, who used to work with Percolate co-founder Noah Brier at the Barbarian Group.

Along with the added cash, which will be used to hire a sales team and engineers, Percolate moved its platform from alpha to beta and unveiled a new design with a focus on helping brands generate content for "the social web"--in other words their Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter profiles or other branded sites.

The last time we spoke to Mr. Brier, Percolate was being bootstrapped by its founders and had just announced that it would be powering Counterparties, the Reuters owned website, for its editors Felix Salmon and Ryan McCarthy. Since then, the company has helped find content Amex OPEN Forum's Tumblr and taken on a similar role with sites from Mastercard and GE.

Betabeat caught up with Mr. Brier this afternoon to talk about focusing on brands over consumers and why they need a service like Percolate.

Percolate was originally built as a filtering engine to send consumers their top five links. Individual subscribers had their own dashboard and could sign up for "Daily Brew" emails of the most shared and relevant links based on their social graph.

"We’re totally focused on the brand side now," Mr. Brier told Betabeat. "This is how the site has been working the entire time. This is how we’ve been profitable and able to sustain ourselves and build our business is working with these brands. And after three months of being live and having people use it, it was very obvious that this was the direction where the company was best focused," he added, mentioning that Percolate just picked up its seventh client.

"The only product we have now for consumers is the Daily Brew email. The dashboard is now for brands only--we hit a full overhaul [of the dashboard], which is what they use to publish out to Tumblr and Twitter and their dot com from Percolate. We launched that last Friday, sort of quietly put it out to our current customers and switched up the site for consumer users," explained Mr. Brier. "We also added some light analytics for brands, so they can essentially see how their posts are performing when they post them."

When a brand first signs up, Percolate helps them build out an interest graph. “We call it the calibration,” he said. Just as consumers build out their own interest graphs based on who they want to follow on Twitter or what they add to their RSS feeds, “We work with brands at the very beginning to set that up with them and look at a subset of the millions of sources that we scrape on a daily basis and really assign them to the brand based on what they’re trying to accomplish and their campaign goals.”

In the case of OPEN Forum, the sources were related to small business. "The algorithm looks through all those sources to bubbles up those stories that it’s going to suggest they comment on and push back out to Tumblr," said Mr. Brier. "They have a brand editor who chooses the two or three or five or 10 posts a day that are going to get pushed out. They write a short comment. From there we track how it’s doing and we allow them to add more sources, so the small business graph gets better for them over time."

Going forward, Percolate predicts that need for content will explode. "We think over the next two years, brands will need to create somewhere between 30 and 50 pieces of content a day across all these channels. Ten to 15 on Twitter, another five on Facebook, another 10 on Tumblr. The number gets big really quickly. You need to have a mix of longform original content, whether it’s a video asset or original writing, you need to augment those one or two pieces a week with what we call flow content—links off to Betabeat or the New York Times [Ed. note: Betabeat! Yes definitely Betabeat!] whatever fits into your brand ideals."

In the near term, Percolate is looking to hire folks to fill four or five open positions and larger office space than its current digs on Bond St. "We have 9 people now, it’s like a real company," said Mr. Brier.

Percolating?

Yesterday, Betabeat friend and neighbor Kat Stoeffel told you about Counterparties.com, a new Reuters blog that, in short, teaches you "to read like Felix Salmon." The site, which features the most relevant and talked about articles from Mr. Salmon's Twitter and Google Reader, is powered by Percolate, a seven-person East Village startup co-founded by Noah Brier, former head of strategic planning at Barbarian Group, and Federated Media vet James Gross.

Betabeat talked to Mr. Brier about why Percolate hasn't tapped the local froth in the venture market, whether the Barbarian offices are coming down with startup fever, and why no one looks at Twitter anymore.

When did you know you wanted to launch your own startup?

I left Barbarian Group in January. I had actually built another product in the past, BrandTags, which I sold last year, so I had sort of been in the middle of it. I met up with James Gross my co-founder and we got really excited about what I had built. I had a lot of faith in him as someone to start a company with.

How did you meet James?

We got introduced by mutual friends. He used to run publishing a company called Federated Media and I started a thing called LikeMind, a coffee meetup in the West Village, and a number of other cities.

So is there a case of startup fever going around Barbarian Group?

I think there’s a lot of tinkerers there. A lot of really smart people. If you looked at some of the side project that have come out of there like Cinder. I think they also just did a food truck app. It's a great place to work.

Why did you think there was a need for something like Percolate?

It was originally a filtering engine. It sucked it in and filtered down and then sent you an email with your top five links. Where we got really excited was the second part of it, the publishing. Counterparties is a pretty good example for that. The idea is that Percolate is really a curation platform, we have a Ph.D in mathematics on staff and we find interesting stuff with the intent of prompting you to react.

Did you think the existing curation engines were missing something?

I just don’t think that we saw this happening somewhere. When you look around the web, there are very few people doing what you do. Most of us are just finding interesting links and adding a sentence or two and pushing them out. So this felt like something. We’ve been thinking of it as curation engine that tells you what to blog about.

How did you end up hooking up with Felix?

Felix was an early power user on Percolate and got excited about it and brought us in at Reuters. They’re licensing our API, they’ve got a Counterparties account, filled with all Felix’s sources, and they comment on it and it gets pushed out.

If it’s an engine that tells you what to blog about, why is Reuters your first media partner?

We totally meant for this to be a consumer platform. Ultimately we’re seeing that brands and media companies have the same problem that consumers have, which is sort of like: What should I talk about?

Your brand clients pay $10,000 to $20,000 in licensing fees a month. Does Reuters have the same arrangement?

Yeah, roughly. We don’t talk specifically about the numbers for any of the clients. But it’s in the same ballpark.

Most startups go for the consumers first and then try to bring on paying clients based on consumer adoption. You went the opposite route.

We’ve used the money from our brand licensing deals to fund the company. We have not taken any venture capital up to this point. So having a business model for us was a pretty natural thing. At the end of the day the product that the brands and media companies are using is the exact same product the consumers are using.

VC money is so easy to come by these days. Why did you opt against it?

I don’t know that there’s any specific reason. We felt good about the product we had for brands. At some point we may raise some venture capital--or maybe we won’t, but at least we have the choice. We’ve been able to support ourselves to this point, we have seven people who work for us now, so we have a pretty reasonably-sized company. We’re not opposed to venture capital. For us and the partners we have in place, it was the right decision.

Where are you working?

We’re on Bond Street and Bowery. We’re in an office with the folks from PSFK, the trends website.  We just rent some desks in here.

Right now Percolate pulls from your Twitter and RSS. But how do you determine which stories are the most popular?

So it’s not actually "most popular." The algorithm works across about 15 different factors. Popularity is certainly one of them. So it looks at how many people in your network were linking to that thing. But it’s also looking at recency, you know, how old is that link. So if you go on now and two hours from now, there will be probably different links on the top of your brew--because we’re basically saying links lose value over time. Then there’s some secret factors that we keep under our hat. We also try to calculate authority--how important do we think this source is to you, which we try to figure out in a bunch of different ways. The system also learns over time. So that’s a big part of the publishing piece. When you comment on something, when you tag something, you’re also training the algorithm on what you like most.

Is Percolate is going to be free for consumers when you open it up to the public?

Yup. It’s free for them now and it will continue to be free. We’re in alpha now. We’re building out a couple key features and testing out the product and refining designs and stuff like that. But when we open up in the not-too-distant future it will be free for consumers. It’s free for brands to sign on as well. Really, the paid license for the API piece is the one piece that there’s a charge for.

Part of the reason for building Percolate must have been overload from too much information. So do you envision Percolate being a substitute for Twitter, or another site you have to check?

A little of both. With something like Twitter--more and more it’s becoming embedded. When you look at the iOS integration, it only becomes more of that. I don’t think even think about checking it directly anymore.

The Bose radio in the kitchen piped soothing Dixieland standards past the verdant rose bushes. Dr. Parkinson went sockless in his loafers. He wore navy seersucker shorts and had his chambray shirt unbuttoned to somewhere around his fourth rib, revealing a tight, tanned torso. Life seemed swell.

“I was the doctor of the tech community,” the 35-year-old Dr. Parkinson recalled of his emergence on the scene several years ago. “It was just my first practice, but I got a ton of press and a lot of hits. So, like, anybody young and creative in New York would call me up to be their doctor.”

At the time, Dr. Jay, as he’s known around town, used tools like Google Calendar and Skype to redefine the conventional office visit for the web age. In lieu of humorless receptionists and cumbersome insurance claims, he offered to meet patients anywhere and accept PayPal. With lower overhead and no margins lost to the insurance companies, he could offer a concierge service to patients—house calls and hour-long appointments—and still pay off more than $200,000 in med school loans.

The slew of articles that followed focused on Dr. Parkinson’s start-up Hello Health (also based in Williamsburg), which attempted to formalize the system he’d hacked together into a streamlined social platform. Light-weight technology, meet the creaky old American health care system.

The idea was to build something that could scale nationally, enabling any small practice to join the digital revolution. But Hello Health quickly ran into problems when it tried to incorporate doctors who wanted to accept insurance and navigate the attendant maze of regulations and guidelines. Dr. Parkinson had given up his medical practice after just six months to become Hello Health’s chief concept officer in January, 2008, letting his license lapse after deciding he could not longer offer his patients the flexibility they deserved. A year and a half later, he left Hello Health  in the hands of his co-founder.

The peripatetic Dr. Parkinson has a new scheme, of course, and it’s even more ambitious than what came before. Through a new start-up, The Future Well, launched last year, and a collective that he started a few months ago called Doctors of the Future (a reference to his own magazine profile), Dr. Parkinson aims to position himself as the Michael Pollan or Jamie Oliver of “health consciousness,” he said, changing American priorities through his enlightened philosophies of lifestyle and design.

“I’d like to be one of those people,” Dr. Parkinson acknowledged. “Michael Pollan has to stay within food. I’d like to say—from a doctor’s perspective, from a health expert’s perspective—it’s food, movement, relationships, environment, work. It’s essentially just sex, drugs and rock and roll. It’s fun, it’s enjoying sex—doctors never talk about that, but it makes the world go round. It’s a consciousness about these components of your life that you should be optimizing.

“If you enjoy your life better, I think you’ll be healthier,” he concluded, while adding quickly, “but I don’t know if there’s any proof of that.”

So what exactly is the Future Well? The website’s tagline reads, “We design, speak, and consult to inspire health,” which is a touch vague, to say the least. But if it’s hard to define just exactly what Future Well does, that hasn’t stopped blue-chip clients like the multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi, the National Institutes of Health and the Freelancers Union here in New York from requesting samples.

In each case, Dr. Parkinson’s treatment has been different. For Sanofi, he and his Future Well partner, Grant Harrison, created a Tumblr-inspired app that lets doctors “favorite” online resources about various health issues and then offer patients access to those curated lists. For the Freelancer’s Union, Future Well suggested strategies like creating a prize network of “mission-based” independent doctors and offering boutique services to the expensive outliers in the union’s insurance pool to keep them out of the hospital and taking their meds.

The flow of ideas seems to have increased now that Dr. Parkinson, like so many of New York’s growing contingent of entrepreneurs, has pivoted away from his original plan. “I’m trying, basically, to stay out of the medical world and focus more on health,” he explained. “I think the medical world is an intractable problem. I do not want to engage in any sort of system where I have to engage with the health insurance industry.”

In practical terms, that means he’s targeting those who are already either healthy enough or wealthy enough to sidestep some of the most trenchant problems in the health care system in favor of a boutique approach.

“Boomers are too far gone, diabetes is too far gone,” said Dr. Parkinson, who will deliver this message in upcoming speaking engagements at Google, Stanford and the Mayo Clinic. “All we can do is focus on people who are young, really well or relatively well and get them to be conscious of the fact that their behavior today influences their life 10 years from now. I like to talk about that. I like to talk about the standing desks.”

Dr. Parkinson was referring to research that shows that people who stand all day have a 65 percent lesser chance of cardiac events than those who sit at a desk. “That’s waaay better than what Lipitor would do and it’s a simple thing,” he said. “Plus I lose 300 calories a day from standing up and working. I mean, that’s like three glasses of wine.” Through his influential Tumblr, he’s already inspired a change in start-up offices around the city. Which is sort of the point. By seeding his ideas with the type of people who made up his short-lived practice, he hopes to watch the influence roll downhill.

“Everything good starts in Williamsburg, in New York City,” Dr. Parkinson said in soft-spoken, drawn-out cadence that sounded vaguely surfer-ish, until he told The Observer he's from St. Louis. “A couple years later, it trickles down to the rest of America. A couple years later, it trickles down to the poor in America, you know? So to me, you always have to start with the innovators and the ones that have the means to adopt early. Look at what Michael Pollan has done to McDonald’s. Happy Meals replacing their fries with apples—you can’t say that’s Michael Pollan, but he’s part of the ecosystem that’s encouraging them to do that.”

He offered another example. “Whole Foods when we were kids was like something that a bunch of hippies in California did. Now it’s a whole industry,” Dr. Parkinson said. “Jamie Oliver didn’t exist. Rapha, which is really kickass bicycling gear in London, teamed up with Paul Smith to design clothes that you can wear to a business meeting. I think that’s absolutely amazing.”

AMONG NEW YORK’S CREATIVE SET, Dr. Parkinson already has a few followers and friends who think he can pull it off.

“When you talk about good design and what kind of audience you can find through that, in a certain sense, quality is elitist,” acknowledged Benjamin Palmer, CEO of the interactive agency Barbarian Group. “But Whole Foods or Starbucks, it was just a way to convince everyone that coffee should be pretty good, actually. In 2008, Facebook was an elitist hipster little thing and now everybody is doing it.” That said, he added, “I’m not sure how quickly anything Jay’s working on could achieve that.”

Mr. Palmer is a regular attendee at Dr. Parkinson’s popular backyard parties, which attract a number of prominent techies. “He’s got this eclectic, intellectual geekdom,” noted Aubrey Sabala, who heads up Facebook’s consumer marketing team in Palo Alto. In addition to the tech set, Ms. Sabala said, you’ll see folks like comedian Reggie Watts show up. “The conversations that are happening are not just nerdy coding stuff,” she added. “It’s the theory of technology and how it could be applied to—it sounds nerdy, but there’s wine.”

Friends and followers of Dr. Parkinson’s, who devotedly comment on and “heart” his daily Tumblr posts, buy the Michael Pollan vision, even if they’re not exactly sure how he will get there.

“I just see him as a household name,” Ms. Sabala said. “I’d love to see him on a White House Council for Health or influencing decisions in Congress.”

Others are hard-pressed to envision how a prescription for better health that fails to grapple with the poor or infirm could have any real effect on the problem. “I think it’s viable for those that can afford it, but there’s a large base of people who can’t—people who aren’t making $100,000 a year,” said Leslie Ziegler, creative director of Rock Health, an accelerator for health start-ups based in San Francisco. “We’ve seen the wealthy go out of pocket for a long time already.”

Dr. Parkinson shrugged off the criticism. “You can beat your head at trying to figure out solutions for, like you said, a creaky system,” he acknowledged, “or you could design things that people want, and if they can afford it, they can afford it.”

As it happened, that was one of the challenges for Hello Health: while patients seemed willing to pay the subscription fees, doctors balked at the cost of a social platform that didn’t allow customers to pay with health insurance.

Having shuttered its incubators in Williamsburg and Manhattan in 2010 and largely stopped courting media attention, Hello Health’s software is now both HIPAA-compliant for insurers and designated as “meaningful use,” which means Medicare and the federal government will subsidize the cost of adoption. “The idea that Jay had sounds so simple, but health care is a land mine,” said Hello, Health CEO Nathanial Findlay, who counts BlueCross BlueShield as an institutional investor. “You have to be very, very careful about which toes you’re stepping on.”

That doesn’t seem like a big worry for Dr. Parkinson. He said he’d recently met with Tumblr about the possibility of creating a concierge medical service for the start-up’s staffers. “A doctor friend for their employees that they can call, email, text questions. We’ll set up appointments with our favorite groups of doctors in the city.” He described the plan as “a layer on top of insurance that would work within their insurance network.”

As for the physicians, Dr. Parkinson has been building a list via Tumblr, posting a call for “forward-thinking creative doctors” to join his tribe. (He said 1,500 signed up to be Doctors of the Future.) “As in everything there’s a technology-adoption curve,” he explained. “If you gather together all these really innovative, creative, young, earlier-adopter types, something interesting can happen.”

If the Tumblr arrangement gets approved, he imagines it will be duplicated by other start-ups around the city. If not, he’ll try something else.

Toward the end of the afternoon, The Observer migrated inside Dr. Parkinson’s railroad apartment for a tour. Next to a mini bedside filing cabinet, containing curios from his medical antiquities collection, stood a tall red industrial cart with an iMac monitor on top. “That’s one of the other things that I would like to do—start a company that makes handmade, beautiful standing desks,” he said. “They’re all geeky and gross, made in China. Or sort of do-it-yourself, bad looking things. I want to make a whole, like, really beautiful standing desk company.”

-ntiku@observer.com

Barbarian at the boarding gates

Rick Webb is ready for a roadtrip. "D.C, Richmond, North carolina, Kennedy space center, Miami, Orlando, SF, Chapel  Hill, Philly, Boston, SF, Seattle, then home a week, then Asbury park, Austin, Atlantic city, SF, LA," he told Betabeat this morning about his plans for the next two months. "I think that's most of it."

Mr. Webb has been with The Barbarian Group since he helped found the company in 2001, and has been primarily responsible for developing the firms celebrated “secret-sauce”. In the last year he has become a much more active tech investor and says he's ready for a new challenge, although he won't say yet  what that is. "I am consciously undecided. I figure I've done the same thing for so long I need to decompress before I even think about doing anything else."

Knowing Mr. Webb is an acolyte of the Four Hour Body, we wondered if this trip would be some combination of new aged mysticism and cyber quantification in search of his next big mission. "It's not like some vision quest or anything. Mainly seeing old friends and weddings."

We hear from sources that the search for a replacement is already underway, but probably won't become official for a little while. Pass on any intel to tips@betabeat.com

NEW YORK  CITY'S START-UP SCENESTERS

Mr. Webb traced the outbreak back to the carbo-loading marathon that is South by Southwest. Or “beer and taco week,” as Mr. Webb described it. He and several other techies had recently become disciples of The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman, a life-hacking manual written by Tim Ferriss that distills a decade of experiments into chapters about slow carbs, self-tracking and, yes, how to make a woman orgasm in 15 minutes.

The book is a follow-up to Mr. Ferriss’s wildly popular debut, The 4 Hour Work Week, which also came with its own garrulous subtitle: “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich.” Mr. Ferriss’s second installment purports to help readers “reach their genetic potential in six months” and “lose more fat than a marathoner by bingeing,” featuring seductive advice like “How to Lose 20 Pounds in 30 Days Without Exercise.” The near-600-page tome climbed up the New York Times’s best-sellers list over Christmas and has clung to the top 10 of Hardcover Advice & Misc. since. But judging by the uptick in “cheat day” tweets over the past few weeks and our sudden familiarity with the body fat percentage and breakfast habits of local start-up types, the diet—sorry, body-hacking lifestyle—has taken a few months to fully infiltrate the New York tech ecosystem.

An Old School MIT Hacker Gives us His Top Ten Hacks in History

Although better-known as a music festival, SXSW's 10-day affair in Austin also serves as a petri dish for start-up founders to culture their latest app with eager early adopters. To stay on the no-sugar bandwagon during SXSW’s 24-hour party cycle, Mr. Webb looked to another high-profile New York techie also in attendance, Michael Galpert, co-founder of Aviary, a Madison Square-based photo-editing site. Mr. Galpert knew he would need some kind of support group. So, like any self-respecting start-up founder, he found a way to automate the process.

GroupMe, a New York-based group messaging app, was heavily-hyped heading into SXSW. Mr. Galpert decided to use it to set up a public SMS group to text out what he was eating to fellow techies like Mr. Webb and “my boy,” Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai, arguably one the most recognizable faces out of the city’s tech scene. Mr. Galpert sent out messages like “You can eat here” or “This bar doesn’t have wine.”

“That was an important one,” notes Mr. Webb. (Did we mention you get two glasses of wine every night on this thing? Big selling point for folks who see every elbow-graze as a networking opportunity.)

The buzz around GroupMe, which eventually brought home SXSW’s breakout prize, was bubbling up. “Everybody’s trying the software out. They see this group with me and Galpert and Naveen and they join it to see what we’re talking about. Then they realized it was about men’s dieting,” said Mr. Webb, disintegrating into raspy belly laugh. Men’s dieting? “Well, it was a group of five dudes. They’re like, ‘What are you guys doing?’” Even Mr. Selvaduari was befuddled.  He put the group on mute.

“It probably seems like a cult, huh?” Mr. Webb asked The Observer, his deep laugh reverberating through the phone. Well, maybe more like an infomercial.

The word cult (or “cult-y” or “cultish”) came up repeatedly when we asked start-up founders, venture capitalists and developers why The 4 Hour Body was so popular with the city’s newly forged creative class. No one mentioned the sex advice. “Haha. Everyone’s read that chapter, but so far I don’t know anyone who’s claimed to try it,” Mr. Webb typed via gChat. Another acolyte, Meghan Keane, a former tech reporter and editorial director of B5Media, put it more pointedly: “If you’re staring at/thinking about sex diagrams while having sex, you’re probably doing it wrong.”

If you forgo the sex chapters, questionable tips on holding your breath longer than Houdini, and unapproved Chinese supplements (the readers we spoke to do), the slow carbs and kettlebell regime doesn’t sound that different from, say, the South Beach diet or Power 90 Extreme. Rather, the biggest difference seems to be who, exactly, is downloading it onto their Kindle or iPhone.

Mr. Webb, who’s been a 4HB-er since January, said about 20 of his fellow Barbarians have now read the book. In late July, when Whitney Hess, who has designed user experiences for start-ups like Boxee and Seamless, tweeted, “What are the chances I vomit during cheat day tomorrow?” she CC’d seven other start-up folks, including First Round Capital’s principal, Charlie O’Donnell, and four members of New Work City, the co-working space in Chinatown where a growing cell of 4HB followers regularly plug in their laptops. “Tim’s use of social media probably drives a lot of usage,” Mr. O’Donnell told The Observer. “It’s the only diet I see with a hashtag.”

The tech appeal of The 4 Hour Body also lies in Mr. Ferriss’s personal brand. No optimization aficionado worth his real-time productivity app would be caught dead without The 4 Hour Work Week on his bookshelf. The man Wired magazine once called the “greatest self-promoter in the world” also comes dude-approved. Everything from the cover to Mr. Ferriss’s extreme experimentation barks: It’s not a diet, it’s a life hack, brah. The emphasis on quantifying progress using spreadsheets and tools like Fitbit, a sleep and fitness tracker you can wear around your wrist, also helps sell the idea that The 4 Hour Body is all about optimization, the same way you’d track the financials or traffic for a new web feature. We didn’t meet any 4HB-ers who attended the first-ever Quantified Self conference in Mountain View this May, but we imagine there was some overlap.

For New York techies in particular, however, Mr. Ferriss’s weight-loss philosophy happens to have arrived at a moment of reckoning. Between the late nights and the office kegerators, the first flush of the start-up lifestyle can play out with the same limit-testing zeal as leaving your parents’ house for the college dorm. Now with some experience under their belts, techies are stepping away from their keyboards and deciding to do something about that “founder 15.”

“It goes along with the hacker culture of optimizing and perfecting all different kinds of your life,” said Mr. O’Donnell from First Round’s conference room above Union Square Park. “The tech community in general is unsatisfied with the status quo and wants to find hacks and cheats,” he added, fidgeting with the water bottle that accompanied him on his 9.2-mile bike ride from Bay Ridge that morning. “This is like when they used to play video games and figured out the Contra code: Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right B, A, Start.” The 4 Hour Body operates a self-serve menu of hacks. Even Mr. Ferriss acknowledges there’s no need to read all 592 pages, although the hardcover edition does make a handy kettlebell alternative.

“IN MY CASE, IT WAS MORE LIKE THE FOUNDER 30,” said Mark Webster, who started his own interactive design consultancy, Kickstart Concepts, back in 2009, and is currently working on another venture. Mr. Webster got a copy of The 4 Hour Body when he attended Mr. Ferriss’s launch party in December. “It was at that horrible nightclub, Greenhouse, where there’s always tech parties.” Mr. Webster said he hadn’t seen a critical mass of compatriots on the diet, but a behavioral switch had definitely been flipped. “That whole Mountain Dew late-night pizza culture is dying out. When I go on business breakfast, we’re all ordering egg whites.”

“Maybe it is tech’s dirty little secret, because I’ve seen a lot of people opening their burritos lately,” he added, describing a recent tech lunch, “We were basically standing around some lecture, they got sandwiches, and everyone goes to throw the bread away and eat the filling.”

As evidence of the healthy-office trend, Mr. Webb said, just last month four employees asked him to swap out their office chairs for standing desks at the Barbarian Group. “Standing desks are definitely in vogue right now. You know Jay Parkinson?” he asked, referring to Williamsburg doctor behind Hello, Health. “All of us read his Tumblr and he’s been going on about all this new data about sitting and how bad it is. So, yeah, you’re out all night, you think ‘I don’t need to exercise if I stood up all day.’”

Last month, in a blog post announcing its new ergonomically-optimized 5,000 sq. ft. office space on 6th Avenue, ff Venture Capital partner David Teten also mentioned standing desk, as well as subbing out desk chairs for exercise balls and wobble boards for the VC firm and start-ups that would call the space home. The next week, Mark Peter Davis, co-founder of Kohort, a service for organizing groups, wrote a blog post about office culture entitled, “Why We Do Push-Ups.”

DATA NERDS KNOW that adding variables requires measurement to see what works. “Oh, yeah, personal informatics? I love that shit,” said Mr. Webb. “We all have Daytum and RescueTime. Do you know that one? It’s a personal productivity thing for your computer. It tracks how much time you spend on each program. You look at your stats and you’re like, oh, I spent half my week on Facebook.”

Mr. Webb lost his Fitbit, but he’s created his own system. “I have a spreadsheet in Evernote where I do all the abdomen and leg and arm measurements each weekend and still measure my weight every day. You lose weight so fast, it’s rewarding. I keep it all on a giant spreadsheet and chart it out.” He uses the Withings scale to weigh himself. “Of course we all have it. It’s a scale with Wi-Fi in it that sends your weight to a personal informatics site, which is awwwwwwwwesome.”

Ms. Hess, a self-described numbers person,who got into the 4 Hour Body after watching fellow New Work City denizens Tony Bacigalupoand Fredrick Selby encourage each other by texting photos of cheat day meals and emailing support, says she’s just as into the self-quantifying aspect. “As a curvy woman I did a few different measurements in my torso--butt, hips, belly button, and waist--and then I did bust and I did face. My friends were like, what’s ‘face'?!” Ms. Hess, a pretty, diminutive redhead, told The Observer, moving her hand up her body as she listed each area. “I get puffy in my cheeks when I gain a few pounds, so I put the tape measure around my neck and under my ears and then around to just over my mouth to see what the horizontal circumference would be,” she says, miming the movement. “I tweeted it and people were like, how do you measure your face? They thought I was doing it vertically, like to see how big my chins were.”

After adopting the plan three weeks ago, Ms. Hess says she’s still in the euphoria stage although she’s heard it takes woman longer to drop the weight. “It definitely skews tech and that’s because of Tim. I’d also say it skews very male,” she explained. “There are not a lot of diet books if any out there that a man would be caught dead reading on the subway. But The 4 Hour Body, it sounds like something futuristic, it sounds like Superman.”

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