Do you have what it takes?

Kawasaki has developed a rather high-profile personality in the technology world, writing books (most recently "Rules for Revolutionaries") and a column for Forbes, and rallying the Macintosh faithful for Apple. Like Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Kawasaki has acquired a cultlike following; several people I spoke to at the conference said they had come specifically to see Kawasaki. "I'm a longtime Mac user, and Guy has been really inspirational to me," said one. "I felt like I owed it to him."

Kawasaki, in his speaking and writing, paints with a roller, not a brush. He is the tech world's Tom Peters. He makes high-level recommendations like "harness naiveti," meaning that you should ask naive people to do things that conventional wisdom brands impossible, and often they will succeed.

So I was surprised, as he moderated the day's first two panel discussions, to hear him asking picayune, packaging-obsessed questions that harked back to the author Q&A's of my youth. The panelists were bankers, lawyers, accountants and venture capitalists. Among Kawasaki's questions:

"How long do you think a business plan should be?"

"How many business plans do you see a day?"

"How long should the pitch last, and how many slides should there be in the PowerPoint presentation?"

"How many e-mails and voice mails do you get every day?"

The answers perfectly paralleled what a panel of literary agents and publishers and writers would tell a roomful of wannabe novelists. Venture capitalists, the late '90s equivalents of literary agents, are inundated with business plans; Michael Frank of Advanced Technology Ventures said he expects to receive 10,000 this year. They prefer short plans. Write it on a napkin, suggested Craig Johnson of Venture Law Group: "Length is an inverse predictor of success." They very rarely invest if the plan arrives without a referral from someone they know; Frank said he never had, and neither had Chip Hazard of Greylock, another venture firm.

Much of the day's discourse was similarly packaging- and process-oriented. Instead of asking venture capitalists and entrepreneurs about hot markets or finding that first batch of customers, Mary Ann Cusenza of Garage.com asked this "Swingers"-inspired question: After presenting to a venture capitalist, how long do you wait before you call?

Though questions like that seemed to skirt the essence of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, Garage.com seems to be in tune with its audience. The previous two Bootcamp events, both held in the Bay Area, had sold out, as did this one, with 700 attendees who each paid as much as $895 for the two-day conclave. Garage.com marketing director Geoff Baum told me that the company was planning six Bootcamps for next year, and would expand to some new cities, like Seattle, New York and Austin. Though the initial business plan for Garage.com didn't include a conference arm, "it will be a significant portion of our revenue this year," said Baum.

And the audience at the Boston Bootcamp seemed to feel they were being given insider info. Few people I spoke to expressed disappointment at the "just add water" nature of much of the advice. Justin Mabey, a 22-year-old college student who is starting a company called I-moments.com in Provo, Utah, came to learn the steps to the V.C. dance, as did aspiring entrepreneurs I met from Atlanta and Maryland and Virginia and Singapore, who all seemed to feel that two days at this conference would grant them admission to the dance hall - or at least the chutzpah to crash it.

But in addition to this group, who hoped that by having the right number of PowerPoint slides (12) in their presentation, they would gain entree to the world of Yahoo and eBay and Cisco, there were people with x's in the upper-right corners of their nametags ("No idea yet, not seeking funding"), and people with only the vaguest notions of what product or service their prospective start-up would offer, and why anyone would be interested.

These were the start-up fantasists, whose imaginations were fueled by the relentless media gong-banging about struggling entrepreneurial misfits who'd been magically transformed into billionaires by the VCs and investment bankers. "GetRich.com: Secrets of the New Silicon Valley" was the cover story of the Sept. 27 issue of Time magazine. A copy of Forbes handed out at Bootcamp bore a picture of the billionaire founder of Portal Software astride his mountain bike. The subhead: "A mass affluent class emerges in America. So what's it take to be rich?"

These guys wanted to find out. They were here to learn just how to enact the rallying cry that graced the Bootcamp T-shirt: "Start up, kick butt, cash out."

Next Page: Quick! Make me the next Pierre Omidyar!

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