

Guy Kawasaki: A Dozen Don’ts for Entrepreneurs - urlwolf
http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the-world/article/a-dozen-donts-for-entrepreneurs

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patio11
Nothing new here, and upwards of 80% of it is common knowledge on HN.

Pick which two of the following three items are desirable: revenue, launching
early, hiring your uncle as CTO. Wow, you're a sharp one, aren't you.

On the other hand, I sort of liked this phrase:

 _Don’t believe that the exception is the rule. ... Twitter is the exception.
Facebook is the exception. YouTube is the exception. There, I listed all the
exceptions. Everyone else needs revenue asap, or you will fail._

~~~
terpua
At least this one is getting discussion vs.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682892>

Goes to show that adding "Guy Kawasaki" to the title makes a difference.

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vivekamn
Guy Kawasaki used to write good articles based on insight gleamed from his
personal experience. But these days he seems to be more about just generating
some content to get eye balls so that he can push alltop. He is losing
credibility fast.

~~~
rimantas
Sadly this is true. I've removed his blog from my RSS reader quite a while
ago. Seth Godin got ditched for the same reason :(

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andrewljohnson
You should work with your spouse. It's great, and a lot of companies have
successful husband/wife teams. Here's an HN thread that lists a few:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=663881>

I've liked some Guy Kawasaki articles, like the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint,
but this article seems hastily written.

Another fallacy is to think partnerships are bad. Partnerships are great in
certain markets. Seek out people... you'd be surprised who'll take a phone
call.

~~~
hapless
This was the only piece of advice in the article that I really liked. _It
doesn't matter whether you work well with your spouse._ It could be a truly
great working relationship and still present a problem for your firm.

The problem is that _other people_ will hate working with you and your family.
You will fail to recruit the best, you will have to pay the workers you do
recruit more money, and morale will always be lower than it would have been if
you had not hired your family. Other employees will simply assume your family
gets special treatment. (And they're always right.)

~~~
tptacek
People will hate working with you if your company is failing to execute. If
you haven't hired your husband, they will find some other reason to hate you.
In any group of smart, opinionated adults, there are 100,000 reasons to hate
your coworkers --- compensation, effort, strategy decisions, nepotism,
cliques.

Kawasaki's comment ignores the upsides of working with your spouse. You can
both keep longer hours. It's easier to balance childcare needs. You can get
another unquestionably committed team member.

Singling out family involvement is a fallacy. There are thousands of
successful family businesses. There are hundreds of thousands of companies
that fail that never even considered hiring a spouse. There's simply no data
to back this point up, just supposition.

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spolsky
Wow, you could reverse all these and have a pretty good blog post.

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ajju
The other problem with hiring or co-founding with your spouse is putting all
your eggs in one basket. Startups are always in turbulent waters (often
financially and always emotionally). A spouse whose main occupation is not
your startup can be very helpful as an anchor.

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edw519
The probability that a blogger can confidently say 100% is 0%.

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alaskamiller
I would really like to know the details of Guy's contracts with these
publications. He must be raking it in shuffling and reshuffling his posts from
site to site.

