guy kawasaki

1.

Avoid negative people. This refers to the folks who are likely to express the negative stereotype that first-time entrepreneurs don’t know what to do. (This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to avoid venture capitalists because they never tell you what they really think.) Certainly you should avoid “proven” older entrepreneurs who don’t remember how clueless they were when they were “your age” and now consider themselves experts.
2.

Ignore the people you cannot avoid. As George Orwell should have said, “Ignoring is bliss.” If you think about what they said, it could lead to what they said, so figuring out what to ignore is as important as what to listen to. The best way to ignore negative people is to bury yourself in your work—to prototype like hell. When I’m writing, nothing enters my brain but the need to eat and pee—and sometimes not even that.
3.

Invoke positive stereotypes. Positivity can enhance performance according to the article—it’s “fighting fire with fire” as the saying goes. For example, entrepreneurs could invoke the positive stereotype that a couple of guys/gals who love technology and aren’t “proven” entrepreneurs can start companies like Apple, Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Perhaps this is one reason that Silicon Valley rocks as a place for young people to start companies: the wunderkind stereotype is a very positive one here.
4.

Frame, or reframe, yourself. Finally, you can control how strongly you identify with any social group. For example, you don’t have to identify with “first-time entrepreneurs.” You could more strongly define yourself in terms of being a mom, dad, wife, husband, scholar, programmer, marketer, or whatever works for you. Or, in my hockey experience, not as a lousy beginning skater, but a 53-year-old guy from Hawaii whose peers are mostly playing golf if they are exercising at all.

I'd say it depends on thee business and opportunity, but Microsoft, Google, Youtube, and Facebook do all match the following...

Quoted: I once heard Mike Moritz of Sequoia explain what kind of entrepreneurs he wanted to invest in. I’m paraphrasing: “Guys under thirty who are building a product that they themselves want to use.”

Quoted: Marcus spends about two hours a day in his underwear managing a free dating website that gets twelve billion page views a year. He is the only employee, and he only has one server. And by the way, he makes $5-6 million/year with Google ads.
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I’ve moderated many panels in my time, and if I had to choose one that entrepeneurs should watch, this is it.

Quoted: $12,107.09. In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.

Guy Kawasaki's review of "The Long Tail". He highly recommends the book (so the post title is misleading). I guess his point is that the entrepreneur still has work to do in defining the "how" after reading this book.

Quoted: But it’s one thing to write about, or read about, a successful company after-the-fact and analyze how it achieved success. It’s another to build that successful company from scratch. Everyone knows that the innovator’s dilemma is to find a tipping point in order to cross the chasm. The question is not “why?” but “how?”.

A link to the PDF of the first chapter of Guy Kawasaki's "Art of the Start." I've been hearing good things.

Quoted: The article postulates that people have two kinds of mindsets: growth or fixed. People with the growth mindset view life as a series of challenges and opportunities for improving. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are “set” as either good or bad. The issue is that the good ones believe they don’t have to work hard, and the bad ones believe that working hard won’t change anything.

Quoted: As you can see, it’s a gold mine for great stories about entrepreneurship. Here is a list of some of my favorites. The major lesson: Entrepreneurship is all about tactics, hootspah, not knowing that things are not done “this way,” and making do with not enough money. You’ll LOL at points and wonder if a better title would not have been Flounders at Work.

Guy Kawasaki's observations on Mumbai...

Quoted: Just returned from a few days in Mumbai. What a mind-expanding experience! I was there to speak for an IBM conference for middleware vendors and customers.