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.
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Appearances
You know what? If you come right down to it, there are only two fundamental processes in business. And somebody has to make it and somebody has to sell it. Everything else is easy. Counting it, getting the money, hiring, training. Everything else is easy. If you have somebody who can make it and somebody who can sell it, revenue comes in. And with revenue, as I say, sales fixes everything.
Sales fixes everything. No more strategic partnerships. No more strategic bullshit. Sales fixes everything. So in the world, the world, you're either selling or you're making. So I was not an engineer. So I couldn't make. So I had to sell. And it was that simple. And I attribute my success in evangelism and selling. I work for a small jewelry manufacturing company in downtown L.A.,
And this was a manufacturing company owned by a Jewish family. And they embraced me. I don't know why. I mean, I could not be further from Israel than Honolulu, Hawaii. But, you know, whatever. So they embraced me. And basically, I schlepped gold and diamonds for the first five years of my life. And I tell you something, the jewelry business is a very, very tough business. We were a manufacturer.
We sold to retailers. And so we weren't the retailer. We didn't do business with consumers. We did business with businesses.
So you learn patience because you make an appointment with a jewelry store and you fly to Kansas City and the appointment's at 10 and you get there at 9.30 and then all of a sudden it's 11 and they kept you waiting and then they say, okay, so now you can go see our buyer, but the buyer's about to leave for lunch, so you got 15 minutes.
So then you open up your bag and you show your goods and they look at the goods and they say, well, you know, there's five ounces of gold is one carat of diamonds. Diamonds are $300 a carat. 14 carat gold comes out to so much per gram. And so... They're basically reverse engineering. You say you got $300 worth of diamonds. You got $75 worth of gold. Your cost of goods sold is $375.
Because I'm such a nice person, I'm going to let you make 10%. A bargain.
$400 from me, and I need 90-day no-interest dating because I'm not going to pay you right away, and I need delivery in two weeks. And that's the good news. That's if you got an order. If you didn't get an order, you went to Kansas City for nothing. So basically, I learned sales in that kind of surrounding, hand-to-hand combat.
Which if you tell that to most Gen Z people who say, this is what sales is like. You're sitting in an office outside the door. You're waiting for an hour. You get 15 minutes. Somebody throws your goods on a scale. They figure out the cost of goods sold and the scrap value. And because they're kind to you, they're going to give you 10% over scrap value. That's what sales is like. Not this bullshit.
Let's do A-B testing on our way of sight. You know, it's the purple bullseye. More effective than the red border. Do we get more clicks with this? Do we get more clicks with that? Should we put the button at the top or the button at the bottom? That's not sales.
This is one of those kinds of questions that you answer and you hear somebody answer. And you have to understand, you need to be a skeptic when you hear people answer that kind of question because you're only hearing one person's story. There's nothing scientific about my story. There's no controlled experiment.
It's like if you took two people identical to a guy, you put them in an identical program, you give them identical opportunities, and then you see which way is better, pivot or stay. This is not science. There's no control. There's no hypothesis. This is just dog shit luck. But dog shit luck worked out for me.
Listen, I write management books, so I know how much bullshit there is. But for every book that says you got to fail fast, you got to break things, you got to pivot. There's another book that says you got to stick with it. Even when naysayers are telling you it's impossible, you don't believe them, you stick with it because you believe. Well, those two pieces of advice are diametrically opposed.
Do I pivot or do I gut it out? And it depends on which book you read last, right? So when you asked me that question, I don't know what to tell people because for some people you can pivot, for some people you can stick it out. Both ways have worked.
I don't think there's any science to it, but I will tell you that my observation, and this is just one person's observation, is that sometimes it's better to water the grass that you're standing on than to find new grass. And I could make the case that 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.
Maybe you want to go find a better episode now because why would I listen to this dumbass who left the most valuable company in the world before he made any long-term capital gains? So Let's just put that out on the table. But I will say that for those of you who are now thoroughly confused about whether you should pivot or stick it out, I'm telling you, either way can work.
And like I referred to before in Silicon Valley, the way it works is if you pivot and you're successful, you say, Of course I pivoted. I'm so smart. I came to that realization. And if you stick it out, you say, of course I stuck it out. I knew I was right. But that's how Silicon Valley works. Now, there is a bigger, more important lesson here.
And I think the bigger, more important lesson is whenever you hear a story, you always ask the question, what's missing? And I'll give you a perfect story for this. So, you know, lots of times there's this issue about should I go to college or not? Is a degree worth it? I'm an entrepreneur. I don't need a degree or do I?
And then you listen to some people, Peter Thiel or whatever, and they say, you don't need to go to college. Steve Jobs didn't finish college. Bill Gates didn't finish college. Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Those are three highly successful people. They prove you don't need to go to college. Well, when you hear a story like that, you ask yourself, what's missing?
And what's missing is you've heard three examples of people who didn't go to college and succeeded. Well, what about the people who didn't go to college and failed, which is 99.9999999% of the people? And the flip side is also true is how many people went to college and became successful? Because every Fortune 500 company has a CEO that went to college.
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