Guy Kawasaki on Founders at Work | Hacker News Reader

Guy Kawasaki on Founders at Work

blog.guykawasaki.com

32 pointsbrett22 comments

Seems like a lot of the things he finds funny are because he's a suit, and has always been a suit. He always gets modded up by the former reddit/current YC news community, and I've never figured out why, since normally the same people seem to be anti-suit.

I could tell from my coversation with him that he is genuinely a nice person. Guy hasn't always been a "suit" btw. He started out as an Apple evangelist, not a venture capitalist. He has an inspiring video that might change your view of him:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/the_art_of_the_.html

That said, his book "The Art of Start" did not live upto my expectations. I felt that it was too practical; consequently, leaving little room for creativity or sparking new ideas.

I think he always has been a suit: http://guykawasaki.com/about/index.shtml

He got his MBA, then got into evangelizing about Apple through a friend. I think I would count MBAs who evangelize about Apple as suits.

Edit: By the way, nothing about being a suit means you're not nice, of course. I would assume that most suits are probably nicer than most hackers, because it's the job of a suit to say nice things, while it's the job of a hacker to say true things.

Well, I guess I meant it more in the sense that he's always been self-deprecating about being an MBA since he likes to promote the entrepreneur over the businessman. For a suit, he understands the culture pretty well.

Yeah, Guy Kawasaki is a great example of the maxim that what really matters is "getting it", not so much "being it". Even though he's no hacker (and makes no claim to be) he understand hackers, which has made him incredibly effective at interfacing with hackers--which is really the hard problem of what he does.

"That said, his book 'The Art of Start' did not live up to my expectations."

His book Selling the Dream is a lot more out there. A lot of his ideas has since been appropriated by others, so it's not entirely fresh. Still, there are some good things in that book that you won't find anywhere else. He has this huge list of people who told famous entrepreneurs their ideas sucked. Like, "I think there's a world market for maybe 5 computers." But about 100 of those quotes in a row. Including the quote where he turns down the chance to be CEO of Yahoo! because "there's no money in search and the commute is too far." :-)

He hasn't always been a suit. But python_kiss is right, his advice is very practical. He does understand a lot about tech business, but then again he's no hacker himself.

I thought most of them were funny too. Startups are basically comedies, or at least seem so in retrospect.

One thing I've learned from YC is that practically all startups are broken in some way, no matter what face they show to the world. And novel kinds of breakage are the basis of humor.

I can relate to that. In January, without my knowledge, my newly minted startup hit Digg's frontpage. What followed was an entourage of hungry geeks that basically killed my shared hosting account. It took about 3 days for my site to recover with an upgraded VPS server. But every hour of those 3 days left me hysterical and I couldn't sleep at all :(

But it seems funny now that I look back. Whatever made me think a shared hosting account was the way to go? `:D

"Startups are basically comedies [...]"

I've been seriously waiting for a Scrubs-style primetime comedy on startups and/or Silicon Valley-esque entrepreneur culture. Maybe one of these days, I'll get a pilot-writer and pitch the idea to a network...

"Maybe one of these days, I'll get a pilot-writer and pitch the idea to a network..."

heh, or you could always pitch to YCombinator :D

'... been seriously waiting for a Scrubs-style primetime comedy on startups and/or Silicon Valley-esque entrepreneur culture ...'

AGENT: "So tell me about the show, what's it about?"

NERD #1: "Well its 4 guys, sitting inside on computers typing, making jokes, writing code and eating pizza trying to reshape the social networks in cyberspace."

AGENT: "So do you go outside?"

GEEK #1: "No, we don't need to. I just look up 'alt.nerd.obsessive' and find the google location & look it up on google map."

AGENT: "Do you do normal things?". "You know Like go to cafe's and meet women?". "You know talk, drink coffee?"

GEEK #2: "I saw a girl this week. I've counted three this week... including the one at the 7-11". D"o you know what I'm working on? I'm optomising a ...."

NERD #2: "Don't listen to them. They're doing server side work. We are the front end guys. I own a mac. It's got an OS10-X Tiger OS with ..."

AGENT: zzz... zzz... zzz...

NERD #1: "Guys, guys your blowing it, jeez. Now look what your've done. You've put the agent to sleep. How we ever going to get on TV?"

Geek #2: "What about YouTube?"

===========

Oh yeah it's really going to catch on :)

You obviously haven't watched the IT Crowd: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=it+crowd&search=Search

I haven't, though it slightly rings a bell. I referred to the Wikipedia article on it and it reports a US pilot has just been filmed last month. I'll keep my eye on that one.

yes... very clever nerdy english show. Still waiting on series 2, "after the party" :)

Why write a script when you can just use reality? Give each startup in the next YC batch a video camera and get them to record the journey. They could either post it regularly as a video blog or save it all up and edit it into a lovely 2hour documentary. Would be great to watch and give outsiders a better idea of what startups are like. Kind of like 'Project Aardvark" [http://www.projectaardvark.com/movie/].

Kind of like, Startup.com http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/

I think "suits" like Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin are hackers-in-wolves clothing. That's why I find their opinions interesting.

IIRC, Seth Godin was a CS major in college though.

Don't forget, hacker originally meant someone who crawled around in steam tunnels. It really just means someone who explores and takes stuff apart because they want to learn how it works. That could be code, could be social systems.

"Woz (Apple). All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever."

There's a lot of poor, inexperienced people here in Cleveland. I wonder why it hasn't become a start-up hub...

Also, I've just gotten through reading a couple choice interviews from Founders at Work. These stories are true treasures. Above being insightful and inspiring for entrepreneurs, it's damned entertaining for anyone.

there's an awesome picture of his book full of stickies

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