How to Change the World

The Art of Recruiting

The art of recruiting is the purest form of evangelism because you're not simply asking people to try your product, buy your product, or partner with you. Instead, you are asking them to bet their lives on your organization. Can it get any scarier for them, and tougher for you, than this?

1. Hire better than yourself. In the Macintosh Division, we had a saying, “A player hire A players; B players hire C players”--meaning that great people hire great people. On the other hand, mediocre people hire candidates who are not as good as they are, so they can feel superior to them. (If you start down this slippery slope, you'll soon end up with Z players; this is called The Bozo Explosion. It is followed by The Layoff.) I have come to believe that we were wrong--A players hire A+ players, not merely A players. It takes self-confidence and self-awarness, but it's the only way to build a great team.
2. Hire infected people. Classically, organizations look for the “right” educational and professional backgrounds. I would add a third quality: Is the candidate infected with a love of your product? Because all the education and work experience in the world doesn't matter if the candidate doesn't “get it” and love it. On the other hand, an ex-jewelry schlepper like me can make it in technology if you're infected with a love of the product.
3. Ignore the irrelevant. This is somewhat redundant with the prior point, but it merits repetition. Often a candidate's educational and work experience is relevant on paper but irrelevant in the real world. Would a senior vice-president from Microsoft with a PhD in computer science be an ideal employee of a startup? Not necessarily--this poor guy has been working for a company with $60 billion in cash and 95% market share, and he woke up every day not worried about the competition or customers but the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. The flip side is also true: the candidate--using a jewelry analogy-- without the “perfect” background could be the diamond in the rough.
4. Double check your intuition. Everyone has stories about the candidate that they “knew” would work out who turned out to be a nightmare employee. Or the employee they “knew” wouldn't work out despite a lack of qualifications who turned out to be the employee of the decade. The problem with intuition is that people only remember when their intuition was right--truth be told, their intuition was probably wrong as often as right. My recommendation is that you ask every candidate the same questions and take extensive notes. You might even conduct the first interview by telephone so you cannot judge the candidates by their appearance. In particular, startup founders believe they have a good “gut feel” for candidates, so they conduct unstructured interviews that are way too subjective, and they end up with lousy hires.
5. Check independent references. How many of us have limited reference checking to only those provided by the candidate? I know I have. Can we be more stupid than this? This often happens because we don't double check our intuition: we like the gal, so we only call the references she's provided because we don't want to hear that we like a bozo. Do as I say, not as I did: check independent references--preferably at least one person that she worked for and one person that worked for her.
6. Apply the Shopping Center Test. As the last step in the recruiting process, apply the Shopping Center Test. It works like this: Suppose you're at a shopping center, and you see the candidate. He is fifty feet away and has not seen you. You have three choices: (1) beeline it over to him and say hello; (2) say to yourself, “This shopping center isn't that big; if I bump into him, then I'll say hello, if not, that's okay too;” (3) get in your car and go to another shopping center. My contention is that unless the candidate elicits the first response, you shouldn't hire him.
7. Use all your weapons. Once you've found the perfect candidate, use all the weapons at your disposal to land her--not just salary and options. More important--and more telling--is the attractiveness of your vision for how you'll change the world and the other employees (who doesn't like to work with smart people who are kicking butt?). To this armory, add your board of directors and advisors who should use their sway to sign her up. And finally, throw in the resume-building potential of working for a great organization like yours (let's not be naive, here). Once you decide you want a person, pull out all stops and go with shock and awe to land her.
8. Sell all the decision makers. A candidate seldom makes a decision all by herself. There can be several other people contributing to the decision. The obvious ones are spouses and significant others, but it can also be kids, colleagues, and friends. With Asian Americans, it can even be parents because Asian Americans are perpetually trying to make their parents happy. In the interviews, simply ask, “Who is helping you make this decision?” And then see if you can make them happy too.
9. Wait to compensate. A common mistake that many organizations make is using an offer letter as the starting point for negotiation. This is very risky because you don't know what reaction this first data point is going to have. If the candidate is Asian American, for example, she might show it to her mother; her mother might be offended by your lowball offer and then tell the candidate to forget your organization because it's dishonored your family. A offer letter confirms what everyone has agreed upon. It is the last step in negotiations, not the first one.
10. Don't assume you're done. Garage once recruited an investment banker (mea culpa #1) from a large (mea culpa #2) firm. After weeks of wooing and several offers and counter offers, he accepted a position with us. He even worked for us for a few days, and then he called in sick. Late the next night, he sent me an email saying that he had accepted an offer from a former client of his old investment bank. I learned a valuable lesson: never assume that your recruiting is done. Frankly, you should recruit every employee every day because when they go home at night, you might never see them again if you don't keep the lovin' going.

Addendum:

Here's a great article called “25 words that hurt your resume.” I found it because this site had a trackback to this blog entry.

Written at: Benihanas, Cupertino, California

Loop Du Jour

Today's loop is brought to you by a member of this blog's community: Krishna M. Sadasivam! It's a loop called PC Weenies---if you use a computer, you'll love these cartoons. And, I guess by definition, if you are reading this blog, you use a computer. :-)

You can point your friends to this URL, if you want to share it:

http://snipurl.com/pcweeniescartoon

If you want more humorous loops like Doonesbury, etc, go to:

http://network.filmloop.com/humor

Do “What” to the Butt?

A point of clarification to the award winners of the my loop contest. I've sent most of you a copy of The Art of the Start, and I signed them “Kick butt!--Guy Kawasaki.”

Some people thought I wrote “Lick butt.” Once I autographed a book for a woman, and she asked me why I signed her book, “Nice butt!” (I can't remember if she had one or not.)

So just so you know, I sign my books, “Kick butt.” Not “Nice butt.” Not “Kiss butt.” And certainly not “Lick butt.”

And while we're on the subject of kicking butt, let me tell you a funny story. About six years ago, at the height of the dotcom hype, I owned a Porsche 911 Cabriolet. One day I was at a stoplight in Menlo Park, and a car full of teenage girls in the next next lane were giggling and smiling at me.

I'm thinking, “Guy, you've finally arrived: Even teenage girls know who you are--Macintosh evangelist, venture capitalist, author, speaker. How sweet it is!” Finally, one of the girls motions me to roll down my window.

I put down the window, fully expecting her to tell me how much she loves my writing, speaking, whatever, and she says, “Are you Jackie Chan?”

That incident made me establish a new goal to execute: that someday Jackie Chan will be stopped at a light in Hong Kong, and a car full of teenage girls will ask him to roll down his window. Then one will ask, “Are you Guy Kawasaki?”

By the way, he may do his own stunts, but I do my own blogging.

The Art of Execution

If my memory isn't failing me, after the Robert Redford character gets elected in The Candidate, he whispers to one of his supporters, “Now what?” Raising money ls like running for office: it's very exciting and even fun if you get the money. But after you raise the money, now what?

The good news is that you got the money. The bad news is you got the money. At the end of the process, every entrepreneur has to answer the same question as the candidate: “Now what?” The answer to this question is, “Now you execute.” And the next question is, “How do we execute?” This is the topic of this blog.

1. Create something worth executing.You're going to get tired of my obsession with great products but pitching, demoing, bootstrapping, and executing are a lot easier if you've created something meaning-full. It's hard to stay motivated and excited about executing crap. It's easy if you're changing the world. So if you and your team are having a hard time executing, maybe you're working on the wrong thing.

2. Set goals. The next step is to set goals. Not just any kind of goals, but the right goals, and the right goals embody these four qualities:

   • Measureable. If a goal isn't measureable, it's unlikely you'll achieve it. For a startup, quantifiable goals are things like shipping deadlines, downloads, sales volume, whatever. The old yarn, “What gets measure gets done” is true. This also has ramifications on the number of goals because you can't (and shouldn't) measure everything. Three to five goals are plenty.

   • Achievable. Take your “conservative” forecast for these goals and multiply them by .1; then use that as your goal. For example, if you think you'll easily sell one million units in the first year, then set your goal at 100,000 units. There is nothing more demoralizing than setting a “conservative” goal and falling short; instead take 10% of your forecast, make this your goal, and blow it away. You might think that such a practice will lead to under-achieving organizations because they aren't being challenged--yeah, well, check back with me after you don't sell a million widgets like you conservatively thought you would.

   • Relevant. A good goal is relevant. If you're a software company, it's the number of downloads of your demo version. It's not your ranking in Alexa, so telling the company to focus on getting into the top 50,000 sites in world in terms of traffic is not nearly as relevant as 10,000 downloads per month.

   • Rathole-resistant. A goal can be measureable, achievable, and relevant and still send you down a rathole. Let's say you've created a content web site. Your measureable, achievable, and relevant goal is to sign up 100,000 registered users in the first ninety days. So far, so good. But what if you focus on this body count without regard to the stickiness of the site? So now you've gotten 100,000 people to register, but they visit once and never return. That's a rathole. Ensure that your goal encompasses all the factors that will make your organization viable.

3. Postpone, or at least de-emphasize, touchy feely goals. I'll get lots of negative feedback about this, but touchy feel goals like “create a great work environment” are bull shitake. They may make the founders feel good. They may even make the employees feel good. But companies that execute on measurable goals are happy. Those that don't, aren't. As soon as you start missing the measurable goals, all the touchy feely stuff goes out the window. As my mother used to tell me, “Son, sales fixes everything.”

4. Communicate the goals. Many executive teams set goals, but they don't communicate these goals to the organization. For goals to be effective, they have to be communicated to every employees in the organization. Employees should wake up in the morning thinking about how they're going to help achieve these goals.

5. Measure progress on a weekly basis. The goals that people achieve are the goals that are measured. If you don't measure progress towards a goal, you might as well not set it. This is also another reason for setting only three to five goals: people can't focus on more than five, and measuring many more that five is difficult too. The optimal time period to review progress is weekly: monthly is too little pressure; daily is too anal.

6. Establish a single point of responsibility. If you ask your employees who is responsible for a goal, and no one can answer you in ten seconds, then it means that there's not enough accountability. If more than one person is responsible for the achievement of a goal, then no one is responsible. Good employees accept responsibility. Great employees seek responsibility. Lousy employees avoid responsibility.

7. Follow thru on an issue until it is done or irrelevant. Many organizations set goals and even measure progress towards them. However, after a short period of time, some goals are no longer on the radar because people start focusing on the coolest and most interesting stuff. For example, fixing bugs in the current version of a software application may not be as interesting as designing a new, breakthrough product, but your current customers think so.

8. Reward the achievers. Rewarding the people who achieve their goals has two positive effects. First, the achievers feel rewarded and become even more excited about doing their job. Second, the under- and non-achievers know that the company takes execution very seriously. The form of the reward can be money, stock options, time off--whatever works to serve notice to everyone that “this person delivered.”

9. Establish a culture of execution. Execution is not an event--a onetime push towards achieving goals. Rather it is a way of life, and this way of life (execution versus non-execution) is set in the early days of the organization. The best way to establish this culture is for the founders, particularly the CEO, to set an example of filling goals, responding to customers, and heeding and measuring employees. This obsession should go right down to the level of the CEO answering emails and responding to phone calls.

10. Heed your “Morpheus.” Morpheus is the character in The Matrix who gave Neo the choice between the blue pill and the red pill. He was, essentially, the adult supervision. Cold, brutal reality is the ally of execution, so find a Morpheus who distributes the red pills and enables employees to see things as they really are.

Written at: Backseat of a car going to and from Stockton, California.

The Art of Bootstrapping

Someone once told me that the probability of an entrepreneur getting venture capital is the same as getting struck by lightning while standing at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. This may be too optimistic.

Let's say that you can't raise money for whatever reason: You're not a “proven” team with “proven” technology in a “proven” market. Or, your company may simply not be a “VC deal”--that is, something that will go public or be acquired for a zillion dollars. Finally, your organization may be a not-for-product with a cause like the ministry or the environment. Does this mean you should give up? Not at all.

I could build a case that too much money is worse than too little for most organizations—not that I wouldn't like to run a Super Bowl commercial someday. Until that day comes, the key to success is bootstrapping. The term comes from the German legend of Baron Münchhausen pulling himself out of the sea by pulling on his own bootstraps. Here is the art of bootstrapping.

1. Focus on cash flow, not profitability. The theory is that profits are the key to survival. If you could pay the bills with theories, this would be fine. The reality is that you pay bills with cash, so focus on cash flow. If you know you are going to bootstrap, you should start a business with a small up-front capital requirement, short sales cycles, short payment terms, and recurring revenue. It means passing up the big sale that take twelve months to close, deliver, and collect. Cash is not only king, it's queen and prince too for a bootstrapper.
2. Forecast from the bottom up. Most entrepreneurs do a top-down forecast: “There are 150 million cars in America. It sure seems reasonable that we can get a mere 1% of car owners to install our satellite radio systems. That's 1.5 million systems in the first year.” The bottom-up forecast goes like this: “We can open up ten installation facilities in the first year. On an average day, they can install ten systems. So our first year sales will be 10 facilities x 10 systems x 240 days = 24,000 satellite radio systems. 24,000 is a long way from the conservative 1.5 million systems in the top-down approach. Guess which number is more likely to happen.
3. Ship, then test. I can feel the comments coming in already: How can you recommend shipping stuff that isn't perfect? Blah blah blah. ”Perfect“ is the enemy of ”good enough.“ When your product or service is ”good enough,“ get it out because cash flows when you start shipping. Besides perfection doesn't necessarily come with time--more unwanted features do. By shipping, you'll also learn what your customers truly want you to fix. It's definitely a tradeoff: your reputation versus cash flow, so you can't ship pure crap. But you can't wait for perfection either. (Nota bene: life science companies, please ignore this recommendation.)
4. Forget the ”proven“ team. Proven teams are over-rated--especially when most people define proven teams as people who worked for a billion dollar company for the past ten years. These folks are accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and it's not the bootstrapping lifestyle. Hire young, cheap, and hungry people. People with fast chips, but not necessarily a fully functional instruction set. Once you achieve significant cash flow, you can hire adult supervision. Until then, hire what you can afford and make them into great employees.
5. Start as a service business. Let's say that you ultimately want to be a software company: people download your software or you send them CDs, and they pay you. That's a nice, clean business with a proven business model. However, until you finish the software, you could provide consulting and services based on your work-in-process software. This has two advantages: immediate revenue and true customer testing of your software. Once the software is field-tested and battle-hardened, flip the switch and become a product company.
6. Focus on function, not form. Mea culpa: I love good ”form.“ MacBooks. Audis. Graf skates. Bauer sticks. Breitling watches. You name it. But bootstrappers focus on function, not form, when they are buying things. The function is computing, getting from point A to point B, skating, shooting, and knowing the time of day. These functions do not require the more expensive form that I like. All the chair has to do is hold your butt. It doesn't have to look like it belongs in the Museum of Modern Art. Design great stuff, but buy cheap stuff.
7. Pick your battles. Bootstrappers pick their battles. They don't fight on all fronts because they cannot afford to fight on all fronts. If you were starting a new church, do you really need the $100,000 multimedia audio visual system? Or just a great message from the pulpit? If you're creating a content web site based on the advertising model, do you have to write your own customer ad-serving software? I don't think so.
8. Understaff. Many entrepreneurs staff up for what could happen, best case. ”Our conservative (albeit top-down) forecast for first year satellite radio sales is 1.5 million units. We'd better create a 24 x 7 customer support center to handle this. Guess what? You sell no where near 1.5 million units, but you do have 200 people hired, trained, and sitting in a 50,000 square foot telemarketing center. Bootstrappers understaff knowing that all hell might break loose. But this would be, as we say in Silicon Valley, a “high quality problem.” Trust me, every venture capitalist fantasizes about an entrepreneur calling up and asking for additional capital because sales are exploding. Also trust me when I tell you that fantasies are fantasies because they seldom happen.
9. Go direct. The optimal number of mouths (or hands) between a bootstrapper and her customer is zero. Sure, stores provide great customer reach, and wholesalers provide distribution. But God invented ecommerce so that you could sell direct and reap greater margins. And God was doubly smart because She knew that by going direct, you'd also learn more about your customer's needs. Stores and wholesalers fill demand, they don't create it. If you create enough demand, you can always get other organizations to fill it later. If you don't create demand, all the distribution in the world will get you bupkis.
10. Position against the leader. Don't have the money to explain your story starting from scratch? Then don't try. Instead position against the leader. Toyota introduced Lexus as good as a Mercedes but at half the price--Toyota didn't have to explain what “good as a Mercedes” meant. How much do you think that saved them? “Cheap iPod” and “poor man's Bose noise-cancelling headphones,” would work too.
11. Take the “red pill.”This refers to the choice that Neo made in The Matrix. The red pill led to learning the whole truth. The blue pill meant waking up wondering if you had a bad dream. Bootstrappers don't have the luxury to take the blue pill. They take the red pill--everyday--to find out how deep the rabbit hole really is. And the deepest rabbit hole for a bootstrapper is a simple calculation: Amount of cash divided by cash burn per month because this will tell you how much longer you can live. And as my friend Craig Johnson likes to say, “The leading cause of failure of startups is death, and death happens when you run out of money.” As long as you have money, you're still in the game.

Written at: Atherton, California.

Loop de Hawk

This is a good story. A few months ago I spoke at the Surfing Industry Manufacturers Association meeting in Cabo San Lucas. To my dismay, the speaker I followed was Tony Hawk.

After our speeches, I got to hang out with Tony and set up an Airport network for us, so I asked him to sign my PowerBook. (Incidentally, he did not ask me to sign his, but I digress...)

Anyway, fast forward a few months. He got married in early January, and he created a loop of his wedding pictures. These pictures are a FilmLoop exclusive. :-)

If you'd like so share this loop with Tony Hawk fans, please send people to:

http://snipurl.com/tonyhawkwedding

Hindsights II: the Learning Continues

It's been a few years since I wrote the Hindsights speech. During these years, a lot of water has gone under the bridge. I am married to the same woman. I have three kids with a fourth on the way. (My youngest is a girl we adopted from Guatemala, and any day now, we are adopting her biological brother.) I've written seven books and made about five hundred speeches. I've started three companies and done another tour of duty at Apple. Finally, I've racked up 1.5 million miles on United Airlines--it's a bad sign when immigration tells you, “There's no more space on your passport; you need to get a new one.”

You'd think that I would have learned something beyond the original ten hindsights, and indeed I have. To this end, here is Hindsights II. If you add these hindsights to the ones in my first speech, you'll have the big things that I've learned in life.

1. Things are never as good or as bad as they seem. When I was working at Apple from 1983 to 1987, the company experienced fantastic highs and dismal lows. Shipping Macintosh was one such high. Apple's first layoff a few years later was a dismal low. But I saw that when things were supposedly great, there were lots of problems that people chose to ignore. Then I saw that during the black days, things weren't that bad: Customers were still buying Macintoshes by the thousands; developers were fairly happy, and most employees weren't affected by the layoffs. (Some employees even thought the layoffs were a good method to clean house.) So I've learned to temper my optimism and my pessimism in my old age.
2. You can love an adopted child as much as a biological one. A man's contribution to a pregnancy lasts about ten seconds--five if he told the truth--three if you asked the mother. And yet I've met many men who who were skeptical about adoption because they didn't think they could “bond” with a child that didn't have their DNA--ie, the ten-second commitment. This is simply not true: when you hold your precious jewel for the first time, no one cares if none of those chromosomes came from you. Certainly not the baby. Certainly not your wife. So get over it. Your DNA isn't the Holy Grail--to mix several metaphors.
3. The key to child delivery is one word: “epidural.” We went to the delivery classes; we learned the relaxation techniques; we took the soothing music with us to the hospital. At the end of the day (or, more accurately twenty-six hours), we came to believe that if God wanted every delivery to be natural, She wouldn't have enabled doctors to invent the epidural shot.
4. People act like their last names sound. People may start to look like their dogs, but I think that they act like their last names sound. For example, I have a buddy named Will Mayall. He helps me with anything technical; for example, when I ask him if he can make my web site or blog do something, his initial response is, “I may be able to” and then two hours later he's done it “all.” Hence, “may all.” Similarly, there's Jean-Louis Gassée. He's a funny guy--always armed with a great (usually sexual) metaphor to explain anything. He is a “gas” for the things that he “says”--hence, “gas say”. Then there's Kawasaki--my high school football teammates told me that I was a “cow's ass sagging.”
5. If you think someone is an orifice, everyone else does too. When I met people that I didn't like, I wondered if it was me or the person. Perhaps I had gotten her all wrong, and other people liked her, respected her, adored her, whatever. After much investigation, I formulated the Rule of Perfect Information About Orifices; that is, if you think someone is an orifice, pretty much everyone thinks she's an orifice too. There is seldom disagreement about orifices. The same, however, is not true about good guys. If you think someone is a good guy, you should never assume most people agree with you.
6. Life is too short to deal with orifices. Continuing on the orifice track. I'm now fifty-one years old, so more than half my life is over. There's not enough time left to accommodate orifices--frankly, there's not enough time to take care of the people you like. Why should you waste time with people you don't? So no matter how great a customer, partner, or vendor someone could, or should, be, don't waste time with orifices. They not only waste your time, but they taint your soul for the time you spent with the people you like.
7. Entrepreneurs are always a year late and 90% high in their “conservative” forecast. I've worked with entrepreneurs who were so green they couldn't run a lemonade stand, and I've worked with entrepreneurs with great track records in brand-name companies. At the end of the day, experience, age, gender, educational background...nothing matters: entrepreneurs are usually a year late in delivering their product, and their financial results are 90% lower than their “conservative” forecast. This isn't necessarily bad--indeed it may be necessary for entrepreneurs to believe their own bull shitake, but it is how things work.
8. Judge others by their intentions and yourself by your results. If you want to be at peace with the world, here's what you should do. When you judge others, look at what they intended to do. When you judge yourself, look at what you've actually accomplished. This attitude is bound to keep you humble. By contrast, if you judge others by their accomplishments (which are usually shortfalls) and yourself by your intentions (which are usually lofty), you will be an angry, despised little man.
9. You don't have to answer every email. I am compulsive about answering email. Sometimes I simply can't answer email for weeks, and I feel like slitting my wrists. However, there have been a couple of times where I lost my inbox--copied the wrong file, file got corrupted, whatever--and I was terrified that hundreds of people wouldn't get a response and would be furious. They'd be thinking, “Guy thinks he's such a big shot that he doesn't need to answer email anymore.” I expected to get hatemail for weeks. Do you know what happened? Nothing. Not one pissed-off email. I was amazed. But I am still compulsive about email.
10. Always use the toilet in an airplane after a woman. This is getting a little vertical, or horizontal, depending on how you want to look at it. Simply put, men pee on the seat. Women don't. And if a woman follows a man who peed on the seat, then she will clean it up before she sits down. If you sit down after her, you're good to go--so to speak.
11. Never ask people to do something that you wouldn't do. This is the ultimate test for every sales promotion, marketing campaign, engineering design, and employee directive. If you won't do something, don't ask anyone else to do it. I don't care how great your nuclear powered mousetrap is: You wouldn't pay $500,000 for it, go back to school for a PhD in Physics to learn to set it, and drive to the middle of Utah to drop off the dead, toxic mouse. On the flip side, as my buddy Smittie told me, if you do the tough, dirty stuff then (a) employee can't complain; and (b) employees will follow you because they know you would do what you're asking them to do.

Addendum: Hindsights IIa: Many men have written to me that their spouses pee while standing up. Thus, my belief that women pee sitting down is false. And maybe WAY false because a woman peeing standing up is likely to be “less accurate” for reasons of plumbing. All this said, someone once told me that pee is sterile anyway, but I digress.

Written at: Anderson School of Management, UCLA, Los Angeles, California.

Award Winners Loop

By popular demand, I've made it easy for you to see the award winners by clicking here. I've also added one more award:

Best Canadian family: Cameron B

Now seeing the winners is easier than shooting fish in a barrel.

How to Be a Demo God

From February 6th to 8th, executives from seventy companies will do a six-minute demo of their products to an audience of venture capitalists, analysts, and journalists. This event is called, logically, Demo. It's a great event--especially if you understand the dance that's going on: entrepreneurs acting like they don't need capital, and VCs acting like they don't need entrepreneurs. (This dance is akin to acting prudish in a brothel, but I digress...)

This posting is ostensibly for the seventy or so souls who will do the demos--everyone one of them aspiring to be labeled a demo god. I should probably throw in another seventy vice presidents of marketing. And seventy PR account execs. Let's call it three hundred or so people. But it's also for anyone who has to demo a product to raise capital, make a sale, garner press, or recruit an employee.

With no further delay, here is the path to demo-god-dom:

1. Create something worth demoing. My first “duhism” for the week, and it's only Monday morning. If you want to be a demo god, create a great product to demo. If you create mediocrity, and you somehow slipped past the gatekeepers of Demo, you will be outed there. I know Demo is a great PR opportunity, but if you don't do a demo, only you'll know you have mediocrity. If you do the demo, the whole world will.
2. Do it alone. A demo god works alone. You may think it will be interesting and hilarious if the two co-founders do the demo together. Plus, it will show the world how they're getting along so well. Do you know why  Laurel and Hardy is so famous?  It's because there has been so few successful duets. It's hard enough for one person to do a demo. Trying to get two people to do an interactive demo is four times harder. If you want to be a duet, go to a karaoke bar.
3. Bring two of everything. There is a place for duplication: equipment. Expect everything to break the night before you're on stage, so bring two, maybe even three, computers, phones, thumb drives, whatever you'll use in your demo. There is zero slack for equipment failures at Demo other than the projector and audio (which are the responsibility of the Demo folks).
4. Get organized in advance. You should never futz around in a demo--for example, looking for folders and files on your hard disk. You have weeks to prepare for these six minutes; you're absolutely clueless if you haven't set everything up in advance.
5. Reduce the factors you can't control. Should you assume that you'll have Internet access during your demo? Yes, but have a back up anyway.  Sure, the hotel has a T1 line, but several hundred people in the audience are accessing it. You can count your lucky stars that Verizon has EvDO service in Phoenix. Better yet, simulate Internet access to your server by using a local server.You don't have to show the real system. This, after all, the demo.
6. Get to it. You only have six minutes, so within thirty seconds, stop jawboning and start demoing. Nobody cares about the genesis of your company or that you have a PhD in cognitive science from Stanford. They came to see a demo, not hear your life story. Believe me, if your demo is good, they'll hunt you down to get your whole story later. If your demo sucks, it won't matter if you've won a Nobel Prize.
7. “Do the last thing first.” I stole this from my buddy Peter Cohan who is a demo maven; he teaches people how to do a great demo. What he means, and I second, is that you have about one minute to captivate your audience, so don't try building to a crescendo. Start with “shock and awe”--the absolute coolest stuff that your product can do. The goal is to blow people's minds.
8. Then show the “how.” Once you've blown their minds, then you work backwards and show them the “how.” This is the knockout punch: not only is the “what” fantastic, but the “how” makes it possible for mere mortals to do this too. True or false: What's coming out of your mouth should impress the audience. The answer is False; what's happening on the screen should impress the audience, not what you're uttering.
9. Cut the jargon. The Demo audience thinks that it is very sophisticated and tech savvy. It may well be, but you should cut the jargon nonetheless because jargon seldom impresses people. The ability to speak simply and succinctly is always the best way to go. You may have the world's greatest enterprise software product, but the consumer device partner of your dream venture capital firm is in the audience. If she can't understand your demo, she's not going to be telling her counterparts about it back in the office.
10. Don't take any questions until the end. There are no questions during a demo at Demo because of the six minute limit. However, in other circumstances, you may be tempted to field questions as you go. Don't do it. It's too risky. You never know what you'll be asked--it could take you down a rat hole so deep that you'll never come back up. The upside of showing that you can answer any question in real-time is an ego trip that doesn't justify the downside of getting derailed.
11. End with an exclamation point. You want to start on a high. You also want to end on a high. (If I had to choose, though, I'd start with a higher high than end with a higher high.) Just keep one more cool thing in your bag of tricks. Think of it as a great dessert at the end of a great meal. Scary but true: the goal is to end like the Ginsu knife commercial: “But wait, there's more...” And when you do end on this exclamation point, leave the screen alone. Give the audience plenty of time to let the exclamation point sink in. If they're interested, they look you up in the program, so don't end with a screen of contact information.

Written at: Atherton, California.

First--and Last--Guy's Blog's Loop's Photo Winners

Much to my delight, dozens of you have posted your picture to my loop of blog readers. In your honor, I am presenting the first and last “Guy's Blog's Loop's Photo Winners.” (You know I love top ten lists, but I couldn't reduce the number of categories.) I didn't plan to select “winners” when I asked people to join the loop, but I just enjoyed the photos so much.

You know who you are: Send me your address, and I'll send you an autographed copy of The Art of the Start. (You see how little FilmLoop really knows about your identity?)

1. Best use of a mirror: Andreas J (Perhaps we should take up a collection to buy you a camera with a self timer and a tripod.)
2. Best action shot: Mlongfellow; close second: William V
3. Worst hair: Scott I
4. Best marketer: Mike L
5. “I've been reading too many blogs” award: John Ray T
6. Best name of linked-to blog: longblondetail.blogs.com
7. Closest to pornographic: Steve P
8. Best hockey picture: Terry R
9. Strongest quadriceps: Lusin L
10. Most dubious use of depth of field: Terry R
11. Most pricks in photo: Dan O
12. Cutest skirt: Garry H
13. Best plug for Macintosh: Tie: Dan W and Michael D
14. Worst plug for Macintosh: Nelson L
15. Best nasal hair: Brian K
16. Best use of rubber bands: Andrew H
17. Most likely to piss off environmentalists: Lance M
18. Best picture of Chairman Mao: Madhura Konkar
19. Most likely to be an MBA: Matt J
20. Best smile: Sam P
21. Best Bose ad: Pete W
22. Cutest couple: Tie: George H, Chris H, and Michelle H
23. Best “how the heck did you do this?” shot: Thomas K