Top Ten Twenty Lies

Yes, this is a bit old, but quite good. I was wan­der­ing around and found these two art­icles on Guy Kawasaki’s web­site, about The Top Ten Lies of Ven­ture Cap­it­al­ists and The Top Ten Lies of Entre­pren­eurs. Great, great read­ing. One small snip­pet from each. On the VC side:

“This is a vanilla term sheet.” There is no such thing as a vanilla term sheet. Do you think cor­por­ate fin­ance attor­neys are paid $400/hour to push out vanilla term sheets? If entre­pren­eurs insist on using a fla­vor of ice cream to describe term sheets, the only fla­vor that works is Rocky Road. This is why they need their own $400/hour attor­ney too – as opposed to Uncle Joe the divorce lawyer.

and one on the Entre­pren­eur side:

“Oracle is too big/dumb/slow to be a threat.” Larry Ellison has his own jet. He can keep the San Jose Air­port open for his late night land­ings. His boat is so big that it can barely get under the Golden Gate Bridge. Mean­while, entre­pren­eurs are fly­ing on South­w­est out of Oak­land and steal­ing the free pea­nuts. There’s a reason why Larry is where he is, and entre­pren­eurs are where they are, and it’s not that he’s big, dumb, and slow. Com­pet­ing with Oracle, Microsoft, and other large com­pan­ies is a very dif­fi­cult task. Entre­pren­eurs who utter this lie look at best naive. You think it’s bravado, but ven­ture cap­it­al­ists think it’s stupidity.

Great stuff.

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