The deals may be flowing, but the founders are on ice.
Loading audio narration…
Billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper backed Tesla, Skype, and Twitch. The early investments made him billions and boosted the VC firm he founded, Draper Associates. He recently looked for his next big deal in an unusual place: an ice bath.
“I took 52 pitches in 52 minutes at below 40 degrees,” Draper wrote on X on Wednesday. “Welcome to my office.”
Draper also included a photo of the ice bath. Four people sat around the cold tub, looking directly at Draper. Floating chunks of ice surrounded them.
In an email to Business Insider, Draper wrote that the pitch session took place at an “undisclosed location where we do Draper University survival.” The program trains the next generation of founders and once spawned a reality TV show.
“Pitching in stressful situations allows entrepreneurs to relax when they need to,” he wrote.
Draper is not a frequent cold plunger, “but I am apparently good at it,” he wrote. He took on the 52 pitches continuously, but wrote that things became “dicey” around the 40-minute mark.
The VC hinted that some potential deals emerged from the ice bath pitches. “There are always a few that catch my imagination,” he wrote.
Silicon Valley is on a health kick. Many in the industry have embraced lifting weights and injecting peptides while cutting out alcohol. Why be a scrawny nerd when Mark Zuckerberg got ripped?
Their embrace of frigid conditions isn’t new, though. Since at least the 2010s, tech executives looking to live longer and work harder were dunking themselves in ice baths.
Cold plunges have some benefits. Shocking the senses with cold temperatures can relieve joint pain, reduce inflammation, increase energy, and decrease stress.
The jury’s still out on whether they have any concrete benefits to healthy aging. Longevity hacks may have spread nationwide, but they’re still localized in Silicon Valley, where figures like Bryan Johnson have spent millions looking for new ways to extend life.
What does Draper think of the longevity movement?
“I want to keep living,” he wrote. “I like life.”
