By popular demand (okay, two people asked me to do it), here are the top ten ways to attract the interest of venture capitalists. There's no guarantee that if you do these ten things that you'll raise millions of dollars, but this wishlist will get you in the game. Before you even start addressing the [...]
In honor of the recent Macworld Expo and the upcoming Super Bowl (the two great branding exercises of every new year; one much more fruitful than the other), this blog entry is about the art of branding. My assumptions are that you don't have infinite resources and that you do have a great product (see [...]
Harker School Commencement I've been blogging for a whole ten days now, and all my topics have been business stuff: venture capital, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, evangelism, etc. Now I want to throw you a total curve ball. About fourteen years ago my wife and I separated for a time. As part of my search for what [...]
I found a life-size photo of my next Macintosh laptop. :-) Not to mention an even greater understanding of what makes Steve such a great presenter. I made the big time: an interview on NHL.com! Written at: Atherton, California
Out of curiosity, I went to SimplyHired, a vertical search engine for jobs, and looked for openings containing the keyword “evangelist.” Amazingly, there were 611 matches--and none were for churches. It seems that “evangelist” is now a secular, mainstream job title. Indeed, the first eight matches were for evangelist jobs at Microsoft--go figure. As people [...]
I think I fixed the problem--or, more accurately, a friend of mine fixed it. Please leave me comments to this post if text is appearing very large in your RSS feed. Thanks, Guy
I attended Steve's keynote address at Macworld Expo San Francisco this morning, and I took a picture of most of the slides that he used. I couldn't capture them all because of the special effects he was using. You can read about these announcements all over the place, but here's a good summary on MacNN. [...]
I'm getting tired of writing about lies, so today I'm covering truths. Specifically, the truths of innovation. I hold these truths to not be self-evident; hence we see so little innovation. Jump to the next curve. Too many companies duke it out on the same curve. If they were daisy wheel printer companies, they think [...]
Finally, I can stop using my Vaio for demos because today at Macworld Expo, we launched FilmLoop for Macintosh. You can download it here. This is one of the coolest applications I've ever seen. You can use it to do three things: Share photos with friends, relatives, and colleagues. Broadcast photos to customers, employees, and [...]
(Since I've antagonized the venture capital community with last week's blog, I thought I would complete the picture and “out” entrepreneurs to begin this week. The hard part about writing this blog was narrowing down these lies to ten. Luckily, my partner, Bill Reichert, had already documented this list of the top ten lies of [...]
Venture capitalists are simple people: we've either decided to invest, and we are convincing ourselves that our gut is right (aka, “due diligence”) or there's not a chance in hell. While we may be simple, we're not necessarily forthcoming, so if you think it's hard to get a “yes” out of venture capitalist, you should [...]
Dear God, Mea culpa: because one of the Garage portfolio companies, FilmLoop, wrote a Windows version of its product before a Macintosh version, I’ve had to use a Windows laptop for demos. It is one of those tiny Sony Vaios—I don’t even know the model number because I didn’t bond with it. This is the [...]
One of the great ironies of startups is the envy entrepreneurs express for innovators in large companies—let’s use the Gifford Pinchot term: “intrapreneurs.” From the outside looking in, entrepreneurs think intrapreneurs have it made: ample capital, infrastructure (desks, chairs, Internet access, secretaries, lines of credit, etc), salespeople, support people, and an umbrella brand.Guess again. Intrapreneurs [...]
On January 4th at 1:00 pm Eastern, I'm doing a free online seminar based on The Art of the Start for Raindance Communications. In the seminar, I'll cover the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, missions vs mantras, and other topics pertinent to anyone starting anything. Hope you can join me! http://snipurl.com/artonlineseminar Written at Ilikai Hotel, Honolulu, [...]
Two months ago I spoke at a marketing conference in Istanbul, Turkey. I stayed at the Conrad hotel. It has men’s bathroom with two urinals that provide a stunning view of the Bosphorus. Naturally, I took a picture of these urinals and their view. Unnaturally, I showed the picture in my speech and mentioned that [...]
If only I could get paid for answering the question, “How can I get people to evangelize my product?” I would be able to stop working and play hockey every day. Alas, there is no way to get paid for this information, so I give it to you for free. The short answer is called [...]
Who among us has not had the horrible experience of an corporate offsite to build teamwork and to craft a mission statement? The offsite usually went like this: Day 1: Teambuilding. Selection of cross-functional teams so that, God help us, engineering has to work with sales. A day of exercises such as, “Each of you [...]
I keep telling myself that I have big bones and lots of muscle mass (I hear that muscle weighs more than fat), but the bottom line is that I weigh 200 pounds. Unfortunately, I’d like to weigh 180 pounds. Coincidentally, I’m drafting my New Year’s resolutions, and one of them is to lose weight. This [...]
I suffer from something called Ménière’s disease—don’t worry, you cannot get it from reading my blog. The symptoms of Ménière’s include hearing loss, tinnitus (a constant ringing sound), and vertigo. There are many medical theories about its cause: too much salt, caffeine, or alcohol in one’s diet, too much stress, and allergies. Thus, I’ve worked [...]