Behind the scenes of Truemors and the right conclusions

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One of the talks at Silicon Valley Launch event (which was fantastic) today was from Guy Kawasaki. The title of the talk was “”How I Launched a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for only $10,918.09“. Guy was referring to his new startup (hobby business, of course) Truemors. Here is Guy’s latest blog post on this topic

I sort of disagreed with the fundamental theme of Guy’s talk today at the SVASE Launch event. My reason for disagreement was as follows:

The key message from the talk was that times have changed and anyone can now build an online company for a song. However, Guy also mentioned that he was able to do this for $12K because of his identity that was built over last 24 years. My dilemma was:

1. If the above is true (which I think it is) then it is not applicable to others who have not built an identity as big as Guy’s identity in this world. So the talk is not applicable to most of the audience.

2. For the minority (who have an identity closer to Guy’s identity) it is not applicable because there is only one GUY (pun intended) who can try such crazy things.

So, I started questioning what was Guy trying to achieve from his talk.

I have the utmost respect for Guy and consider his blog almost as an online university for entrepreneurs. I was confident of one of the two things – either my logic was flawed or I was not seeing something that Guy was seeing. So I sent a note to him asking for an explanation. Here is Guy’s response (presented here with his permission)

Your logic is without flaw. However, the conclusions that I would draw are:

* Get going or people will wake up 24 years from now and still not have a lofty reputation to live off of and exploit.

* Okay, so Guy can do it with $12K. I’m not guy, but still maybe I can do it for $120,000. But this is still a lot better than having to suck up to VCs to raise $2 million.

* Life is not about waiting for an even playing field. It’s about slanting it towards you.

I agree with Guy and I hope that he will end the next presentation with these conclusions. There are not many guys (pun not intended) and gals out there who can think like Guy.