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Guy Kawasaki - The Art of Innovation, Speech (ENG)
Guy Kawasaki - The Art of Innovation, Speech (ENG)
Good morning. My name is Guy Kawasaki and I am here to talk to you about
innovation. I will give you a little more detail about my background: I worked for
Apple from 1983 to 1987, I was Apple software Evangelist. So my job was to
convince people to write Macintosh versions of their software products, as well
as to create hardware peripherals for Macintosh. Back then the company was
divided into various divisions; there was the Apple II division and the Macintosh
division. The Macintosh division of course worked for Steve Jobs, the one and
only Steve Jobs. To use the word loosely, it was a very interesting experience
working for Steve. Because we worked for the co-founder of the company we
had very special rules that are not part of Apple Computer; we had unlimited
supplies of fresh orange juice at two dollars a bottle; we had massage therapist
coming to our cubicles on Thursdays and Fridays, so that we could have
massages while we sat at our desks; obviously this was before sexual
harassment was a issue in the workplace, back then sexual harassment was a
good thing as a matter of fact.
And unlike any other part of Apple, we could fly first class for any flight over two
hours. My interpretation of this rule was that the two hours begins from the
moment you leave your apartment, so... I flew first class everywhere I had flied
first class from San Francisco to Monterrey.
You know?, back then as I said we were divided into divisions; the Apple II
division was shipping just both loads of Apple IIs; the Macintosh was not yet
shipping, so if you looked at a PML statement of Apple back then, they were the
"P" and we were the "L". The interesting thing is that, I think the Macintosh
division was arguevely the largest collection of ego-maniacs in the history Silicon
Valley, and if you know people from Silicon Valley that is really seem quite a lot. I
will give you one example of the manifestation of that egotistical nature and
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A woman is often measured by the things she cannot control. She is measured
by the way her body curves or doesn't curve. By where she is flat or straight or
round. She is measured by 36-24-36 and inches and ages and numbers. By all
the outside things that don't ever add up to who she is on the inside. And so if a
woman is to be measured, let her be measured by the things she can control, by
who she is and who she is trying to become because as every woman knows,
measurements are only statistics, and statistics lie.
This is an ad for Nike women aerobic shoes. You are going to be my perspective
customer. Not you, you. OK? So I am the VP of marketing of Nike. Turn around,
look at me; I am the VP of marketing of Nike. Do you want to stand up? So I am
the VP of marketing of Nike, and you are someone who I hope has a hundred
dollars. All right? So I say to you: listen, you give me the hundred dollars, I will
give you two pieces of cotton, leather, and rubber manufactured under somewhat
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Step two, is to make a mantra. A mantra is a two or three word explanation for
why you exist. Unify and Simplify IT is an example. Now, most of us, especially
if we have an MBA, even more so if you work for a company like McKinsey or
Arthur D. Little, or Bain or Brownie Consulting Groups, we have been trained to
create mission statements, not mantras. Mission statements by contrast are sixty
words long. Now, you are from all over the world, let me explain how a mission
statement is made in Silicon Valley. The process is two days. It is at an off-site.
You take the top 60 people in your company to this off-site. The off-site is always
at a hotel that has a world class golf course. Very high correlation between
mission statement and gold course. Two day off-site, the first day is run by a
group facilitator, a meeting facilitator, an executive coach type, this is because
usually the team doesnt have anybody on its management team with leadership
or communication ability. So you hire this outsider who knows virtually nothing
about your company and your customers. Not to be sexist, but lets say that her
name is Moon Vim. Moon Vim is not only an off-site facilitator, she is also a
Lamaze instructor, because the process of getting a team to work together is not
unlike getting a couple to push out a baby. Lamaze instructor, executive coach.
Two days; the first day is spent in cross functional teams. So you do not want all
the sales people together, all the production people together, all the accounting
people together, you want the accounting and the sales, and the engineering,
and the support people in groups that are mingled. You are outdoors in the first
day, and Moon Vim says All right everybody, every group send up one
volunteer, one volunteer goes up, everybody, that volunteer, get behind the
volunteer. Volunteer, hold out your arms, shut your eyes, fall backwards into the
arms of your team, because you are going to learn trust, you are going to learn
communication, that is the first step to building a great company, and a great
mission statement.
This ladies and gentlemen is the mission statement for Wendys. Dont get me
wrong, I love Wendys. My wife and I have four children; the children out number
the adults in our family. We have gone from a men to men to zone, if you will. If
you are a hockey fan, the kids are a permanent power place at our house. I love
Wendys, the more children you have, the more you appreciate fast food. At our
house, we consider French fries to be a vegetable. However, despite my love for
Wendys I will tell you that I cannot believe this mission statement. I cannot
believe that Wendys stands for something that has leadership, innovation and
partnerships. I cannot believe that if you went to Trixie or Biff, who is working at
Wendys and ask Trixie or Biff: say what is the mission statement of your
company, I do not think any of them could repeat this mission statement. Further
more I do not even think the founder of Wendys could repeat this mission
statement; I know this is true, because he is dead.
Instead of mission statements like this, if you want to be innovative you need to
create a two or three or four word mantra that explains why should this
innovation exist. Wendys should stand for Healthy fast food, that is what the
company stands for, in three words; Trixie of Biff could memorize this; you know
what, healthy fast food, that is what we stand for.
Nike, Nike has a great customer slogan: Just do it, but its mantra, the reason
why Nike exist, is Authentic athletic performance.
Fed-Ex, you know, Fed-Ex has vans, airplanes, they have an incredible IT
infrastructure; Fed-Ex can tell you that your package is on the third shelf from the
bottom, on the left hand side of our van, in the second lane from the right, going
south on 101, in Mountain View, California, at twenty seven and a half miles per
hour; can tell you all that; all of that is for Peace of mind.
And the fourth example is eBay. eBay stands for the Democratization of
commerce, so that one sole proprietary in the middle of Indiana, or in the middle
of Ohio, can sell stuff on-line as well as Amazon, as well as Wall-Mart, it is the
democratization of commerce.
Four examples using two of three words that explain their innovation.
My suggestion for you is, as soon as you figure out how you want to make
meaning, you figure out a two or three word summation of why that meaning
should exist, to keep the team on line.
Now, if I had not dissuaded you from focusing too much on mission statements,
let me at least give you the worlds best way to create a mission statement. All
you need to do is go to the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator website. You do
not even have to click to our advertising, it is all there. I will read you one:
We exist to professionally build long-term high-impact sources I have to take
a breath here so that we may endeavor to synergistically leverage existing
effective deliverables to stay competitive in tomorrows world.
That is your basic two day off-site at the Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay, McKinsey
twenty five thousand dollar, mission statement for free. I have a friend who
worked at an investment bank, he said they had an off-site with Moon Vim, and
one of the exercises was everybody came up with a mission statement for the
organization, submitted it, and the people voted; he could not come up with one,
so he went to this site, grabbed one, submitted it, he has came in second in the
vote. This is why you should never work for an investment bank.
Point two is make meaning; second point is make mantra. The third point is to
jump to the next curve. This is what defines innovation. It is not about doing
things slightly better, ten percent fifteen, twenty, twenty five percent better, you
should aim for ten times improvement. It should be on a different curve. You
should go from telegraph, to telephone, to VoIP. That is the kind of curve jump. If
you are a letter quality printer company, a Daisy-will printer company, you should
not aspire to having more font sizes of Helvetica next year; you should aspire to
go from letter quality printer company to Daisy-will printer company, to laser
printer company.
Let me give you another example, having to do with ice: in the eighteen hundreds
there was a thriving ice harvesting industry in the north eastern part of the United
States. During the winter Bubba and Junior would go out and cut blocks of ice.
Bubba and Juniors idea of innovation was: we could have a sharper saw, he
The fourth thing is to roll what I call the DICEE; DICEE is an acronym. You know,
one of the problems with key note speeches is that two days from now you are
going to be back at your house and, many of you are taking notes, so you will
look at these notes and will say aha, Guy said to create great stuff that jumps
curves, and you are going to say yourself, you know: thank God for CA that
brought me to this conference because until I had gone to that conference and
heard Guys speak, I was going to create crap!, and then Guys said to create
great stuff that jumps curves now I know! Where was me? I was going to
create crap, thank God for that enlightenment
Well, the problem is that I want to provide you with more than this though of
create great stuff, well duh! as opposed to what? I will like to define the
elements of what I think makes a great product or a great service: it is DICEE.
The D stands for Depth; great products are deep. They have lots of
functionality. This is an example: this is a fanning Reef. Believe it or not, this is a
sandal. This sandal, like any other sandal in the world, protects your feet. Duh!
There is also a second function to this sandal: there is a little metal clip near the
mid soul that mid soul clip has a very specialized function: it opens beer
bottles. Every other sandal in the world does only one thing: protects your feet.
This one has twice the functionality, it is deep: it protects your feet and opens you
beer bottles.
Deep. Think of something like Interscope. Very deep product, right? allows you
truly to analyze what is going on with an application. Depth is the first quality.
Now, the people at Reef are not content to just open beer bottles, recently they
introduced the second model of sandal, and this is called the dram. The dram
has a little container at the mid soul that holds three ounces of liquid. Just
enough to keep the TSA happy, but three ounces of liquid. Now, admittedly once
of the consequences of wearing either the fanning or the dram, is you really have
to be careful where you walk, but truly these are deep sandals. So the first quality
if depth.
The C stands for Complete. Complete means that it is a product, but it is not
just the digital download, it is not just the car, it is the Customer Support, it is the
OEM, the on line support, the strings of enhancements that come out, it is the
after sales service of your car; it is all those great things that make Lexus, the
totality of the Lexus experience, so wonderful. Great products are also complete;
they are not defined strictly as the physical thing or the digital download, or the
source code. It is the total picture.
The first E is for Elegance. Great products are elegant, you look at them and
you say Mhm, somebody was thinking, I do not even need a manual, I can figure
this out, like an iPod.
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And the second E is for Emotive. Great products generate strong emotions.
You love a Harley Davidson or you hate a Harley Davidson, very few people are
indifferent to Harley Davidson.
So two days from now I hope you will remember I said not only to create
products that jump curves, but also products that embody: Depth, Intelligence,
Completeness, Elegance, and Emotiveness; that is what defines great
innovation.
The fifth thing is stolen from a song by Bobby McFerrin. Bobby McFerrin song
was dont worry, be happy, I would make the case that great innovation
requires that you dont worry, be crappy. This is a picture of Macintosh 128 K,
the first Mac that we shipped. I can tell you now looking back, this product had
elements of crappiness to it. It was 2.500 dollars; it had 128 K of RAM, we
thought that was an ocean of RAM triple of what was on an Apple II, what
would people do with all that RAM?; it had a 400 K floppy drive, what would
people do with all that storage? But there are elements of crappiness to this
product: for one thing, thanks to my efforts, there was no software; there was
also no hard disk, which is OK, because if you have no software what would
you copy? There is no slots, no color, no fast laser printer, two smallest screens,
lots of crappiness to this, but it still was a revolutionary product; it had jump the
curve from MS-DOS to Macintosh.
I will tell you with high sights: if we have waited for the perfect world, the perfect
world of cheap RAM, fast CPUs, big color monitors, slots, Wireless, Ethernet, all
the good stuff, we would have never shipped. I think the way it works in
technology is: you ship and then you test. You ship and then you test. Version
1.0 of the revolution means never having to say you are sorry. Now, note well: I
am not saying ship crap; I am saying you can ship something that jumps
curves with elements of crappiness to it. If you wait for the perfect world, where
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The sixth thing that I learnt is you should not be afraid of polarizing people. You
should create a product or service that some people love and some people hate.
It is OK. Many try to create this product that is perfect, perfect for all age groups,
all genders, all religions, all everything, and they end up creating mediocrity. If
you try to serve too many masters you will create mediocrity. This is a picture of
a Toyota Zion XP. When you look at this car you can have one of two reactions:
you could say Aha, I am a twenty two year old surfer, this is perfect for my surf
board, for my skateboard, for my snowboard, and my golden retriever; life is
good with this car; I am fifty two years old, four children, I look at this car and I
say you know what?, I do not understand Toyota with all the money that you
have, why did you hire someone from Volvo who got fired to design this car?,
because going back to the ice analogy, this is a refrigerator with wheels on it! If
Toyota had try to design a car that makes me happy, fifty two years old with four
children, and one guy, one gale, one golden retriever, one surfboard, it could not
be done. You have got to pick one. I am not saying you should intentionally piss
people off, I am telling you however that you should not be afraid of pissing some
people off. What you want is some people to love it and some people to hate it.
The worst case is if everybody is indifferent to it. Polarize people. I will give you
another example: how many of you have TiVos in this audience? Are lots of you.
I love TiVo. I am the only people from California who admits that I love to watch
TV. I really. I watch two hours of TV every day. I love TV. And I will tell you some
of my favorite programs: I love Boston legal, I love Boston Legal Danny
Crane is my hero; I love 24, I love The unit. We are seeing a trend here, I
basically love movies that really do not care about do process. Now, I love TiVo
because I travel a lot, and it obviously time shifts my programming for me;
because on any given Tuesday I am out, and I cant watch Boston legal. Now I
love TiVo; probably all the people who would have TiVos love TiVos, but there
are people who hate TiVos, principally: advertisers, and companies who pay for
advertising, because I do not about you, other TiVo owners, but I just watch
commercials one day a year in January; the rest of the time I have not watch a
commercial since January. Do not be afraid of polarizing people.
You know? one of the reasons why I love my TiVo is the thirty second skip
ahead feature, right?, that is the feature that most upsets advertisers, because I
can fly through commercials with four clicks. Dont be afraid of polarizing people.
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The seventh thing is to let a hundred flowers blossom. I stole this from
Chairman Mao. Let a hundred flowers blossom in my context means that at the
start of innovation, at the start of the revolution, you may have whiteness of a
very interesting phenomena, which is, people who are not your intended
customers are using your product. Many companies freak out when this
happens:
My God! all this people are using our products that we did not anticipate as
customers something is wrong!, call up Moon Vim, book the Rich Carlton Half
Moon Bay, we need another off-site to figure out what is going wrong! Why are
all this people buying our products? They are not our intended customers, and
further more: they are doing things that we did not intend also.
My first piece of advice for you if you are ever fortunate enough to have this
happen, is when this happens: take the money. Take the money. The second
thing is to ask people who are buying your product or service: why are you
buying our product or service? This is very different than asking people who are
not buying your product or service: why are you not buying it? I believe that is
futile When you ask those people why are not you buying a Macintosh? In 1984,
they will say: well, if you only have Lotus 123, and if you only have letter quality
printer driver, we would be a lot more interested, and you go back and you fix
those two issues, and you take it back to them, and they will come up with
another five excuses. Let a hundred flowers blossom, you know with Macintosh
we though we had all figured out in the mid 80s, because in the mid 80s what
would a personal computer had to do? spreadsheet, database, word processor.
An if you were a Macintosh user in the mid 80s you would know that we were
zero for three there. The product that saved Apple Computer was Aldus
PageMaker. Aldus PageMaker created a field of flowers called desktop
publishing, and desktop publishing saved Apple Computer. If it was not for Aldus
PageMaker and desktop publishing, we would all be listening to cassette tapes
and Sony walkmans right now. I believe that Aldus PageMaker was a gift from
God to Apple Computer, because it saved Apple. And I believe in God. One of
the reasons why I believe in God is there is no other explanation for Apples
continued survival.
Let a hundred flowers blossom. You may think you know exactly who is going to
use your product. One example from CA is Clarity, right? Clarity was intended
for IT to focus and use IT resources better, but come to find out it was such a
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The eighth thing is to churn, baby, churn. This is stolen from the Black
Panthers. The Black Panthers said burn, baby, burn; they were revolutionaries
of a sort too, but I am telling you that to be a successful innovator, you need to
churn, baby, churn. I am saying: ship, then test. I am saying: ship that thing that
is ten times better. I am not saying that once you ship you stop. Version 1.0 of
the revolution must become version 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5. 2.0. Honestly, I think
this is the hardest lesson for the revolutionary to learn, because part of being a
revolutionary requires that you are in denial. You need to be in denial as an
innovator and a revolutionary, because to a large degree the status quo is going
to try to grind you down. They are going to tell you: it cant be done, it shouldnt
be done, it isnt necessary, customers arent asking for it, we arent asking for it,
just give us better, cheapest, faster, status quo. So you need to ignore those
Bozos. But as soon as you ship, then you need to start listening to customers
again. What is wrong with version 1 of the revolution? How do we turn this
product to make it better for you? The hardest lesson of all for innovators to
learn.
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The ninth thing I think is all the marketing that you need to know, which is the
nitch thyself. It is a very simple chart: there is a vertical axis measuring your
ability to provide a unique product or service; the horizontal axis is the value of
that product or service to the customer. I will kill the suspense, OK? we are going
to end up high and to the right. Because everybody ends up high and to the right.
That is the corner you are supposed to end up in. I swear, at Garage, if an
entrepreneur ever came in and said they were low and to the left, we would fund
them right there; it would be so interesting to hear a company that finally said: we
are low and to the left!
We are going to end up high and to the right. Let me go through the other
corners first.
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The first corner is where you create something of great value to the customer,
but many other companies do it. In that corner you have to compete on price; you
have to compete on price. Many people make the same kind of computer; you
have to compete on price. You can obviously still make money there, but it is
always about price.
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The second corner is where you create something of no value to the customer,
but only you do this; in that corner you are just playing stupid.
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This is one example: this is Fandango. As I told you, I have four children; at any
given moment one of them has a guest at our house that sleep over. As you can
imagine for a person that loves TV, we love movies; we go to all the first round
movies. Getting five kids into a mini van is an exercise that takes at least fifteen
minutes. So trust me when I tell you: you want to know before you go that you
have a ticket. Further more, you would like to skip the ticket buying line.
Fandango enables you to buy your movie ticket at home, so you know you have
a ticket, and enables you to skip the movie ticket buying line, and go straight into
the theater. For someone like me, Fandango is high and to the right. Very
valuable service, and the only way you can do it in my hometown is Fandango;
high and to the right.
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The second example: this is a Breitling Emergency watch. This watch at the five
oclock position, do you see that big knob? If you pull that big knob out by
unscrewing it, it puts out an antenna, that antenna puts out a signal on the
emergency broadcast system. That signal is caught by airplanes flying around.
This means that if you are in trouble, if you are lost, if you are hurt, you are in the
wilderness, if you are a snowboarder, a skier, a camper, hiker, anything like that,
and you are lost, and you are really up to creep, you pull that out and broadcast
out an emergency signal. You do not do this because you took the wrong exit on
the freeway, OK? this is a serious, serious thing. This is the only watch that has
something like this, and this watch literally could save your life if you are one of
those kinds of people.
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Another example: this is a Smart car. This Smart car is coming to the United
States next year. There are thousands of different models of cars. Every one of
them can park parallel to the curve. The Smart car is the only one that could park
perpendicular to the curve. If you really have tight parking, you buy a Smart car,
because you can park perpendicular to the curve.
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And this is my last example: this is a LG Kimchi refrigerator, for those of you who
really love Kimchi. A couple of things about Kimchi: it stinks, and it needs to
ferment, the more it ferments the better it is. Most refrigerators are not very well
suited for Kimchi; they are too cold, and if you put Kimchi in them, everything
else stinks. So what you need to do is you need to buy the LG Kimchi
refrigerator, which is optimized for the fermentation and storage of Kimchi. LG
clearly has understood this lesson, because they also make a special microwave
oven for the mid-east. All of us have microwave ovens with a dedicated button to
pop-corn, what the LG microwave oven for the mid-east does it is that is has a
dedicated button to warming Shish ka bubs. So my point here is that the holly
grail of marketing, and innovators always have to be thinking about marketing, is
to create an innovation that is high and to the right, that is unique and of great
value to the customer. I will explain this also in political terms: what I am saying
essentially is that your product, your service, needs to be like our president,
George W. Bush, high and to the right. High and to the right.
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The tenth thing, because innovators always have to pitch, they have to pitch for
money, they have to pitch for approval, pitch for sales, pitch for partnerships,
pitch for recruiting; to be an innovator means you are pitching. Now, I have
something called Menieres decease. Menieres decease has three symptoms:
tinnitus, which is a constant ringing in one ear; hearing loss on this ear; and a
third ramification of Menieres decease is that you sporadically have attacks of
dizziness There are many things, and I am serious, about what causes
Menieres: excessive caffeine, excessive salt, excessive stress, allergies,
acoustic neuroma, lots of theories; I have another theory about what causes
Menieres: I am a venture capitalist; as a venture capitalist what do I do day in
and day out? I listen to entrepreneurs pitch me. Every one of them comes in for a
one hour meeting with 60 slides, because they are such eloquent people that
they figure they can rip through one slide per minute. Every one of these
PowerPoint presentations has a bunch of slides that say we only need one
percent of the market. There are 300 million Americans, one in four owns a dog,
that is 75 million dogs; each dog eats two cans of dog food per day, that is 150
million cans of dog food per day; how hard could it be to get one percent of 150
million cans of dog food per day? How hard could that be? we have a proven
management team who used to work at, you know, Pet-Mart, we have a proven
technology, we have a proven business model, life is good. I will tell you, I have
heard some real doozies as a venture capitalist. I will tell you three of them. The
first, one company wanted to raise money in order to buy Israel, to turn it into an
amusement park. A second company wanted money to build a geodesic Dome
over Los Angeles, to curve air pollution; it is not clear if they wanted to keep the
air in or out, but they wanted to build a geodesic Dome. The third one, and the
one that is probably the most funny, is because it has an element of sort of
veracity and truth to it; you know building a geodesic Dome over L.A. is like are
you crazy? buying Israel, are you crazy? but this one let me explain:
they come in and they said: we have this patent pending, curve jumping,
paradigm shifting way to prevent drowning, drowning is a growth business;
according to Forbes, by the year 2010 drowning will be a ten billion dollar
industry. The reason why drowning is a growth industry is because as we are
having disposable income, Bubba and Junior are buying more boats, when more
dumb people buy more boats, more people get down. This is a great business to
be in! The fundamental pain that we are trying to solve is that you cannot see the
person who is drowning in the water. Remember the guardian? The Kevin
Costner movie where he is a coast guard, rescue diver, or whatever? So, you
know, picture this: it is night, it is a darken stormy night, rain, wind, everything,
high waves, everything, Kevin Costner is in the coast guard helicopter, he is
looking down into the ocean and he is trying to save Bubba from drowning. The
problem that the coast guard has is: it is very hard to spot Bubba in the middle of
the night in the storm. So this company has already met with the coast guard,
and the coast guard is very interested in forming a partnership. Because this
company is going to help the coast guard, Kevin Costner, find Bubba, who is
drowning. This is going to be cool, this is going to be some GPS chip, this is
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The 10 in the 10/20/30 rule is the optimum number of slides in any pitch, for
anything: money, sales, partnership, recruitment, it is 10 slides. That is all that
human mind can handle.
The optimum amount of time you should take to present those 10 slides is 20
minutes. Sure, you may have a 60 minute meeting, but not everybody is using a
Macintosh, you know it is going to take you 40 minutes to hook it up to the
projector and make it work. Lets say it is working, or you are using a Macintosh,
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And then the 30 part of the 10/20/30 rule is that the optimal font size for a pitch
is 30 points. 30 points does two things for you: one is that forces you to put just
the essence of the text; you have to really think through what exactly do I want
to say because I do not have a lot of space; the second thing it does is that
makes that so the audience will pay attention to you and not the slide; because if
you use an 8 point font or a 10 point font, it is because you want to put a lot of
text; the reason why you put a lot of text is because you need to read the slide.
What happens when you read the slide? Is that the audience very quickly figures
our this bozo is reading his slides; I do not need him; he is just reading it; I can
read the slides slightingly faster than he can speak the slides. The problem with
that is that you loose your audience. Most of the time when you are pitching, you
are pitching to people who look like that. As a rule of thumb, if you find this too
dogmatic, figure out who the oldest person is in your audience, divide his or her
age by 2; that is the optimal font size. 60 divided by 2 is 30. Now, maybe you
work for a younger company, maybe you do, so if you are pitching to 16 year
olds, God bless you, use the 8 point font. Generally speaking 30 point font is the
way to go. 10 slides, give a bull in 20 minutes using a 30 point font.
And now the eleventh point, as a bonus for my friends at CA World is do not let
the bozos grind you down. Because the bozos will try to grind you down. There
are two kind of bozos in the world: disgusting, body odor, danger pocket
protector, rusty car bozo, a loser of a bozo; that bozo says cant be done,
shouldnt be done, isnt necessary easy to ignore that bozo; you say to
yourself his person is a loser, why should I let a loser pertain what I try to do?.
That is not the dangeroust bozo; the dangeroust bozo is svelte, the dangeroust
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There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home, Ken
Olsen founder of DEC said this in 1977. Ken Olsen was a stud. He was a great
entrepreneur, a great innovator. He was very successful revolutionizing the
mainframe business and making it the minicomputer business, but he could not
embrace the personal computer curve, because he was too successful already
on the minicomputer curve. I dare say if Steve, or Woz, saw Ken Olsen and told
him: you know Ken, you believe in these terminals connected to a central brain,
we believe in little edibility brains; these edibility brains are small, cheap, easy to
use. They are so small, so cheap, so easy to use, that you could have one in
your house Mr. Olsen. And Mr. Olsen would say there is no reason why anyone
would want a computer in their house; you want to balance your check book?
drive back to the office, it is quick and running on a DEC minicomputer, what is
the problem?
This is my last quote: Its too far to drive, and I dont see how it can be a
business. This is the quote that I authored, when I was asked would I like to
interview for the CEO position of a new startup funded by Sequoia Capital, I told
them this answer. My wife and I were living in San Francisco; this company was
down at Stanford, it is an hour each way, commuting. My wife and I had one child
at that point, she was pregnant, so she was, using your terminology, she was in
beta with our second child. However, she shipped on time, and with no bugs. So
I told Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital: you know what?, this company is too
far away, I do not want to drive that far every day, and I looked at their website
I do not see how this could be a business. So the question is: what company is
this? the answer is: Yahoo! So I was offered the opportunity to interview for the
CEO position of Yahoo! and turned it down because it was too far to drive, and I
didnt see how this could be a business. You think this bothers me today?
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And this is my final slide, three pieces of information: I have a blog where I cover
topics like this: blog.guykawasaki.com; for copies of this presentation just send
an email to gina@garage.com; she will be happy to send it to you; and the third
thing is I love stock photography, you a photo in everyone of my slides, these
photos came from iStockPhoto. Nice Calgary a product company. Calgary is in a
big depression because they lost with the red wings last night, so give
iStockPhoto a shot. The way I use iStockPhoto is, lets say you wanted to
illustrate a thing like stupid people who create products that are no value to the
customer but only they do it, so you go to iStockPhoto, you type in the word
stupid, you will find 800 stupid looking people. You buy the photo, hi-res, 3
bucks, unlimited royalty free. Lets say you want to illustrate the concept of letting
a hundred flowers blossom, go to iStockPhoto, type in flowers, you will find 5
thousand flowers, 3 bucks, hi resolution, unlimited use. I love iStockPhoto, I am
going to evangelist for iStockPhoto.
So let me summarize: I think the art of innovation starts with the desire to make
meaning, to make the world a better place. Then you need to create a mantra;
this mantra is two or three words to explain why you exist: to make IT part of the
process of innovation, to simplify IT, to make IT better, whatever it is. How do you
make the mantra? And be sure this thing that you are doing is jumping curves. It
is not just doing something 10 to 15 percent better, it is doing something 10 times
better. It is going from ice harvester, to ice factory, to refrigerator, to biotech. It is
jumping curves. Dont worry, be crappy; that first permutation, if it is 10 times
better, if it is a different curve, doesnt have to be perfect. But you do have to
churn, baby, churn; taking 1.0, making 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.5, 2.0; you need to do that.
Dont be afraid of polarizing people. I am not saying you should piss people off
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