Guy Kawasaki speaks about making meaning not money

Courtesy: Inquirer.net

As a motivational speaker, Guy Kawasaki is blessed with a funky name, a charming smile and sense of humor perfect for delivering slide presentations. Yet he calls himself a "bozo".No wonder, business intelligence and analytics software firm SAS timed his presentation after lunchtime. Kawasaki wowed the Mumbai crowd with his presentation entitled "The Art of Innovation", eliciting plenty of chuckles and applause.In his speech, he gave advice on what he refers to as the Holy Grail for any entrepreneur: coming up with a unique product that has great value. To illustrate this point, he talked about how companies like Nike, Apple, Federal Express and Breitling are doing it.So what exactly are these types of products? A flashlight that can run on different types of batteries and an outdoor watch that comes with a built-in SOS signal are among his examples.But his most profound piece of advice for would-be entrepreneurs: Make meaning, not money."Based from my observation, companies that really are successful change people's lives. Most companies that set up just to make money eventually fail," he told INQUIRER.net during a short interview after his talk.Kawasaki who was born on Honolulu, Hawaii and considers himself half-American half-Japanese, was appointed Apple Fellow during the 80s. He is credited as one of the earlier "evangelists" responsible for the success of Apple's Macintosh computer. He is also a noted venture capitalist in Silicon Valley as managing director of Garage Technology Ventures. Recently, he founded alltop.com, a website that aggregates news based on topics.Asked if his "make meaning, not money" ethos applies more (or maybe less) to entrepreneurs in places like the Philippines where there isn't as much access to venture capital, Kawasaki said it applies to everyone, while saying it's now a "different world out there" for entrepreneurs in the technology industry, thanks to open source."Now, because of things like MySQL, Rails, PhP, you can do things so much cheaper than before. It's a great time to be an entrepreneur, you can delay venture capital funding for a longer period, get further and therefore you have higher valuation," Kawasaki said."Before, the first step was sort of try to raise money and build your product. Now you build your product and then try to raise money. It's a very different world," he added.And in the same vein, he had another advice for would-be CEOs: Make a mantra, not lengthy mission statements. And to observe his personal "10-20-30" rule: 10 Powerpoint slides, 20 minutes tops (he takes a crack at Windows for booting up longer thus, less presentation time) and size 30 font (which also applies to his business card below).Also, he took note of bozos (or slang for stupid) who are either out to make money (who, according to him, drive cars and wear clothes ending in "i" like Ferrari, Maserati and Armani) or who fail to see where technology is heading.So why does he call himself a bozo then? He tells his story about how he was once offered to become a CEO of a then start-up but was too lazy to drive all the way to his new office and after looking at the company's website, dismissed it as "just a collection of their these guys' favorite websites".That company turned out to be Yahoo!