The Art of the Start 2.0 (Guy Kawasaki, 2004)

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  • GIST - Great Ideas for Starting Things
  • Culture: set and communicate goals, measure progress, establish a single point of accountability, be part of the solution, reward the archivers, follow through until the issue is solved or no longer relevant
  • Reality check: what is our top priority, when will we ship, when will we run out of money if we don’t ship, how much does it cost to acquire a customer, what is our fully loaded cost of operations, whom do we compete with, what can our competition do that we can’t, who are our non performing employees, what can we beg or borrow or lease that we are buying, how good am I as a leader
  • Roles to fill: someone understand your customers, a geek with all the knowledge, dad role to calm the board, morpheus who is totally legit and ethical, jerry maguire the connection guy
  • Ten slides pitch deck: title, problem and opportunity, value proposition, underlying magic, business model, go-to-market plan, competitive analysis, management team, financial projections and key metrics, current status and accomplishments to date and timeline and use of funds
  • Story writing: start strong, cut the industry jargon, drop all the big names you can, catalyse fantasy, finish strong
  • Evangelism DICEE: deep project features, intelligent, complete, empowering, elegant
  • Evangelism community: let 100 flowers blossom, assign tasks and expect them to get done, give them the tools to evangelise, respond to their requests, give them stuff, hire someone whose sole purpose is to foster a community, create a budget for supporting them, integrate evangelist into your sales and marketing efforts, host the community efforts, hold a conference, continue fellowship
  • Interacting with people: get out, ask good questions and shut up, make it easy to get in touch, follow up, unveil your passion, give favors
  • Mistakes of entrepreneurs: multiply big numbers by 1 percent (calculate from the bottom up), scale too fast (eat what you kill), form partnership (focus on sales), focus on fundraising (focus on prototyping), use too many slides (obey the 10/20/30 rules), process serially (proceed in parallel), retain mathematical control (make a bigger pie), use patents for defensibility (use success for defensibility), hire in your image (hire to complement), befriend your investors (exceed expectations)


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