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
And I would much rather be deaf than dumb because for deafness, you can get an implant. If you're dumb, I don't know what you can do, but it's not as easy as getting an implant. Yeah.
What worked for me, and again, this is kind of hindsight, but what worked for me is that in a sense, having this podcast was a blessing because I came into firsthand contact with people who had ALS, with people who had been in prison, who people were homeless and all this kind of stuff.
So, you know, if you have half a brain and you're on the phone with somebody who has been in federal prison for 22 years, it's hard for you to say, oh man, You should feel sorry for me. I'm deaf. I mean, there's just no freaking way. If you have half a brain and you can say, well, you know, I'd rather have gone to prison than be deaf.
Listen, you know, I don't want you to think I'm Dan Quayle comparing myself to JFK, but when I became deaf, I said to myself, you know, if Beethoven can compose the Fifth Symphony, surely, guy, you can interview a few people being deaf. And for a while before my cochlear implant, I was basically depending on half a good ear, but also live transcription.
And right now I'm getting live transcription of most of what you're saying so that it helps me, right? So live transcription helps. So one way of looking at it, you know, one message is that... There's always a way. And believe it or not, Ilana, I interviewed a woman who was deaf and blind and graduated Harvard Law School.
Yeah, I can hear, I can see. I don't think I would even get into Harvard Law School, much less graduate. And then to just top it off and make me feel about two inches tall, she surfs. I was like, how the hell can a woman who is deaf and blind... Go to Harvard, pass, and surf. This is not just possible, guys. So you are only deaf, so, you know. Get your ass in gear, God.
I already mentioned the passion thing. Like don't go looking for passion, just look for interest. And when you find interest, scratch them and just hope that over the course of your lifetime, a few of them developed into true passions or true reasons for your existence. So that's one thing. A second thing I would say is do not underestimate the grit that's necessary. You have to be gritty.
You have to be willing to persevere. Nothing will come easy that's valuable. And then you have to make yourself vulnerable. You know, I took up ice hockey at the age of 44, never played ice hockey, never skated before. I took up surfing at 60, having never surfed before.
Now, those are athletic things, but I got to tell you, I mean, taking up ice hockey at 44 is 39 years too late and taking up hockey at 60 is 55 years too late. But you have to say those were interests that I scratched that became passions, if not obsessions.
And you have to say that you're going to have to pay the price and you have to open yourself up to vulnerability that you will get hurt if you try something risky. If you have, in the words of my hero, Carol Dweck, if you have a growth mindset, the flip side of the growth mindset is you have to embrace vulnerability. Because you are going to get hurt. You are going to fail.
You are going to be ground down. And you just have to come to grips with that. And I think it's very, very poor to say to yourself, you know, I tried this and it was so hard. I didn't succeed immediately. It's not for me. If you go through life only doing things that you're instantly good at, you're not going to do very many things. I mean,
You know, the grass that looks greener might be astroturf.
If somebody had told me not to quit Apple three times because you would be part of a trillion-dollar company, that would have been useful.
On the other hand, maybe this is a rationalization, but if I had stayed at Apple from 1983 till today, I'd be richer than God, but I would also be even more of an asshole. So there's some upside there. Yeah.
Can I give the entrepreneurs listening some advice?
So my advice to entrepreneurs first is you have to understand the business you're in. And the business you're in is not creating wealth for yourself. It is not creating jobs for society. It is to create customers. You need to take people who never heard of you, don't know what you do or make, don't understand what you do or make, and you need to create customers out of those people.
That's the purpose of a company. And if you create customers, the wealth and everything else will follow. But if you don't create customers, you might end up in jail. So that's step number one. Step number two is that... You have to understand that sales fixes everything. You can talk all about the strategic, visionary stuff you want, but at the end of the day, cash flow is king.
Do not ever forget that because you cannot pay the bills with strategic relationships. It is cash. That's number two. Number three is if you're the... CEO and you have a technical officer or an engineer or, you know, VP of engineering, let me give you a rule of thumb. Whatever your VP of engineering or CTO tells you about the delivery date of the product, you always add one year.
You always add one year. I don't care if they say it, it's going to be ready in two weeks. You add a year. You will never go wrong adding one year to the delivery date of what your engineer tells you. And so that's engineering. Now on the sales side, you can never go wrong by taking his or her worst case projection for sales and dividing by a hundredth.
So basically, I'm telling you, when your CTO says we'll be shipping in a month, you heard 13 months. When your VP of sales says we're going to do 5 million in the first year, you divide that by 100 and you get... What is that? 50,000 or whatever. Yeah, right. And if you believe that, and then you always believe that sales fixes everything, you'll be just fine as an entrepreneur.
Showing 101–120 of 235 · page 6 of 12
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