#leweb - Guy Kawasaki on social media and entrepreneurship

Liveblog of Guy Kawasaki talking on stage at LeWeb 10.

A few years ago people were predicting that MySpace would be the operating system of the internet. Now Facebook is close to that. Would you really have invested in Twitter 7 years ago?

Predicting the future is impossible. If you want to leave people doubt that you’re an idiot – don’t predict the future, because it will leave no doubt that you’re an idiot.

Guy loves the idea of bitcoin, because it isn’t in the control of Goldman Sachs!

Guy on Social Media

Guy has a team helping manage his social media presence. His approach is different from most social media “experts” – it’s a marketing platform for him, not a friend-building one. He’s married with four children, he doesn’t need any more friends. He doesn’t want to be your friend. But he does want to provide you with great content.

Look at TV stations: if they provide great content 365 days a year, they get to do a telethon. If he provides great content, he gets to market stuff to. Buffer allows him to schedule things to post to all the different social networks. He reads the comments, and if there’s a reply, it’s him, not the team.

He repeats his tweets four times, eight hours apart. He gets four times the clicks as a result. Look at TV news: they repeat stories all the time. You can’t assume people will scroll back to find your tweet. Why just four times? If Guy had a really organised mind, he could create eight links and monitor eight links. But he’s probably pushing the edge even for him. He’s probably breaking Twitter’s ToS already… If people see his tweet twice – they’ve been on for 16 hours! That says more about them than him.

Guy on entrepreneurship

The most important thing an entrepreneur can do is build a prototype. Not a PowerPoint, not a Pitch. A Prototype. Most plans, forecasts and pitches are total bullshit. They all say roughly the same numbers.

The number two piece of advice? Create a product or service so great that the US industry wants to copy it. That’s so different from the French version of service x.

Don’t expect your customers to fill in loads of information to get access to a free service. Would you do that? No? Why would they, then? Build something you want to use. Don’t go to a conference, listen to 50 year old white men tell you what to build. Create the product you want to use, and hope like hell you’re not the only two people in the world who want it.

Investing is – and should be – a local phenomenon. There are so many ways we can lose money at home, why would you want to fly half way around the world to lose money? The ideal number of times you should use the world patent in a presentation is one: “we have a patent pending”. Your defensibility should be your passion, your skill and your silliness to change the company to make it work. Create a company and make it scale.

There’s nothing he’s really looking for right now – but that doesn’t stop him falling in love with products, like he did Google+:

"I want to fall in love, what's wrong with that?" – @guykawasaki "Nothing, you're in Paris!" – @loic #leweb2013— Ali Wunderman (@AliWunderman) December 10, 2013

If you fall in love – truly fall in love – you’ll try to make it work. You don’t say to the person “I will continue the relationship if you move to where I am”. That’s not love. If you’re in SF and you want to invest in Paris, you encourage them to create a Delaware corporation and have an SF HQ, leaving the programmers in Paris.

Investors should be race blind, gender blond, sexuality blind and even nationality blind. Just look for a great frickin’ prototype.

Well, @GuyKawasaki has managed to find a brand new #leweb complaint. Not wifi, food or temperature – he doesn’t like the towel. #leweb13

— Adam Tinworth (@adders) December 10, 2013