Guy Kawasaki Quotes

Take my word for it: More people will like you if you believe that people are good until proven bad.

Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.

Arguably, in business books, I don't think there's much that has never been said before.

To say that Windows 95 is just like the Mac is like finding a potato in the shape of Jesus and thinking you have witnessed the second coming

If you want to make a good first impression, smile at people. What does it cost to smile? Nothing. What does it cost not to smile? Everything, if not smiling prevents you from enchanting people.

Looking back on my own career, I've come to the conclusion that too much money is worse than too little.

Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players; B players hire C players; and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to Z players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies.

At the end of my life, is it better to say that I empowered people to make great stuff, or that I died with a net worth of $10 billion? Obviously I'm picking the former, although I would not mind both.

Don't get stubborn, flow with the go. The key is to be open to unintended success. Some companies just can't take yes for an answer.

One must understand what people are thinking, feeling and believing in order to enchant them.

Writing is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time. The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and writing some more can help you control issues that you face.

There is only one Steve Jobs, but if you want a shot at being the next Steve Jobs, learn to communicate using stories, demos, and pictures.

I do have a peripatetic and active intellectual curiosity.

How fast you are moving is more important than where you are.

If you don't toot your own horn, don't complain that there's no music.

Customers can tell you how to evolve a product, but they can't show you how to make a leap.

When you give people too many choices it makes them hesitate and not buy stuff.

I learned how difficult it is to self-publish a book. It's complex, it's confusing, it's idiosyncratic.

I think that no one, or very few, are born as good presenters. It's a skill that you learn.

Create something, sell it, make it better, sell it some more and then create something that obsoletes what you used to make.

When I finally got a management position, I found out how hard it is to lead and manage people.

The world is a big place. There are lots of smart people in it. Entrepreneurs are kidding themselves if they think they have any kind of monopoly on knowledge. And, sure as I'm a Macintosh user, on the same day that an entrepreneur tells this lie, the venture capitalist will have met with another company that's doing the same thing.

Great leaders are paradoxical. They catalyze, rather control, the work of their teams. They have an overarching vision for the team but are not autocratic in the realization of this vision. Their eyes are open to whatever results occur-not just planned goals, because serendipity is a great innovator.

At the end of the day in business, it's not about peer review and getting into a scientific journal. You either increase sales, or not.

It's a very valuable skill to succeed in life whether you work for a startup or a Fortune 500 company.

The more popular a person thinks he is in the blogosphere, the thinner his skin and the thicker his hypocrisy. This should be exactly the opposite: the higher you go the thicker the skin and thinner the hypocrisy.

The record of what you do is forever recoverable because of Google. The lofty upside and scary downside makes reciprocity more important than ever. This is all good because it makes people think more before they do something that reduces their trustworthiness.

Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like 'ID 02'. 'ID' is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates how many more months of testing the product should have had.

Revolutionary leaders have to care more about what they think of themselves than what the world thinks of them.

Good blurbs are short, sweet, and limited to six. They answer the question “Why should I buy this book?

Do not write to impress others. Authors who write to impress people have difficulty remaining true to themselves. A better path is to write what pleases you and pray that there are others like you. Your first and most important reader is you. If you write a book that pleases you, at least you know one person will like it.

Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.

This is the beauty of social media: it helps you find people and then you can contact them fast and inexpensively.

My real mantra for my life is "empower others".

"No one is doing what we're doing." This is a bummer of a lie because there are only two logical conclusions. First, no one else is doing this because there is no market for it. Second, the entrepreneur is so clueless that he can't even use Google to figure out he has competition. Suffice it to say that the lack of a market and cluelessness is not conducive to securing an investment. As a rule of thumb, if you have a good idea, five companies are going the same thing. If you have a great idea, fifteen companies are doing the same thing.

The first 90 percent of a revolution is creating the product or service; the second 90 percent is evangelizing it. At the beginning of a revolution, you need evangelists, not sales, because leverage spreads news.

You know, if you're Guy Kawasaki and you create a car that gets 500 miles a gallon with zero emissions, people on the Internet would say: 'I could have done that in half an hour, and it's been done before. What's the big deal? I expected something more from him.' Meanwhile, they didn't do it, right? They're still living at home with their mothers.

The Future belongs to those who can spread ideas.

Entrepreneur is not a job title. It is a state of mind of people who want to alter the future.

Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.

In giving presentations, use the 10/20/30 rule....use only 10 slides, take 20 minutes maximum, and use at least 30-point fonts.

A good idea is about ten percent and implementation and hard work, and luck is 90 percent.

Skillful pitching... is a necessary, but not sufficient, part of raising capital. More important are the realities of your organization: Are you building something meaningful, long lasting, and valuable to society?

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone.

Defy the crowd. The crowd isn’t always wise. It can also lead you down a path of silliness, sub-optimal choices, and downright destruction. Enchantment is as necessary for people to diverge from a crowd as it is to get people to join one.

I have four kids in a private school who have not yet entered college. Their tuition is what keeps me motivated. Life is simple sometimes.

Greatness is won, not awarded.

Just do what's right for the customer, and you'll be okay.