Guy Kawasaki
A good idea is about ten percent and implementation and hard work, and luck is 90 percent.
Guy Kawasaki
You say: “I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur.” Investor thinks: “I’ve always wanted to be a professional golfer. So what if you always wanted to be an entrepreneur?”
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
Organizations are successful because of good implementation,not good business plans.
Guy Kawasaki
I have lots of great ideas, but I have trouble figuring out which one to try. Let me tell you about a couple.” Investor thinks: “I want to know which idea you’re going to kill yourself trying to make successful, not which ideas have crossed your idle mind.”
Guy Kawasaki
If you make meaning, you’ll make money.
Guy Kawasaki
The hardest thing about getting started is getting started.
Guy Kawasaki
You say: “I’m bright and ambitious.” Investor thinks: “That’s a relief because I usually invest in stupid and lazy people.”
Guy Kawasaki
Pursue joy, not happiness…Take my word for it, happiness is temporary and fleeting. Joy, by contrast, is unpredictable. It comes from pursuing interests and passions that do not obviously result in happiness.
Guy Kawasaki
Yes, but he’s back again, … As a company grows larger and larger it will have to bring in different types of managers.
Guy Kawasaki
Make a mantra, not a mission.
Guy Kawasaki
You say: “I’m a blue sky thinker.” Investor thinks: “You have no business model, and you don’t know how to ship.”
Guy Kawasaki
You say: “If you sign an NDA, I’ll tell you my idea.” Investor thinks: “You are clueless. How can you not know that venture capitalists don’t sign NDAs?”
Guy Kawasaki
The secret of evangelism is Guy’s golden touch – whatever is gold, Guy touches. That’s very different than saying whatever Guy touches turns gold.
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
You say: “The last time I contacted you, I…” Investor thinks: “I’m going to fire my secretary for putting this clown on my calendar again.”
Guy Kawasaki
It’s a beautiful time for Entrepreneurs…Life is good.
Guy Kawasaki
You say: “My goal is to build a world-class company.” Investor thinks: “How about you ship and sell the first copy before we talk about world-class anything?”
Guy Kawasaki
I think the crisis part is over. Certainly, we still have a lot of hard work to do.
Guy Kawasaki
Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.
Guy Kawasaki
Revolutionary products don’t fail because they are shipped too early. They fail because they aren’t revised fast enough.
Guy Kawasaki
I understand the difference between cash flow and profitability, and I’m not recommending that you strive for a lack of profitability. But cash is what keeps the doors open and pays the bills. Paper profits on an accrual accounting basis is of no more than secondary or tertiary importance for a startup. As my mother used to say, “Sales fixes everything.”
Guy Kawasaki
Revolutionary leaders have to care more about what they think of themselves than what the world thinks of them.
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
Here’s what you should say [to investor]: “This is what my company does…” It’s that simple. What you’re trying to do is get potential investors to fantasize about how your product or service will make a boatload of money. They can’t fantasize if they don’t know what you do.
Guy Kawasaki
Think different in order to change the rules. By definition, if you don’t change the rules you aren’t a revolutionary, and if you don’t think different, you won’t change the rules.
Guy Kawasaki
Don’t worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test… Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap – but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.
Guy Kawasaki
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.
Guy Kawasaki
Shut up, take notes, summarize, regurgitate, and follow up.
Guy Kawasaki
Simple and to the point is always the best way to get your point across.
Guy Kawasaki
By the time (the Leaning Tower of Pisa) was 10% built, everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But the investment was so big they felt compelled to go on. Since its completion, it cost a fortune to maintain and is still in danger of collapsing. There are no plans to replace it, since it was never needed in the first place. I expect every installation has its own pet software which is analogous to the above.
Guy Kawasaki
Learn to like yourself or change yourself until you can like yourself.
Guy Kawasaki
Challenge the known and embrace the unknown.
Guy Kawasaki
Our mission is to democratize venture capital. We’ve made great progress in the U.S. market in 1999. Now we are expanding globally so that talented entrepreneurs in the European high tech centers can get access to the world’s best venture investors.
Guy Kawasaki
Sell! Don´t enable buying.
Guy Kawasaki
My wife was in Beta with our second child…Shipped on time and no bugs.
Guy Kawasaki
Ignore schmexperts. Schmexperts are the totally bad combination of schmucks who are experts–or experts who are schmucks. When you first launch a product or service, they’ll tell you it isn’t necessary, can’t really work, or faces too much competition. If you succeed, then they’ll say they knew you would succeed. In other words, they don’t know jack shiitake. If you believe, try it. If you don’t believe, listen to the schmexperts and stay on the porch.
Guy Kawasaki
You have to start with the basic premise that you need to know what your competition is doing,
Guy Kawasaki
Make meaning over money.
Guy Kawasaki
Eating your own dog food — using your own products — is probably the best way to reinforce the urgency of churning. Kelly Johnson, the leader of Lockheed’s legendary Skunk Works, once explained why he flew with test pilots in experimental aircraft: “I figured I needed to have hell scared out of me once a year in order to keep a proper balance and viewpoint on designing new aircraft.”
Guy Kawasaki
Evangelism is selling a dream.
Guy Kawasaki
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.
Guy Kawasaki
Don’t assume you’re done [after you've hired someone].
Guy Kawasaki
Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players; B players hire 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.
Guy Kawasaki
… Unfortunately, the best products don’t necessarily win if another product is, at a minimum, sufficient plus quick to market, well promoted, and revised (churned) accordingly. Why? Because of the Law of Increasing Returns. The more a product sells, the easier it is to sell. Other products may be better, but people get locked into a product and sales snowball even though it may be inferior.
Guy Kawasaki
Play to win and win to play.
Guy Kawasaki
While we’re living, we need to get over ourselves and accept others if we want to enchant people.
Guy Kawasaki
“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.
Guy Kawasaki
You’re looking for chinks in the armor. You’re looking for pockets of dissatisfied customers that you can steal from them.
Guy Kawasaki
Make prospects talk.
Guy Kawasaki
Steve [Jobs] proves that it’s OK to be an asshole… He just has a different OS.
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
You say: “I don’t know much about your firm, but I thought I’d contact you anyway.” Investor thinks: “You’re a lazy idiot–why are you wasting my time?
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
Success is a numbers game.
Guy Kawasaki
Let’s say a startup is hot. It ships something great, and it achieves success. Thus, it’s able to attract the best, brightest, and most talented. These people have been told they’re the best since childhood. Indeed, being hired by the hot company is “proof” that they are the A and A+ players; in fact, the company is so hot that it can out-recruit Google and Microsoft. Unfortunately, they develop a fixed mindset that they’re the most talented, and they think that continued success is a right. Problems arise because pure talent only works as long as the going is easy. Furthermore, they don’t take risks because failure would harm their image of being the best, brightest, and most talented. When they do fail, they deny it or attribute it to anything but their shortcomings. And this is the beginning of the end.
Guy Kawasaki
Leverage your brand, … You shouldn’t let two guys in a garage eat your shorts.
Guy Kawasaki
“No one can do what we’re doing.” If there’s anything worse than the lack of a market and cluelessness, it’s arrogance. No one else can do this until the first company does it, and ten others spring up in the next ninety days. Let’s see, no one else ran a sub four-minute mile after Roger Bannister. (It took only a month before John Landy did). 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.
Guy Kawasaki
You have to sit by the side of a river for a “very” long time before a roast duck will fly into your mouth.
Guy Kawasaki
If you have revolutionary potential, then you have a moral imperative to make the world a better place.
Guy Kawasaki
Our mission is to democratize venture capital. We’ve made great progress in the U.S. market in 1999. Now we are expanding globally so that talented entrepreneurs in the European high tech centers can get access to the world’s best venture investors,
Guy Kawasaki
Great teams are usually small- under fifty in total head count. (There are few examples of a team made up of hundreds of people who created anything revolutionary.) Big teams aren’t conducive to revolutionary products because such products require a high degree of single-mindedness, unity, and unreasonable passion.
Guy Kawasaki
Think of all the things an entrepreneur needs and you´ll see that most things are free or cheap.
Guy Kawasaki
“Patents make our product defensible.” The optimal number of times to use the P word in a presentation is one. Just once, say, “We have filed patents for what we are doing.” Done. The second time you say it, venture capitalists begin to suspect that you are depending too much on patents for defensibility. The third time you say it, you are holding a sign above your head that says, “I am clueless.” Sure, you should patent what you’re doing- if for no other reason than to say it once in your presentation. But at the end of the patents are mostly good for impressing your parents. You won’t have the time or money to sue anyone with a pocket deep enough to be worth suing.
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
It would have taken great courage to do that because at the time, the Macintosh was selling well. You’re making $700 gross margin on a Mac and now you’re going to go make $35 gross margin on a (software) license? I wish we had, but we didn’t. We didn’t for that reason.
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
Enjoy your family and friends before they are gone.
Guy Kawasaki
You say: “I love to think of new ways to solve problems.” Investor thinks: “Is this a high-school science fair?”
Guy Kawasaki
A crash is when your competitor’s program dies. When your program dies, it is an “idiosyncrasy”.
Guy Kawasaki
“(Big name research firm) says our market will be $50 billion in 2010.” Every entrepreneur has a few slides about how the market potential for his segment is tens of billions. It doesn’t matter if the product is bar mitzah planning software or 802.11 chip sets. Venture capitalists don’t believe this type of forecast because it’s the fifth one of this magnitude that they’ve heard that day. Entrepreneurs would do themselves a favor by simply removing any reference to market size estimates from consulting firms.
Guy Kawasaki
…the wisest course of action is to take your best shot with a prototype, immediately get 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
Let yourself be enchanted in small ways.
Guy Kawasaki
Be unique and valuable.
Guy Kawasaki
When I saw that the mouse was the controlling thing and there was graphics moving all over and it wasn’t character based … it was a religious experience. Definitely, the scales were removed from my eyes. … I became a believer in 30 seconds.
Guy Kawasaki
[Create your team first, and then look for the money. The days when investors would fork over cash for a promise are gone.] The way you do it is evangelism, … It’s also options, quite frankly.
Guy Kawasaki
They make cool stuff. Sometimes the cool stuff works. And sometimes the cool stuff doesn’t work.
Guy Kawasaki
Forget about layers, content on demand, and movies, … Right now, people cannot understand [why they cannot get service]. If you fix this problem, you’re 90 percent of the way there.
Guy Kawasaki
I think a lot of it was because companies were resistant to change vendors.
Guy Kawasaki
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.
Guy Kawasaki
Find what works for you and your customers, then stand back and let your flowers bloom.
Guy Kawasaki
This makes them much easier to compare. We use the computer to process the plans, but each one gets seen by human eyes.
Guy Kawasaki
I hope [Apple is] creating a computer that is to the Macintosh what the Macintosh was to Apple II. That’s the test, that’s the main thing.
Guy Kawasaki
I am a bozo.
Guy Kawasaki
The way you do it is evangelism. It’s also options, quite frankly.
Guy Kawasaki
It’s more effective to preach to the choir or focus on the agnostic, than try to convert the atheist.
Guy Kawasaki
If someone tells you like you eat like a bird, the implication is that you don’t eat much. Yet for their body weight, birds eat a lot. The peripatetic hummingbird, for example, eats the equivalent of 50 percent of its weight every day. (If you’re a 200-pound male, imagine eating 100 pounds of food every day!)
Chances are no one will tell you that you poop like an elephant because elephants poop 165 pounds per day. So far you’re probably thinking, “Guy is into the weirdest things. No wonder Apple had so many problems.” However, there two are messages for revolutionaries in these biological facts.
First, a successful revolutionary relentlessly searches for, consumes, and absorbs knowledge, about the industry , customers, and competition. You do this by pressing the flesh of your customers, attending seminars and trade shows, reading journals, and browsing the internet.
Second, you need to spread the large amount of information knowledge that you’ve gained–pooping like an elephant. This means sharing information and discoveries with your fellow employees and occasionally even with your competitors.
Guy Kawasaki
The angels started singing, the clouds parted, it was a religious experience. I’ve never had the same reaction to a product, not in 25 years.
Guy Kawasaki
Many companies think that building a virtual community is as simple as throwing up a cool Web site that compels people to visit every day. Dream on. These sites are commercials, not communities. If you want to build a virtual community, here are the principles to implement:
Community before commerce. In the words of John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong (authors of Net.Gain, “put community before commerce.” That is, the purpose of these efforts is to build a community, not sell more stuff, so cool it on the commercialism. The community exists for its own benefit, not yours. Communication comes next. Build in the capability for people to communicate with each other via message boards and Internet mail lists. Peer-to-peer communication is more important than being able to communicate with the company. You’re hosting the event, but it’s a cocktail party, not a lecture.
Place the community’s interests above your own. The big picture is that a vibrant community will help you, but getting to this place means sacrificing short-term interests. For example, people should be able to freely discuss and endorse competitive products.
Tolerate criticism. Not only should peple feel free to plug competitive products, they should be able to criticize your own. This freedom produces two desirable results: first, good public relations because tolerating criticism on a company-sponsored site is unheard of; second, free and voluminous customer feedback. Encourage “personalities.” Remember how one of the keys to the success of MTV was veejays with an attitude? The same is true of a Web site, so encourage your employees to develop online personalities to show that corporate thought police don’t control your site.
Guy Kawasaki