Guy Kawasaki only needs two words to tell you what he does: empower entrepreneurs. He’s followed his own advice – trading in a mission statement for a mantra – and come up with a short phrase that describes his ventures. In a world where everything is done to excess, Kawasaki says it’s important to make only a few words spring to mind when your user or customer utilizes your product or service. Overly long mission statements filled with fluff phrasing – that companies often pay tens of thousands for! - are rarely ever even seen by the customer, much less used to reflect what the companies actually do for the consumer.
Some might say paring down all Kawasaki’s ventures into two words is overly modest and simplistic. He is, after all a former Apple Fellow and evangelist, a writer, blogger, founder of a VC firm, and entrepreneur.
When his first stint with Apple was up, Kawasaki began Fog City Software, then sold a product created by the company to Claris.
After leaving Apple a second time, Kawasaki founded Garage Technology Ventures – a venture capital firm. He also wrote several books, including “The Art of the Start.” Aside from speaking to entrepreneurs about starting businesses, he continues to found companies of his own, following the rules he preaches. Namely, that there are only three reasons why you should start a business:
To increase quality of life
To right a wrong
To prevent the end of something good
When beginning his most recent venture – a site called Truemors - he followed his own rules for starting a business and created the site to democratize information. He started the site by putting only about $30,000 into it – dispelling a myth that you have to have a lot of money to start a company.
He’s set out to dispel a lot of other myths along the way. For example, the idea that VC firms are a good way to go to get start-up money. Kawasaki says computer hardware and software, semiconductors, communication, and biotechnology account for 81 percent of all venture capital dollars. He goes on to quote a statistic that the odds that a start-up company will get VC money are about one in 4,000.
But none of these facts or myths are reasons why someone with a good idea shouldn’t go forward with a well-thought-out business – just make sure it fits the criteria needed to theoretically make it successful.
He also has very minimalist theories about giving presentations about your business – utilizing the 10-20-30 rule. This refers to the number of slides, the length of the slide presentation, and the size of the font.
When it comes to making hiring decisions, he says he has very different ideas from other venture capitalists. He encourages people to hire candidates who love the product or service – not necessarily those that have the specific job experience or education that would qualify them for the job.
It’s perhaps these ideas and differences that have set him up as one of the industry’s most respected and sought-after speakers, entrepreneurial minds, and venture capitalists – and why it’s easy to see that he does empower entrepreneurs and encourage them to go after their passion.
Sometimes, he says, entrepreneurs are “like a whale who takes in thousands of gallons of water to find some plankton!” You may have to work a long time and meet with a lot of people before your idea takes off – or before you find the perfect version of that idea.
Photo by Thomas Hawk
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