Guy Kawasaki is the brand expert speaking at BRAND MINDS 2019.
He is the Brand Expert of Canva and an executive fellow of the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley). He was also the Brand Expert of Apple that enforced and maintained the Macintosh cult for years.
In 2013, Guy Kawasaki became a special advisor to the CEO of Google’s Motorola division. Two years later, in 2015 he was appointed to the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Kawasaki is charismatic, open and honest, often breaking myths on business and entrepreneurship. He helps first time startup founders and all aspiring entrepreneurs understand the nitty-gritty of entrepreneurship with humour and witty comparisons.
Best-Selling Author of 8 Books on Entrepreneurship
Guy Kawasaki wrote 13 books beginning in 1987 with The Macintosh Way and including bestsellers such as The Art of the Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media and Enchantment.
Serial Startup Entrepreneur
His time with Apple inspired him to change his life and turn to entrepreneurship and the world of business.
Here are the companies which Guy Kawasaki co-founded:
1995 – Fog City Software, a company which developed email software for Macintosh
1998 – Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm that has made investments in Pandora Radio, Tripwire, The Motley Fool and D.light Design.
2007 – Nononina, the owner of Alltop, a website that provides information collected from news websites and blogs.
2007 – Truemors, a website that allows users to post information about people and events and have them rated by viewers; acquired by NowPublic, a global crowdsourcing social news website of ordinary citizens.
Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist
I’m a marketer. Hopefully I can recognize visions that can sell.
Guy Kawasaki
Although he defines himself as a marketer first and foremost, Guy has found a new passion and career: investing in startups. As a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, he is always on the lookout for the next Google or YouTube or CISCO.
"A very necessary skill for young entrepreneurs: brevity and speed. You must do everything fast and to the point.", Guy Kawasaki.
As a long-time entrepreneur, innovative marketer and venture capitalist, here are 6 pieces of knowledge for startups:
- The two essential roles in a startup – someone who can make the product and someone who can sell it.
- It’s the soft skills that is hard to learn, not the hard stuff. You can always hire an accountant.
- Put aside market driven data and create the product you want to use.
- Sales fixes everything.
- The purpose of any company is to create customers and to create customers you need to finish your prototype. So focus on finishing your prototype and creating customers.
- The opposite of success should be learning.
Guy Kawasaki – the Apple Evangelist
The tech evangelist is ‘a person who builds up support for a given technology, and then establishes it as a standard in the given industry.’ (venturebeat.com)
In Guy’s own words, evangelism means having the other person’s best interest at heart.
He was the first to coin the term and the first to take on the role of Chief Evangelist. Apple owes its strong relationship with the Apple community to Guy and his innovative work.
He described his role at Apple as “to protect and preserve the MacIntosh cult by doing whatever I had to do.” Through his activities he managed to influence and inspire the Apple community at a time when the company’s image was on a downward spiral.
His honesty and transparency about Apple facilitated a lifelong relationship between brand and its customers who helped him spread the word and became evangelists themselves.
In 2014, he resumed his role as Chief Evangelist for Canva, an innovative graphic design platform which acquired 10 million clients in 10 years without any paid advertising.
Guy Kawasaki is coming to Bucharest at BRAND MINDS 2019, on 10th of May 2019, where he’ll be holding a speech on The Art of Innovation.
