How do you become a great entrepreneur? According to Fortune, the answer is practice, practice, practice.

The article specifically addresses how this relates to business:

Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all.

The article does give some unattributed advice. There's a section called "Be the ball", which is advice famously given by Ty Webb in Caddyshack. It's hard to argue with advice on greatness from such a great movie.

You can't study entrepreneurship without studying failure. The New York Times recently offered an in depth account of Friendster's failure, but it's too early to see if anything good will come out of that failure aside from a classic case study.

The man with one of the best jobs in the world (making fun of cubicle life), Dilbert creator Scott Adams, writes in his blog that he's failed 9 out of 10 times in his own business ventures. However, he doesn't consider his early failures in vain: "I’m not complaining, since that’s the disgruntlement that led directly to Dilbert."

Harvard, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs all have famous alumni clubs. There's an old joke that you hire the kid from Harvard because if he screws up, you can always say, "How was I suppose to know he was a dud? The kid went to Harvard."

If I were a venture capitalist, I'd fund the kid from PayPal in a heartbeat. The New York Times just published a great article titled It Pays to Have Pals in Silicon Valley, profiling PayPal alumni's adventures in entrepreneurship. These guys seem to be free of the baggage that hinders some second-time entrepreneurs.

We've interviewed PayPal's David O. Sacks and have recently recorded but not posted interviews with two other PayPal alums. Stay tuned.

Fun fact from the NYT article: "[Peter] Thiel tapped his network of friends from Stanford, many of whom had worked at the Stanford Review, a libertarian magazine that Mr. Thiel co-founded in 1987. They populated PayPal’s business ranks."

Download the MP3.

If technology entrepreneurs have a guru, it surely must be Guy Kawasaki. For about two decades, Guy’s been advising entrepreneurs in one way or another. First as an evangelist for Apple, he courted software entrepreneurs and developers to write code for the Macintosh. Guy later tried his own hand at entrepreneurship, and eventually returned to Cupertino as an Apple Fellow. In the late 90’s, Guy jumped ship from Apple again to launch Garage Technology Ventures. Garage went through several incarnations before turning into the venture capital fund that it is today. Guy spreads his vision of entrepreneurship though books including The Art of the Start, speaking engagements, investing and blogging. Now you can hear his story.

…notwithstanding my lack of recent posts. I’ve been busy with projects and haven’t had much time to blog. In the meantime, check out this Slate article (co-written by my fiancee). It’s a little off topic but that’s a proud guy’s liberty…