Guy Kawasaki: A Dozen Don’ts for Entrepreneurs | Hacker News Reader

Guy Kawasaki: A Dozen Don’ts for Entrepreneurs

openforum.com

62 pointsurlwolf14 comments

Nothing new here, and upwards of 80% of it is common knowledge on HN.

Pick which two of the following three items are desirable: revenue, launching early, hiring your uncle as CTO. Wow, you're a sharp one, aren't you.

On the other hand, I sort of liked this phrase:

Don’t believe that the exception is the rule. ... Twitter is the exception. Facebook is the exception. YouTube is the exception. There, I listed all the exceptions. Everyone else needs revenue asap, or you will fail.

At least this one is getting discussion vs. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682892

Goes to show that adding "Guy Kawasaki" to the title makes a difference.

Guy Kawasaki used to write good articles based on insight gleamed from his personal experience. But these days he seems to be more about just generating some content to get eye balls so that he can push alltop. He is losing credibility fast.

Sadly this is true. I've removed his blog from my RSS reader quite a while ago. Seth Godin got ditched for the same reason :(

You should work with your spouse. It's great, and a lot of companies have successful husband/wife teams. Here's an HN thread that lists a few: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=663881

I've liked some Guy Kawasaki articles, like the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint, but this article seems hastily written.

Another fallacy is to think partnerships are bad. Partnerships are great in certain markets. Seek out people... you'd be surprised who'll take a phone call.

Working with your spouse needs a special kind of person on both sides. Most people would not succeed with this, some would. Just because you would does not mean most would.

This was the only piece of advice in the article that I really liked. It doesn't matter whether you work well with your spouse. It could be a truly great working relationship and still present a problem for your firm.

The problem is that other people will hate working with you and your family. You will fail to recruit the best, you will have to pay the workers you do recruit more money, and morale will always be lower than it would have been if you had not hired your family. Other employees will simply assume your family gets special treatment. (And they're always right.)

Lots of married couples run businesses together; it's somewhat of a change that this is now viewed as a bad thing.

Of course, there is also a difference between hiring family and cofounding with family. If you cofound with a spouse, this problem might be unique to a startup environment where your early employees expect to be treated as equals. In a more traditional business, it's definitely not an issue.

People will hate working with you if your company is failing to execute. If you haven't hired your husband, they will find some other reason to hate you. In any group of smart, opinionated adults, there are 100,000 reasons to hate your coworkers --- compensation, effort, strategy decisions, nepotism, cliques.

Kawasaki's comment ignores the upsides of working with your spouse. You can both keep longer hours. It's easier to balance childcare needs. You can get another unquestionably committed team member.

Singling out family involvement is a fallacy. There are thousands of successful family businesses. There are hundreds of thousands of companies that fail that never even considered hiring a spouse. There's simply no data to back this point up, just supposition.

I think working with your spouse is a special case, because if your company hits it big (or crashes and burns), then your spouse is likely to share in the joy (despair) whether or not he or she is officially a co-founder. So if the spouse has some talent that could make the company more likely to succeed, it's not necessarily A Bad Idea for him or her to come on board.

This is different from saying "well, Uncle Murray needs a job so I'll hire him to do my bookkeeping"--that's much more likely to be A Bad Idea.

Wow, you could reverse all these and have a pretty good blog post.

The probability that a blogger can confidently say 100% is 0%.

The other problem with hiring or co-founding with your spouse is putting all your eggs in one basket. Startups are always in turbulent waters (often financially and always emotionally). A spouse whose main occupation is not your startup can be very helpful as an anchor.

I would really like to know the details of Guy's contracts with these publications. He must be raking it in shuffling and reshuffling his posts from site to site.

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