Larry cornered
Guy Kawasaki at the 2008 BioWest conference after his keynote address. Guy, author of the best selling book,
The Art of the Start and
Reality Check is also cofounder Alltop.com as well as Garage.com. Larry asked, "We are going through some tougher times, how do you see this playing out?" Guy, a champion for entrepreneurs replied, "Well, I’m not a visionary or an oracle, I’ll tell you what I would tell an entrepreneur, which is, ‘plug your ears and keep going!’ Of all the tech startups one out of 5000 go public so what difference does it make what the DOW Jones Industrial Average, especially tomorrows DJIA, maybe 5 years from now it’ll matter, but not tomorrow. If you just try to build a great business, hopefully that great business will make a ton of money. If you make a ton of money, maybe you’ll go public – still unlikely, but you might; and you might get acquired, also unlikely but we go from one out of 5000 to one out 500, something like that, so that helps. But even if none of those sort of dream things happen, you have a good business! If you only start businesses in good time, you may have to wait a few years – I really don’t see why it truly matters. You either believe or you don’t believe. If you’re an entrepreneur who says, ‘well, I’m not going to start a company because the stock market is too low and unemployment is too high’, I’ve got to tell you I would put those two items right at the bottom. You have to develop a good product, you have to make it, you have to sell it, collect the money and service your customers, pretty much the fundamentals.
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Related Links: Alltop.com || Garage Technology Ventures || BioScience Channel || Guy Kawasaki Blog || Mastering Change Website || Channel: Change >> Bytes: 9134814 - 9/7/09 LISTEN