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Post details: Webinar with Guy Kawasaki (short review)

07/10/2010

Webinar with Guy Kawasaki (short review)

I attended the free webinar at Brazen Careerist yesterday with Penelope Trunk and Guy Kawasaki. They had sound problems for several minutes at the beginning so that it was hard to understand but finally they got it fixed so that was a very inspiring and interesting session.

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Guy Kawasaki mentioned that he really answers his emails and that it's really hard to do because he already have 200 unanswered messages in his inbox. He estimates about 2 minutes to answer each one, so he already spends 3-4 hours every just on his emails. I think this is really amazing.

Here are some of his key ideas.

Don't bother with venture capital if you want to start your own online business. No bank would give you money even for the greatest idea and you'd never need more than $50K (that's right fifty-thousand US-Dollars) to start a successful business. But why is this number so low?

First of all, Guy told in the interview, all needed tools are free. There is Apache web server, PHP, MySQL, WordPress and all the other fine applications that you can get for free on the internet.

Also, according to Guy Kawasaki, marketing is free. Nobody should pay six-figure amounts of dollars to get a marketing agency to work on your business. That's because you can use the free tools that are available like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and youTube.

Finally he said: "workers are free"! Ok, he revised that in the next sentence and said that in a recession or in economically difficult times, people love to work with no pay just because they don't have any other things to do. Working for an upcoming business is even better than watching TV, and people get recognized by potential employers or business partners if the work on a public project.

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In the course of the ongoing interview, I could get the idea that paying one thousand dollar for work is still considered "free" according to Guy. My mileage vary with this statement but I believe as soon as you make some money with your startup business, a thousand dollars more or less may not be a big thing to think about.

So, this is how he got to the number or $50K as your needed capital to start your business. And he said that you should be able to get this money without involving a bank. "Collect it from family, fools, savings ..." (his words, though I'm not sure what he meant with "fools").

He also told us that starting a business is a privilege and not a right. The desire to make money with it should not be the first on our list of motives. I remember that I have heard that before when people say: "do what you are obsessed with, and the money will come without any effort".

Another valuable insight from his interview was the fact that life for an entrepreneur is not serial, it's parallel instead. You don't raise capital, produce a product, market the product and then sell it. For the entrepreneur all these steps happens in parallel for several products or ideas.

I can say, this webinar was really inspiring. Parallel there was a live chat where I also could find some good ideas and it seems that I have also gained a few more followers on twitter after I did participate in the chat. I'll keep my eyes open for other interesting webinars and will post them here in my blog when I think they might be interesting for my readers.