In this vlog, Evan Carmichael thanks Guy Kawasaki for pivotal support that helped launch and scale two of his entrepreneurial initiatives. First, a brief email to Guy resulted in an endorsement that gave Evan confidence to open his website to contributions, growing it to 7,000 contributors and over 20 million visits. Second, Guy’s enthusiastic reply enabled Evan to create a charity entrepreneur trading‑card line, partnering with bloggers and raising funds through Kiva that have helped roughly 3,500 entrepreneurs in Africa start businesses. Evan frames these stories as proof that gratitude and seeking mentorship can unlock confidence, community growth, and social impact. He closes by urging viewers to thank those who have helped them, promising that gratitude benefits both the giver and receiver, and invites comments and questions for future videos.
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Hey, it's Evan. I believe it's important to thank the people who have helped you in your business get to where you are. Show some gratitude. And every week I make a new video thanking someone who's helped me. So today I want to thank Guy Kawasaki. When I was first starting my website, I had a bunch of famous stories, famous entrepreneur stories on my site, and a few friends of mine who are business coaches and consultants wrote in to say if they could add content too. And I thought, maybe there's a model here. Maybe I can get more people on board to contribute some stuff on my website. It could be a great resource for entrepreneurs, but I wasn't committed to the model. I didn't know if it would work out or not. And a friend of mine knew Guy and introduced us, and I sent a quick email to him saying— basically asking if he would be part of my website. You know, we could take some articles of his and post it on the site. I think the email was pretty weak, but it had some passion to it, and he wrote back to say, I trust you, let's do it. And that for me gave me confidence that, hey, this is something that people are interested in and I could really blow this up. And from there we've gone on now, I have 7,000 people contributing to the website, we've had over 20 million people check it out, helping tons of entrepreneurs, and a lot of that can be traced back to guys saying, yeah, count me in, I'm on board. And that gave me a huge confidence boost to go out and, and do this. A couple years later, I wanted to create a line of famous entrepreneur trading cards. I'm a huge baseball card fan growing up. I've got thousands of cards, and I wanted to create my own line and do it for charity. And I thought if we partner up with bloggers who are well known in their field and ask them to pick their favorite famous entrepreneur, I'd make a baseball card of them. So the famous entrepreneurs on the front and the bloggers on the back. And any money we made from it would go to support entrepreneurs in Africa through a program called Kiva that I'm a believer in. So I had the idea, I partnered up with the company to do it, and I said, "Okay, how am I going to start this? I got to turn to Guy." And I thought, "You know what? I don't know if I'm going to commit to this or not, but I'm going to write to Guy, and if he's on board—" because I really wanted the Steve Jobs card, and I knew that he was a big fan of Jobs. If Guy was on board, then we're a go because I could use that to then go out and get other bloggers and create a whole line of cards. So I wrote to Guy, and it was a few days, you know, had gone by. I hadn't heard anything back, and I was wondering, ah, you know, maybe it didn't get to him, or maybe he's not interested in it because he usually writes back to the emails. And then I remember I was driving one day. I was going to go buy a new stroller. I'm in the car, I'm the passenger, and I look at my phone, and an email from Guy comes in. About the cards. I go, this is it, let's see what he says. I hope this is— I hope he says yes. And I don't remember exactly what he wrote, but basically he was on board. He said, let's do it, he's excited, let's do it, count me in for the project. And like, it's a go, this is great. And I called up the company I was working with and said, we're on board, let's get this going, let's make the first card, and then we can expand it to all the other ones. And so again, I was at this, you know, point of Maybe I'll do it, maybe I won't. Let's see what Guy says. And he gave me the vote of confidence and I created that line. And as a result, we brought on a number of bloggers. They all picked their favorite famous entrepreneurs. We started selling the cards. And we have helped 3,500 entrepreneurs in Africa get their businesses started because of the proceeds that we've raised through selling the cards and through the website. And so again, it was a great project. It meant a lot to me as a passion project. I got to create my own line of baseball cards around entrepreneurs and help raise money for a great cause. And again, Guy was instrumental in helping set that up just by saying yes and just by, you know, being involved at the early stages and giving that confidence boost to let me know that, hey, you know, this is interesting and people will want to be involved. So thank you, Guy. You know, I don't know if I ever told you those stories, but it means a lot. It has helped my business grow in a number of different directions, and I don't know if I would have gone that path if you didn't give me that vote of confidence in the early days. So thank you so much, and for everybody watching, take time today to thank somebody who's had an impact on your business. It'll make you feel good and make them feel good, and it'll help your business grow. If you guys like this video, please give it a thumbs up below, and I'd love to hear what you have to think about this video in the comments. I love seeing the comments. Thank you guys, and if you have a question for your business, leave it in the section below, and I'll do a video response for you. I will see you soon.
