Guy Kawasaki

Guy Takeo Kawasaki was born on August 30, 1954, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His early life in the Kalihi Valley saw his father, Duke Takeshi Kawasaki, work as a fireman, real estate broker, state senator, and government official, while his mother, Aiko Kawasaki, was a homemaker. Kawasaki graduated from Iolani School in 1972 before attending Stanford University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology in 1976. He briefly attended law school at UC Davis before pursuing an MBA at UCLA Anderson School of Management, graduating in 1977. During his MBA studies, he also worked at Nova Stylings, a jewelry company, where he gained valuable sales experience.

Kawasaki began his career at Apple in 1983, joining as the chief Apple evangelist through a Stanford roommate. He served in this role for four years, during which he popularized the term “evangelist” in marketing the Macintosh computer and established concepts of evangelism marketing and technology evangelism. After leaving Apple in 1987, he led ACIUS, the U.S. subsidiary responsible for the Apple database software 4th Dimension. In 1989, Kawasaki transitioned to focus on writing and speaking, contributing columns to Forbes and MacUser magazines in the early 1990s. He also founded Fog City Software, which developed Emailer, an email client later sold to Claris, and released “Guy’s Utilities for Macintosh” (GUM), which was later remarketed as “The Norton Essentials for PowerBook” by Symantec.

He returned to Apple as an Apple Fellow in 1995. In 1998, he co-founded Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm that invested in companies such as Pandora Radio and The Motley Fool. Kawasaki also founded Truemors in 2007, a rumor mill platform that was acquired by NowPublic, and Alltop, an online magazine rack. In March 2013, he became an advisor to Motorola’s business unit at Google, focusing on developing a Google+ mobile device community. He joined Canva as its chief evangelist in April 2014, a position he held while also serving on the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees from March 2015 to December 2016. Kawasaki’s bibliography includes fifteen books, such as “The Macintosh Way” (1990), “The Art of the Start” (2004), and “Wise Guy: Lessons from a Life” (2019), and he launched the “Remarkable People” podcast in December 2019.