Guy Kawasaki
Here's what you should say [to an 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.Collection: Simple
The record of what you do is forever recoverable because of Google. The lofty upside and scary downside makes reciprocity more important than ever. This is all good because it makes people think more before they do something that reduces their trustworthiness.Collection: Thinking
It's a very valuable skill to succeed in life whether you work for a startup or a Fortune 500 company.Collection: Skills
There was no "decision" per se to re-position myself. I simply decided that I wanted to write a book that would help people influence others.Collection: Book
You need to earn the right to promote.Collection: Needs
"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.Collection: Lying
Twitter, Facebook, Google + are the trifecta of marketing for authors (and bloggers).Collection: Google
Enchantment can be done with writing but I think enchantment is basically a prospective or an operating system for life. That you can enchant a person who is assigning your airplane seat, your hotel room, your waiter, your waitress.Collection: Writing
People are free or cheap. Marketing: using Twitter or blogs. Cheap or free. Infrastructure: call up Amazon, call up Rackspace, terabytes of data in the clouds, thousand dollars, two thousand dollars.Collection: Clouds
Klout and various measurements of influence are fun. I love to see where I score on them, but there's a computer algorithm behind the calculation. If there's an algorithm, it can be gamed. Even if it's not gameable, you have to take a leap of faith that the number of followers, retweets, mentions, whatever really mean something.Collection: Fun
Most of my life is over. I am going to enjoy my family and friends before any of us depart this earth. I'll never start another company. I'll never work long hours again. At this point in my life, I only answer to God, my wife, and my kids. Everything else is secondary - especially the expectations of strangers.Collection: Kids
This is the beauty of social media: it helps you find people and then you can contact them fast and inexpensively.Collection: Media
The root of great companies is make meaning vs. make money.Collection: Roots
An editor who is a mentor, advisor, and psychiatrist. Don't kid yourself-a good editor will make your book better.Collection: Book
What I lack in talent, I compensate with my willingness to grind it out.Collection: Talent
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.Collection: People
Good blurbs are short, sweet, and limited to six. They answer the question “Why should I buy this book?Collection: Sweet
You’ll learn that the key to a great book is editing-grindin g, buffing, and polishing-not writing.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Guy
The more popular a person thinks he is in the blogosphere, the thinner his skin and the thicker his hypocrisy. This should be exactly the opposite: the higher you go the thicker the skin and thinner the hypocrisy.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Team
"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."Collection: Business
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.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Knowledge
It's just as valuable to curate content as it is to create it.Collection: Growth
When you’ve worked hard and done well and walked through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you.Collection: Opportunity
Jolt is for Windows programmers. It's typical IBM PC: it goes in brown and comes out yellow. Mountain Dew is for Macintosh programmers: it goes in yellow and comes out yellow. It's WYSIWYP.Collection: Yellow
It's hard to build community around mediocre and mundane writing.Collection: Writing
Do not write to impress others. Authors who write to impress people have difficulty remaining true to themselves. A better path is to write what pleases you and pray that there are others like you. Your first and most important reader is you. If you write a book that pleases you, at least you know one person will like it.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Creating
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.Collection: Mother
Steve [Jobs] proves that it's OK to be an asshole... He just has a different OS.Collection: Jobs
The telephone operator has one of the biggest roles in creating your organization's image....indeed, many people may come into contact with no one except your operator.Collection: Organization
Writing is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time. The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and writing some more can help you control issues that you face.Collection: Writing
The essence of evangelism is to passionately show people how you can make history together.Collection: Essence
'Branding' has taken on too much of a role as a specialized craft performed by voodoo artists.Collection: Taken
To say that Windows 95 is just like the Mac is like finding a potato in the shape of Jesus and thinking you have witnessed the second comingCollection: Jesus