Guy Kawasaki has never been known as one who follows the crowd. In fact, quite the opposite. He’s the type of person that business and technology experts look to for guidance and vision. So, it’s only fitting that he’s leading off the conference keynotes on Tuesday morning with a talk called “The Art of Innovation“. Many of you may recognize the title — one of Guy’s most successful books is called “The Art of the Start“. In that book, he covered the points that every entrepreneur and start-up hopeful needs to know about getting venture capitalist’s attention, developing a mantra (not a business plan!), and taking action instead of talking about taking action.

I don’t know why MySQL is so darn popular with startups. Maybe the cost/value relationship. Maybe the ease-of-use. Maybe the ubiquity of MySQL in the technology mindshare and hosting systems. Probably all of these and more reasons. There’s a ton of technical sessions at the conference which cover scaling, replication, cluster, data warehousing, and all that. But what Guy brings to the conference is a perspective that you won’t find in these technical sessions. He brings a business focus on startups and disruption that will be valuable to everyone in the audience. Remember Greg Gianforte‘s keynote from last year on how RightNow grew from nothing to the success it is today? I remember Greg saying “Yeah, I sold things that didn’t even exist! Then, I made it happen and found the people that could make it happen.” Well, a lot of folks in the audience had a chuckle at that initially, but then realized that Greg possessed that kind of instinctual, gutty entrepreneurial spirit that they could learn from.

Guy is that kind of person. Come out to the conference and see what I mean. Seriously.