Mr. McClure

#RealTalk Dave McClure, our favorite giver of zero fucks, went on a bit of a Twitter tear the other day. It started with the admission that he'd "just had really hard tough love talk w/ startup founder. fucking sucks, but better harsh truth than bullshit 'you'll make it work' lies." He didn't stop there, adding that "what really sucks is none of other investors (incl big lead VC) have the balls 2 tell them its not going 2 fucking work & shut it down."

He concluded: "the Silicon Valley story is indeed the 1% story of Instagram $1B win, but also 99% broken dreams, shattered hopes & try, try again. sigh."

Okay, 'fess up: Who's the startup? Tips@betabeat.com if you wanna talk.

Not So Super Today, in unlikely historical connections: Wired reports that the decades-long legal battle over the ownership of Superman has been resolved... using the precedent set by the conclusion of Winklevoss vs. Facebook. To simplify a byzantine copyright nightmare: In 1938, the creators of Superman sold the rights for a mere $130. For decades, Jerry Siegel’s heirs have been attempting to rectify the move. In the latest chapter of the saga, they argued that an agreement reached in 2001 wasn’t finalized, meaning that the Siegel heirs could press for more rights and more money. Lots and lots of money. It also presented a potential legal problem for the studio with Man of Steel, which is scheduled to hit screens this summer.

In 2008, the courts sided with the Siegels. That’s been overturned, though, thanks in part to a ruling against the Winklevosses claim that an earlier settlement with Facebook hadn’t actually been binding. Warner Bros. now has the rights to make the movies free and clear--and without having to hand over more moola to Siegel's heirs. Hope the Winklevii and Mark Zuckerberg are proud of themselves for this.

It Ain’t Me, Babe Last year’s coverage of the booth babes of CES took a more circumspect, critical view. “That Mad Men bullshit doesn't represent who we are as an industry anymore, and it certainly doesn't represent what we should aspire to become. Technology is about the future, and this attitude is from the past,” Mat Honan wrote over at Gizmodo.

But Business Insider went back to business as usual this week with its slideshow ogling the antiquated, alienating marketing tactic.

glad we've moved past meta booth babe coverage and circled back to unironic booth babe galleries

— matt buchanan (@mattbuchanan) January 10, 2013

That wasn’t the only sexism on display. Skillcrush, the tech literacy startup, took a stab at “unpacking male tech privilege,” starting with the backlash that followed a petition to get more women on conference panels.

Indeed, blockbuster tech shows tend to surface all manner of moral quandaries, apparently, such as what happened when CNET's corporate owners intercede in news coverage to their own advantage. It was enough make Sam Biddle go straight quid pro quo.

(GIF HAT TIP: @jwherrman)

Viva Las Vegas Maybe the Buzzfeed editorial team skipped CES, but that doesn't mean head honcho Jonah Peretti missed a chance to visit Sin City. Photographic evidence comes from the unlikeliest of sources: Namely News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted that "At CES getting many brilliant presentations. So far most fun Buzzfeed."

We'd almost be afraid to hear what secrets were discussed. Our faces might melt off, like in Raiders of the Last Ark.

WTF Consider the charmed life of Kevin Rose. Sure, Digg crashed and burned (only to be resurrected by Betaworks once it was out of his hands), but Mr. Rose landed on his feet. He's now a venture partner at Google who spends his time Instagramming things like his Hawaii vacation and also this:

The caption: "Hanging with Tim Ferriss, yes this is normal."

Here's what we'd like to know: What was Mr. Rose wearing to the party? Was this, by chance, a furry party?

Open the door and influenza Could someone check on Chris Hughes? You might find him huddled in a corner at the New Republic between two bookshelves overflowing with pamphlets from the 1950s, clutching a giant bottle of hand sanitizer. Earlier this week he tweeted a link to a New York Times piece (with an xpost to Facebook) and commented that "Flu, stomach viruses, and whooping cough are at record levels this season. Reminder: wash hands compulsively."

Okay actually now we're terrified too. If you need us, we'll be looking for Mr. Hughes' Tamiflu stockpile.

Mr. Kutcher at TechCrunch Disrupt. (flickr.com/kevinkrejci)

That's according to some number crunching from PeekYou, anyway. The company has debuted a new analytics service and, to promote the product, took the time to rank Twitter's top 1,000 most influential tech investors. CEO Michael Hussey explained the methodology to VentureBeat: 

Unlike Klout’s engagement rankings, PeekAnalytics’ rankings derive from “the quality of your audience,” Hussey said. If you multiply the amount of followers someone has by the amount of people in the followers’ networks, you get a “pull quotient,” by which you can rank audience quality.

Hm, okay.

A few more, well, interesting findings:

• Al Gore (Generation Investment) sits comfortably within the top ten, at number 8. Please, no jokes about the invention of the Internet.
• At number 16, Tim Ferriss (who, when not touting his fitness strategies, makes angel investments in companies like Twitter and Posterous) outranks hometown hero Fred Wilson, who comes in at 18.
• Kevin Rose, in his new home at Google Ventures, outranks both of them at 10.
• Anil Dash (no. 23) beats Michael Arrington (no. 27).
• There are only two women--newly minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior--in the top thirty. (Pause for sad trombone sound effect.)
• It does not appear that any of PeekYou's investors made the top thirty.

We propose a slightly different, more meatspace metric: How many people, on average, surround each investor at any given party? That's where, as the kids say, shit gets real.

(Photo: Virtual Business Lifestyle)

Apple has won an injunction against Samsung, preventing the company from selling its biggest Android tablet. [AllThingsD]

A day in the life of a startup founder: "Shower and then spiritual time. I have a small shrine set up that allows me to focus on the important. I light an incense and gaze up at posters of Tim Ferriss, Kevin Rose and Warren Buffet." [Hacker News]

Zynga announced a new hub for their online games, which will probably still not do much for their stock. [Wall Street Journal]

Apparently changing your email address to @facebook.com was a "visibility" change, not a privacy change. Welcome to the wonderful world of Facebook semantics! [New York Times]

Surprise! Most of BuzzFeed's content is just repackaged Reddit posts. [Slate]

Mr. Cieplak.

This is a guest post from Gordon Cieplak, Creative Director at 8tracks and the principal of Handsome Code. You can find him @gordoncc on Twitter and grdn.cc on Tumblr, his preferred methods of distraction.

Gordon Cieplak, web designer

Email is awesome. It is the foundation for all electronic communication. (You know, after things like math, transistors, TCP/IP, etc.) Basically, every 'tech start-up' in New York is an elaborate way to send an email that says 'Hey, look at me!' or 'Hey, look at this stuff I like!'

That said, like anything awesome that man has invented (and I mean man, not woman, you raucous 'change the ratio' maniacs), it ends up becoming more of a chore than the incredible and liberating tool that it is.  But we (both men and women) only have ourselves to blame, the technology is not the culprit.

So, if you get lots of email and it's a pain in the ass to deal with it and you feel like a 'hero' when you can manage, you are not an 'inbox hero.'  You're just a technologically confused asshole, like most of us. This column really should be called 'inbox assholes,' though that sounds like the name of a niche porn site.  But I digress.

If you get lots of email that must be answered, that is an awesome problem, because that means you have responsibility.  That means somebody values your words and judgment, and that you probably get paid for those pieces of information. Being an information worker is great, because it's pretty easy, pays well, and mostly doesn't result in life-threatening illness, though I did have quite an existential malaise at my first full-time job, which was easily remedied by a quick trip to South America where just my longing for American-style pizza was enough to make me come crawling back to hyper-consumption and information overload.

Anyway, the point is that the most challenging part of being an information worker (And I mean information, not knowledge.  Knowledge is useful information, and most information work is not useful) is actually getting things done and avoiding distractions, which is hard if you have access to the internet.  With the current fucked-up system of online advertising, most of the internet is literally designed to consume as many possible seconds of your time and get you to click on irrelevant shit. And really, with all those calls to action for 'cool singles in your area,' and 'top 100 most valuable startups’ how can you really get anything done?

But on top of that, our workspaces are invaded by bullshit.  We get email all the time from social networks, digests from 'culture blogs,' and requests from Observer writers asking you to spy on startups or write guest columns for them.  How can you actually get your allotted 15 minutes of work per day done with all that?

As it so happens, I just read a book that's supposedly about working less and getting rich, but really it's about how to not use your computer like an idiot. It's called The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferris, and while you feel like a marketing/sales douche just by reading it, it has some great advice.  Mainly, close your goddamn email window for a second.

The second you don't get little notifications that you have a new message, a new IM, a new like on your sandwich photo blog, your computer suddenly becomes incredibly powerful, and you have much more time to finish all the crap you were supposed to do.

Mr. Ferris recommends initially that you check your email twice a day--start with 12 p.m. and 4 p.m., and deal with everything in a focused session of 10 to 15 minutes at those times. If you must, compose an auto-response telling people that you'll get back to them at X time and to give you a call if it's urgent. I didn't bother with that because I've always had my number in my email footer, and nothing I do is really that important or urgent. (Also, auto-responses are really, really annoying.) I did get a few more calls, but on the whole nobody noticed and while I'm not sure I'm getting more done, I am spending less time on the computer in general.

Supposedly, Mr. Ferris checks his email once a week, presumably in the form of curated summaries from his dozen virtual assistants, while training for his next extreme sports challenge or demonstrating his technique for 15 minute orgasms (see the 4-Hour Body for that one) for for an entrepreneurial bikini model conference in Thailand. Clearly, we can't all roll like Tim Ferris, but I think his basic idea of closing your Gmail window most of the time is fucking great.

To summarize:

- Don't use whatever 'priority inbox' is.  Passing off more responsibility to machines is the last thing to do.

- Don't use the Gmail/whatever web UI.  Those tend to have IM, which is an even deeper distraction.

- I recommend Sparrow if you're on a Mac. Or Mail if you don't want to spend $10.

- Put your number in your footer.

- Check your email twice a day, then close it.  Or hell, check it three times, or six times daily.  As long as you do it at some sort of regular interval and mostly don't have it open to distract you.

- Get your shit done with your newfound free time.

According to Mr. Ferris, these are all just stepping stones to working remotely (which is something I happen to do and I have to say is pretty awesome) and then ultimately creating some sort of profitable company that pays you thousands per week while you get massages in Southeast Asia and go kiteboarding. I have yet to figure that part out, but the first bit about email has already made my days much more pleasant. I hope it will for you too.

For Inbox Heroes, Betabeat is curious about your war stories, productivity tips and moments of extraordinary email. Send us an email to tips et betabeat daught com with “war on email” in the subject line and a paragraph or two (or more!) about how you deal with your influx of electronic letters.

Fitocracy CEO Mr. Wang, bottom, with CTO Mr. Talens, outside the pair's office in Soho.

IT STARTED BECAUSE BACK IN HIGH SCHOOL, Dick Talens was too fat and Brian Wang was too skinny. Or rather, Mr. Wang was “skinny fat,” meaning he had stick limbs and belly pooch, as the 25-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate explained to Betabeat during a recent visit to the Soho co-working space where the pair’s startup, the viral hit fitness game Fitocracy, is headquarted.

Mr. Talens and Mr. Wang sit next to each other in a sunny corner alongside their gym bags, with greasy athletic shoes tucked under their desks, an economy-sized bin of almonds and a filing cabinet of goodies such as protein powder, vitamins, oats and Splenda.

Mr. Talens, also 25, is muscular and broad-shouldered. There is hardly any resemblance between the 230-pounder he was in high school and the shredded CTO we found outfitted in a pair of flip-flops, jeans and a backwards baseball cap, typing code on an IBM Thinkpad which he had elevated atop a defunct Dell notebook. While Mr. Talens reclined backward as far as his office chair would permit, Mr. Wang, who has the physique of a welterweight, was a bit hyper. He powerwalked between his Mac and a conference room, preparing for a phone call with a potential business partner, pausing to dump into a thermos of milk what looked like enough powder to make pancakes.

Both Mr. Talens and Mr. Wang are computer nerds who enjoy the genre of online diversion known as “massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” or MMORPGs, like Everquest and World of Warcraft, in which players create a character who grows more powerful the more they play. “I remember one summer, it was like before junior year,” Mr. Talens said. “I’d literally wake up in the morning, play Everquest, like, eat a few times in the day, and just go to bed. And that’s all I did. In a different life, I’m like that kid who got blood clots and died in his room.”

While they still enjoy computer games, at some point the boys transitioned from an addiction to games to an addiction to fitness. Even before they met, they pored over the same online forums where bodybuilders were sharing fitness tips, personal statistics and before-and-after pictures. They met at Penn, over dinner with mutual friends. “It’s actually a very romantic story,” Mr. Talens said. He noticed what Mr. Wang was eating--tuna and broccoli--and thought, dude, he’s like me.

He started prodding Mr. Wang about his diet. “I was like, ‘Are you doing this for health reasons?’ I was trying to flush it out of him,” Mr. Talens said. “And he literally said, ‘I’m cutting right now.’ Cutting is the bodybuilding term for focusing on losing fat. And I was like, holy shit. I’ve never heard anyone offline talk in these terms before. This is only stuff I’ve heard online. And we became best friends ever since.”

The two now live together in Clinton Hill, having learned how to tolerate each other’s constant company after a few hellish months training together for the Mr. Penn bodybuilding contest. A little over a year ago, they quit their corporate jobs (Mr. Talens was working for Comscore and Mr. Wang was slogging through a gig as a product manager at a Connecticut-based agency) and moved to Brooklyn with the plan to launch a startup. After kicking around a few ideas—gift recommendations, sponsored weight-loss contest—they hit on Fitocracy, a website for tracking personal fitness in a way that resembles a game. Fitocracy rewards users for working out the same way Everquest rewards players for killing dragons.

The basic functionality, however, is logging your workouts. Type in an activity, “push-up,” for example, and Fitocracy will suggest categories--”push-up,” “handstand push-up,” “reverse grip triceps pushdown”--and pop up a description of how to do the exercise correctly. Betabeat, at 5'0" and 95 lbs., received 52 points for entering 20 push-ups. Eighty-two more points, and we’d be promoted to level three. You can add notes to each activity and comment on other users’ exercises. After logging enough workouts, users will start to receive badges, like “No Stranger to the Rack,” for performing a barbell squat for 1.2x your body weight, or “Hello There!” for posting ten comments on Fitocracy. Users can also follow each other’s progress and share updates with friends, join groups and earn “achievements.”

Fitocracy launched by invitation only in February, and the crowd went wild. Users on fitness forums would start “invite trains,” threads where everyone would post their invites, and the site would get flooded with 2,000 new users from a single site. Last month, the immensely-popular nerd web comic XKCD featured a Fitocracy sex joke, which brought in so much traffic that the site crashed. Fitocracy now has about 55,000 users, with almost 60,000 more on the wait list. The startup hired an engineer and early power user and was looking for angel investment two months ago; the founders may be ready to announce funding soon.

Mr. Talens works out three times a week for about 45 minutes, doing mostly deadlifts, squats and bench presses—but fitness is 80 percent diet, he told Betabeat. “I try not to be too anal about it, but I try to keep my feeding period from 12 to eight,” he said, and only eats two meals a day, which he says has several benefits including prolonged lifespan and a higher naturally-occurring GH level when the body is in “fast mode.” The popular idea that one should eat six smaller meals throughout the day in order to keep the metabolism running is “bro science,” he said—folklore that gets passed around the gym.

Eating two meals keeps him from thinking about food all day, he said. “Those meals are also glorious, which I’ll show you in a second, for somebody who likes to eat like me,” he said. “When I say I like to eat, I mean I like to eat huge quantities of food.” He giggled. “Like, enormous quantities of food.” Giggle. “I can make it when ever you want to take a little tour of the kitchen.”

We agreed, and Mr. Talens pushed back his chair and padded over to the kitchen, where he used a scale to measure 16 ounces of cooked chicken breasts, followed by three cups of white rice; opened a can of black beans, and extracted two strawberry-frosted Pop Tarts from a box, put each food on its own paper plate and microwaved it all. He brought the feast into the break room and began devouring it with plastic silverware, stacking the plates as he finished each course. Mr. Wang joined us. He had no lunch. “If I’ve worked out that day, then I’ll eat right after and that will probably be my biggest meal of the day,” he said. “The other day I just had a whole bunch of oatmeal and whey protein. And today I had a whole bunch of ice cream sandwiches and whey protein.”

Mr. Wang doesn’t always have time to eat at work, he said, although he keeps chicken, boiled eggs, tuna and some veggies around. The boys also schedule a regular FreshDirect order delivery to the office. “We’ll make a beeline for the tuna cans,” Mr. Wang said. “They’re coming in today!” said Mr. Talens.

Fitocracy hit the web in an opportune moment. Startup guru Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4 Hour Workweek” has made body-hacking trendy among the web-savvy set with his current bestseller “The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman,” and an instructional blog post titled “From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks.”

Betabeat noticed a copy of the book on Fitocracy’s filing cabinet. But when we mentioned it, the founders started rigorously shaking their heads. “That was a gift,” they said.

“What Tim Ferriss has done is surface a lot of stuff that fitness geeks have known for a long time,” Mr. Wang said charitably. “Even though some of the claims he makes in there are completely outrageous and misleading.”

The boys pointed to the blog post about gaining 34 pounds of muscle in a month as an example. A lot of the weight Mr. Ferriss gained was probably water weight, they explained, and the fact that he was a wrestler in high school and already had a muscular frame would have helped accelerate his progress.

The fitness industry is also rife with sham before-and-after pictures, they said.

Mr. Talens pulled out his cell phone. “Here’s a before-and-after,” he said, showing Betabeat a picture of a bloated belly in a mirror, followed by a picture of the same belly, in the same mirror wearing the same basketball shorts, but with a chiseled six-pack. “Guess how many weeks apart that was?” We had no idea. “That is six hours apart,” he said. The chiseled picture was actually the before shot, he explained. “This is like, in the morning when abs were still visible, I was like okay, I’ll take a picture of myself,” he said. “And then, six hours later”—he tabbed to the bloated picture. “That’s just water weight! Water and food.”

“We don’t want to turn this into a Tim Ferriss bashing session,” Mr. Wang said, so we moved on to prodding the boys for fitness tips. “What should a person who smokes, gets irregular sleep and doesn’t exercise do to be more fit?” we asked. “Stop smoking!” Mr. Talens said, incredulously. “And get regular sleep. That’s really important.”

Playing computer games also seems to help. Mr. Wang still has time to play Starcraft, he admitted to Betabeat, although he gets to the office every day at 8:30 a.m.

Mr. Talens, however, only plays Fitocracy. “I’m the exact same person I was when I was a fat kid,” he said. “Except instead of leveling up my character, I’m leveling up myself.”

Want to try Fitocracy? Click here. Invite code: BETABEAT.

I totally got to fourth base.

It's a scenario playing out for busy wantrepreneurs across the nation. You settle into bed with your copy of the Tim Ferriss tome, The 4 Hour Body, but can't make heads or tails of the section comparing part of the female anatomy to "an Imperial Guard from Star Wars." Your lady is due home in twenty minutes and you want to make sure to get this right the first time.

Well if you're savvy enough to be reading #4HB on the Kindle, you can ask Mr. Ferris directly. Amazon's new @author feature lets readers fire off questions to a writer's Twitter and Amazon homepage without ever leaving the book.

Amazon rolled out a social network for Kindle readers back in March, which recently earned a rave review from A VC Fred Wilson. Increasingly Amazon is supplanting the forums and reading groups publishers have been trying to build, and doing so with a network scale and hardware integration that few publishers can match.

While the Kindle has been a success and sales of e-books are growing fast, the real tipping point could be the release of an Amazon tablet this fall. Right now Apple dominates the market and the units produced by competitors have fallen flat with critics and consumers. There is a huge market for a number two player if Amazon can deliver a compelling experience at an affordable price.

If they are truly interested in satisfying their customers, of course, Amazon should get a little advice from @tferriss. A "15-minute orgasm" Mr. Ferriss? More power to you.

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.”

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