Many people have encouraged me to read The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki.  Although I didn’t find the first few chapters to fascinating, the latter chapters made up for it.  I found most value in the parts covering recruiting and bootstrapping.  Overall I found very good value in The Art of the Start and would recommend it to anybody about to take the dive into entrepreneurship. It would be well used as a manual to starting a new venture.

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Each chapter in The Art of the Start concludes with a few FAQ, which offered some additional insight. There are also topical mini chapters interwoven into The Art of the Start like: The art of designing T-shirts.  I got some great book suggestions from the recommended reading at the end of every chapter. The Art of the Start is divided into five main parts: Causation, Articulation, Activation, Proliferation and Obligation.

Causation: (The Art of Starting)

Kawasaki starts The Art of the Start with what he believes the 5 most important things entrepreneurs have to accomplish: Make Meaning, Make Mantra, Get Going, Define your Business Model and Weave a MAT.  It is a relatively fresh approach for me, but I think I have had an overdose of books on the vision and mission side of business.  Which is probably why this was the least appealing part of The Art of the Start to me.

Articulation: (The Art of Positioning, The Art of Pitching, The Art of Writing a Business Plan)

Kawasaki argues that the positioning of an organization should explain why the founders started it, why customer should support it and why employees should work there.  Which is related to the three golden circles Simon Sinek refers to in Start with Why.

When trying to raise money most entrepreneurs’ lives consist of pitching day in and day out.  The advice offered on pitching is very practical and should help anybody taking that route.

I have come to the conclusion that business plans are mostly a waste of time and effort.  While Kawasaki accepts that the actual plan is more or less worthless, he makes a case that the process adds value to a startup by forcing it to answer some of the tough questions. As well as getting the founders in each other’s faces, this result in either confirmation that they are a good team or that they aren’t.

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Activation: (The Art of Bootstrapping, The Art of Recruiting, The Art of Raising Capital)

This was by far my favourite part of The Art of the Start.  In my next business I am going to do my best to bootstrap all the way. I learned a great deal in the chapter on bootstrapping to help me when the time comes. Kawasaki gives five characteristics of a bootstrappable business model: Low up-front capital, short sales cycles, short payment terms, recurring revenue, word-of-mouth advertising.  Those are great clues to look out for.

The recommendations Kawasaki offered in the chapter on recruitment was my favourite.  He gives tips on doing the reference checks like that it is better to do them earlier in the process. He also discusses the conflict I have often felt between my intuition and the qualifications of a candidate.  There is also a table to decipher some of the lies often told by prospective employees.  If you only read one chapter in this book, I would go for this one.

The Art of Raising Capital starts off with some great advice: focus on building a business not raising money. There are wonderful insights in this chapter. I am sure allot of people would prefer this chapter, but my attention is more turned to bootstrapping so I was not fully engaged. A very entertaining part was the 10 lies entrepreneurs tell investors.

Proliferation: (The Art of Partnering, The Art of Branding, The Art of Rainmaking)

For startups it always looks attractive to partner with a big company that could help shorten the road to success, but this road is full of potholes. Kawasaki offers tips on helping to navigate the potholes and also includes a table to decode big company ‘speak’.

The best part of the branding is his advice on recruiting evangelists.  He also suggests helping fans setting up a community, giving them tools and interacting with them often.

Each chapter in the book begins with a quote. The quote at the start of Chapter 10: The Art of Rainmaking is one of my favourites:

“Stop going for the easy buck and start producing something with your life.  Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others.”   -Carl Fox (From the movie Wall Street).

Kawasaki explains also that great business can be built when unexpected customers use products in unexpected ways. You just have to be aware enough to notice and capitalize.

Obligation: (The Art of Being a Mensch)

There is a common theme in The Art of the Start: that starting and growing a business should be about more than just money. It should be about meaning and making the world a better place.  That really resonated with me. Kawasaki ties it all together with this last chapter by showing that paying back should be the fulfilment of any successful career.

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Writing this review of The Art of the Start has actually made me realized that I enjoyed the book and learned more than what I though I did when I started to write it.  The Art of the Start should be compulsory reading on any entrepreneurship course, and if you are going to start a business.

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I first really learned about Paul Graham while reading The Launch Pad.  He is the well know founder of Viaweb (now Yahoo Store) and Y Combinator, he’s also an exceptional essayist.  I find his writings very convincing, well-structured and insightful. Hacker and Painters (2008) is a collection of his essays published on his personal site.

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The essays address topics ranging from the unpopularity of nerds, the similarities between hacking and painting as well as why and how startups create wealth.  Although I struggled with some of the chapters later in Hackers and Painters, which was focused on programming languages, I really enjoyed this it.

His resounding argument leaves no doubt that a small team of good, trusted programmers can outperform big companies.  It is also clear that this combined with the increased productivity, free from any bureaucracy, creates new wealth.  This newly created wealth that is obtained by hard work, sacrifice, and persistence is something society should encourage.

In fact, he offers an alternative view on the much discussed gap between rich and poor.  Unlike most economists that would argue that the widening gap between rich and poor is bad for any society, Graham sees it as a sign that innovation, which creates new wealth, is encouraged.  This innovation and newly created wealth leaves the whole society better off.  He argues that it is absolute poverty not relative poverty that you want avoid.

Most of the last half of Hackers and Painters, Grahams discusses programming languages.  By using his own startup (Viaweb) as an example he shows that picking the best fit in a programming language can give a startup a competitive advantage.  That is something that I would have never considered.  He also goes on to describe what he considers to be the dream language.

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Although I have already decided that I would like to learn to code. Hackers and Painters have forced me to ask a new question: Do I want to be a hacker?

I enjoyed Hackers and Painters, if you are interested in startups, hackers or programming, it is worth a read.

O Man! Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days was incredible. Jessica Livingston, the author, is one of the founding partners at Y Combinator. If you don’t know Y Combinator make sure you read ‘The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s Most Exclusive School for Startups’. Livingston is married to Paul Graham another co-founder of Y Combinator.

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I found the collection of people interviewed in Founders at Work fantastic. It included software, hardware and web startups. The interviews were frank, thoughtful and inspiring. It really felt like it gave me some great insights into what all these people went through in building their business, including the highs and the lows. It was almost like reading a mini biography on each of the founders and their respective companies.

There are some awesome gems in this book, here is a few that had the most impact on me:

Steve Wozniak. – Apple. It was interesting getting his take on the start of Apple, having read the Steve Jobs book. It was also amazing how Wozniak build those first computers with the complete lack of resources especially money. It was a theme that occurred a few times in the book. More noticeable was when the founders did not raise money early, how the limitation in resources forced them to be more creative, and they felt looking back that was part of their success.

Paul Graham – Viaweb. Having read a few of his essays and a lot about Y Combinator, I didn’t think this chapter would be that interesting. I was mistaken, I loved it. The story about how they came up with the first web-based application. That is also where the name – Viaweb came from.

Philip Greenspun – ArsDigita. I was amazed how big some of the service/consulting businesses became in this era. Some of them then changed to product based, and many others seem to have hit a wall. ArsDigita was one that hit a wall, but not before Philip was pushed out by the VC, even though he was still a majority shareholder. After some litigation the VC eventually bought him out, but the business went under not long after that. His whole story about dealing with VC, although like always only one side of the story was very interesting.

Here is the full list of interviews included in Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Day’:

Max Levchin  – Paypal. Sabeer Bhatia – Hotmail. Steve Wozniak – Apple. Joe Kraus – Excite. Dan Bricklin – Software Arts. Mitchell Kapor – Lotus Development. Ray Ozzie – Iris Associates, Groove Networks. Evan Williams – Pyra Labs – Blogger.com. Tim Brady – Yahoo. Mike Lazaridis – Research in Motion – Blackberry. Arthur van Hoff – Marimba. Paul Buchheit – Gmail. Steve Perlman – WebTV. Mike Ramsay – TiVo. Paul Graham – Viaweb. Joshua Schachter – del.icio.us. Mark Fletcher – ONElist, Bloglines. Graig Newmark – craigslist. Caterina Fake – Flickr. Brewster Kahle Wais – Internet Acrhive, Alexa Internet. Charles Geschke – Adobe Systems. Ann Winblad – Open Systems, Hummer Winblad. David Heinemeier Hansson – 37signals. Philip Greenspu – ArsDigita. Joel Spolsky – Fog Creek Software. Stephen Kaufer – Trip Advisor. James Hong – Hot or Not. James Currier – Tickle. Blake Ross – Firefox. Mena Trott – Six Apart. Bob Davis – Lycos. Ron Gruner – Alliant Computer Systems, Shareholder.com.

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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups Early Days’ is well worth the time to read, it is long but each chapter offers great insight into starting a tech business. Get a copy today!