The Art of the Start: Review Print
The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything Entrepreneur-turned-financier Guy Kawasaki has parsed the launch of an enterprise into 11 separate “arts”—Starting, Positioning, Pitching, Writing a Business Plan, Bootstrapping, Recruiting, Raising Capital, Partnering, Branding, Rainmaking, and Being a Mensch. While the 10 later chapters delve into the nitty gritty of founding, financing, and publicizing a startup, Kawasaki's message never strays far from this guiding principle: making “meaning” is the all-important task—the ultimate litmus test—that every entrepreneur must reckon with. If the world would be no worse off without your venture, he quips, then why bother?

Through stripped-down logic, Kawasaki applies fresh thinking to the well-covered territory of entrepreneurship. (“If your attitude is ‘Cut the crap and just tell me what I need to do',” he writes in his introduction, “you've come to the right place.”) Like the business practices he espouses, Kawasaki's writing is to the point and wonderfully free of pretense, his ideas often contrarian. Once entrepreneurs have decided how they will make meaning, for example, the next step is to cast that meaning in words—an exercise that most MBA programs would say is best fulfilled with a mission statement. But not Kawasaki, who derides the average mission statement as “a painful and frustrating experience that results in exceptional mediocrity.” He favors short, catchy mantras.

Art of the Start urges entrepreneurs to define their product or service narrowly in the beginning; there's no danger in filling (or creating) a niche, as evidenced by the fact that many a multibillion-dollar company started out doing just one thing very well. And in a sequence that's downright irreverent, the book suggests delivering the product first, then working out kinks later.

For the most part, Kawasaki avoids abstractions and theories. Instead, he offers practical tools that are eminently deployable, such as five ways to avoid hiring the wrong people. A minimalist philosophy runs through Art of the Start. When pitching to venture capitalists or other backers, we're told, 10 slides in 20 minutes are more than enough to get the point across.

The importance of “keeping it real” (borrowing from pop-culture parlance) is another message that resonates. Don't inflate cash flow projections or cite flimsy market research. Bind your business plan with a staple. Give back to society. Be the first to admit that your competitors can do things you can't. And never be so naïve as to claim that you have no competition—if your audience buys this, they'll quickly conclude that there is no market for what you have to sell.

Kawasaki writes as someone who has truly seen it all, both from the vantage point of an entrepreneur and arbiter of other people's visions for startups. In the 1980s at Apple, he had a hand in creating Macintosh, then went on to start several Silicon Valley ventures. (Not coincidentally, the book is replete with references to the computer industry.) Since 2004, he has run Garage Technology Ventures, which invests in early-stage, high-tech companies.

Despite Kawasaki's intent that Art of the Start, the eighth of his books, be a guide for anyone hoping to start any type of organization, much of the content seems geared to manufacturing and high-tech businesses. No mention, for example, is made of bank loans, the most accessible form of financing for many small businesses. Still, whatever his or her ambitions, any entrepreneur will come away from this candid, memorably witty book with a better understanding of what it takes to succeed.
 
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