Book: The Art of the Start

Continuing my perusal through Spolsky's book list ...

Jamie brought in "The Art of the Start" by Guy Kawasaki as another small business get going guide. This book was a lot better that the last one on the list, and a lot faster to read. Kawasaki is the former Macintosh evangelist at Apple and now a partner in Garage Ventures, a VC firm, so I assume he knows a lot about startups getting to market since he's seeing lots of them come through his door looking for money.

Although the book claims to be about starting anything, it's really pitched at tech startups that need VC funding. Even though he says that the odds of getting VC funding are similar to being struck by lightning while sitting underwater on the bottom of a pool, the book is focused on what to do when you are starting up and getting in front of VCs, That's not to say it's not valuable for other situations, but he really undersells bootstrapping and other models that are viable. Having said that, I still felt the book to be quite valuable, especially because you can breeze through it in an evening.

His main format is to break down the topics necessary to start a business into a chapter and give you the overview, his take on the subject, and then possibly some insight from industry veterans. The chapters cover the "arts" of starting, pitching, hiring, marketing, raising capital. And also, "menching" (being a decent corporate citizen). Each of the chapters had useful tidbits for me, especially pitching, hiring and marketing.

I've always thought I was a decent extemporaneous speaker. Turns out, I'm not. Because the people who are great extemporaneous speakers aren't doing it off the cuff; they've practiced repeatedly and know their material cold. Guy has really decent tips for how much you have to practice (at least 25 times) and how to structure your presentations. And although these tips are presented in the context of how one pitches to VCs, they are relevant to any speaking engagement. He even has tips for being on a panel.

His hiring section is also quite good. We're evaluating if we can expand around here, so I'm trying to read everything I can on hiring right now. Kawasaki doesn't get too crazy on the "hire all rockstars" meme, which is refreshing, and his advice on how to check references was eye-opening.

The marketing aspect for us is the toughest. We have our tagline which encapsulates what we do for our customers. Kawasaki says we need a mantra as well. We're in a niche market without a large number of other firms doing what we do, and we're good friends with some of our "competitors." This blog, various conferences, open source projects, and networking with students forms the bulk of our marketing. I'm going to have to re-read this chapter to see what else we could be doing.

Bottom line, this is a decent book with good ideas. Well worth the evening it took to read.