Guy Kawasaki came to Houston yesterday evening to give a talk at The Houston Technology Center. I had seen him give a talk called a couple of years ago at the NTC 2006 in Seattle and it was fantastic! So I was very excited about the event.
I was not dissappointed... Guy was phenomenal, gracious, hilarious, brilliant and just freakin' AWESOME! His presentation was called "The Art of the Start". Guy was amazingly gracious in staying wayyy longer than anyone expected. He took every question and even went partying (from what I understand) with some local Kawastalkers (no need to name names). <grin>
Guy also showed us alltop.com which is a site that covers a variety of interesting topics... he specifically showed us:
We've posted some pictures of the event on the HTC Web site.
I was also really excited to run into some old friends and met new ones... here's a short list of some of the folks I encountered last night (sorry if I missed anyone):
- Erica O'Grady
- Christine Selleck
- Imelda Bettinger
- Laura Mayes
- Tracey Lee Wallace
- Monica Danna
- Holly Gunn
- Kelsey Ruger
- Richard Yoo
- Dwight Silverman of The Houston Chronicle
- Marc Nathan of The Houston Technology Center
- AND I GOT TO MEET.... are you ready?... Jenny Lawson... The Bloggess!
Since several other folks have blogged about this event, I wanted to do something slightly different.... I decided to copy and paste a bunch of the tweets that were posted on Twitter during the event. Some of them are obviously funny, others you have no idea what they mean... but here's the list, enjoy:
- she's in beta with our second child
- Laura Mayes of skirt has been called out several times... Freakin' awesome
- Most people think rich and smart parses to smart. No. Most of the time it parses to 'lucky'
- There is no reason for the survival of Apple but that there is a benevolent God
- 2 kinds of bozos. rich and famous are the most dangerous bozos. rich/famous usually parses to lucky
- Don't let the bozos grind you down
- Find the influencers. the higher you go in most orgs, the thinner the air. harder to support intelligent life. CX0 are dumbest people who sucked up the longest. smartest are the influencers. not ultimate decision makers
- i believe in god because there is no other explanation for the survival of Apple than a benevolent god
- seed the clouds ... how you make the rain. "let a hundred flowers blossom". plant fields of flowers
- Sales fix everything
- Embrace your evangelists
- embrace your evangelists... people who get it and want to help you because they believe you/they are making world a better place
- don't ask someone to do something you would not do
- lower the barriers to adoption. flatten the learning curve - "plug it in and it works
- Hire people who are better than you
- hire better than yourself ... that's very hard to do, but everyone knows they should do it
- apple hired me because they were willing to ignore the irrelevant
- hire infected people - infected with a love of what you
- 10/20/30 rule of powerpoint - 10 slides is optimal number of slides in powerpoint presentation
- holy grail of marketing - provide something only you can do that provides high value
- All you white people look alike
So there's the list.... and if you ever have the opportunity to watch Guy Kawasaki... do anything and everything (even slashing someone's tires) to be there.... he's worth every second!
