GSIF Post #8 Rohan Ekambaram

There were many important takeaways from Guy Kawasaki’s video. One of them was that you should always hire better than yourself. I thought this was a very important idea about management since I had always thought that one should hire at the same level as themselves, but Kawasaki made a lot of good points. Another takeaway was that when starting a venture the most important thing is to try to make change with the product not just to make money. He stated that he has seen much more come from a project when it is centered on making a difference for people. Another interesting point that Kawasaki made was that you cannot please everyone with a product. If there is a demographic of people who like the product, work with them to improve the product since they are the ones that are going to buy the product. You might not be able to hit every single person with your product but you can find the niche that your product fits into. Another idea that Kawasaki presented was the 10/20/30 rule. This outlines how a presentation should be given. The 10 represents 10 slides because you want to keep the presentation short and concise, otherwise the people listening might lose interest. The 20 represents 20 minutes. The presentation should not be larger than 20 minutes. This also falls along the lines of keeping the interest of those you are presenting for. The 30 represents the font size of the words in the presentation. Keeping the font size above 30 serves a couple purposes. For example, most people will not be able to read with a lot of ease most font sizes smaller than that. The second reason is that you do not want to just read off the presentation while giving it. Using a large font forces you to learn the information instead of just putting it on a slide because there is no entertaining way to present information that people can get if they read the slide behind you. I thought a very interesting point that he made was about the mission statement. A lot of companies have a long winded mission statement that does not say anything unique about their company. Kawasaki said that the best thing to do was have a mantra instead. Three or four words that outline the short simple goal that your company wants to achieve. I thought this was interesting and valid since you do not want to confuse you investors by hitting them with a paragraph of large words you found in a thesaurus, you want the message to be clear and concise. Another takeaway that I thought was interesting was the idea that ideas that were abandoned by others can be extremely useful. His point was that you should not listen to the “bozos” of the industry and follow what you believe could be the next revolution. His examples were about the cellphone and his work in Apple. In both cases a good idea was dismissed earlier by someone and then later on the advancement went on to change the industry in a revolutionary way.

Our main business plan for this venture is to make a product that can be sold for a very low price. We plan to sell our strips to the community health workers of Sierra Leone so that they can sell them to people. This is important because we want to empower the community health workers to help out the community and make sure that everyone is living a safe and healthy life. We are also putting money into hiring people that can teach the new community health workers while we are out of country. There is also a  person is also in charge of delivering the UTI test strips out to the community health clinics. He is paid less than the first one but, that is because the first person has a much more important job of selling and teaching the community health workers. A large portion of this money must come from grant money from different charitable operations like world hope and the Gates foundation. All of these organizations have given us money for this venture because in order to sell the test strip for such a small amount of money and make no profit we need to be able to front the overhead costs. Obviously some of the money goes to the manufacturers who make the test strip so that we can sell it to the community health workers. We try our best to keep everything as clean cut as possible.

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