Liveblogging Guy Kawasaki at Stanford

Guy Kawasaki came to speak at Stanford today for Entrepreneur Week, talking about failure. He was a very funny and also down to to earth.

- The only way to guarantee failure is not to try.

- Failure is forgiven, it may even be a badge of courage.

He also told a funny story about coming into business and how one of the benefits of youth is that you don't know what you don't know. When he came to apple from the diamond business, he thought

"One day I was schlepping diamonds, the next day I was schlepping computers.. how hard can it be to sell people on using a platform with zero install base?"

He talked about the steps listed in 'The Art of the Start', then gave a few tips from the VC viewpoint.

- When they listen to financial projections, they divide by 100 and add a year. "We know you're lying, we just want to figure out by how much. It shouldn't be the Mariana Trench"

- Most projections seem to be $25 million for some reason, even if they're for shrimp processing software.

- One other thing to look for in companies is did they start out with 'Wouldn't it be cool..' rather than 'Is there a market for ..."

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Ryan Says.. also covers this event (and has a better picture). :)

EDIT: Fixed Marianas to Mariana, added a new picture, added link to other coverage.