CW 500 – Guy Kawasaki – Celebrate Jason Hartman’s 500th episode with Entrepreneur & Former Marketing Evangelist with Apple Computers

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And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors. Welcome to the Creating Wealth show. Episode, episode number 500. 500. Half of a thousand. 500. This is a big deal today, so thank you for joining us to celebrate. Episode number 500 of the creating wealth show. You know, it has been a fun, interesting and amazing ride over the years and I really want to thank everybody so much for making the show such a big success. You know, we've had millions of downloads of the show from listeners in 164 countries worldwide. When I started the Creating wealth show years ago, I never in my wildest dreams imagined it turning out like this. But it's because of your support and the great guests that we've had over the years just making the show what it is. And so we appreciate your support of the show. You're referring people to the show, your reviews on the show and your questions and comments. And many of you listening listeners have been on the show over the years. We've had many client interviews over the years. We've done case studies on our clients to hear about their experiences, the good, the bad and the ugly with their investments. It's just been an amazing ride. So thank you so much for making the show such a big success and thank you for joining us today for kind of a special episode, episode number 500. I've got Fernando here with me to help me with the introduction and our guest today will be the world famous Guy Kawasaki. We'll get to him in a few minutes. Fernando, how you doing?

I'm doing great, Jason. Congratulations on your number 500. I think that's, that's awesome. You've been doing this for many years and congratulations. It's, it's been a very inspirational podcast for me personally and I know a lot of People can say the same, so congratulations.

Well, thank you so much. And Fernando, you started out as a listener to the podcast. I just thought I'd ask you, how do you find the show? You, you just went on itunes, I assume, and searched real estate investing or something.

Ye. Searching for all kinds of investing and real estate related podcasts. Try to find the ones that would resonate with my idea of achieving financial independence. And I came across your podcast. I listened, I think I listened to one episode and from that point on I decided to download literally hundreds of podcasts. Went back and just went on a spree and listened to everything that I could and tried to, you know, get my head around the concepts that you present. So it's, it was awesome.

And you did listen to a couple of other real estate podcasts too, I think, right? And they, of course they sucked, I'm sure.

Yeah, of course I have to say they suck. But no, the reality is they did suck. They talked a lot about, you know, how to flip houses and what the real estate market is going to look like the next year. You know, try to predict this and is this a good time to buy or sell. And it's always the same. And really they didn't come near.

The target of how do I actually make income from this investment and how am I going to become independent financially through real estate? It was just a different concept you're presenting. That was great.

We try to really go know knowing that our clients are whole people. We try to take a holistic approach to investing and life. Every 10th episode we something of general life interest. And that's what we're doing today. Just Guy Kawasaki, you know, we're not talking to him about real estate, but you know, there's also a lot more to the world than specifics about real estate investing. So I hope the listeners like that. You know, we've got to talk about the broader economy, we've got to talk about the political climate, we've got to talk about the legislative and, you know, the legal climate, the regulatory climate. All of these issues really integrate into our investments. So there's a lot to talk about. It's been great to experience that. Fernando, I'm curious, when you were a client before you came to work with us as an investment counselor after your financial Independence Day and leaving Apple Computer to be a full time real estate investor, do you know what show number you started with by any chance? I'm kind of curious.

Oh boy.

That was, that was three years ago, right?

Yeah, yeah. I started listening the beginning of 2012.

Okay, so.

So you've been, you've been doing it for eight years, right?

Something like that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't remember the actual, you know, episode number.

Yeah, boy. And I tell you with the frequency at which we publish episodes now, three per week, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And of course Friday now has turned into flashback Friday, which most people love, but one guy said he didn't. I talked about that on the last episode.

I don't know, I think if you understand this little more with my explanation, he will, you know, three episodes per week, we'd be at episode 500 a lot faster. We didn't used to publish so many as we do now. But let me just tell the listeners, before we jump into some of today's actual topics and the meat of this show, I want to just remind the listeners of some of the incredible, high level, thought leading, groundbreaking, famous, exceptional celebrity guests that we've had over the years. I hate to say this and I've really tried to balance it a little bit, but you know, the financial world is a male dominated world, you know, unfortunately, I'd say. And we just, we are constantly trying to get more women on the show, but you know, there's just not a lot of them writing books about finance and in the financial world. I mean, compared, you know, it must be a pretty small ratio. So we definitely want to get more female guests on the show because I just love that they have such a different perspective about things. Just to go down a few of these. And of course, you know, 500 episodes, we're not going to cover all of them, but I'll highlight a few. Jim Rogers, the world famous Jim Rogers, author of many books and hedge fund manager. Really just incredible guy. I love Jim Rogers work. Of course, the very famous Steve Forbes, the Forbes family, Forbes magazine, Robert Kiyosaki, the author of the Rich Dad, Poor dad book and that entire franchise of books. Harry Dent, who I discovered in the mid-90s with his books, they've just been phenomenal over the years. You know, he's made some pretty bold predictions. He's been right and wrong about them. But really interesting economic demographer, a guy, you know, Fernando, of course, John McAfee, because he's in the tech world and that's where you came from. An Apple computer.

Yeah. Very interesting interview. I really enjoy that.

John McAfee, he talked about his life in Belize and some of the new technologies he's working on. Interesting guy. And you know, folks, you got to give me credit for entertaining every Part of the political spectrum. Bill Ayers, I mean, Bill Ayers, the guy who is self described on my show, when I asked him the very blunt, maybe rude question, bill, are you a communist?

And his answer was, jason, I'm a communist with a small C, not a capital C.

So I love that one. Interesting.

Yeah.

And then to go to the other side of the political spectrum, Pat Buchanan, complete opposite of Bill Ayers. Right. Meredith Whitney, she wrote a great book and I just, I think we just reran her episode on Flashback Friday as, you know, the Fate of the States, which really talks about the business friendly states and those are the places we like to invest as real estate investors. So that's a phenomenal book on that topic. Meredith whitney's book. Dr. Ben carson, who's a presidential candidate. And he was really interesting. Dennis Waitley, one of my big mentors in life, who, I discovered it at age 17. We had Ryan Holiday on the show, author of I believe just three books now. And his books are groundbreaking, huge best sellers. Brian Tracy, he's in the same category of Dennis Waitley, of course, a big, you know, motivational speaker and business philosopher. Eve Wright, who works for the Miami Heat basketball team. She wrote a great book on passion in life and living with no limits on the far left side of the political spectrum. Noam Chomsky, really interesting guy. Dr. John Gray, the author of the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus series of best selling books. Harvey McKay, another huge best selling author that I followed for many years. His first book was, I love his book titles. Fernando, how to Swim with the Sharks without being Eaten Alive.

Very descriptive.

Yeah, yeah, he has great book titles, really good book titles. Kelly McGonagall, she has written some great books and she's an author on some, some really great stuff about how to use our mind more effectively. The famous Dan Millman, he's great. You know, Way of the Peaceful Warrior. Millions and millions of people read that book.

Yeah, I enjoy that.

You saw the movie. Wasn't that, you know, few books translate into a movie really well, but the Peaceful Warrior was, the movie was fantastic.

It was fantastic. I mean, we enjoy. There's so many good messages in that movie. I highly recommend it.

Yeah, me too. And you can get that on Netflix. I've watched it three times. It's great.

Yeah, yeah, same here.

Thomas Sowell. Thomas Sowell, author of many best selling books. You know, contributor to Forbes magazine. I believe he's a Harvard professor. Forgive me, I can't remember right now. He's just a great thought Leader and thinker and great, great guy, Doug Casey, the guy who in the 70s wrote the very famous book called the International man and it's all about internationalizing our life. And he's made a lot of really interesting predictions on the economy. Here's another tech one for you. Noah Kagan. I think he was employee number 30 at Facebook and he's the guy behind AppSumo, which is a very popular, successful company nowadays that a lot of Internet marketers and software developers use. So really some great stuff. We had representative Todd Aiken, who got fired for some of his somewhat outlandish comments. Byron Dorgan has been on the show. Really. We've had some incredible guests over the years and many more. Not just those, but Jillian Tett, very famous one. She was really good too. So just a lot of great, great thought leaders over the years and we'll have a lot more for you. Fernando, since you're in the tech world or you were in the tech world until your financial Independence Day last year. Working for Apple for many years. You know about Guy Kawasaki, right?

Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. He was known as Apple's chief evangelist and he did that work for many years at Apple. He started back in 1983. So he's obviously, I wasn't there when he was there, but he's very well known. I think he's moved on to, to found many ventures and, and is involved in, in a lot of companies nowadays. So it's very, very famous. Guy.

Yeah, definitely. I remember when I first started following Guy Kawasaki, I flew out to Boston and I went to his garage.com seminar and he. And that was during the first, you know, dot com boom and bubble. And it was, it was amazing. Like there were probably, I don't know, maybe 400 people there and they were all these, you know, mostly young kids who were all had some startup idea, some Internet company idea. And he gave out t shirts for garage.com that said, and this was the culture and the thinking at the time. It was an amazing time, really. It's sort of amazing. You couldn't see that bubble getting ready to pop. But, but the T shirts, I remember them because I don't know where that, you know, I wonder sometimes where some of my clothing goes. It just kind of disappears. I mean, I give a lot of it away certainly to Salvation Army. You know, I'm always taking bags of clothes and giving it away to them. But where does it go? Some of it I know I didn't give it away. I don't know where it went.

Yeah. You know who. Who knows? Fernando? I can tell you though, for sure that my dryer, you know, the divorce rate among my socks is. It's skyrocketing. You know, like, where do these socks go in the dryer? I sort of wonder.

You know, there's a black hole hidden behind your dryer.

Yeah. When you're at Apple. You didn't work on an app for that?

No, no, it wasn't my specialty.

Yeah. Okay. Okay, got it. But anyway, these. These T shirts that he gave out, I remember they just totally, like, basically nailed the culture at the time. The shirt said garage.com. it said startup, get big cash out.

Yeah, the easy way.

Yeah, that was. That was the whole idea, you know, forget about building a company to last or anything. You know, it was just all about, you know, having someone buy you, you know. But, yeah, it was an amazing culture. There were all these ideas and. And, you know, I think that was like a $700 event which, adjusted for inflation, was kind of a lot. It was amazing. It was at Babson College. And I remember meeting Seth Godin. I want to get him on the show, too. When I was there, he was one of the speakers. I talked to him for a bit. Yeah. So Guy Kawasaki, I mean, when you. How long did you work at Apple, by the way, Fernando? And tell the audience what you did there, too?

Well, I was. My. My latest job at Apple was as a program manager for intellectual property in the chip hardware division. And basically I interfaced with companies that would sell intellectual property features that would be present in the mobile devices at Apple.

I was there for.

10 years. Four of these years were in a startup that was purchased by Apple, and the remaining years were actually at Apple. So I retired in 2014. So about a year ago, Financial Independence Day. Financial Independence day was in May 2014. So that's when I left Apple.

Yeah. And you did that when you had 70 units. When I met you the first time, and you just discovered the podcast, I remember you only owned your own home and now you're a real estate mogul, right?

Yes.

Well, thanks to all the podcasts that I listen to in my education.

Learning the principles allow me to get to this point, which is very grateful for that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and we're very grateful for your business, and I'm really grateful to be working with you now. And we're developing a software that we're working on, so, you know, more to come about that on future episodes. But I think that's really going to help investors. It's going to help investors self manage their properties, hopefully or buy a la carte services from property managers. We have a big vision for what we're doing here and I'm Fernando, I gotta tell you, I'm super excited about it.

No, me too. I think we've talked a lot about it and we're definitely making big strides putting the startup together and putting the team together. And I think that we'll be able to talk more about it once we get the first mock ups done and we can tell people to try it out. I think it's the first step of the big vision that you mentioned and there's a big opportunity there and we certainly are.

One of the few people that.

Can see some of the pains in the business and can try to address where there is issues, there's opportunity and I think that's what we're going after is how do we address these issues?

We can make it easier for you through a software program to manage your managers or to not have a manager and be a self manager nationwide and have a long distance portfolio. Not doing management the old fashioned way. From our experience in working with thousands of clients over the years and just seeing the, the pain points and you know, gosh, if we could just do this or just do that, that's what Fernando and I are working on. And you dear listeners, are going to be the first to know about it and the first to be able to beta test it and use it with your own portfolio. So keep listening for more announcements on that. There's going to be a lot of opportunity there I'm really excited about. But tell us a little bit about Fernando, your thoughts on Guy Kawasaki before we get to his interview. I mean he's a really innovative Guy, author of 13 books by the way. I have to say to the listeners, I apologize that this special episode, the sound quality of the interview I did with him isn't better. I had to be mobile. I was in San Diego last week when I recorded and I was under a time crunch because episode 500 won't wait. You know, it has to come on a given date. I was traveling and it's the soonest we could get Guy Kawasaki. So apologize in advance for sound quality not being as good as usual. But you know, our editors fixed up, it's passable. Okay, tell us about like the Steve Jobs mentality on focus groups, listening to the customer. Guy Kawasaki made an interesting comment about that, didn't he?

Yeah, again he worked at Apple in the early years and certainly learned quite a bit from Steve Jobs, and I remember him on documentaries when he was discussing marketing at Apple back when Steve Jobs was in charge. And one of his comments that really.

Stayed with me was that the concept of an Apple focus group back then was the right hemisphere of Steve's brain talking to the left side of his brain.

That's kind of.

The marketing focus group that they did, which is probably right on. You know, I can see how that, how that played out. But he did have many, you know, many learnings that he took from Steve. And another one that I remember is about experts being clueless, you know, and Steve was famous for thinking that people that can tell you what's wrong usually cannot make it the right way, but they can just talk about it, which is interesting. If you rely too much on experts, you know, it could. It could bring you to the wrong result.

There's an old, very telling joke about that. What do you call a consultant? A consultant is a guy who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is and then doesn't give it back.

That's spot on. That's exactly the concept.

Yeah, exactly. So this whole concept, though, with Apple and Steve Jobs not using focus groups, I think it's interesting. And it reminds me of another guest that I really want to get on the show that I discovered many years ago. His name is Paul Pilzer or Paul Zane Pilzer. He wrote a book. I think he wrote several books, but one's called the Theory and Practice of Economic Alchemy. And I just remember how when I was very young, that book fascinated me. You know, it talked about everybody being so concerned that Japan was going to take over the world and how that just wasn't true and turned out to not be true. You know, as well, he was right about that. But he also talked about, like, companies, you know, that have this whole thing of they say they want to listen to the customer and all this kind of stuff. And of course, there is a lot of validity to that. And I don't know exactly where to come down on it, but, you know, he talked about how if you listen to the customer, you'll always be looking like in the rear view mirror. And the example he gave, I remember it well in that book. And, you know, think of this. This is in the olden days, okay? You know, this is a long time ago this book was written. But he said no one realized, no customer could tell you that they had a need for a waterproof cordless phone until Sony invented one. So the concept of, you know, the normal concept of businesses find a need and fill it. That's like, you know, kind of Business 101 concept. Right. But the. The more advanced concept, and I'm sure this is a Steve Jobs guy, Kawasaki, Apple type evolutionary concept or maybe revolutionary is Paul Zane Pilzer said this is. He said, imagine a need, create the need, and then fill the need. You know, so did anyone know they needed an iPhone before it was invented? Not exactly.

Yeah. If you were to ask people if they were, you know, describe their desires, they usually. They do it in terms of items they're already using. You know, they just want something that is better, faster, and cheaper. But they. They usually. You can't go the step beyond, which is where the holy grail is. And that's what Steve was so good at.

Yeah, yeah, there's a. There's a Henry Ford quote like that too. If people asked me. Or maybe it says, if people asked horse people or, you know, people what they wanted at that time, they would have said they wanted a faster horse instead of a car. You know, see people, most people can only think in terms, like you said, what they have now. Right. To work with, with. Whereas, you know, taking that evolutionary leap really requires a different mindset.

That's true.

Yeah.

Another one just.

Just to.

To complete. Another learning that that guy took from Stephen and certainly put into practice into his ventures was the concept that a players hire other a players. You know, you always want to surround yourself with people that are the same level as you are or better than you are. That way you will grow. And if CEOs and entrepreneurs understand the concept, then they have a much better chance of being successful. I learned that when I was.

With my dad back when I was a kid. And that's just great advice that applies directly to business.

How did you learn it with your dad? You told me that story when we were in Las Vegas at that conference. I remember you saying that. Did you want to share that at all?

Well, it's just that the advice was always to when I was playing sports or in school, just surround yourself with people that are at the same level or better than you are, and you will learn from them, you will grow, you will become a better person because you're surrounding yourself with people that. That will allow you to get there. And if you do the opposite and you hang out with people that are not gonna, you know, gonna be losers, and you're gonna end up, you know, going the wrong way. So that's pretty much what. What I learned back then. And I apply it even to Today.

That's a great, great bit of advice, Fernando. And I want to just put a plug in for the Venture Alliance Mastermind, because that's the whole idea of it. Okay. Yeah. And by the way, we have a really sort of crappy website you can all check out. Listeners, see how transparent I am. This website is under construction. It's not very good, but I'll go ahead and announce it on the show. It's venturealliancemastermind.com so you can check it out. Venturealliancemastermind.com under construction. Please pardon the dust on that website. It's not done yet, but you can check it out and see what we're up to and check out our event coming up in San Diego. Our first event. It's going to be the inaugural Venture alliance event. But that's really the whole point is surround yourself with people who are ahead of you, and it really just sort of expands your consciousness and makes more things possible. So I think that's a. That's a very good point. And Guy Kawasaki nailed that. Huh? But that doesn't happen in a lot of corporate America because people. People don't want to hire really smart people because they're intimidated by them. They think they'll take their job, right? Yeah. Everybody's protecting their turf.

Yeah.

Some managers and executives, they think that they want to hire people that are not as good as they are to feel superior to them. But that's just such a backwards idea. I think it's just an ego trip and it really doesn't bring value to the company. You always want to get better, so that's definitely something to not do. You want to hire people that are equal or the same? Yeah, sorry. Equal or better.

Right.

That's really the goal.

People, they can't pull you forward if they're not ahead of you. If they're. If they're behind you, they can only pull you back toward them. You know, water seeks its own level, as the saying goes. Right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Good stuff. Well, hey, let's get to Guy Kawasaki and jump into episode 500. Again, sound quality not up to my usual standard here, but I think you'll still enjoy the interview. And of course, Guy Kawasaki is a great guest. We'll talk to you next time in episode 501. Here's episode 500. Guy Kawasaki. Thanks for joining me, Fernando. Let's get to Guy. Hey, it's my pleasure. Welcome Guy Kawasaki to the show. You've heard the name. He did not invent secular evangelism, but he certainly popularized it. Back starting in 1983 when he was at Apple. And he's the author of 13 books. These books are basically textbooks for academic institutions and startup companies and people in the tech world. They've been on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller list. He does over 50 keynotes per year and it's a pleasure to have him here with us. Guy, how you doing?

I'm doing great, thank you.

Good, it's good to have you. So what's the latest and greatest, what are you working on nowadays?

I just had two books come out, the Art of Social Media and the Art of The Star version 2. So I've been busy trying to make a living, you know how it is.

Tell us about the social media and what your thoughts are on it.

Yeah, so I just think social media is just the best thing that ever happened to entrepreneurs and marketers and yet I see it used so poorly. So this book has about more than 150 or so tips about how to optimize social media and I assure you that.

There'S never been a better book about social media.

Good stuff, good stuff. Well, tell us what are some of the big mistakes that you see entrepreneurs making in their social media sphere?

They don't use it enough that they don't repeat their posts. They don't post frequently enough. So more positively an entrepreneur optimizing social media would repeat their tweets.

Because.

You can repeat tweets, all your audience is not listening or watching at the same time. I think that every post, Twitter or whatever platform should have either a graphic or embedded video. And these are some pretty fundamental things that many people, if you look at what they do, they're so wrong. I mean social media has high activity and CNN and espn, they don't run a report only once and figure that everybody's seen it.

That's good. That's a fair statement. I agree with you. Any tips on how often to repeat things? I mean, you know, any leader knows that you've got to keep beating the drum over and over, right?

Yes, indeed. I take most of my tweets and repeat them three times. So three times over 24 hours and you know, I pushed the edge. But I have to tell you, I've looked at my analytics and I can either get X or I can get 3X. So it's kind of a no brainer. You want 3X, not X, right?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So three times in 24 hours for Twitter. What about the other platforms? Do you feel the same way with those?

No, I don't feel the same way. I think you can get away with much less. So with Facebook, I think it's. Well, with Facebook I probably post five or six times a day, but each one is different. And I may post a similar promotion or something three or four times every other day. But it looks different, you know, different graphic, different text. So on Twitter, I'm talking absolute identical posts three times in 24 hours. Facebook, I could do, over a course of several days, two or three times, but looking different.

How do you perfect posts and respond to comments, especially critical comments? I think that's a vital thing to learn.

Well, with comments, good news, bad news, right? So if you have comments, at least you're being seen and people are interacting. It might not be the fanboy stuff that you prefer, but it's better than being ignored. So that's data point number one. Data point number two is I think that you do what I call the amateur boxing rule of social media, which is you only go three rounds. So somebody comments, you respond, they respond, and no matter what they respond, you drop it.

So don't get sucked into the vortex. I like that, the three round concept. They shouldn't get hung up on having the last word because on three rounds you can't have the last word, can you?

No, you can't have the last word. And it doesn't matter if you get the last word because frankly, nobody cares. And yeah, people are not going to watch and follow the thread of 5, 10, 15 comments. The only person who might be following the whole thing blow by blow is the person you're, you know, fighting with. And that might be some 16 year old kid. Anyway, so.

It'S not worth it.

Don't give in to the trolls. Right, okay, so what about blogging? I mean, what about the integration of blogging and social media? Do you just mean repost your blog post? A lot of people do that already. Or did you have something more specific about that?

Well, my test is that if it's worth blogging, it's worth promoting through social media to get people to read the blog. So I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the concept of you went through the effort of writing a blog post, but now you don't want to tell everybody to read it. I mean, that's just like I'm searching for a scenario where that's true. So that's what I mean. And I don't mean obviously reposting the entire blog post. I just mean that you do sort of a tweet or a two or Three sentence summation and you point to the source. So it's self curation, if you will.

I want to get to some of your other entrepreneurial ventures and Canva and your early days at Apple. Maybe a few comments on that. I'd love to hear too. But let's finish up on the social media topic and talk about getting more followers, socializing events, running hangouts, etc.

Sure. So for social media, it is a very powerful tool for also optimizing the impact of your events. Many people use social media to get people to events, but once the event starts, they drop the ball and arguably that's the most important time, particularly if you regularly run events. So what you want to do is provide so much attention and so much action from the event that next year people say, wow, you know, I have to attend this event because I really missed out last year. And so that means someone who is probably wholly responsible for social media taking pictures.

Now with Periscope and Meerkat, live streaming and tweeting out great comments, great short quotes from speakers, selfies of people, all this kind of stuff because you want to make it so seem like this is the most important place to be on the earth at that moment.

Yeah, the streaming is definitely hot. I mean, Meerkat and Periscope are getting a lot of play right now. Why is that? What do you attribute that to? People just want to be in the action, of course.

Well, I do Periscope a lot and I only do it when, you know, it sort of passes a test. Right. So one test is I'm at an event, it's a speaker or a panel, and people who are all over the world or don't have the time or money to come to the event can see this. So I feel like I'm doing them a favor. In a sense. I'm cheating for them. I'm getting them content they could not have gotten. So that's one scenario. Another scenario would be where I'm getting someplace that most people cannot get. So, for example, in April, I'm going to the Porsche factory. So I'm going to stream live from the Porsche factory. And you know, it's, it's not like I'm streaming live from the Oval Office. On the other hand, you know, I bet there's a lot of people who love Porsches and love cars who've never been to the Porsche factory. So it's, it's that kind of thing. I see a lot of people meerkatting and, and periscoping, you know, themselves Sitting at a desk.

And they're answering tweets and all that. And, like, you know, I can't think of something that's more boring and more egotistical than, you know, my live stream of me answering email is fascinating. I just, you know, if Barack Obama wants to do it, okay. You know, if. If Shaquille o' Neal is doing it, maybe. But, you know, Lonely Boy 15, saying, Tune into my periscope, or I'm gonna be sitting at my desk. What a waste of bits.

Waste of bandwidth. Definitely. Okay, well, talk about the other kind of live formats. You know, whether they be hangouts or webinars, Twitter chats, any. Any of those real quick, and then let's jump back a little bit.

Well, I happen to love those. And I love those because they're so difficult to do well, and they're difficult to do well because you have to be very quick on your feet. And there's two aspects of that. One is mental. So you have to be able to answer quickly, think quickly, you know, come back at people quickly. So that's one. And there's also. For Twitter chats in particular, there's also the more mundane, how fast can you type? So there are people who can type fast, and there are people who can come back fast, but there are not too many people who can type and come back fast. So that's the challenge for a Twitter chat and for those kinds of things. I happen to love that challenge.

I want to ask you about the art of the start, which I just loved. I thought that was a fantastic work. Work one particular chapter, but, you know, talk about anything you like. But I definitely want to make sure you talk a little bit about partnering, because that is so critical and so complicated. I remember one of my grandmother's old quotes. She used to say, jason, the hardest ship to sail is a partnership.

And, you know, but partners can be vitally important, you know, complementary talents. Right.

And it is a very difficult thing to do. I think the word and the concept is vastly overused to me. The only kind of partnership that matters is a partnership where it affects your spreadsheet. So if you form a partnership and you don't whip out Excel and change, something like a cost went down or revenue went up. I think basically it's a BS partnership. So partnerships have to move the needle, and it's not just warm and fuzzy because, you know, the press is gonna love it or whatever. If it doesn't move the needle, it doesn't matter. Don't even bother.

How about anything more Technical on the way you split up equity or, you know, choosing partners, anything like that.

Yeah, everyone is so different. You know, I kind of believe in the win win theory. Not everybody does. And I'm not saying the win win theory is the only one that works works, But I like to sleep at night and I also believe in karma, so that's kind of my test. I think that win lose partnerships, they don't work. Yeah, they don't work. Or they may work, but they may die young. It's got to be good for everybody.

And even if it gets you through the one deal, there's always going to be another company you want to start, you know, six years later.

Right, well, that too. And you know, I also believe it's karma that, you know, one day you may be the 800 pound bully and you know, can get a great deal, but the next day, guess what, there's always an 8,000 pound gorilla if there's an 800 pound gorilla.

Marketing is one of your great, great skills, at least in my opinion. What about positioning, pitching, branding?

Pitching, branding, all that stuff I think just comes down to first a good reality that it's not about, you know, if you have a pig and you put lipstick on the pig, what you end up with is lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. And so the secret to evangelism and marketing and branding and positioning is don't start with a pig. It's very easy to evangelize something that's great. It's very hard to evangelize a pig. So many people believe that you can take a pig and you can add marketing and make it not into a pig. And it's just not true. It's like so hard. So this is kind of the anti marketing marketing, which is you want to be good at marketing, find something good to market.

Very, very good point. You know, when I first met you back in 1999, maybe 2000, it was in the heyday of the dot com bubble and some of the ideas we saw out there were some of the silliest ideas. And I thought that at the time, really not looking back, I mean really at the time, I thought, thought that too. And I'm sure you did as well. What do you see out there nowadays in the tech world, in the startup world? You know, things you love, things you hate if you're willing to mention the ones you hate.

Well, obviously I went to work for a company called Canva and what Canva does is it enables anybody to create beautiful designs. So it's in the democratizing of design business. And it is doing remarkably well. Thousands of people sign up for it every day. So I'm kind of dedicated to that. A couple weeks ago, I was appointed to the board of trustees of the Wikimedia foundation, which is the entity that owns Wikipedia. And so that is very interesting. Also one of the most important projects, maybe for all mankind.

I agree. I donate every year. I love what they do.

Yeah. So those two things alone, plus my speaking and writing kind of keep me busy, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But, you know, just kind of as an observer out there, not what you're into necessarily, you know, do you, do you think we're seeing a lot of silly stuff in the last few years that's going to be weeded out? You know, are we, are we in another bubble like we were 15 years ago?

It's very hard to predict what's stupid and what is brilliant. And it's a very fine line. And, you know, the only way you can really know is after the fact that, let's just be honest. So if I told you that I'm starting a company to enable people to send out 140 character text messages when you could already send out text messages and you had IRC and you had email and you had all that, you'd say, well, Twitter, such a stupid idea.

Well, fair enough.

Guess what? Not so stupid after all.

Right.

And then.

A few years ago, we all thought MySpace would control the world, that it would be the operating space system of the Internet. Well, you know, MySpace kind of disappeared.

Especially Rupert Murdoch.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, he bought it. So, oops. So, you know, how do you, how do you reconcile all this? That some stupid ideas really, really created humongous companies and some smart ideas imploded, and so it's just kind of a crapshoot. And it is better to be lucky than smart. That's my conclusion.

Yeah, right, right. I always say that better to be lucky, even good any day. But you can't depend on luck. That's the problem. That's the problem. Talk to us for a moment about some of your early days. I especially want to hear about Apple, you know, working with Steve. Any, any insights there that would be interesting to listeners?

Apple was just fantastic. Working for Steve was a life changing experience. I wouldn't trade that for anything. Very difficult person to work for. But you know, what a great experience. And it was like, you know, working at Disneyland and getting paid every day. It was fantastic. I would not be here were it not for that experience, that's for sure.

I was telling one of my clients who used to work at Apple about you being on the show, and he said to ask you about some, some sort of comment you made about the right brain and the left brain of Steve Jobs and marketing. Tell us about that.

So, so my comment was that many marketers believe in focus groups and asking customers what they want and checking with them and all that. And my statement was that Apple did not do any focus groups. The only focus group was Steve's left and right hemisphere being connected. So that was the Apple focus group. And I'm not saying every company can do it this way, but certainly it worked for Apple. So when you have a brilliant dictator, it's a very efficient company. The problem is that there are many dictators, so few are brilliant. So the dictatorship part is easy. It's the brilliant part that's hard.

The focus group thing, is it really the job of an entrepreneur to figure out what the customer wants before they know they want it?

Coming from the Apple school, I would say yes, that's how it works now. But there are other kind of entrepreneurial organizations. You could try to be the local cost provider.

Right.

So that's another path.

You know, I don't know if Target was, you know, some brilliant insight as much as, well, if we provide great selection at low prices, we'll win. Okay. You know, I mean, how hard would have that been to see? So this is a way, call it the Steve Jobs way. I don't think it's the only way.

Yeah, yeah, good point, good point. I mean, you know, the kind of idea that in business you want to find a need and fill it. Right. You know, or is it more about imagining a need, creating that demand somehow and then filling it, you know, and that's, that's the, like, I don't know, the focus group thing. I agree. That's an interesting ideology of Steve and Apple.

Here's the danger with all this kind of stuff, which is on the one hand, it's very dangerous to run your business according to.

Sort of stories. Right. So the story of Steve or the, you know, the story of this kind of thing, so this is kind of an episode, a particular instance in time. Well, that doesn't take into account that for every Steve who was the brilliant dictator, there are 10,000 stupid dictators. So this doesn't mean that, oh, you should look at what Steve did and say, okay, so that's the way to go. Because we don't know what the statistics are. He could be, you know, seven standard deviations away from the norm. And so, you know, you shouldn't pattern your life against Steve Jobs because you, frankly, are not seven standard deviations of visionary like he was. So that's one thing. And, you know, lots of things have to work together for a Steve to be successful. You have to be at the right place at the right time, you know, probably prior to personal computers. But as things are getting cheaper, there's a lot of factors, right? So it's hard to do science, because with science, you're trying to test the hypothesis and you're trying to create control, where you control for all the variables. But in business, you cannot control all the variables. And so it's dangerous to learn by stories. On the other hand, if you try to create a scientific experiment in order to learn what to do, you will run out of time and no one's going to fund it. So can you imagine if you went to venture capital and said, we're going to run a test, we're going to take a visionary and we're going to have this kind of product, and we're going to take this and this kind of product and we're going to control for all the variables and we're going to tell you which is the better path. Nobody's going to fund that. So scientific method is not suitable for business. And the method of individual stories is also very risky. So that's why, I guess, it comes down to luck.

That's a good point. Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, on that thought, do you think that in American business or in business in general, we're studying success too much and failure too little?

Listen, the right thing to do is always be consuming information, trying to digest and turn information into knowledge, knowing full well that, you know, just because Steve did it this way doesn't mean it's the only way or the best way. Also, you have to control for the fact that correlation is not causation. So, you know, just because Steve drove in the carpool lane and parked in a handicap slot, that doesn't mean that if you did, you'd be Steve Jobs.

Right?

That's correlation. That's not causation. So there's a lot of things to think about. And then, you know, best strategy of all is be lucky.

Not quite actionable, but I love it.

Yeah, not quite actionable. Exactly. Well, good stuff. Well, Guy, give out your website. Tell people where they can find more. And your Twitter handle, too.

So my Twitter handle is as you would expect, Guy Kawasaki and my blog site is guy kawasaki.com Very easy.

And then on Twitter, you see the three times a day posting.

Well, can I just tell you, Jason, if somebody sees my post three times a day, it says more about them than me. They need a life. They should not be seeing it.

That's a good point. Yeah, they should have only seen it once.

Exactly.

Or maybe twice.

Or not at all.

Yeah, good point. Good point. Good point. Definitely. Definitely. So, Guy, just as a closing thought, we're living in an amazing time technologically. It's an amazing time to be in business, too, because the cost of starting a business has just plummeted. You know, there's so many great tools out there. They're free or very, very cheap. Canva is a fantastic tool, of course, and it's not very expensive. I think there's even a free version. This is giving the entrepreneur so many tools to just be so innovative and create so much. What do you see for the future?

As you say, it's cheaper and easier than ever. You don't have to buy servers anymore. You don't have to buy tools anymore. You have virtual teams. Your marketing is social media. So, you know, maybe the best and only place you need to spend money in social media is promoting Facebook posts. Although I would also say that promoted pins on Pinterest is also going to be good. So it's a great time and have at it. I don't. I don't know what else to say. It is a fantastic time to be an entrepreneur. It means that there's going to be more ideas and more companies. That doesn't necessarily. They're going to mean that there's going to be more good companies and ideas, but at least it's more of a meritocracy where it's not just the people who know the right VCs. At least more people can try.

Guy Kawasaki, thank you for joining us.

Thank you. Enjoy yourself.

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