The value of advice

- So the most common question that entrepreneurs ask me is could you review my pitch, review my plan, review my website, check out my product, tell me what you think? And that happens every day. And I am really torn, because on the one hand I believe in the concept of noblesse oblige where I have an obligation to help people like this. On the other hand I could spend my whole life doing this. So I figured out the world's best answer to this. So my older son plays for the UC Berkeley hockey team and as a club sport they're not officially supported by the university, so they're always short of money, okay. So when people as me to review their business plan I tell them if they make a $500 donation to the hockey team I will review their business plan. And there's a lot of nuances here, so first of all I'm not telling them no, I'm telling them yes. Secondly, I don't want anybody to ever say, "Guy Kawasaki charged me 500 bucks "to read his business plan, or my business plan." So this is a way out of that, because I am not getting the 500 bucks, I'm not doing it to make money. I'm doing it because I wanna put a barrier in front of these people, I wanna see do you really want my advice? Or do you think my time is valueless? And so now you might of course wonder what percentage of people that I tell this to actually pay the 500 bucks and get my review, and I would say it's one out of 20 or 30. Hardly anybody does that. So it's a very interesting data point, because you think, "Okay, so I can get Guy "to review my business plan, "but it's not worth 500 bucks to me." Well, maybe it's true that my advice isn't worth 500 bucks, but you would think that if you're serious and you really wanted me to do this what is 500 bucks? So I think that's a reasonable number and very few people take me up on that. So my conclusion there is well, if it wasn't worth 500 bucks to them, why am I bothering giving them the advice? So that's how I take care of that problem.