Guy Kawasaki's Quotes

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

If you look at my Twitter feed it is 99% links, but 1% is me responding and 1% of a big number is a big number.

If you make money, you might not make meaning.

Leverage your brand. You shouldn't let two guys in a garage eat your shorts.

Most venture capitalists won't read a business plan unless the entrepreneur is introduced to them by a contact.

Not many people agree with what I do.

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

Social media allows me to pick my times for social interaction.

The A-listers and the A+ listers, are reporting the news, they're not making it.

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

When you enchant people, your goal is not to make money from them or to get them to do what you want, but to fill them with great delight.

At the end of my life, is it better to say that I empowered people to make great stuff, or that I died with a net worth of $10 billion? Obviously I'm picking the former, although I would not mind both.

I have developed a Zen-like approach to the operating systems that people use: 'When you're ready, the right operating system will appear in your life.'

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.

What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you're always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, 'I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.'

You know, if you're Guy Kawasaki and you create a car that gets 500 miles a gallon with zero emissions, people on the Internet would say: 'I could have done that in half an hour, and it's been done before. What's the big deal? I expected something more from him.' Meanwhile, they didn't do it, right? They're still living at home with their mothers.

A good idea is about ten percent and implementation and hard work, and luck is 90 percent.

Smart, well-meaning people get it wrong when they start believing that the world owes them something and that the rules are different for them.

Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.

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

What I lack in talent, I compensate with my willingness to grind it out. That's the secret of my life.

Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players. But others hire below their skills to make themselves look good. So B players hire C players. C players hire D players, etc.

The jewelry business is a very, very tough business - tougher than the computer business. You truly have to understand how to take care of your customers.

If you're an entrepreneur and you think that the president makes a difference to your business, you should stay at your current job.

It doesn't matter whether the Dow is 5000 or 50,000. If you're an entrepreneur, there is no bad time to start a company.

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.