Guy Kawasaki
speaker
235 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Guy Kawasaki’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I quit Apple twice. I turned Steve Jobs down for a third job. So you're listening to a podcast guest who left Apple three times.
The way it works in Silicon Valley is you throw a lot of shit up against the wall. Some of it sticks. You go up to the wall, you paint the bullseye around it, and you declare victory. I hit the bullseye. I hit the bullseye because I am so freaking smart. This concept of finding your passion is vastly overrated. There are only two fundamental processes in business.
Somebody has to make it and somebody has to sell it. Everything else is easy. My advice to entrepreneurs first is.
As long as you don't say that I wrote Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I'm happy.
Yeah, we all sound alike. We all look alike. It's OK.
No, I did not. I did not grow up in Mar-a-Lago, no.
I grew up in a lower middle income neighborhood in Hawaii. It's called Kalihi Valley. And if you know anybody from Oahu or Honolulu and you say you met a guy from Kalihi Valley, the first question out of their mouth might be, well, did he hijack you? Did he pull a gun on you? Did he pull a knife on you? And so that's the kind of place I grew up. It was a very, very diverse community.
Oh, can I say diverse anyway, Aidan? These days, right? We were DEI before DEI was a thing.
And I was in a public school system. And thank you, God. One of the public school teachers told my parents to take me out of the public school system, put me in a private college prep system because I had potential to go to college. And again, thank you, God. My parents listened to her and made the sacrifice. And so I got into this school and then...
I honestly cannot remember why, but somehow I decided to apply to Stanford. Because I know today if I applied for Stanford, I wouldn't get past the first reader. I don't think I would get past the, you know, AI they use to make the first screen. So, yeah. So I got into Stanford. I went to Stanford.
I hate to tell you, but I'm so old that Silicon Valley wasn't Silicon Valley yet. I mean, I came to Silicon Valley in 1972, and it was like Intel and HP, but it certainly wasn't this kind of phenomenon yet. And yet, coming from Hawaii, the scales were removed from my eyes when I landed at SFO because here was a place that... Fortunes, true fortunes were made.
If you're from Hawaii and from Clay Valley, you know, you think you're successful if you run a drugstore or run a hotel or work in agriculture. Not that anything is wrong with those three things, but your horizons are limited by what's in Hawaii. And I come to California and it's like, oh my God, there's like Italian cars, German cars, blonde women, you know, I have found myself.
This is the promised land.
Well, there's a deeper story there. So if you were Asian American back then in the 70s, your parents wanted you to be a doctor, dentist, or lawyer.
And marry a nice Jewish girl, yeah.
And so I took this course where you went on staff rounds at the Stanford Medical Center. I swear to God, in the first class, I fainted. So I figured, okay, that takes out medicine. And then I thought, well, maybe dentistry. But then I read an article that dentists have the highest rate of suicides. I said, no, there goes dentistry. So all that was left was law.
And my father was a state senator in Hawaii. So he would have loved if I had a law degree. He never went to college. So I went to law school and, oh, wait, we're backing up, backing up. How did I get a psych major? I got a psych major because at the time at Stanford, psych major was the easiest major you could find. I had a very rigorous selection process. I'm like, what is the easiest major?
Psychology. Sign me up. I went to law school for about two weeks and I quit and I just couldn't stand it. I mean, it was like too tough on my fragile ego. So or the way I look at it now is that many lawyers take 20, 30 years to figure out they're miserable. I did it in 20 days. So that's how much smarter I am.
Well, I mean, listen, I'll tell you something about Silicon Valley. The way it works in Silicon Valley is you throw a lot of shit up against the wall. Some of it sticks. You go up to the wall, you paint the bullseye around it and you declare victories. I hit the bullseye. I hit the bullseye because I am so freaking smart. I hit the bullseye. So you're wondering why this story applies to my career.
So yeah, I guess I look back and I said, yeah, I decided I wanted to be in sales and marketing. So I majored in psychology because I knew psychology, social psychology, behavioral psychology would help me in the rest of my career. And if you want to believe that, God bless you. But I'm telling you, the reason why I picked psychology... Psychology was the easiest measure. It is that simple.
Showing 1–20 of 235 · page 1 of 12
Next →