Bnoopy is in fact turning out to be a great blog. Case in point: Persistence Pays, Part 2, which tells some stories about the bulldog tenacity of Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun, who flew with his team to the headquarters of a corporation who had just rejected his offer and accepted a competitor's and sat in the lobby until they got an audience with the people who had just turned them down. Great stuff.
Bnoopy, Joe Kraus's recently launched blog, already has a lot of great posts about entrepreneurship, such as the importance of finding great people (can't be overstressed) and some conjectures about how to "rate" great engineering talent. Good stuff.
There is an abridged version of some sections from Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start online where he writes on the art of the pitch. There is also a chat transcript. He provides such pithy advice as
The key is the 10/20/30 rule: 10 slides given in 20 minutes using no font smaller than 30 points.
HDOWNING: What is the biggest challenge new entrepreneurs face today?
KAWASAKI: If you were to ask ten entrepreneurs this question, seven would say raising money, two would say closing deals, and one would say building the team. If you experience great difficulty in raising money, it's not because VCs are idiots and cannot comprehend your curve-jumping, paradigm shifting, revolutionary product. It's because you either have a piece of crap or you are not effectively communicating what you have. Both of these are your fault. End of discussion.
Closing deals is similar. Sure, it's tough to make a sale, but that's the way the world works. You have to make meaning and show customers why they should be happy to open their wallets and give you money. Building a team is also similar. I guess that it all comes down to the entrepreneur coming up with a meaningful idea and communicating that idea. The good news about entrepreneurship is that your fate is in your hands. The bad news is that your fate is in your hands!