 Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here in Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum for Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm here with Laura Cooney, the analyst for the Wikibon team and our next guest is, I'm proud to have Guy Kawasaki here on theCUBE. Guy goes without mentioning the legend in the industry. Currently, the chief evangelist for Canva, author of Art of the Start, really a real pioneer in entrepreneurship, tech entrepreneurship, tech evangelism. Guy, great to see you. Thanks for joining us today. Among other things, you've done a lot of amazing things. Thanks for joining us. What better place to be? So the tech culture now is so mainstream, you're seeing Facebook CEO drawing more audience than a Supreme Court Justice. More people watched the Senate hearings yesterday. He probably has more impact than a Supreme Court Justice. And he's running the world. The tech culture has really grown to be a mainstream and the early days of the computer industry when it was really the beginning of the revolution, the PC revolution, Macintosh and the PC, you were there, so much has happened. I mean, as you look back, I mean, you looked out at the young guns coming up. What's your view? What's your reaction to all this? You have these pitch me moments. What's your take on all this? Well, I suppose many people would say, well, we never thought it would get to this point and it's turned destructive and negative and all that. But, I mean, it's a short snapshot of time. Snapshot of time. And first of all, can we put the genie back in the bottle? No, so does it really matter? But all things considered, the democratization of computing. Everybody has a computer, whether it's a phone or a computer. The democratization of the transfer of information. Obviously some information may be fake. It may not be what you like. But would we go back to a time where, we send things by fax machine? Not at all. All things considered, it's a great time to be alive. Democratization goes through these ways. Democratization with the PC. Democratization with the internet. Documentization with Web 2.0 and social media. The beginning of social media. About 15 years ago, maybe 10, whatever, whatever you went on market. And now the democratization with data and AI is interesting. So you're having these waves of democratization. It's going to take some time to sort out. I mean, as you look at the tech trends, how do you make sense of it? What do you get excited about? What's your, how do you surf that wave? I mean, if you're going to surf the wave of the big wave coming, which some say is blockchain and cryptocurrency and decentralization. What's the wave that you're on? That's the question. To use a surfing analogy, if we're going to go down that rat hole. You know, a good experienced surfer knows where to sit. Can look out and say, oh, take the fourth wave, right? And it'll sit in the right place, turn around at the right time, paddle at the right time, you know, all that. And then there's people like me. We sit in the same place and every 15 minutes, the right wave comes along and catches us. Those are the two theories. So I think it's, if only predicting tech trends were as easy as predicting surfing. Timing's everything. Timing is everything. Luck is a lot to do with it. And, you know, we only learn about the apples and the Googles and the Cisco's and the Facebook's and the Pinterest and the Instagram's. And so you, I think you think, well, there are these really smart people and they can predict the trend and cause the trend. I think it's more the game of big numbers where if you have enough surfers in the water, somebody's going to catch a wave and look good. And then you can say, yeah, I knew he was the best surfer. But really, right place, right time. And you got to know what a wave looks like, too. You got to be like, okay, am I in a tide pool or am I on a boogie board? Well, and to your point, you've got to be in the water. You can't be standing on the shore saying, I'm going to catch a wave. You have to be in the water. And if you're in the water, you know, nine times out of 10, you're going to get crushed. If you're not out in front of that next wave, you're driftwood. And also surfing and people will try to jump and take your wave. This sounds like the tech industry. Oh yeah, exactly, right, right. What waves do you see coming in your mind? You've seen a lot of waves in your day. I mean, right now, what waves are exciting you right now? If you look at the waves. Well, what's out there? What I learned about that is you can only declare your intelligence and victory after the fact. All right, so I can tell you the internet of things is big. I can tell you that social media is big. I can tell you that computing is big. Problem is, I can tell you that because I know it's big now. Can I tell you what's in the future? No. And if I could, first of all, I wouldn't tell you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think in a rare moment of humility, it's the law of big numbers. And you know, infinite monkeys typing at keyboards. Somebody's going to come up with Beethoven. I mean. Yeah, I want to ask you a question because I get this question a lot. Like, hey, John, you've been around a while. You know, I want to catch that next big wave. I want to be in the next Google. I want to make, I want to be rich on stock options. And so I say, look, I go, a lot of times the best companies where you take the most advantage of is when no one else wants to work there or no one yet knows it. So like you really can't say, oh, I'm going to get rich on that company because by that time it's either too late and people are chasing the wrong thing. So what's your, I mean, how do you give that same advice to someone? Well, I mean, listen, you're talking to a guy who quit Apple twice and turned down Steve once. So how smart could I be? But, you know, now we can say, well, Apple's the most valuable company in the world. You know, you should have stayed there. Well, thank you very much. It's good. Thanks for telling me what I should have done, yeah. Right. I think it's really, I mean, I could all, I don't want to be too dramatic, but I could almost build a case that you should invest in or work for the most dumb ass idea you heard. Because, I mean, at any given point, like if somebody should- Airbnb, we're going to rent out mattresses and give out cereal, like, hello. Very good example, Airbnb. So let's face it, if somebody told you Airbnb before there was Airbnb, you would say, so you're telling me that I'm going to rent a room from somebody I met on the internet and I'm going to sleep in that person's house, hoping he's not a murderer or pedophile. On the flip side, you're saying, I'm going to rent out my room to someone who I hope is not a pedophile or an ax murderer. Or eBay, I'm going to buy a used printer from 3,000 miles away and I'm going to assume it works. Or I'm going to sell my good printer to someone 3,000 miles away and assume that he's not going to say he never got it or that it didn't work and he wants a refund. So if you go down the line of all these ideas, you'd have to say at the time, nobody, like even take an extreme Zappos. Like if you told me that women would buy shoes without trying them on, seeing them, smelling them and touching them, I would tell you you're crazy. Like you'd buy a book that way. You'd buy a CD that way. You'd buy a DVD app. Would you buy shoes? Would you buy shoes without trying them on? I totally would. Well, now you can say that. Now to Zappos's credit, some of the ways it made that work is it offered shipping back for free, right? So there was really no risk. But I would have been a skeptic about Zappos. It was one of those things for me, Zappos, where they shipped in one day. So I could get them immediately, try them on. And if they didn't work, I could ship them back and get a different size. It was no big deal. It was very low overhead. So that's one of the reasons that that worked. But I think when you mention all of these great things like eBay and Airbnb, it's really part of the sharing economy with people really wanting to share the goodness of their goods with other people that need them. It's just really connecting those folks. There are places in Oakland and San Francisco where there's certain streets where you line up and you just get in the next car with a stranger and you go to San Francisco with them. And it's not computerized or anything. It's just, you know, trust. I did that once and it was frightening, you know? You never know who the driver's going to be or how they're going to drive. But you did it. I did it. And people do it every day. I know. I'm amazed. I did it once, but yeah. We're here at Warsaw. Guys, so let's ask you a question. What's the craziest idea that you've seen that worked and the craziest idea that didn't work? Well, probably, well, let's start with the easy one, okay? So I had a company called garage.com and we were venture capital investment banks. We got pitched all the time. So one day a guy comes in and says, I'm going to build a dirigible hotel over San Francisco. So you stay in the dirigible. Another person said, we're going to build a geodesic dome over Los Angeles. And I can't remember if it was to keep the air pollution in or out. But I'll just tell you one really great one, okay? So these people were from Seagate, so they had CRED, right? They worked for Seagate. And they say we have this patent pending curve jumping, patent pending, you know, whatever technology so that if you drop your laptop with your hard disk, the head won't crash into the hard disk and ruin the hard disk. And at the time, this is, I don't know, 15 years ago, that was a great idea, right? It wasn't solid state, it was like heads crashing into hard disks. Moving parts. Okay, Seagate, so we said, this is a great idea. Every hard disk in every laptop should be likely. So we get in the car, we go to their office and the receptionist says, oh, they're running late because they're on the phone with IBM. IBM is really interested in using this technology for the IBM PC laptop. Keep us waiting, keep us waiting. They get out, I mean, they come, yeah, IBM is really, they're so excited, they're ready to move and I'm like, we're really excited. And finally I say, so just, you know, give me the gist. What is your technology? Is it like some special chip that detects gravitational fall is too fast so it's got to be, you know, hitting the ground so it parks the head because it recognizes motion or whatever. And I swear to God, I swear to God. He brings out this piece of foam and he says, this is military spec foam. So we take your hard disk, we put this foam thing around it and we put it in the laptop. And I swear to God, I was having this out of body experience. Like you're telling me. I drove all the way here. If your proprietary technology is putting foam around the hard disk and IBM is excited by this hard, this foam. So welcome to my life. So what are you up to now? Talk about your advantage. I know you're a board ambassador of Mercedes. You got a bunch of things going on. You've been very prolific in social media. You were on the suggested user list from day one on Twitter. No, I wasn't. Oh, no, no, you weren't. That's right. But you have a zillion followers. That's why I have never forgiven Twitter for that. I thought they put you on. No, you weren't. No, no. Okay, I stand corrected. No, you had to be an actress. Yeah, well, some tech people got on there, I know. But I was not on, so I'm on. So there you go. Measly like a couple of 20,000 or so. But you got a million and a half followers, very active. You've really been prolific in a good way. Engaging with communities. What have you learned and how do you view this next generation of social, because you're seeing, like the Facebooks, and you're seeing LinkedIn, they're siloed platforms, and is there hope, is there, what's your take on it? Is it going to grow? Is it going to be? I've come to the point where I always believe things are never as good or as bad as they seem. So I don't think it's as bad as people say. And these social media sites are selling my data. But they're going to go broke selling my data. You know, I don't know how you can look at my data. First of all, I never look at ads. So go ahead, sell my data. I'm not going to look at the ad anyway. It doesn't matter. But I think that the ability to spread ideas, arguably good or bad, but the ability to spread ideas with social media, all things considered, is better. It's going to be abused and all that, but my father was a state senator in Honolulu. And we were into banner ads, where are you before anybody else? Banner was literally a piece of cloth with his name on it that you staple to the side of building saying vote for Duke Kawasaki. That was the nature of banner advertising back then. Do I think that social media targeting all that for sales is a good thing? Yes, I do. If you're a real estate broker and you want to reach people who live in Silicon Valley, age 50 to 70, female or male or whatever, in such and such an income bracket, how else can you do it with Facebook? And that's why Facebook is so successful. I mean, metadata is all about the clan and the culture. And I think putting ideas out there is a way to send your ideas into the ether, and make it happen. So that's key. Now, we're here to develop our conference. So one of the things that's also a big part of this community is the notion of how open source has become a tier one citizen and it's really running the world, which is also grounded in community as well. So you have this ethos of community, ethos of software open. I believe in open source. I believe that the more intelligent people pounding on your stuff, the better it is. I'm an author and what I do is speaking in the sense of open source. So right now I'm about 80% done with my book. I put out a post on social media saying anybody who wants to review my book, test my book, send me your information. So I do this, I cut it off at about 280 people. I send them the word document, the entire word document of my book. Does that mean they could take it and publish it in China tomorrow? Yes. But from that, I get hundreds and hundreds of comments that make my work. With the crowds at self editing. Yeah. And they point out stuff that I never would have noticed because I'm too close to it at this point. So is there a downside? Yes. Is there piracy? Yes. Arguably with those pirates have bought the book anyway? No. Yeah, I mean, our conference is all free and we're really big in China because they actually take it and translate it in the native language. With all the jargon, you can't hire a firm to do that. Exactly. Guy, great to catch up with you. Thanks for coming on. What are you working on now? You mentioned the book. What's the book about? The book is called Wise Guy and it's a compilation of the stories that have influenced my life. So it's not an autobiography. It is not a memoir. It is, have you ever heard the book Chicken Soup for the Soul? Yeah. You know, it's familiar with like inspirational stories. This is miso soup for the soul. So I'm working on that TV evangelist of Kano which is just going gangbusters. Brand ambassador from Mercedes-Benz. I'm on the board of directors of a company called Cheese with a Z. It's an anti-social photo sharing and video sharing app. And that's it. You've been an inspiration to many. Great job over the years. Been a big fan of your work. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Guy Kawasaki here inside theCUBE. We're at DevNet. Great, Cisco's cloud developer conference. Different from their core DevNet Cisco networking developer. This is all about DevOps, open source and this theCUBE bringing you all the action here in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back with more after this short break.