Making Meaning Make Money

Source: Exec Digital Canada

Date :13/03/2008 06:25:05

Guy Kawasaki believes in the power of enterprise to make the world better - last year he took a step back from his venture capital firm to test new ways of democratizing information.

By John O’Hanlon

Guy Kawasaki and I first met in September 2001. Though seven years is a long time in a life as eventful as his, he hasn’t forgotten the occasion, not so much because of the honor of being interviewed by me, so much as because of what happened the next day.

After delivering a lecture at the London Business School he heard about the attack on the World Trade Center, and is unlikely ever to forget, he tells me now, the confusion, disbelief and frustration felt by every American that day, particularly when air transportation locked down and he couldn’t get back.

“At first, we all thought it was a Cessna that had flown into the building by accident,” he recalls. “Shortly thereafter, I got on an airplane to Frankfurt, and I was stuck there for a week. I’ve never seen, and hope to never see again, basically the entire world go into a deep depression. It affected people to the core, and it’s taken a good five or six years to recover from it.”

The tech market was depressed then, has rallied, and is now joining the rest of the economy in facing a possible deep recession. But Kawasaki never follows the herd. The co-founder of Garage Technology Ventures, a seed-stage and early-stage venture capital fund based in Palo Alto, California - down the road from the garage where Hewlett-Packard started in 1938 and the Los Altos garage where Steve Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak first built Apple computers in the 1970s - is still the plainest speaking, straightest-to-the point communicator I have ever encountered.

Out with the crap

The author of eight books, he is a compulsive blogger and has a bi-weekly agony column in Forbes Magazine where he offers reality to any aspiring entrepreneur who risks it. A typical exchange: “I am 18 years old, attending a four-year college full-time and also starting my own LLC, with a focus on real estate investing. What is your best advice for me – and other young entrepreneurs – who want to start their own business?” – “Finish school, go to work for a company that sells a product or service (that is, not a venture capital firm or investment bank), get the crap beat out of you and then start a company.”

Kawasaki grew up in Hawaii, and as a kid was much more interested in football than in technology or making money. His plan at high school was to continue his education at a smaller university where he could pursue this early passion with more success than he might meet with at Stanford where he’d be up against too many awesomely big and fast players. Unfortunately, “My father told me that he was not about to fund me through college just to play football, though…

Click here to read the full interview with Guy Kawasaki