Guy Kawasaki: Don't Pitch What You Can't Believe In
Guy Kawasaki: Apple's original software evangelist, Chief Evangelist at Canva, host of the Remarkable People podcast, and bestselling author of Think Remarkable, Wise Guy, and his upcoming Everybody Has Something to Hide , joins Jessica Neal on Truth Works for a conversation that goes everywhere you didn't expect.
Guy didn't have a plan. He fainted on his first day of a pre-med hospital tour, dropped out of law school after two weeks, and ended up counting and shipping diamonds in the jewelry business after his MBA. That jewelry job taught him how to sell, and selling taught him how to evangelize. Everything else followed from there.
At Apple in the 1980s, Guy's job was simple: convince developers to build for Macintosh. That was the birth of tech evangelism as we know it. Today, as Chief Evangelist at Canva, he's still doing the same thing — spreading the good news of tools that make people better communicators and creators.
In this episode, Guy and Jessica go deep on what separates remarkable people from everyone else, why most founders are building the wrong way, what AI is actually going to do to humanity, and why the single most powerful thing you can do in a pitch is show a product that works.
Topics covered:
- What evangelism actually means — and why you simply cannot pitch something that isn't great
- His non-linear path: pre-med dropout → law school quitter → jewelry salesman → Apple → Canva
- The three traits every remarkable person shares: Growth, Grit & Grace — and why the third one matters most
- The "Guy's Golden Touch" rule and why it applies to everything you build or sell
- Why founders who build products they personally want to use almost always outperform those who build from market research
- Why he openly uses AI in his writing process — and why every author should
- AI as the biggest shift since the industrial revolution — and his theory on where it actually came from
- Privacy in the age of AI: Signal, encryption, and his new book Everybody Has Something to Hide
- Women in leadership — the numbers, the reasons, and why Guy thinks women should run everything
- The F-16 pitch framework: how to get off the deck in 38 seconds or drown
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