Stanford Entrepreneurship Videos

In Kawasaki's opinion, he discusses the 10 reasons why Silicon Valley 4.0 will never happen.

Listen to your customers and your noncustomers, emphasizes Kawasaki. People who are not your customers are going to buy your product and use it in ways that you would not expect, he says. It is a good thing to see people using your product in a way you didn't intend means that your product means something to them, he adds.

Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, provides a description of Garage Technology Ventures and their services. These include: mergers & acquisitions, investment banking, and venture capitalism. He also describes what Garage Technology Ventures looks for in startups.

Kawasaki talks about the essence of Selling the Dream, his new book. You need evangelists, those who sell your dream, he says. The way to get others to believe in your dream is to show them you're making the world a better place, he adds. Kawasaki uses Google as an example of a company that has changed the world and has evangelists supporting their cause and spreading the word.

Kawasaki talks about how he uses a top 10 format for Powerpoint presentations and thinks that most presentations are terrible. For example, he says either the presentations are too long, Powerpoint is used poorly, or the font is too small to read.

Kawasaki shares his thoughts on whether or not to get an MBA. The problem with an MBA he says is that you believe you are being taught how to manage, and he generally thinks it is impossible to learn how to manage in school. The only way to learn how to manage, according to him, is to do it in the real-world.

In the first or second year of his medical residency training in the US in 1978, Palmaz went to an early meeting of the Society of Cardiovascular Intervention and Radiology in New Orleans. The keynote speaker was a young professor from Germany, Andreas Grunzig, who was coming to the states to report on his early experience with balloon angioplasty. Grunzig was charasmatic and intelligent, and explained balloon angioplasty so clearly--benefits and potential risks--that when he came to the reasons for failure, Palmaz immediately began to think of solutions to the problem. Palmaz describes the problem: early failures showed that balloon angioplasty was inconsistent. Palmaz describes how he began to work on a solution--he first wrote down his idea. He described his idea to his chairman on the way to the airport, and was encouraged to write it up to put his thoughts down on paper.

The company vision is conveyed through telling a story. Even though Jensen doesn't enjoy public speaking or think of himself as an orator, he understands the importance of speaking to his employees. He emphasizes the importance of forcing yourself to communicate despite not liking it or not being good at it.

Every company looks for a fundamental advantage, but in reality there are none. Most large markets are designed to foster competition. The question that must be addressed is not how to create one single fundamental advantage for the company but rather ongoing advantages.

Jensen describes 3D technology that he expects will become popular in the near future: lightweight displays that can be worn as goggles allow the user to be immersed in a 3D environment just by looking around.

There is no such thing as a sustainable great idea. Ideas have to be continuously reinvented. Jensen likes to tease that his company is always thirty days away from going out of business. The world is changing so rapidly that techniques and strategies will be obsolete thirty days from now, and therefore must be continuously changed.

Business at NVIDIA is going well -- they are selling new products and entering new markets. Though Chinese and Indian companies are threatening their American counterparts, Jensen is enthusiastic about NVIDIA's long-term viability. He does not believe that the industry is particularly scalable; having a thousand engineers is not as important as having the right engineers, and there is an advantage to being in the Silicon Valley where there is a spirit of innovation.

Corporate culture is the single most important thing for a CEO or entrepreneur to focus on in a company today. The culture at NVIDIA is about innovation and intellectual honesty, and the ability to be self-critical and recognize mistakes. Recognizing the power of this culture is very important for a leader.

Will NVIDIA have to re-position itself with the slowing of the PC industry? Though NVIDIA is traditionally a PC-based company, in reality the PC-market share is only 40%. However, it is still seen as a PC company and it is important not to re-position the company so drastically that this market will be lost.

There road is long between the foundation of a company and the IPO. If the IPO is the founder's purpose for starting a company, there is a great probability that the founder will be disappointed. Contrarily, NVIDIA's purpose has been and is to build a sustainable company that can make a difference in the world.