The Art of the Start

Guy Kawasaki, a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, and a former Apple Fellow, presents a practical guide for anyone starting a new venture. Drawing on extensive experience in Silicon Valley, he broadens the definition of "entrepreneur" beyond technology startup founders to include anyone launching a company, a new division within an established organization, or a not-for-profit such as a school or church. In the preface, he frames his philosophy through a metaphor of microscopes and telescopes: The "microscope phase" of a business cycle demands scrutiny and fundamentals, while the "telescope phase" encourages visionary thinking. Entrepreneurs need both, but most available advice buries them in theory when they should be acting.

The opening chapter, "The Art of Starting," reduces launching any organization to five essential steps. The first is to "make meaning": The most powerful motivator, Kawasaki argues, is not money or prestige but goals such as improving quality of life, righting a wrong, or preventing the end of something good. The second is to "make mantra," replacing verbose mission statements with short, memorable phrases. He contrasts Starbucks's three-word mantra, "Rewarding everyday moments," with its lengthy official mission statement to illustrate the superiority of brevity, and he distinguishes mantras, which guide employees internally, from tag lines aimed at customers. The third step, "get going," urges entrepreneurs to build prototypes rather than write plans, calling cogitation the enemy of activation. He presents several design philosophies, including creating something you yourself want (as Ferdinand Porsche did) and pursuing what seems newly possible (as Motorola did with cellular phones). The fourth step is defining a business model by answering two questions: Who has your money, and how will you get it? The fifth, "weave a MAT," instructs founders to compile lists of milestones, assumptions, and tasks to manage scope and surface overlooked problems.

A minichapter on internal entrepreneurship addresses employees innovating within large companies, recommending they stay under the radar, find a senior "godfather" for protection, secure a separate building to foster independence, and integrate the entrepreneurial group back into the larger organization once its product succeeds.

"The Art of Positioning" reduces the concept to one question: "What do you do?" Good positioning, Kawasaki argues, must be positive, customer-centric, specific, and differentiated. He urges startups to find niches, noting that Microsoft started in the narrow sliver of the BASIC programming language for the CPM operating system before expanding. Practical advice includes using plain language, choosing names with verb potential (as "google" became a verb), and applying an "Opposite Test": If descriptors like "intuitive" or "fast" are the same ones competitors use, they are meaningless, and entrepreneurs should instead offer concrete proof points.

"The Art of Pitching" prescribes the 10/20/30 Rule: 10 slides, 20 minutes, and 30-point-font text. Kawasaki specifies slide content for investor, sales, and partner pitches and introduces the "little man" concept: a figure on the speaker's shoulder whispering "So what?" after every claim, forcing the speaker to answer with a concrete example. He advises pitching at a practical altitude, avoiding both strategic abstraction and technical minutiae, and recommends rewriting the presentation from scratch after approximately 10 deliveries.

"The Art of Writing a Business Plan" argues that the writing process matters more than the document itself. Kawasaki compares the plan to the Holy Grail, mythologized but of limited practical use, and insists on pitching before planning. He counsels devoting 80 percent of effort to the executive summary, keeping the plan under 20 pages, and maintaining the adaptive flexibility a startup requires even while writing in the deliberate style investors expect.

"The Art of Bootstrapping" opens with the observation that most entrepreneurs will never raise venture capital. Kawasaki refutes the idea that bootstrapping limits ambition, citing Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft, Apple, and eBay as companies that began this way. He advocates managing for cash flow, building bottom-up revenue forecasts from real-world variables, and shipping products early to generate cash and feedback. Additional tactics include hiring talented but unproven young people and starting as a service business to fund product development. Kawasaki introduces the "red pill" metaphor from the film The Matrix: Entrepreneurs must honestly confront questions about product readiness, true operating costs, and underperforming employees. He recommends finding a "Morpheus," a realist such as a chief financial officer who counterbalances the CEO's optimism, and stresses that the real enemy of bootstrapping is failing to execute.

"The Art of Recruiting" invokes Steve Jobs's principle that A players hire A players while B players hire C players, creating a cascading decline Kawasaki calls a "bozo explosion." Startups need three sequential types of employees: relentless early workers, implementers who build infrastructure, and operators who maintain it. Kawasaki insists on hiring "infected" people who believe in the organization's mission, advises ignoring irrelevant credentials, and introduces the Stanford Shopping Center Test: If you see a candidate before they see you, would you approach them or flee?

"The Art of Raising Capital" frames fundraising around the premise that building a meaningful business matters more than any pitch technique. Kawasaki stresses getting introductions through credible third parties and identifies "traction," demonstrated through actual sales or equivalent metrics, as the factor that cuts through all claims. He lists common lies entrepreneurs tell investors, from "Our projection is conservative" to "All we have to do is get 1 percent of the market." He demystifies venture capitalists, noting they do not know more about an entrepreneur's sector than the entrepreneur does and that taking any outside money means accepting obligations regardless of voting share percentages. Minichapters address angel investors, whose motivations center on giving back to society, and board management, for which Kawasaki identifies five essential roles including the customer voice, the technical realist, and the ethics enforcer.

"The Art of Partnering" argues that partnerships must change a company's financial forecast, not just generate press coverage. Kawasaki contrasts the failed Apple-Digital Equipment Corporation alliance, built on mutual weakness, with the successful Apple-Aldus Corporation partnership that created the desktop publishing market. He stresses that the middle and lower levels of both organizations must support the partnership, recommends finding dedicated internal champions, and advises letting discussions precede legal documents.

"The Art of Branding" contends that great brands begin with great products and are built through evangelism rather than advertising. Kawasaki identifies complexity as the most common barrier startups erect and presents a framework for recruiting evangelists by focusing on belief rather than credentials, assigning concrete tasks, and providing tools for proselytizing. He uses the Calgary Flames Ambassadors, hockey fans who pay for the privilege of promoting their team, as an example of a fully realized brand community, and argues that publicity establishes brands while advertising only maintains them.

"The Art of Rainmaking" borrows Mao Tse-tung's concept of letting a hundred flowers blossom: Sow many seeds, watch where unintended customers appear, and nurture those markets. Kawasaki connects organizational blindness to a well-known psychological experiment in which 50 percent of participants counting basketball passes failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the video. Practical tactics include enabling test drives, offering a safe first step rather than demanding total commitment, and learning from rejection by categorizing the reasons prospects decline.

The final chapter, "The Art of Being a Mensch," argues that the highest aspiration for any entrepreneur is ethical, decent, and admirable conduct. Mensch, the Yiddish term for such a person, embodies three foundations: helping people who cannot help you, doing what is right, and paying back society through time, expertise, and emotional support. In a brief afterword, Kawasaki urges readers to cast away their microscopes, focus their telescopes, and get going.