Guy Kawasaki | Part 1 Advice for Startups and Entrepreneurs | AQ’s Blog & Grill

Announcer: AQ's Blog & Grill. Interviewer: Hi. Welcome to AQ's Blog & Grill. Very excited today to
welcome our guest, Guy Kawasaki. Guy is Skyping in from
California. Welcome. Guy Kawasaki; 12 books, you're doing a lot
of speaking, you've got Garage, you're a venture capitalist, but
you've described yourself as a father just making a living by
speaking and writing to support his family. Guy: Yeah, that's me. Interviewer: That's it. You're comfortable with the fact that you're
now the second most famous Hawaiian. Guy: We don't count Barack as a Hawaiian. Interviewer: You don't? Okay. Guy: He wasn't born there. Interviewer: Guy, you get your degree at Stanford,
in psych, and then you apply to UC Davis for law school. What happened? Guy: I actually got in to that one. The following fall, I started. I
lasted about 9 days. I hated law school, so I quit. I went back
to Hawaii, got a job, eventually, I came back to the mainland to
go to UCLA for an MBA. While I was there, I started counting
diamonds, believe it or not, for a jewelry manufacturer.

Then my
Stanford classmates showed me Macintosh and I fell in love with
Macintosh. Eventually got a job there, and the rest is
history. Interviewer: I think it one point you said
it was like a religious experience. Guy: Yes. Seeing the Macintosh for the first time was
a religious experience, definitely. Interviewer: The time that you spent with
the jewelry company, what did you learn there that helped you as an entrepreneur? Guy: I learned, arguably, some of the best
lessons there. I learned how to
sell. Entrepreneurship is very simple; somebody
has to make it, somebody has to sell it, and somebody has
to keep the wheels on the bus. That's it, that's all you have to do. I learned how to
sell. The jewelry business is about selling. Interviewer: It's funny; I teach in an MBA
program, and yet there's no courses on selling, but there is on entrepreneurship. I'm
thinking there's got to be both. Guy: Entrepreneurship is about 50% selling. The easy part is writing the
business plan, making the PowerPoint, and even, arguably,
raising money. The hard part is making the sale, and that
is the most important part.

If you are making enough sales, you don't
need a business plan, you don't need PowerPoint, you don't need
anything. Sales fixes everything. Interviewer: You've had some great advice
to entrepreneurs about their presentations and their pitches. Your 10/20/30 rule is fabulous. Why aren't business schools picking up on
it? Guy: Maybe that many of the people teaching
those courses are not entrepreneurs nor investors. I don't know. If they think 60
slides is what it takes, they're 50 off. Less is more. Basically
in life, less is more. Interviewer: When you're sitting in an audience
or at a presentation by some entrepreneurs, what is it that you are
looking for as a venture capitalist? Guy: I am primarily looking for a product
that I fall in love with.

It's
that simple, and yet that complex. It's hard to explain exactly
why or what, but it's along those lines. It really truly is
along those lines. Interviewer: There's something magic, I guess,
that happens between the relationship between the founder, the product,
and then the investor. It's almost like voodoo. Guy: It's almost like falling in love. Like falling in love, 2 men could
meet the same woman. Let's say this woman has 2 teenage kids; in
fact, make it the worst case, 2 teenage boys. One man might say,
"Oh, my God. I don't want to get in a relationship with
this woman because look at all this baggage; instant
family, 2 teenage boys.

Who wants to get involved with that?" Another man
might meet the same woman with 2 the teenage boys and say, "Wow. I love this woman. I think it's so great she has kids and I
couldn't be happier." Same woman, same kids, same everything. The same thing is true with companies. One investor can look at
a company and say, "They don't have a world-class team. They
don't have a proven market. They don't have a proven business
model." Another investor could say, "Wow. This is really a lot
of potential. There's some hair on the deal, but if it were
perfect, they wouldn't need me." You can fall in love with the
same deal. I think that's how it works. Interviewer: Bootstrapping versus getting
VC funding, Series A, or whatever. What's happening there? Do you think too many people
are trying to get right into the VC market to quickly? Guy: To me, the VC market, I think VC's only
fund a few thousand deals a years, and obviously, millions of companies
start a year.

The VC
market is a very different game. It is a game where you're
trying to create the next Google. Without being on crack, you
can see that you might be doing, I don't know, $200 million in 5
years. That eliminates a lot of businesses, such
as consultancies, retailers, restaurants. I'm not saying any of
these businesses are not going to be successful. I'm just saying
the venture capital game is for something that is going to be
the next Google, so that eliminates a lot of companies. Luckily today, most of the things you need
as an entrepreneur are free or cheap. Tools are free or cheap.

People, virtual
teams are . . . I don't know if they're cheap, but it's not like
before, where you had to rent a building and bring people in and
all this stuff. Commercial real estate is less necessary. There's incubators. Then marketing is free or cheap with
Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and stuff like that. As you go down
the line . . . you don't have to buy servers and racks of stuff
because now you use Google Drive, use S3, use Rackspace or
something like that.

Basically if you go down the list,
everything is free or cheap so you need less money. That's why
venture capitalists are less necessary. Then to really do your company right, you
should bootstrap, you should use Kickstarter, or Indie GoGo and
get that first round that way. Venture capital is not what it used to be. It's like
crack or like cocaine; not that I've ever done either of those
things, but it's an addictive thing. Eventually, it's going to
kill you. Interviewer: One of the things you're most
famous for is being the evangelist for Apple. How do you think your . . based on the
social media which you are a maven of, how would that have
changed the world for you as an evangelist. It is just that much
easier now to . . Guy: I think it would have been easier to
evangelize Macintosh with social media. This is of course, assuming that Apple would
have let me do what I do on social media. Today, Apple is antisocial. Who
knows? Announcer: AQ's Blog & Grill..

As found on YouTube

Visit my site for more!

Leave a Comment