Watch Kanwal Rekhi’s Lecture at Michigan Technological University « I.P. in the U.P.: “”

Entrepreneurship in Hard Times from Engineering Michigan on Vimeo.

Guy Kawasaki’s latest book, Reality Check,is a very good convenient desktop reference (in a way) to some good common sense advice on many aspects of startups, small business, and work in the cubicle world.

I called it What Biz School Can’t Teach when I reviewed it on my main blog. And below, from BNET, is a video of Guy talking about it.

If, for any reason, you don’t see the video on this page (there are technical reasons, having to do with your system, your bandwidth, add-ons and such), you can probably find the video directly on the source site, using this link.

You’re going to do this class by yourself, going through the following web videos. Brace yourself, because there might be a pop quiz later, something like recognizing which slide in a set of slides wasn’t included in the videos.

The Back to Fundamentals Series: this is from a webinar given in November 2008. The total is 50 minutes. It divides into four parts.

• Part 1: Back to Fundamentals
• Part 2: The Heart of the Plan
• Part 3: Flesh and Bones of the Plan
• Part 4: Dressing and Growing

Nice summary, an excerpt of a book on business structure.

What do investors want? A common topic for blogs, entrepreneurs, and investors. So here’s another view on it, from somebody who knows:

Naval Ravikant, the speaker, has been through the ringer a few times, on both sides of the investment table. I watched one of his ventures, epinions.com, very closely, because my daughter and son in law were employees. So I now, a few years later, I follow his Venture Hacks blog.

Most of what he says here is pretty standard. And if you’re interested, his fellow blogger transcribed this interview on venture hacks. Some highlights:

“I look for two things that are paramount above all:

1. Great team. It’s obvious. It’s a tautology. Everybody says it. You have to be working with some of the best people in the industry you’re in.
2. Huge market. Niche markets just don’t work because the first idea never works. You always have to change the idea, so you need room to maneuver in a big market.

“There are three more factors that I look at. Not all three of them are required but I prefer a company to have at least two of them:

1. Difficult technology that is compounding over time.
2. A proprietary distribution channel. A clever viral marketing, or SEO, or partnership, or whatever strategy that gives them a leg up over competitors.
3. A direct monetization model. Something more than throwing up 10 cent banner ad CPMs.

Naval has more authority on this than I do, but his reference to niche markets bothers me a bit. I like niche markets in a world that is constantly splintering and dividing itself finer and finer. Some of the biggest markets there are started as niches: Facebook, for example, focused first on a few university campuses. Yahoo was a niche — the Internet — when it started. Starbucks was once a niche (gourmet coffee, affordable luxury) in the Northwest.

This interview is a couple of years old now, but I thought it was a pretty good summary of business planning as applied to real-world companies. It was done on the floor of a trade show of eBay vendors.

About a year after the book was published, and after a lot of previous engagements speaking on it, Guy chose this video as the one to post on the web. It’s a very good live and in person presentation of most of the same content as in the book.