Best 186 quotes of Guy Kawasaki on MyQuotes

A 50-year-old company can innovate as well as two guys/gals in a garage.

Accept diversity and don't take any crap.

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

A magnificent cause can overcome a prickly personality, but your ability to enchant people increases if they like you, so you should aspire to both. You’ll know that you’re likeable when you can communicate freely, casually, and comfortably with people.

Ambitious failure, magnificent failure, is a very good thing.

An editor who is a mentor, advisor, and psychiatrist. Don't kid yourself-a good editor will make your book better.

An MBA is a great degree for career paths like investment banking, finance, consulting, and large companies. An MBA is not necessarily the right path for starting a tech company. You should be building a prototype, not getting an MBA in that case.

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE.

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.

At the end of my life, I want to say that I made the world a better place because I raised good children, loved my wife, and empowered entrepreneurs. If I do these things, then I can rest knowing that I made the world a better place.

Best way to succeed is to do things for the customer, not to the competition. Very few people buy a product in order to help you hurt the competition. To think otherwise is lunacy.

"(Big name research firm) says our market will be $50 billion in 2010." Every entrepreneur has a few slides about how the market potential for his segment is tens of billions. It doesn't matter if the product is bar mitzah planning software or 802.11 chip sets. Venture capitalists don't believe this type of forecast because it's the fifth one of this magnitude that they've heard that day. Entrepreneurs would do themselves a favor by simply removing any reference to market size estimates from consulting firms.

'Branding' has taken on too much of a role as a specialized craft performed by voodoo artists.

Coming from the U.S., you tend to look at one homogeneous market with 350 million people. But in Europe, every country has its own customs and laws.

Companies can add value and simultaneously promote themselves if their product or service truly improves the lives of their customers. I mean really improve lives, not wishful thinking, rationalization. That's the acid test.

Companies in Europe should stop trying to do the U.S. version of a European idea.

Companies should always want to delight their customers.

Create something, sell it, make it better, sell it some more and then create something that obsoletes what you used to make.

Crowdsourcing is a great way to approach creation because in any given point there's always somebody on the Internet who knows something better than you do.

Customers can tell you how to evolve a product, but they can't show you how to make a leap.

Defy the crowd. The crowd isn’t always wise. It can also lead you down a path of silliness, sub-optimal choices, and downright destruction. Enchantment is as necessary for people to diverge from a crowd as it is to get people to join one.

Disorganizatio n is the enemy of good 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.

Don’t be discouraged by the size of your network – inspire one person and you are doing good.

Don't get stubborn, flow with the go. The key is to be open to unintended success. Some companies just can't take yes for an answer.

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.

Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.

Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant.

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.

Enchantment is the purest form of sales. Enchantment is all about changing people's hearts, minds and actions because you provide them a vision or a way to do things better. The difference between enchantment and simple sales is that with enchantment you have the other person's best interests at heart, too.

Enchantment is the purest form of sales

Entitlement is the opposite of enchantment.

Entrepreneur is not a job title. It is a state of mind of people who want to alter the future.

Evangelism is selling a dream.

Everyone is passionate about something. It's your job to find out what it is.

Facebook is for people, Twitter is for perspective, Google+ is for passion, LinkedIn is for pimping

For me, while writing I am an engineer, so if I decide to change the format, I want to add a section, to move a section, reorganize the section, anything I want to do, I just boot words, and I do what I want to do. So, I feel completely empowered when I'm a writer.

For me writing is as close to being an engineer as possible.

For startups, SM is now crucial: it has never been cheaper and easier to reach one's customers. Entrepreneurs should thank God for Twitter, Facebook.

Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like 'ID 02'. 'ID' is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates how many more months of testing the product should have had.

Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn’t easy, but it’s fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.

Good blurbs are short, sweet, and limited to six. They answer the question “Why should I buy this book?

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.

Great companies start because the founders want to change the world... not make a fast buck.

Great leaders are paradoxical. They catalyze, rather control, the work of their teams. They have an overarching vision for the team but are not autocratic in the realization of this vision. Their eyes are open to whatever results occur-not just planned goals, because serendipity is a great innovator.

Greatness is won, not awarded.

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.

Happiness is temporary and fleeting. ... Joy is the right goal.

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.

High achievers tend to have major weaknesses. People without major weaknesses tend to be mediocre.