This past Tuesday famous author of "The art of Start," former Apple evangelist and the current Venture Capitalist, Guy Kawasaki was invited to SAP campus by the Chinese Entrepreneur Organization. I was very excited and booked a spot as quickly as I could. I had read the book a while back so I made sure to polish up on it by skimming it again. On the day of the event, I scrambled at work to get back home to get a few things done before the evening session with Guy and forego a nice evening with the family in the process. For all that effort, the event turned out to be a disappointment.
First, Guy went through power point slides of stuff that was straight out of his book and other writings. Now, somebody should have informed him that he is speaking at a tech comany and mostly a technical audience was in attendance and the probability that most of the audience will have already read his work was high. In fact, when he tried to give away his book during the Q&A session, there were a couple of people who told him that they already have the book and have in fact, read it already.
The interesting bits about Mike's presentation were the anecdotes from all of the thousands of sessions he has had with entrepreneurs over the years as a VC. Those provided some good insight in how VCs think and his reactions to several of those elevator pitches were mostly in line with the book.
After an hour of the presentation, the most painful part of the session began, namely Q&A. Guy, towards the end of his presentation had covered, what I thought was a useful site, using Cricket as an example where all the useful website with information on the game could be located. The website however, is not limited to Cricket and actually covers quite a bit. An Indian gentleman walked up to the microphone and brought up, what I thought, was an excellent point. How can Guy justify promoting the website when he stated that as a VC he is looking for game changing or new curve riding ideas. Clearly, while the website was useful and in fact, I had decided right then, that I would use it to keep track of my news, Guy could have simply said that this was not an example of what he or other VCs would necessarily fund or that it does not represent the leaning or trends followed by majority of his investments, but instead he started defending it. He started taking aim at the gentleman asking the question and got quite a few laughs from the audience at his expense. The problem was that those were, for the most part, cheap laughs. It was clear to me that Guy was stretching himself to entertain the crowd that had gathered to hear him. He really had no need to do that since the people were excited to see him there and were continuing to sit through his mostly cliche laden presentation with the prospect of personally meeting with a Silicon Valley tech celebrity. However, to my dismay, he continued to do that with everyone who had the courage to step up to the microphone. Most of his jokes targeted nationalities, ethnicities and were tacky at best. After a little while, I was not able to entertain a minute more of it and simply walked away without getting my book signed or shaking his hand. I rememberd another Garage Ventures VC, Bill Reichert, who spoke at OPEN Forum 2007 and who was a true gentleman when I met him. I could not believe that Guy worked with him day in and day out without getting infected by his attitude or perhaps I should be thankful that the infection did not go the other way. Guy also talked about Mike Moritz in the context of Mike's offer to Guy to lead Yahoo in 1995 when Sequoia funded Yahoo. Mike Moritz spoke to the OPEN gathering last Saturday via video conference about VC funding and while he was exceedingly funny he was also on his best and gentlemanly behaviour. His humor was most self-effacing and for the most part he inspired the audience to get their ideas out to as many people as possible. Guy, unfortunately, seemed to have the opposite effect. People probably run away from him fearing his dull wit would do more damage to thier ideas and confidence than anything else without really adding any feedback of value.
Comments