The Art of The Start - Guy Kawasaki - Speech/Video

Posted on previous blog at 04/14/08

Following the series of videos I’ve been posting here, the one now is a really good one from Guy Kawasaki, regarding entrepreneurship!

In his own words, from his blog:
“An honest speaker will tell you that she has “on” days and “off” days. The result of a truly “on” day is a standing ovation. I had a very “on” day at TiECon on May 13, 2006. This is the annual meeting of The Indus Entrepreneur organization.
I’ve provided postings of audio and video of my speeches that covered the topics of innovation and evangelism, but this is the first one of “The Art of the Start“. It’s the first one, frankly, because I’ve been waiting until I did it very—standing ovation—well.“

To be in context, “The Art of the Start“ is a best-seller book which, again by the author, can be defined as:
“When you get pregnant, you read What to Expect When you’re Expecting. When you get laid off, you read What Color is Your Parachute?. When you get entrepreneurial, you read The Art of the Start.
This book is a weapon of mass construction. My goal was to provide the definitive guide for anyone starting anything. It builds upon my experience as an evangelist, entrepreneur, and most recently, as a venture capitalist who found, fixed, and funded startups.
The book is as relevant for two guys in a garage starting the next Google as social activists trying to save the world. GIST: cuts through the theoretical crap, theories and gets down to the real-world tactics of pitching, positioning, branding, recruiting, bootstrapping, and rainmaking.”

The speech is really really funny and full of smart sights about marketing, entrepreneurship and life!

In some sense, this video changed my life … it brought me new ideas which I’m applying right now!
Hope you enjoy it as I did. :D

PS: If you cannot see the video, on his blog’s link - up on the beginning of the post - you can download the video in .mp4 format.

Bill Gates Speech - Harvard Commencement 2007

Posted on previous blog at 04/12/08

I saw this video about a month ago and really enjoyed it! In the link you can also read all the speech!

It’s a 25min speech of Bill Gates on the 356th Harvard Commencement, on June 7, 2007.

In this occasion, Mr.Gates was receiving an honor’s diploma (or something like that…I don’t know exactly how it was called) regarding the 30 years of graduation he would had if he had graduated in his class (class of ‘77).

Mr. Gates started the speech with really funny lines, including, but not exclusively, talking about the relevance of this diploma on his career, referring himself as a bad influence, and talking about his personal life experience regarding women:

“I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”

“I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year… and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume. “

“I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvard’s most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class… I did the best of everyone who failed.
But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today. “

“Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.”

After that, the speech gets serious talking about social inequalities, and warning people, specially the graduate students, to care about the world’s despairs:

“Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?
Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty… the prevalence of world hunger… the scarcity of clean water …the girls kept out of school… the children who die from diseases we can cure?
Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least privileged?
These are not rhetorical questions—you will answer with your policies. “

It sounded like a really good speech, full of emotion and hope in the young people.

If you’re also interested on other speeches from the last year’s Harvard Commencement, you can take a look at Harvard Commencement 2007. There you can find other interesting speeches, as from Bill Clinton.

A little p.s. here: It was kind of funny, because I actually have a good friend (Gustavo Lima) from Brazil (my co-worker here at Microsoft) that graduated from Harvard last year, and (obviously) he was there live on the speech and “sharing” graduation with Bill Gates.