Next On Bytemarks Cafe: Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki surrounded by the Hawai'i Twitter community
It’s been almost a year since I first met, internationally known author, speaker and venture capitalist, Guy Kawasaki at the S.T.E.M. conference at Honolulu Community College. Well, let me back track we first virtually met on Twitter, and when I read that he was speaking at the conference I thought it would be a great opportunity to meet someone I follow.
If you get the impression that I looked at the opportunity as meeting someone from Twitter rather than meeting Guy Kawasaki, you’re right. I had no idea the enormity of his celebrity status in the tech world, and being a lifelong PC user and from the Punahou family; our worlds seemed polar opposites.
Both Guy and I will be guests on the next Bytemarks Cafe show this Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. Hawai’i Standard Time to talk about Alltop as well as Guy’s upcoming book “Reality Check.” I’ll also share how my path led to Guy’s and how he changed my world.
For now, in the spirit of Guy’s post, “By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09” I asked him 10 Questions by the numbers, including how much NowPublic paid for Truemors.
1. Truemors was your first Web2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site; what was the one challenge that you encountered and overcame that your experience and instinct didn’t expect?
- I didn’t expect the bitter negativity and hostility of the TechCrunch readers. Those folks really need to move out of their mothers’ homes and start dating.
2. In past conversations you’ve described your work with your second project Alltop as one of the most fulfilling since leaving Apple talk about the moments that create these types of realizations.
- The most satisfying topics are ones like Autism.alltop, ADHD.alltop, Adoption.alltop, and Moms.alltop. We help both the publishers to get some respect, attention, and positive feedback, and we help readers who are lost in a mass of 18,000,000 Google hits. It can’t get much more rewarding than this.
3. “Two guys and a gal in a garage” have been working together for many years, each in your respective roles according to your strengths. What’s the secret ingredient?
- We each have very different roles and abilities. Will is the tech guy–but not a “floating in the heap” type of engineer. He’s good at UI and systems. Kathryn is the “adult supervision” that cleans up the deals and messes that I create. I am the mouth. Electric Pulp designed and created both Truemors and Alltop. Those guys are sensational at implementing ideas.
4. No, no, ni, and na; do they realize that you’re the Jackie Chan of the Tech Industry?
- Nope, not at all. I am no more or less than simply “daddy.”
5. You registered 55 domains for Truemors, in retrospect would you apply some bootstrapping here or disappointed that you had missed some?
- I registered too many. Really, the .com one is 90% of the action. What I did was overkill, but the order of magnitude of this mistake was $1,100. This is roughly one Herman Miller chair for a venture-capital funded Web 2.0 company.
6. Chapter 6 of your book “The Art of the Start” you talk about “The Art of Recruiting” and just before the official launch of Truemors you blogged Help Wanted. Talk about the process of finding your A players via an email?
- One can get a sense of a person from email–at least when I’m right, I believe this. There are some emails that just stand out–you can tell the person knows his or her stuff. I’m white on rice when I see this.
7. In October 2007 you wrote “How Twitter Made My Website Better” could you have fathomed the usefulness of Twitter as it relates to your endeavors today?
- No, not at all. I get more value out of Twitter than anyone in the world. From start to finish: topic suggestions, feeds, corrections, and announcements, Twitter plays a role in Alltop. Alltop would not be nearly what it is without Twitter.
8. Truemor has it that NowPublic purchased Truemors for $80K . Truth, rumor or dare?
- Rumor.
9. It was 362 days from launching Truemors to being sold is the process similar to selling more tangible products like Macs?
- No, not really. Selling something physical is very different from selling an “intellectual property.” They do share one quality: the “dream” of what a Macintosh or a site can do.
10. Has your journey with Truemors made you a more critical or empathetic VC?
- Both. I’m empathetic about how hard it is to generate and sustain traffic. I’m more critical of entrepreneurs who tell me that they need a large marketing budget to succeed. I realize this sounds contradictory. Much of entrepreneurship is contradictory. There’s only what works and what doesn’t work. There’s no wrong or right.
Disclaimer: In case you didn’t know, I am the Chief Evangelist for Alltop.
