I’ve been gradually re-reading Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, which is an absolute bible for creative professionals who are pondering a new business venture. It’s written in the same fresh, vibrant voice in which Kawasaki delivers his wildly popular live presentations, and contains a boatload of surprising, compelling, almost defiant, nuggets of advice (ie: “Don’t write a mission statement, write a mantra”).

Guy Kawasaki, of course, is a venture capitalist, avid blogger, and Tweeter (avid doesn’t begin to describe his blinding Twitter pace), and developer of the web content aggregator, AllTop.

One topic that I have not written much about yet on Merge is strategy, and specifically answering the critical question: “What is my business model?” Kawasaki masterfully boils this complicated and intimidating question down to three basic steps: “You make something, you sell it, you collect the money.” Easy enough, huh?

This “keep it simple” approach comes through in the video below from Stanford’s online Entrepreneurship Corner. Admittedly it’s a few years old (2004), but it still resonates clearly in our current business climate. Incidentally, this is just a single slice of the overall lecture (the rest of which is available on eCorner)which appears to cover most of the key points in The Art of the Start.

Thanks for the great response!
My last post about redesigning the patient experience generated lot’s of input, including this interesting link from Deedy Mullins.