Guy Kawasaki Quotes & Sayings

Better to fail at doing the right thing than to succeed at doing the wrong thing. — Guy Kawasaki

Suck up with subtlety. — Guy Kawasaki

A crash is when your competitor's program dies. When your program dies, it is an 'idiosyncrasy'. — Guy Kawasaki

Happiness is temporary and fleeting ... Joy is the right goal. — Guy Kawasaki

I have a hardcore attitude: a "self-published, ghost-written book" is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. When
people read a book - particularly a self-published one - they have the right to expect that it's the person's writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote. — Guy Kawasaki

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? — Guy Kawasaki

The right algorithm is to put off seeking funds for as long as physically possible. And in an ideal world, a startup would never have to seek funds at all. — Guy Kawasaki

picked a short, generic, evergreen hashtag: #MotoX. — Guy Kawasaki

Try stuff. I also used to believe that it's better to be smart than lucky because if you're smart you can out-think the competition. I don't believe that anymore-this is not to say that you should strive for a high level of stupidity. My point is that luck is a big part of many successes, so (a) don't get too bummed out when you see a bozo succeed; and (b) luck favors the people who try stuff, not simply think and analyze. As the Chinese say, "One must wait for a long time with your mouth open before a Peking duck flies in your mouth." — Guy Kawasaki

Reality is going kick your ass so far that not even Google will find you. The — Guy Kawasaki

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. — Guy Kawasaki

The hard part is implementing the decision, not making it. — Guy Kawasaki

The two most important things about people on a revolutionary team are their ability and passion. Their educational level or work experience is meaningless
most of the engineers who did ground-breaking work of the Macintosh design didn't even graduate from college. — Guy Kawasaki

Not many people agree with what I do. — Guy Kawasaki

Entrepreneurship is about doing, not learning to do. — Guy Kawasaki

For me writing is as close to being an engineer as possible. — Guy Kawasaki

The mark of a good conversationalist is not that you can talk a lot. The mark is that you can get others to talk a lot. Thus, good schmoozer's are good listeners, not good talkers. — Guy Kawasaki

I don't want to make more friends. I have four kids, I have plenty of friends, and all the personal relationships I need. — Guy Kawasaki

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur - or APE. — Guy Kawasaki

People are forgiving of v 1.0 of a product if it's truly innovative and useful. Then you can get away with a lot. But if you're merely marginally improving the status quo, then you better be rock solid. — Guy Kawasaki

DO NOT ADD FOUNDERS TO ENHANCE FUNDABILITY. The reason to bring in additional founders - and any other employee but especially founders - is to make your startup stronger and more likely to succeed. Ask yourself, "Would I hire this guy if we didn't need funding?" If your answer is no, you'd be insane to hire him. — Guy Kawasaki

Hockey is the only thing that I'm not good at that I love. — Guy Kawasaki

Accept diversity and don't take any crap. — Guy Kawasaki

Facebook is for people, Twitter is for perspective, Google+ is for passion, LinkedIn is for pimping — Guy Kawasaki

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

The most powerful sign is that your work no longer enchants you - it's not deep, delightful, and mutually satisfying. When this happens, it may be time to look for new challenges. — Guy Kawasaki

Original visions are often wrong. Companies have to morph as they learn what customers don't want. — Guy Kawasaki

Patience is the art of concealing your impatience. — Guy Kawasaki

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

If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society's heroes. — Guy Kawasaki

In some cases . . . the knife can turn savagely upon the person wielding it. . . . You use the knife carefully because you know it doesn't care who it cuts. — Guy Kawasaki

I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose. - Ludwig van Beethoven — Guy Kawasaki

'Branding' has taken on too much of a role as a specialized craft performed by voodoo artists. — Guy Kawasaki

If you use social media right, you will piss people off. It's actually recommended! — Guy Kawasaki

If you're in enough places at enough times, then some of them are bound to be the right ones. — Guy Kawasaki

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

Great companies start because the founders want to change the world ... not make a fast buck. — Guy Kawasaki

Entrepreneurship is at its best when it alters the future, and it alters the future when it jumps curves — Guy Kawasaki

The Future belongs to those who can spread ideas. — Guy Kawasaki

The essence of evangelism is to passionately show people how you can make history together. — Guy Kawasaki

The key to evangelism is a great product. It is easy, almost unavoidable, to catalyze evangelism for a great product. It is hard, almost impossible, to catalyze evangelism for crap. — Guy Kawasaki

40. Be Defiant In our opinion, most search engine optimization (SEO) is bullshit. It involves trying to read Google's mind and then gaming the system to make Google find crap. There are three thousand computer science PhDs at Google trying to make each search relevant, and then there's you trying to fool them. Who's going to win? Tricking Google is futile. Instead, you should let Google do what it does best: find great content. So defy all the SEO witchcraft out there and focus on creating, curating, and sharing great content. This is what's called SMO: social-media optimization. — Guy Kawasaki

Knowledge is great. Competence is great. But the combination of both encourages people to trust you and increases your powers of enchantment. And in this world, the combination is a breath of fresh air. — Guy Kawasaki

You know in a startup, you only need three people. You need someone who can make something. You need someone who can sell it. And you need someone to collect the money. That's the only three roles in a startup. So which one are you? — Guy Kawasaki

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

Sometimes blissful ignorance is awfully empowering — Guy Kawasaki

The next time you think that there's something that you "can't live without", wait for a week and then see if you're still alive or not — Guy Kawasaki

The wisest course of action is to take your best shot with a prototype, immediately get it to market, and iterate quickly. If you wait for ideal circumstances in which you have all the information you need (which is impossible), the market will pass you by. — Guy Kawasaki

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. — Guy Kawasaki

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

The hardest thing about getting started, is getting started. — Guy Kawasaki

For startups, SM is now crucial: it has never been cheaper and easier to reach one's customers. Entrepreneurs should thank God for Twitter, Facebook ... — Guy Kawasaki

Want to change the world? Upset the status quo? This takes more than run-of-the-mill relationships. You need to make people dream the same dream that you do. — Guy Kawasaki

Entitlement is the opposite of enchantment. — Guy Kawasaki

Crowdsourcing is a great way to approach creation because in any given point there's always somebody on the Internet who knows something better than you do. — Guy Kawasaki

My theory is that when you're young, you should work eighty hours a week to create a product or service that changes the world. — Guy Kawasaki

Luck favors the people who are willing to grind it out. — Guy Kawasaki

If you truly don't have competition, then zoom out until you can define some. Competition can be as simple as the reliance on the status quo, Microsoft (since at some point Microsoft will compete with everyone for everything), or researchers in universities. Pick something, because saying you have no competition at all is a nonstarter. — Guy Kawasaki

If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing, If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing. — Guy Kawasaki

I would consider ... Google Plus a push technology. It's closer to Twitter than to Facebook. — Guy Kawasaki

If you make meaning, you'll make money. — Guy Kawasaki

I don't think Steve Jobs nauseated people when talking about how great Apple stuff was. The reason why he didn't nauseate people is because it was true. The start of all great marketing is to have a great product. — Guy Kawasaki

I would like my kids to inherit a world where people succeed because of merit and hard work, not entitlement, and where people accept others for what they are and not try to change them. — Guy Kawasaki

People are free or cheap. Marketing: using Twitter or blogs. Cheap or free. Infrastructure: call up Amazon, call up Rackspace, terabytes of data in the clouds, thousand dollars, two thousand dollars. — Guy Kawasaki

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. — Guy Kawasaki

The self-edited author is as foolish as the self-medicated patient. — Guy Kawasaki

The most powerful way to convince the interviewer that you can do the job is to show how much you already know about the industry, the company, and the products/services of the company. In other words, enchant the interviewer with how much you already know. — Guy Kawasaki

You have to sit by the side of a river a very long time before a roast duck will fly into your mouth. — Guy Kawasaki

My recommendation for SEO is very simple. It's Write Good Stuff. In my mind, Google is in the business of finding good stuff. It has thousands of the smartest people in the world, spending billions of dollars to find the good stuff. All you have to do is write the good stuff; you don't need to trick it. — Guy Kawasaki

The root of great companies is make meaning vs. make money. — Guy Kawasaki

There is no shortcut to awesome. Zoe Winters — Guy Kawasaki

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. — Guy Kawasaki

A simple summary of my life is that my parents worked very hard so that I could have a great education, and I took that education and worked very hard to get where I am. I would like my kids' lives to be exactly the same. — Guy Kawasaki

The biggest daily challenge of social media is finding enough content to share. We call this "feeding the Content Monster." There are two ways to do this: content creation and content curation. — Guy Kawasaki

From the outside looking in, trying to decipher Google's search algorithms is like reading tea leaves in a toilet bowl ... as it's flushing. With the lights off. — Guy Kawasaki

If you just enchanted one person per day, you would make a big dent in the universe. — Guy Kawasaki

Enchantment is the purest form of sales. Enchantment is all about changing people's hearts, minds and actions because you provide them a vision or a way to do things better. The difference between enchantment and simple sales is that with enchantment you have the other person's best interests at heart, too. — Guy Kawasaki

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

Companies can add value and simultaneously promote themselves if their product or service truly improves the lives of their customers. I mean really improve lives, not wishful thinking, rationalization. That's the acid test. — Guy Kawasaki

Jolt is for Windows programmers. It's typical IBM PC: it goes in brown and comes out yellow. Mountain Dew is for Macintosh programmers: it goes in yellow and comes out yellow. It's WYSIWYP. — Guy Kawasaki

Are two kinds of people: eaters and bakers. Eaters think the world is a zero-sum game: what you eat, someone else cannot eat, so they eat as much as they can. Bakers think that the world is not a zero-sum game - they can just bake more and bigger pies. Everyone can eat more. People trust bakers and not eaters. — Guy Kawasaki

The purpose of a pitch is to stimulate interest, not to close a deal. — Guy Kawasaki

Organizations are successful because of good implementation,not good business plans. — Guy Kawasaki

It's easy to say that entrepreneurs will create jobs and big companies will create unemployment, but this is simplistic. The real question is who will innovate. — Guy Kawasaki

If pitches were weapons, the majority would be B-1 Lancers or Navy Seals. The B-1 pitch is up in the clouds. It features a lot of hand-waving, cool PowerPoint animations, and use of terms such as strategic, partnerships, alliances, first-mover advantage, and patented technology. Typically, it's delivered by an MBA with a finance or consulting background. — Guy Kawasaki

Bootstrapping goes awry when entrepreneurs focus on saving pennies to the detriment of the Big Picture. — Guy Kawasaki

A company should search for every instance of the use of its name and zoom in when there are issues - both good and bad. — Guy Kawasaki

Writing is one way to achieve enchantment. — Guy Kawasaki

There was no "decision" per se to re-position myself. I simply decided that I wanted to write a book that would help people influence others. — Guy Kawasaki

Simple and to the point is always the best way to get your point across. — Guy Kawasaki

Remember that nobodies are the new somebodies. — Guy Kawasaki

You need to save some mental, physical, and emotional resources for enhancing your product after you ship. A revolution is a triathlon, not a hundred-yard dash-it requires long distance stamina and multiple skills such as creating, churning, and evangelizing. — Guy Kawasaki

Look back to the old days: people bought an MS DOS machine and struggled with it for weeks to bring it up to speed. Then Apple created Macintosh, struggled a bit with it, but eventually succeeded. Then it went into other businesses. If your company truly wants to change the world, it would make these problems go away for customers. — Guy Kawasaki

An editor who is a mentor, advisor, and psychiatrist. Don't kid yourself-a good editor will make your book better. — Guy Kawasaki

Successful companies are started, and made successful, by at least two, and usually more, soulmates. — Guy Kawasaki

A magnificent cause can overcome a prickly personality, but your ability to enchant people increases if they like you, so you should aspire to both. You'll know that you're likeable when you can communicate freely, casually, and comfortably with people. — Guy Kawasaki

Some things need to be believed to be seen. — Guy Kawasaki

The goal is to provide inspiring information that moves people to action. — Guy Kawasaki

If you make money, you might not make meaning. — Guy Kawasaki

Meaning is not creating a cool place to work with free food, Ping-Pong, volleyball, and dogs. Meaning is making the world a better place. — Guy Kawasaki