It's easier to do business with less money, says Silicon Valley investor Guy Kawasaki

The biggest technology firms in the world are conceived of in the minds of engineers, says California innovation guru Guy Kawasaki.

"Apple, Google, Yahoo, Cisco, those types of companies that change things," said the Silicon Valley investor in high-tech startups.

Google was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were computer science graduate students at Stanford University in the late 1990s, to name one example.

Kawasaki's venture capital fund, Garage Technology Ventures, bets on entrepreneurs with engineering expertise and has one investment in a data-integrity company developed by such thinkers - Tripwire Inc.

"It's really the case where the richest vein is two people working at home part-time building the product they want to use and they have an engineering background," he said in an interview.

Kawasaki will be the keynote speaker at the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation's R3 Gala on March 18 at the Delta Fredericton.

The event - which stands for "recognizing research results-" honours three successful New Brunswick researchers who have produced applied work that impacts the province's industries.

The foundation hopes to attract up to 400 academics and corporate types to help foster partnerships - Kawasaki is meant to bring out the business folks.

Kawasaki said he will talk about how to raise money, make a product, sell it and collect earnings, including 11 steps on "how to change the world with innovation."

"In my travels around the world, innovators and entrepreneurs are more similar than they are different," he said.

Kawasaki is a founding partner of Garage Technology Ventures and the co-founder of Alltop.com, termed an "online magazine rack" of popular topics on the web with news stories associated with those topics. He was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer Inc.

He is an author of nine books on entrepreneurship and related topics and a public speaker.

His venture firm, which provides seed funding in amounts between $250,000 and $500,000, cut back its investments this year as the markets took a hit, Kawasaki admitted.

According to the U.S. National Venture Capital Association, which cites PricewaterhouseCoopers' compilation of Thomson Reuters data, venture capital investment is down a great deal this year and last.

In the third quarter of 2009, 637 deals across the country worth US$4.8 billion were made, compared with 904 deals worth US$5.7 billion in 2008.

The 2009 figures are worth almost half the value of third quarter investments two years ago: Venture capitalists bet on 1,076 startups and shelled out a total of $8 billion in 2007.

"It's harder than ever to raise money, no question," Kawasaki said.

Luckily, it's easier to do business with less money, he said, advising entrepreneurs to employ social networking sites for marketing, use open source software and pay for cloud storage over hosting data in-house to cut infrastructure expenses.

"I think that people should bootstrap their companies and don't assume they're going to raise venture capital," he said.

Calvin Milbury, president and CEO of the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, said he hopes Kawasaki will be the drawing card that will "bring out the masses" to the gala next March.

The foundation's premiere research event, the R3 gala fits into the organization's mandate to "spur innovation and help commercialist research," Milbury said.

Last year, researchers recognized were Dr. Marc Surette of the Université de Moncton; Kevin Shiell of the New Brunswick Community College and Tillmann Benfey of the University of New Brunswick. Douglas Campbell and Amanda Cockshutt of Mount Allison University were also commended for commercializing a proprietary phytoplankton testing procedure.

Remaining otherwise tight-lipped, Milbury said the foundation will soon announce funding for a project Shiell is working on.

The Grand Falls-based researcher has worked to turn unusable potatoes into biodegradable plastic through a fermentation process and has moved on recently to transform potatoes, wheat and barley into biogas that can be used to generate electricity.