Book: Reality Check

Guy Kawasaki is a master of re-purposing content. If you have read any of his books, followed his blog, or seen him present, then it is very likely that large parts of this book will be familiar to you. Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition is a comprehensive collection of Kawasaki's Greatest Hits. You know them: the 10/20/20 Rule of Pitch Presentations, The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists, and many more!

It's easy to pick on Guy for repeating himself, but the fact is that his advice is practical, commonsensical, and quite useful to entrepreneurs. You'll end up with a bunch of actionable new ideas on how to better manage your startup.

As a bonus, the book has two new forewords. The first is written by Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons:

The Valley is a place like no other place on earth. It's the last true meritocracy in America, a place where a great idea and a willingness to work ridiculously hard can turn a bunch of unknown kids into a bunch of billionaires. This isn't Wall Street, or Washington, DC, or Hollywood, where success depends largely on which people you know and what college you went to. The Valley doesn't care where you went to college or even if you didn't go to college at all. The Valley is simply about ideas. Think you've got a good one? Code it up and give it a shot.

The second foreword is also written by Dan Lyons, this time writing as his alter-ego Fake Steve Jobs:

What is Guy's new book about? To be honest, I have no idea. I didn't read it. I didn't even pretend to read it. Guy is craven enough that he doesn't really care whether I read his book or not. As he put it to me, all he wants is a famous name to put on the cover, and pretty much everyone turned him down and so he had to resort to calling me, and so, fine.

So this is it -- my official endorsement. Reality Check is by far the best book ever written about the Valley. It's an important and necessary work, one that should be required reading in every business school in the country. I wish this book had been around when I was starting Apple in my garage back in 1976.

There's a really super-important lesson, yet one that so many people overlook, especially here in the Valley. Anyway, if these incredibly super-obvious things aren't already super-obvious to you, then you probably need to read a book like this and have someone like Guy Kawasaki teach you how to start a business in terms that a child could understand.

Come to think of it, the forewords are great reading, even if the rest of the book is familiar to you.