I’m moderating a Churchill Club event this Thursday called “No Plan, No Capital, No Model…No Problem: Companies that Defied What VCs Will Tell You.” Here’s a decription of the event: Conventional wisdom says listen to the venture capitalists. They know what works. They know how to successfully build a startup. But Silicon Valley wasn’t built [...]
I love cool graphs. Here’s a visual representation of the federal budget. Guess what that big blue circle is on the left side of the chart.
I’m going to the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference to cover Steve’s opening keynote. I’ll post real-time reports beginning at 10:00 am Pacific on Monday morning at Truemors. Yes, this is just another ploy to draw traffic to Truemors. :-) If this isn’t the coolest way to get this message, I don’t know what is: via [...]
A little while ago I was in Hong Kong to make a speech. I visited Stanley Market,—a large bazaar (nothing to do with the Stanley Cup). Mind you, it’s a kiosk compared to the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, but it’s jammed with stores. Most of the stores carry a little bit of everything: tshirts, shoes, [...]
The most common question about by Truemors post (besides “How could you be so dumb as to think this could be a real business?”), was about what I got for $4,824.13 in legal fees. The fees covered the following: Trademarking Truemors Drafting a Terms of Use Discussion of copyright, liability, infringement, IP, and insurance issues [...]
Threadless is a very interesting company because of how it has “community-sourced” its product design. If you had told me that a company could succeed by running weekly tshirt design contests and then selling the winning designs, I would have told you that you’re nuts. I met Jeffrey during my tour of the Threadless offices [...]
Because of Truemors, I’ve learned a lot about launching a company in these “Web 2.0” times. Here’s quick overview “by the numbers.” 0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not). 0. [...]
Susan RoAne wrote the book on schmoozing. Literally: How to Work a Room: Your Essential Guide to Savvy Socializing. The recently updated and revised book is a classic because we will all have to walk into “rooms” that contain meetings, conferences, trade shows, business mixers, fundraisers, and parties and be able to schmooze, make connections, [...]
In the early 1990s, Bruce Webster wrote and published The Art of ‘Ware (M&T Books, 1995), a reinterpretation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Basically, Webster applied Sun Tzu’s work to creating and marketing IT products. Webster recently updated his original version. If you’re a Sun Tzu fan, you’ll enjoy what Webster has done. [...]
My buddy, Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, had a strong reaction to last week’s post about PR by Marge Zable Fisher. So much so that he penned an alternate solution to the challenge of a good client-agency relationship: Don’t hire an agency and do it yourself. Here’s what he wrote. Nobody knows if Charlemagne [...]
Check out Launch: Silicon Valley 2007. It’s a half-day conference featuring thirty tech startups who are launching new products and services. Think of it as a poor man’s Demo. June 5th Noon to 6:00 pm Microsoft campus (Mountain View, California) Registration I’ll be giving a speech called “How I Launched a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, [...]
Margie Zable Fisher runs theprsite.com. Every day someone tells her that he or she has been “burned” by a PR firm, and Margie’s goal is to help small business find the right PR firm. I asked her to provide the top ten reasons why PR doesn’t work: The client doesn’t understand the publicity process. PR [...]
I recently visited the worldwide headquarters of Threadless in Chicago and took a boatload of pictures. I’ve been to the offices of many startups, but few compare to Threadless’s offices in coolness. Walls covered with graffiti. src="http://files.guykawasaki.com/blog/img/Slide3_2.jpg" /> An “office” in an Airstream trailer for recording podcasts. Inside the office recording a podcast. Interior offices. [...]
The ability to print boarding passes for flights is a great convenience. Unfortunately, half the time you’re in a hotel room when you check-in online and can’t print the boarding pass. Some airlines (Northwest for one, but I always fly United) will fax the boarding pass to you—but this still requires that you get the [...]
Anastasia Goodstein covers Generation Y in her blog YPulse. She has worked for Current TV, AOL, and Oxygen TV. She recently published a book that will help you understand the online activities of young people called Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online. Question: How does being totally wired change being a [...]
I liked Penelope Trunk's interview so much that I asked her for more material. Here's her list of the nine biggest workplace myths: You’ll be happier if you have a job you like. The correlation between your happiness and your job is overrated. The most important factors, by far, are your optimism levels and your [...]
I’ll be speaking at the Salesforce Developer Conference on Monday. This is a free event. I learned something recently: Salesforce.com is really a software-as-service “platform” that has applicability beyond “salesforce automation.” Ergo, this conference is also for software entrepreneurs. Hope to see you there.
Penelope Trunk is the author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. She is a career columnist at the Boston Globe and Yahoo Finance. Her syndicated column has run in more than 200 publications. Earlier, she was a software executive, and then she founded two companies. She has been through an IPO, an acquisition [...]
Richard Stearns is the president of World Vision. This organization is a "Christian relief and development organization dedicated to helping children and their communities worldwide reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty." Stearns holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. [...]
Pam Slim provides a great list of things to do prior to making a presentation. If you make speeches, presentations, or pitches, you need to read this. Here’s one more power tip: Show up with your own Countryman E6i microphone. (And tell your host that you need a Shure or Sennheiser body pack.) This has [...]