Don't Waste Your Time With Guy Kawasaki | Hacker News Reader

Don't Waste Your Time With Guy Kawasaki

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22 pointsmyoung824 comments

I totally agree that "Art of the Start" is a waste of time. It reads as if Guy just collected a couple years worth of notes and Powerpoint slides from his inane pep talks and grinded them up into book form. And yet, paradoxically, it is difficult to criticize Guy. The very fact that he has managed to achieve some measure of Internet renown from the warmed-over banalities in "Art of the Start" represents a certain type of business success that I can't help but begrudgingly admire.

In a strange way Guy reminds me of a fascinating series of articles about Noka Chocolate that I read some time back (http://www.dallasfood.org/modules.php?name=News&file=art... While the author of the series clearly demonstrates that Noka chocolate is grossly overpriced and deceptively marketed, I ended up respecting Noka's chutzpah for convincing so many people to pay an exponentially higher price for repackaged Bonnat chocolate.

Such is Guy. He repackages the same slogans and epigrams that you can't throw a rock in the business section of any bookstore without hitting, and yet he is perceived as a creative business author. His entrepreneurial resume shows only the Web 0.01 Nutsack that is Truemors, and yet he has convinced a respectable cross-section of our industry that he knows something about building startups. You have to respect that. Guy Kawasaki: the Noka Chocolate of Startup Gurus.

I really liked Art of the Start. I read it cover to cover in a day, and then read a couple of his previous books.

However, when reading his earlier books I noticed that a lot of the ideas had been picked up by other bloggers, e.g. Seth Godin. Because of this, the book didn't seem nearly as insightful as it would have if I read it when it was published.

I suspect the same would be true today for AotS because of all the VC bloggers. While many VCs did have blogs two years ago, most of them weren't giving that kind of practical advice at the time. Paul Kedrosky and Fred Wilson had yet to publish many of their best columns, and Venture Hacks and Presentation Zen didn't even exist. Not to mention that PG had only published the first two or three of his essays on startups, the ones in Hackers and Painters (not counting the essays on lisp/coding).

This is true and probably explains part of my frustration with the book. The first pieces I ever read on startups were PG's, so I suppose by the time I read AotS, all the points were sort of cliches.

This is silly. Guy Kawasaki is a good writer, and his books are good, inspiring books. They are not full of secrets, nor are they going to guarantee you success, but they do sum up a lot of things you need to know to be successful. Maybe you already know them, and if so, that's great! You've got a head start. Not everyone does.

I really enjoyed his Art Of The Start talk. I also found "Selling the Dream" among the best marketing books available, along-side Ogilvy on Advertising, "Focus"/"Marketing Warfare" (either one will do, as they are effectively the same theme by the same authors), and "What's the Big Idea?" by George Lois. As someone else mentioned, Seth Godin has successfully re-purposed quite a bit of "Selling the Dream" into "Permission Marketing" (and it wasn't original when Guy was pushing it over ten years ago). It doesn't mean "Permission Marketing" sucks, it just means some things are worth repeating.

That is the one thing that I can be sure benefited me greatly in pg and Guy Kawasaki's writing - the inspiration they provided.

I'd read more writing like this for inspiration alone.

Lots of Guy haters here... why? AoS is an excellent book. If you followed his "obvious" advice, you'd do well. Fact is, there really are no big secrets to being successful. All it takes a lot of effort, tenacity, ethics and perseverance. Guy's AoS captures these perfectly. Look at successful people... many of them have no formal education and no degrees from Ivy schools. WHat they do have are those qualities I mentioned above... and they excel at them. Because his book has a lot of common sense in it, that should tell you something: just do it! Persevere, release that app... get the feedback and iterate until it works and the feedback becomes positive. Never give up!

Personally I didn't get very much useful out of AoS. As others have mentioned, most of the advice was simply common sense, at least if you've already read PG's essays. I also found the writing style to be annoying and gimmicky -- one "top 5 list" after another, and terms like "make mantra" and "rainmaker", for example. In general, the book felt like it over-promised and under-delivered. For example, the book is not for "anyone starting anything", it is plainly about how to start a startup company, and not a school, charity or non-profit organization. Chapters on bootstrapping, raising venture capital, and pitching investors aren't very relevant to a typical charity organization, to the best of my knowledge. Although I bought the book with only an interest in learning about startups, there's something to truth in advertising...

Then again, I put the book down after a few chapters, as I wasn't getting anything out of it -- but in fairness, I should probably give it another try.

Not trying to be a jerk here but all books are supposed to refresh our mind and open our eyes wider. Some can be applied, some can't. It's up to the readers to use the "mantras" (mix-match) to help them to be successful.

Take PG's essays (or books). Some of us love it because it has the sense of defending and making geeks as a superstar. It goes down to whom the author is. Is he voicing our mind? Is he in our field?

If you're a marketing guy, GK and Seth Godin are probably your top authors. If you're from Software industry, Eric Sink and Joel are probably your guys. And if you're in the euphoria of startups (specifically of Web 2.0), Paul is your guy.

When people from Paul's world read Joel's, they probably boo him because he's "too Microsoft" style-ish. But if you actually an ISV (micro or not) like Eric Sink and the rest, Joel's essays made sense a lot.

It's just a different world.

Lots of Guy haters here... why?

This comment sums it up nicely: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26958

Some people seem to feel that GK is mocking them with his mantras. Ie you are spending lots of money on your startup, he spreads the word that you can do it with 12000$ etc.

I think that is just the typical text communication issue. My impression is that GK'S intention is not to mock other people, but to motivate them to do something great. Also, to chill out in a way, I guess. At least in "Rules for Revolutionaries" he is also mocking himself, when he lists famous blunders and also mentions him dismissing the offer to work for Yahoo in it's early days, for how could it possibly successful.

I like his books, and even if not everything is new (how could it be), some things need to be repeated over and over again to finally sink in.

Also, I just looked at trueomors again: it seems the quality of submissions has improved greatly compared to the early days.

I think Guy is being somewhat maligned here. I am not particularly fascinated by his work, the same as others who have posted, but I think we are missing something.

Read The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks, one of the truly innovative works on software development. And you know what? Its boring. Its saying the same obvious stuff over and over, who gives a damn? The thing is that what he wrote was brilliant, when he wrote it. Work derives much of its meaning from context.

The same point can be made about Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. Its pretty much torturous to read: we have already had these ideas drilled into us. But when they were first written they sparked a global environmental revolution.

Is Guy in the same league as Brooks or Carson? No, I don't think its quite fair to say he is, but I do think dismissing him off hand is unnecessarily judgement... which happens to be a big trick for blog articles these days, and seems to be a connecting thread in the articles you write. Perhaps I am now being the one who is unnecessarily judgmental.

Just curious, in which other blog posts does such unnecessary judgement show up?

I am perfectly willing to admit that I wrote a completely subjective, unbalanced post. If I wrote thousands of words in an attempt to keep things balanced, would you have read it? Would it have sparked a discussion? Probably not...

The Bible is full of ridiculously common sense stuff. Some people still manage to use it as a tool to keep them doing those common sense things. That one doesn't strike my fancy, but I have some books that are similar for me.

It's so easy to understand a concept intellectually and yet fail to practice it on a day-to-day basis. Books can be a tool to refresh your thinking and get a (partially) objective point of view. A clear-thinking real person is almost always best, but books can be used in total privacy and on-demand.

I'm not a huge GK fan, but I don't agree with YC disliking him so much. I think that he writes for a different audience.

I'd compare his books with Entrepreneur Magazine (does he write a column for them?). Practical, yet oversimplified, advice for the average joe.

We are the Wired and Business 2.0 crowd. I bet that 90% of Kawasaki readers have never even heard of del.icio.us, let alone YC.

YC doesn't dislike him. Even News.YC doesn't dislike him. Since there's no downvote link, all the article's (current) score of 13 means is that 13 News.YC users dislike him. We currently get 4500-5000 uniques per day, so that's not a large proportion.

There were actually 526 incoming hits from some part of news.yc, obviously not all of these people dislike AoS, but I would bet the number who do is significantly higher than 13.

Even the score is not necessarily reflective of the number of people that might dislike him.

It simply indicates the number of people that found the associated article interesting or valuable enough to give it an up vote.

I get what you're saying re Guy's common sense rhetoric, however his business of selling books and hosting seminars appears really successful. What do you make of that?

So are Robert Kiyosaki's books and seminars, but if you actually have a clue about finance and the industry, you know he's a total sham. I felt the same way after reading Guy's book.

I do not deny that the book sells well, all I'm saying is that for the serious (aspiring) entrepreneur, it's not worth the money or the time.

Kiyosaki is one of the worst scammers of all time. His books are not only wrong but dangerous to your financial health. Absolutely irresponsible. He got rich by writing books about how to get rich. This is a must read:

http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html

Read this some years back during the "Rich Dad Poor Dad" craze. It opened my eyes I can tell you that.

Looks like it was written by someone attempting to promote their own book.

I actually got something useful out of the "rich dad, poor dad" book. I don't care if it is made up or not, but I like his encounter with the aspiring young author who thinks she is so much more worthy as a writer than he is. He then explains to her that he is known as "best selling author", not "best writing author". His books teach a good lesson about marketing, just think how much money he made just by choosing a catchy title.

The other thing where I think he is right is that you have to start trying things to gain experience. I know it sounds trivial, but it isn't (I don't think many people would think about investing in that way, anyway).

I also thought it was somewhat useful.

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