Ypulse Interview: Guy Kawasaki
Posted by meredith on 05-26-2009
Today’s Ypulse Interview is with venture capitalist/Twitter star Guy Kawasaki who Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup attendees can catch next week(!!) moderating The Totally Wired Youth Entrepreneur Panel. Don’t want to miss the sure-to-be inspiring session? Save a last minute seat and register today!
Ypulse: What advice would you give a young entrepreneur today? What steps would you take if you were starting now?
Guy Kawasaki: Entrepreneurs should focus on creating prototypes—as opposed to PowerPoint pitches, Excel forecasts, and Word business plans—and get going. It’s never been cheaper to do this because there’s a lot of talent available, most tools are Open Source, and marketing with Facebook and Twitter is free. The time to develop great stuff is not when economic conditions improve. Instead, you should have it ready to go the moment the recession ends.
YP: Could you describe a humbling experience you went through when first starting out? What did you learn from it?
GK: I have a humbling experience almost every day. This is the nature of entrepreneurship: if you can’t handle humbling, if not humiliating experiences, you should stay on the porch. You could make the case that my ultimate humbling experience is that Windows has 95% market share and Macintosh has 5% market share. What can be more humbling than that?
I learned two things: first, the best product doesn’t necessarily win. Second, winning doesn’t require the best product.
YP: What can older companies learn from businesses started by Gen Y?
GK: It’s not that older companies can learn things from a specific generation. The truth is that established companies can always learn from new ones. The lesson that every company should heed is that success is a two-edged sword. It’s great to achieve success, but it also breeds maintenance of the status quo. Very few companies have cannibalized their success and continued to innovate.
YP: You’ve become quite a Twitter celebrity. Any quick tips for young entrepreneurs who want to use Twitter to promote their businesses?
GK: Twitter is the wild, wild west. It is a new medium that is free, fast and ubiquitous. Young entrepreneurs should use it in any way that they can and worry about the consequences later. A historical perspective is useful: Many “experts” considered banner ads as heresy—much too blatant, irritating, blah blah blah. They offended many people’s sensibilities of what the web was for. Now, who gives a shiitake?
The starting point for using Twitter is search. Young entrepreneurs should maintain an ongoing search of their company name, product name and industry keywords. Then they should use search results to contact potential customers, solicit feedback and assistance, and generally develop business with Twitter.
YP: How can Alltop, your latest venture, be useful to Millennials?
GK: Alltop is an online magazine rack organized by topics. We have more than 600 ranging from adoption to zoology with baseball, food, branding, music, and wine in between. Millennials should use Alltop as an alternative to bookmarking lots of sites and visiting them when they remember. We aggregate all that is new about a topic and provide it on one page.
The fundamental question that we answer for any topic is, “What’s happening.” For example, if you wanted to know how many songs Apple has sold through iTunes, you’d use Google. If you wanted to know what’s happening in music in general, you’d use Music.alltop.com.
More on Guy
Guy Kawasaki is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of nine books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.
Categorized under: 2009 Mashup
May 29th, 2009 at 1:03 am
[...] continue to persevere, be positive and get good advice. Here’s some good general advice from VC Guy Kawasaki: and columnist for Entrepreneur magazine, Scott Gerber : -Graduates should get a part-time job and [...]