| Featured Interview |
|
 |
|
|
 |
Name : Guy Kawasaki |
|
Position : Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures; Columnist, Entrepreneur Magazine; Apple Fellow, Apple.
Author of Eight Books including: the Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| Rohit’s Intro to interview |
|
| One of my favorite quotes from Guy is, “I am the example of doing one thing right and then coasting for the rest of your career.” |
|
| Q: You’re seeing a lot of copycats. What do you see as innovative? |
|
| Fictitious as the answer may be venture capitalists don’t really know what’s innovative. We don’t have any special vision or perspective or anything. The venture capitalist’s job is to be lucky, a, or b, recognize something that will sell. Not many VC’s would admit this but I would say that I don’t see myself as a visionary. Two guys come in here and they show me something I think will work, I can do that. But I can’t predict this is where you should go. |
|
| Two guys sat in these chairs and had infinite bandwidth, infinite service, copy illegal stuff and upload it so other people can watch it? Do you think we want that? |
|
| So the good ones are lucky and the bad ones aren’t. Number one. This has lots more to do with it than you would ever imagine. After a company is successful then you can say why you know it was going to be successful. So you say oh, with you two I knew the trend was using generated content and bandwidth is prevalent now. This is why I knew this company was going to be successful. Okay, if you knew that you two were going to be successful what did you know about Webvan that was going to make Webvan successful? Oh, it wasn’t you? It was your partners that did that? |
|
| Sequoia gets lucky more than most so there’s got to be something there. |
|
| 99% of the VCs in the world will tell you they want a proven team. The other .9% of the world will tell you they want proven technology or proven business models. I believe you should look for unproven teams with unproven technology with unproven business models. Now, I’m not saying you should purposely look for clueless people with dumb ass ideas that can’t possibly make money. I’m not saying that. I just look at these companies and I say, Google. Unproven team, unproven technology, unproven business model. Yahoo. Ditto. Cisco. Ditto. Apple. Ditto. eBay. Ditto. That must be the thing you do. |
|
| So one way of looking at the world is the people who really build these great companies are unproven young people. And they have insights or hallucinations into a market that doesn’t exist and they’re blowing smoke around technology. They’re saying their technology is fast, easy to use, secure, scaleable because they learned those words in Computer Science 101. They have no idea. |
|
| Now I can’t say that every clueless person who comes in is going to be the next Google. But I guess if you told me you are funding semiconductors and chip companies. Two guys in a garage, that’s not likely. You really have to have worked at Cadence or worked at Intel and know how to make a chip and all that. But two guys say they’re going to create a site for teenagers to put their naked pictures up and there’s going to be 110 million users after 2 years. Okay, if you say so. |
|
| Q: Your days at Apple… |
|
| The key to the innovation of Apple is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is in direct violation of probably every marketing principle there is. Steve Jobs’ idea of a focus group is his right hemisphere of his brain is connected to the left hemisphere of his brain. That’s Steve’s focus group. He doesn’t bring 15 people in a room like this and ask, what do you think of this interface? He could care less. So I think Apple is the testimony to just the will power of one individual. |
|
| Now, as we’ve seen in the course of history the will power of one individual can lead to holocausts, it can lead to wars. It can lead to a lot of things. Just cause you have a strong will doesn’t mean you’ll be successful, but Steve Jobs is an example. |
|
| Apple innovated with whatever Steve wanted. I don’t recall him bouncing ideas off the rest of the team. He respected a few people who could come up with clever ideas but I tell you it was not market research, that’s for sure. |
|
| Steve would tell you that it has to be on the side and it has to open up at 16 degrees and it has to sound like psst when you open it up. (describing a coke bottle). Those are the little details but having said that he has that level of detail so you know how some people cannot separate correlation from causation. For example, let’s say you know this really successful, rich person and he’s an asshole. Some people would say, oh so if I become an asshole I’ll get rich. You don’t understand. Not all assholes are rich. Not all rich people are assholes either but it’s not that being an asshole caused the person to be rich. That person was rich and so society gives him the space to be an asshole because when you’re rich you get away with these things. |
|
Q: How about when people come to see you - what are you looking for when you actually
fund someone? |
|
| Again, we’re unusual but I look at stuff that I would use. We don’t do biotech, we have no background there. We very seldom do enterprise software because I don’t know anything about enterprise software. So we look at stuff that we ourselves would like to use. I don’t know if it’s a good test. That may just be because we are who we are. We’re not enterprise software VC’s so that is self selection. |
|
 |
