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Gabbin’ with Guy Kawasaki
He sounds like an incredibly fun guy.
On a recent phone interview, Kawasaki, who will be interviewing Wired editor Chris Anderson in a keynote conversation 2 p.m. Tuesday, March 17, was all laughs and easygoing conversation. For someone so busy — he posts on Twitter so much that some (myself included) avoid following him for fear of a flood of posts — he is gracious with his time and didn’t rush our chat.
The keynote will be of interest to anyone who cares about how money will be made online in the future. Anderson is the author of the forthcoming book “Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price” and is renowned as the author of the book and original Wired article, “The Long Tail,” which predicted that the entertainment industry (and many others) would shift to serve increasingly niche audiences.
“In this particular role,” Kawasaki said, “I am… let’s say Barbara Walters. Chris is Chris. It’s not exactly a conversation of peers. He’s the superstar and I’m the shill.” (Followed by laughs.)
Kawasaki has more than a little interest in the topic. In addition to his work as a venture capitalist at Garage Technology Ventures, he is also the founder of Alltop.com, a site that aggregates information from the best sources for particular topics. Alltop has more than 525 subdomains, such as linux.alltop.com or sxsw.alltop.com. It’s a site that gives this information away for free, much like the businesses Anderson writes about in “Free.”
“I’m gonna ask him about… how do you take a business which is essentially giving away information and make that a viable company?” Kawasaki said.
The attendees at SXSW will most certainly care, even if others may not be obsessed with finding out when Twitter and Facebook, companies potentially worth many billions of dollars, will turn a profit.
“You and I are on Twitter too much,” Kawasaki said, “if you went to your average Starbuck’s and said, ‘hey, anybody here care how Twitter’s gonna make money?” you might get the cold shoulder (but, if you’re lucky, a hot latte).
This will be only the second time Kawasaki has been to the festival, but he already enjoys it more than much bigger conferences where you might rub shoulders with Bono, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer.
“That just doesn’t appeal to me,” he said, “I don’t think SXSW is a seen-or-be-seen conference. I have decided that SXSW is probably the most interesting conference to go to. There’s a lot fewer VPs of business development hanging around.”
Then he got even more interesting: “There’s a much lower tolerance for (bovine excrement deleted). I think it’s the conference to go to.”
We’ll be seeing Kawasaki at the fest, I hope. Does it make you a good venture capitalist when you’re so friendly that it wouldn’t be out of place for someone to ask for a few million dollars out of the blue to go start a company? For his sake, I hope it does.
Oh, man, THAT’S what I forgot to ask. Hey, Guy — when you come to Austin, please bring your checkbook.
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