Full event: In conversation with Guy Kawasaki, hosted by UNSW Founders Program

it's my pleasure to welcome you here for a really special evening in conversation with Guy Kawasaki and this is basically this is our way of saying thanks to you for giving giving back to you essentially for giving us so much and helping us to make the UNSW founders program in its first year so incredibly successful but I do want to begin by acknowledging the gadigal people of the eora nation the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet tonight and pay my respects to their elders past and present and it's fitting that we're here this evening talking about ecosystems because after a year of the founders program as I said we could not have run it so successfully without the skill the expertise the dedication frankly the incredible goodwill that you guys have shown us and there's so many of you in the audience and contributed so much to our programs that we just want to say thank you for that and as we take our place in the ecosystem it's really quite heartening to know that we're all working for the the same end and that is to make Sydney the leading destination for startups around the world it's really a natural home for entrepreneurs as we all know and we're all participating so much in that ecosystem and it's remarkable how much we've already achieved this past year or two Australia has moved up incredibly fast in terms of the venture capital available for start-up funds for the startup ecosystem to the extent that in the last year we have risen for what was originally around 18th and the OECD nations in terms of venture capital available per GDP to third in the world tied with Canada it's an amazing amount of money through funds such as the EIR tree 200 million dollar fund the second Blackbird fund main-sequence ventures and which thought with the launch of IP Group first of all that total was 1.3 billion in new funding in 2017 and then with the launch of IP group this year another over 1 billion dollars theoretically in funding to fund early-stage research and startups in Australia so no longer can we say the funding isn't there we are one of the best destinations for Astra startups around the world socata innovations backed by UTS by university of sydney by Anu and by us at UNSW was named the best incubator in the entire world it's an outstanding achievement the studio in the startup space was one of the best media accelerators I've ever come across and launching another area of expertise in Australia that none of us probably knew was so deep they've launched this year and they've launched their first pitch to investors event we've placed many interns and their companies it's been really exciting hivemind has created a space for the innovators and the sorry the incubators and the accelerators to get together and to share best practice and to collaborate more effectively NAB Ventures has raised another 50 million to fund FinTech startups main-sequence has launched their venture on campus program we are one of the fruit we were the first University to adopt at UTS has quickly followed and what can we say about the incredible events that have been hosted this year over a thousand people on Cockatoo Island for Blackbird sunrise event Tech 23 was just outstanding this year and last week Stark Khan with 4,000 people it's just amazing for our part at UNSW it's been a year since we launched the UNSW founders program with the first cohort of the 10x accelerator and in that time our team has supported 240 startup teams out of UNSW it's just amazing we want those venture funds to have a great pipeline we've introduced almost 10,000 staff student alumni to entrepreneurship through the NCIC Foundation's program through all sorts of ways hackathons challenges design sprints product thinking design thinking and so on we've increased the number of young women participating in entrepreneurship with with initiatives such as our new wave program so that now 38 percent of those 240 startups have female co-founders it's just been outstanding and our startups themselves have been welcomed embraced and incredibly supported by this ecosystem uni seed has invested their first student startup in one of our startups two of our sort of ups have graduated and gone straight into Y Combinator in Silicon Valley till it her out of the last founder 10x has graduated into plug-and-play in Europe one of the European accelerators there and has been nominated for the Australian Young Entrepreneur of the Year award six finalists and the three winners of texted knees student startup competition all over from UNSW founders Moto Rica another 10x company has won the Hitachi Social Innovation Award this past week at Stark Khan get to sleep easy another UNSW founders startup won Best Sydney startup award and share with Oscar another startup of ours won the best mobile app and we're very proud to have launched Australia's first university based university based funding to invest in our students startups to make all of these programs sustainable indefinitely my team has expanded we've been able to attract such outstanding leaders as Jennifer zanuck who's now running our ecosystems and partnerships and Luke Deakin who ran B oz trade landing pads globally is now running our founders programs none of this could have happened without your support you are as much a part of our success as as we are and tonight is about saying thank you and to say we hope that this will be first of many many years of collaborating together I want to say a special thanks to our deputy vice-chancellor of Enterprise Professor Brian Boyle usually he's by our side for every major event like this but today unfortunately he couldn't be with us and I just wanted to say he's been the best kind of boss he's let us run as fast as we can and supported myself and my whole team with outstanding support the whole way through of our growth and here now to reflect on his own experience at the pointy end of the world's most successful and the most enduring startups the ecosystem of all which is Silicon Valley is Guy Kawasaki and he's in conversation with our own feet out feet out is my third senior manager she's in charge of MCI C foundations and the whole network of make faces again the best name the best prototyping student makerspace network in all of Australia and actually one of the best in the world we found out by joining the MIT Consortium she spent her career working locally and internationally designing and producing incredibly immersive experiences for students and staff of all parts of the university to experience entrepreneurship through hackathons through all sorts of programs creativity and innovation and we're delighted to have her here today she has a very special relationship with God it's lasted for several years now they're great friends and he's been quite a mentor to her and she's generously offered up guide to us to say thank you to today guys bio is this long and I told fie I couldn't read the whole thing so apologies guy but I'm just gonna mention a few things you may or may not know he is the chief evangelist of canva one of us jurors most outstanding startups as we all know he's a brand ambassador for mercedes-benz and I know one person in the audience knows that because her father works for Mercedes Finn's just learned he's a he's an executive fell of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley which is an outstanding school he was the chief evangelist of course as you all know a toffee and apple and he's a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation he's the author of several books one of them the art of the start 2.0 which he's going to talk about the art of social media and chant ment and nine other books as well he's been a leading voice as we all know in entrepreneurship and evangelism for years beginning with Apple in 1983 and he has an incredibly unique perspective and insight in what it takes to start a company so we're absolutely delighted to have you here please join us in welcoming be in conversation with Guy Kawasaki and thank you for being here guys thank you so the art of this start has had a huge impact on my career and my personal growth so it's a real honor to host this in conversation with you tonight so the questions tonight have been shaped from input from the audience so I think everyone who has submitted me a question but you'll have a chance the end to ask some questions but to kick off this evening I'd like the audience to get to know you a little bit better by circling back to your diamond today's yeah so from diamonds to Apple how did you go from a jewelry salesman to the Apple evangelist first of all thank you very much for hospitality I have been to Sydney several times and I truly do love Sydney it's uh it's like San Francisco without the hills and with a better president of the country but anyway so I I went to Stanford and I graduated with a degree in psychology and after that basically to make my father and mother happy I went to law school and I hated law school so I left law school after two weeks which shows you that quitting is not a slippery slope and so I go in into the MBA program at UCLA and the MBA program was a four day a week program so I had Friday's free so I had Friday's free and I wasn't exactly you know swimming in cash so I took a part-time job at a jewelry manufacturer literally counting diamonds and after my degree was over when all my friends went to Accenture and Wells Fargo and McKinsey and all those kinds of things I went to an unheard-of small jewelry manufacturer in downtown LA where I was you know in sales and marketing and fast forward a few years and my friend a classmate at Stanford had taken a job he left HP and he went to Apple the Macintosh division and he called me to see if I wanted to interview at Apple and I went and I didn't get the first job but I went again and I got the second job basically you could say that I owe my transition Jewellery to computers to nepotism because it was purely my classmates roommates hiring of me the maid I mean on paper I had never taken a computer class I had never worked really in the computer business it was pure and simple nepotism and the wisdom there is that you know it's not how you get the job it's what you do once you get the job believe me because I had no qualifications for that Chow perfect well thank you so much for you know that's a great lesson to us in the power of your network so you have also been one of the only people to work for see Steve Jobs twice and survived I've heard you describe it as one of the best experiences in your life yeah so a lot of us here tonight you know we've followed the rise of Apple we've seen the movies documentaries and we've read probably lots of articles yeah can you share with us you know your inside perspective on what it was really like working at Apple so everything you've heard read seen it's all true it's all true but it from from the outside looking in I think you might get too much of a negative perspective so the acid test would be you know to ask any of us who worked in the Macintosh division would you do it all over again and the answer is absolutely yes now he was a very difficult person to work for very demanding I would I wouldn't say he was kind of a moral not a moral a mall he just had a different operating system and you know he would he would drive in the carpool lane by himself he would park in the handicapped spaces you know he would it would not be unusual for him to just point out somebody and say you know who hired him I want to know who hired him and why he is still working for Apple and he would do it in a group like this and so one lesson that I learned was a fear is a very good HR technique because I lived in deathly fear that someday he would point me out and say you know who hired guy and why is he still there so you know contrary to the theory of HR that you're supposed to meet with the person and develop mutually beneficial goals focusing on the positive you know the kumbaya BS you learn about HR he ruled by fear and it worked I'm telling you it worked it worked very well now to truly understand him though I would say he drove us to the cab the best work of our lives and that's why we put up with it I mean you know obviously there was compensation all that kind of stuff but one things about working for Steve Jobs is you knew that you work for someone who was smart enough to appreciate great work and that's not true at a lot of companies so that was one thing and I love two-by-two matrices so I will give it to you as a 2 by 2 matrix so if you imagine a 2 by 2 matrix where the vertical axis is you know sort of competent and incompetent and the horizontal axis is not so in a perfect world you'd be in the box where it's not an but competent that's the best case the second best case is competent really the most common location of people is incompetent so you know just wrap your mind around that you want to be in the competent not corner but if you have to be in a corner where you're an at least you should be competent is what I'm trying to say now you could get it the whole philosophical argument about what comes first I mean because you're an it enabled you to achieve or because you achieved you became an I mean it's like which came first I have not yet solved an existential question but you know if you I have never even met him but if you look at the reports of how Elon Musk operates I mean that's not a guy that you know you'd want him to marry your daughter so but I mean look at he's the closest thing we have to Steve Jobs today I'm by far I mean there's nobody else right well thank you for that inside and it's a really great segue into my next question so for you what was the most important lesson that you learnt from Steve Jobs keep your head down probably that customers cannot really explain what they want in terms of innovation that if we had gone through the Apple 2 owners they would have said better faster cheaper Apple 2 none of them would have said give us a computer that's incompatible with Apple 2 different chip different operating system none of our Apple 2 software will work none of our peripherals are work nothing will work it just you know it's completely blank sheet make us buy everything all over again nobody said do that and but that's what we did and honestly if we had not done that if we had just made us better faster cheaper Apple to Apple would have died because you know the 65 co2 I hope you know was at its limit as a chip I mean they're like a lot of factors so you have to do that and you know that's an important lesson so you can go to your existing customer and ask them how do we improve what we have but you can't go to an existing customer say well how would you revolutionize our products because all they can say is better faster cheaper okay great so from the early days of Apple how did you know you leverage the ecosystem support you know what pillars you know did really Apple use in in Silicon Valley well no I think apples continued success first of all if you don't believe in God it's time to rethink your your belief in God because apples continued success is proof there is a god I would say Apple what what kept Apple alive at times when I couldn't do some stuff and shouldn't do some stuff and didn't want to do some stuff where the Apple user groups so these are people who are essentially fans of Apple who are willing to provide support and information and you know warmth for customers when Apple couldn't shouldn't didn't provide support so they sustained Apple and there are companies who have those kinds of evangelists user groups you know believers so that was one and then the third-party developer community that created software and hardware that Apple couldn't shouldn't didn't create so the the third-party developer community rounded out the Apple product offering essentially those two things with Apple created an eco sphere that has caused the one trillion dollar company I mean Apple could not have done it without the user groups that kept them alive in the difficult times of the 80s and 90s and certainly if all the software you got for Macintosh or an iOS device came from Apple listen we'd all be on Android and Windows today trust me sorry to try that too to here in Sydney yeah so from your perspective you know what's unique about our system our ecosystem and how can we work together to leverage our unique features and what can we learn from the valley yeah I think the lesson to learn from the valley is that it's all about education really if if you have a good educational system producing good students good graduates they will come up with ideas and else flows from that so I think many places assume that well the gating item is venture capital that's not been my experience the gating item is not venture capital it's human capital and if you get human capital everything else will flow because if there's one thing you can depend about and depend on with venture capitalists its greed and so if you have human capital trust me the greed will follow the money will flow so I would focus on the educational institutions and you know I think that the key to the Silicon Valley success is certainly not Sand Hill that's just bottom scum-sucking people they're the key to Silicon Valley success is Stanford University Stanford University what I'm very happy to hear that because you know you know that's a really great team for us and for everyone who's here tonight and you know what we're trying to build and create I know who butters the bread so I just we say in America I'm not pissing in your pocket so what I dig just a little bit deeper into like the Silicon Valley mentality and you know I've heard you talk about it I've heard others talk about it you know that is it true that in the valley people wonder why you don't start a company that is true honestly that if if you see someone I'm just thinking who I'm gonna piss off oh let's say you have a buddy and that buddy has worked for HP for 25 years maybe you're not crass enough to say it but you would be wondering why didn't he or she ever go to a startup and start a company and that is true there is that attitude I can't tell you it's fair I can't taste necessarily right but there is that attitude that there's an expectation that you know you tried that I don't know what can I say I mean and also the flip side of that which is helpful is that you know if you feel it it's not that big a deal now some people have taken that too too far in extreme where they're saying it's okay to fail it's not okay to fail because when you fail you throw away money you harm people's careers and psyches and lifestyles and life quality and all that kind of stuff so it's not so cavalier as yeah it's okay to fail take our 5 million run with it if you failed it's alright you know we'll get more money from a pension fund it's not true it's not ok to fail but if you do fail at least you should be learning so because I can tell you something that in Silicon Valley it doesn't matter how many times you fail you just have to succeed once we are very short-term memories and the way it works in Silicon Valley is you throw a lot of stuff up against the wall and a very small number stick and then you go up to the wall and you paint your bullseye around that Mesa I hit the bull's eye look at that I knew that team was world-class I knew there was a great market I knew there was a great business model I hit the bull's eye well yeah you painted the bull's eye afterwards I mean you know if you look at the Silicon Valley successes you know two guys want to start a company for 140 character text message right like yeah I mean sure you know we need another text message we need more IRC we want people to say the line at Starbucks is long I mean that's let's let's fund Twitter or you say well I need infinite bandwidth an infinite server space so that people can upload illegal video and what's gonna make us tip is when people start dropping Mentos into diet cokes so let's rush out there and fund YouTube yeah maybe and you know like so my business is gonna be selling used HP printers across the United States and the first thing you'd ask is well if you're buying they use the HP printer how do you know it'll work and if you're selling the HP printer how do you know the VESA will clear besides that there are no technical issues why eBay shouldn't succeed and so you you can just go down the list them I mean I could almost make the case you just fund the most dumbass idea you hear and sometimes it works because I mean I I can honestly tell you I mean Google so it was the seventh search engine you know there was ink to me and there was hot what did you research handle I mean there like there were five or six I swear and like you know why why did Google succeed why was it the sixth one and we're not talking like bleeding-edge early pioneer of search yeah it's the sixth or seventh search engine so it's a strange place it's a strange place so we should be careful when we're hearing you know people and founders that are telling us that they're failing forward and they're failing fast we should really look at more learning landfills people have been watching too many YouTube videos it's don't believe I'm an author okay and I'm telling you this don't believe everything you read it's theirs okay we're gonna go down a rat hole right now but um not that we haven't been in other rat holes but let's we're gonna in a different rat hole now so you know the problem with business writers of which I am as guilty as anybody is that none of us write as if it's science right so in science there's a hypothesis and there's a controlled experiment so you have to take two identical companies and keep all the variables the same except for one thing and then you can definitively say it's the team or the market or it's the technology but you know quite frankly if you try to concoct the scientist the experiment to prove anything in entrepreneurship by the time you've proven anything it'll be too late so it's probably impossible and too late so basically you take your best shot and so that's why much of business writing about entrepreneurship is kind of case by case right so you look at Apple and you say well so Apple proves it if you have someone who truly loves design and engineering you can can succeed that's the lesson but you know that's the lesson from one story and so you know there's like things where do you pivot right away you know you start it you have these this great founding team they have a dumbass idea so you pivot and you achieve success or the flip side of that is you have this team and everybody said it wouldn't work it's gonna die you're on your last paycheck you keep but you believed and then you somehow flip so which do you believe you should cut it out or you should pivot cuz those two things are exact opposites it depends which book you read right if one author says you know fail fast you say okay so we'll try a bunch of stuff and we'll throw stuff against the wall if the other author says well you know according to my analysis it's the people who truly believed and worked on it for 10 years and when everybody said it couldn't be done it shouldn't be done and it isn't necessary they still believed and they made it happen that's a completely different theory I don't know which one to believe I mean basically in a sense the story of painting the bull's eye after the fact is you you write the book after the fact so if you if you want to say well you should pivot and you find pivoting examples and you see that's what you do and if you want to prove that you should cut it out you find examples of companies and gutted it out and it's I'm sure I'm confusing you more than anything else what I'm basically trying to tell you is that if you think that we have some kind of magic insight and Pixy dust and unicorns in Silicon Valley I hate to burst your bubble but we just know how to declare victory better than most people it's not that we have more victories than other people we can just declare them faster and you know we know how to fake it till we make it burst your bubble huh well that's that's a fantastic insight and you know one for us to you know really consider but for the founders here tonight and for the Australian startups you know who are seeking to you know break into the valley you know what's what's a Keens well first of all I I don't agree with the framing of that question your goal is not to break into the fat into the valley right I mean are you saying they need to break into the valley to get Valley venture capital because Valley venture capital is more value-added than any other venture capital I hate to burst your bubble I mean all cash is green so it's not about breaking into the valley it's about building a viable company so I you know I wouldn't say that canva broke into the valley I would say canva built a very successful business with local venture capital you know I used to be in the venture capital business I'd like yeah I don't want to wait up I don't want to lose all my friends I just don't are there any who are the venture capital industry I need to know who I'm gonna antagonize yeah you know they put their pants on one leg at a time - or their wet suits what else I'm just gonna dig in one just one a little bit more in venture capital so but I'm gonna flip it - women in entrepreneurship yeah so you know pretty much you know very small portion around 4% of funding is allocated to women yeah and then you know we go even lower when we look at you know 1% of corporate procurement goes to women led business yeah so in the words of Vickie Saunders who's the Canadian entrepreneur the see of sheee oh we're not a niche market what do you think we can do to tackle this to change the culture of how we perceive and invest in women LED startups the fundamental cause of this is that men are stupid let's just say that let's just be upfront men are fundamentally stupid and so it's it is an old boys network they feel most comfortable funding old boys you could make the case that you know back in the second grade teachers were pushing girls towards I don't know soft sciences not stem and all that but you know ok I mean maybe the pipeline is different but like to me building a successful company is so hard right and the gating item for most successful companies is great people so you should do everything you can to get great people so why you would say ok so I have to get great people but let's like wipe out one gender from that tool so you just cut your palm in half and then you say well and we don't want women who've stopped to raise children and not returning to the workforce at 40 or 45 so then you cut another piece of that pool off and then if you really dumb Amerika and you say ok and we only we don't want any Mexicans because they're rapists and Muslims because they're terrorists and gays and lesbians because they don't agree with our evangelical Christian perspective so pretty soon there's only tall old white men to fund and I just I that is a conundrum to me I don't understand it because at the end of the day you know you want a successful company and now this is one thing circling back a little um this is one thing that in the mid 80 Steve Jobs had this wire okay so Steve Jobs if you looked at the direct reports he had in the Macintosh division half of them more women I can honestly tell you that Steve Jobs did not care about your gender your race your religion your sexual orientation he did not care at all he either you were either great or those were the only two variables that Steve's mind could comprehend so he was way before his time in that sense he he and Susan Barnes the CFO of Apple right before Macintosh was finalized they went to Japan and met with Sony to you know buy the disk drives for this for the Macintosh and the Sony executives told Steve they would not negotiate with a woman ie Susan Martens and Steve told the Sony if you all negotiate with her you won't have our business so imagine telling Sony that in 1983 Iran this is way before his time and so that's another very valuable lesson of Steve Jobs so really together what we all have to do is radically redesign an ecosystem that supports finances and celebrates diversity in entrepreneurship but you know what I have to say that that may be too big a challenge to embrace I just think you should start from the position oh let's just build the best damn companies we can and if you want to build the best damn companies we can it's hard to say let's build the best damn companies we can't lead by men who are white Christians I mean that's just that makes no sense to me at all I don't understand why you would do that and so I don't think any venture capitalist wakes up in the morning maybe with one rare exception I don't think any venture capitalist in the morning wake suffices I got a fun some women today you know I got a I got make the world a better place for minorities they just want to make money I understand it but if you can convince them that the way to make money is to be gender religion and racial blind you know your pool is better you probably will make more money that's the way to do it and in a sense you know people like like Melanie the CEO of of canva I think she's gonna go a long way because canvas is very successful it's going to be very successful and when they see that a 30 year old woman from Western Australia you know from from Perth of all places you know started this great company that became a unicorn you know maybe some venture capital say maybe we should like meet with women cuz duh die create unicorns I just I could go on like this for hours about this I just don't understand this I really truly don't it is just stupid and I hate stupidity so you won't know how I really feel no I thank you for that honesty so you know so many books and articles and you know thought leaders you know are talking about the formula of a successful startup yeah as having three key elements oh God proven team proven technology proven market total what is your take all total because at the time that a venture capitalist has to make a decision none of those things are known you know at the time you had to squeeze the trigger on Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or Larry or Sergey you didn't know they were world class CEOs world class cxos there were two guys in a garage two gals in a garage a guy and a gal in the garage when Blackbird invested in Melanie she was on a world class you know former CTO of HP or Dell or Apple or Cisco she was she was in the business of making you know annuals and so this concept that you know we're looking for proven team it's total the concept that you're looking for a proven market also total because there was no personal computer business when they started Apple all right yeah are you telling me that when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook there was a proven market for people to post pictures of themselves drunk I mean yeah give me a break and and and you also you don't know if Mark Zuckerberg can really develop the engineering you don't know you know Steve Wozniak can really make an apple one so basically you know none of those things and so I guess the question is what do you do and I see yeah you get lucky I mean I you could rebut me but you know if you can tell me you know you know when a team is good I would like to find out how because I think at the seed stage maybe at you know the mezzanine level you can kind of know that the team is functioning but at seed stage two guys in the garage two gals in the garage a guy in a gown in a garage or a dorm room you're telling me you can know you have a world-class team what am I like I like to ask most VC so you make yeah 20 bits a year you know that 19 are gonna go south so did you know in those nineteen times there was a world-class team or were you just you know faking it because obviously if you knew you wouldn't be one out of twenty I mean you know I mean in what professional endeavor can you be one out of twenty and be successful you know not shooting free-throws not professional surfing you catch one out of twenty I mean there's nothing so I think the the richest vein for successful tech startups the best algorithm I could come up with is two guys in a garage to get a guy and a gal in the garage have created the product that they want to use and then you just hope that they're not the only two people in the world woz and Steve made a computer they wanted to use I think Larry and Sergey made a search engine they wanted to use David Philo and Jerry Yang made a website called Yahoo that they wanted to use I think that cliff and can't cliff and Melanie created a website called canva that they wanted to use and at least you know there's a market for the two people and then you just hope that there's more I think that's the richest vein I really do like it's certainly not you know read highfalutin consulting reports and say okay so you know the highfalutin consultant report says IOT is big so we're gonna go into ilt oh by the time you read it in a highfalutin consulting report it is too late so yeah I don't know what else to mean here we see the rise of the user entrepreneur solving your own problems dishonest yeah that you want I are really maybe even better than that is solving the problem of your spouse I would say wife and that's what I really want to save but I have to be more politically correct but you know I I dislike the concept of you know people see this megatrend and all that like okay now having said all that after you succeed go ahead rewrite the history okay you know you could say yeah we we saw a worldwide market where social media was taking off and we realized that the world was entirely text-based so we saw this need for people to create graphics for social media to better communicate and better you know tell their story so we created canva okay you can tell that story if you're the victor you can reinvent history I understand that all right but let's face it you know when you create Camrys Wow these students cannot use Photoshop and illustrator and they're screwed let's do something better that's what the Genesis was but you know once camera is like listed in all that you you will hear me say this total story yeah we realized that there was a need for graphics it was communication was increasing you know I'll spin this great store and I'll bring tears to your eyes but really storytelling you know two guys wanted to upload a bunch of video so they created YouTube it's not that they foresaw the world market for the sharing of video as a communication platform total so in your talk give me out of innovation you mentioned how great innovation and disruption occurs when entrepreneurs and organizations you know try to jump the curve you know can you explain this yeah I think that your great innovation occurs when you jump curves that is the example I always use his ice so there was ice harvesting then there was ice factory then there was refrigerator so you know it's not like the the people who made it big in the ice factory business decided well let's have a bigger sleigh and a sharper saw and more horses that's how will revolutionize ice harvesting they went from ice harvesting to ice factory and then the people who can't create a refrigerator companies it's not like they said well let's have more ice factories with freeze water bigger and faster and bigger and better ice trucks they went and created personal ice factories called refrigerators and that's where I think the great innovation occurs it's not on the same curve it's the next curve and having said that it is very hard to decide what the next curve is and then create the thing but circling back to what I said before I think the odds of you creating something that's on the next curve because you created something that you yourself want to use is much higher than any with any other method I really do I'm not saying it's you know 90% but it's higher than you know listening to experts so certainly backed like entrepreneurs and one of the most essential and endearing characteristics of entrepreneurs is their unquenchable optimism enthusiasm enables entrepreneurs to believe in the face of all odds that they can change the world this is such a critical asset for entrepreneurs but it's also potentially a flaw Falcon entrepreneurs best leverage this superpower well not overplay it first of all let's just be honest okay even the most brash and bold entrepreneur is faking it I mean you'd have to be a true psychopath to truly believe your when you say that every entrepreneur is faking it and doesn't every entrepreneur is insecure you know the concept that the entrepreneur is a swashbuckling bold person who knows to take risks that's not somebody you want to hook up you wouldn't you want to find somebody who's trying to minimize risk you know I don't want melon you say yeah let's do it take a risk let's just go you know whatever roll the dice you want someone who says okay so we need to think carefully you know should we go after this market for presentations with PowerPoint with with canva to go after PowerPoint should we really offer printing you know people are designing stuff with canva should we give them the next step about printing and you want a CEO who's thinking very carefully you know is it worth it can we compete with FedEx office can we compete with Vistaprint I mean is there enough of a business I I I can't tell you that bluster wins at some point I think it's usually overdone I'd rather have someone who under promise and over deliver in the summer who says you know yeah I'm gonna III specially love these kind of pitch we're two guys in the garage together garage Guyana gallon garage they come up and they say you know we're gonna make this router we're gonna make this router that's gonna revolutionize Wi-Fi and it's because we are smarter than Cisco and we know how to cut cost so we can make a router cheaper and faster and more secure than Cisco this is the kind of guy you're talking about right and you want to say to that person so how many routers have you built in your life Oh zero well how do you know you can make it cheaper well because my sister's uncle's brother has a relative in in China and he said he can build routers cheaper so we're gonna fly to China source our routers in China we're gonna say yeah line you want to say that okay so you're telling me cisco makes 20 million routers a year you're making zero a year you're gonna make a cheaper than cisco is that what you're trying to tell me and they are and I mean that you know to see if you're gonna lie at least lie with some basis to believe your lie or tell different lies but that that's just you know how you're gonna I get I hear that kind of pitch every day we are you know we're gonna make a better phone than Apple because we're smarter than Apple so yeah you're smarter than Apple Apple makes 20 or then actually the best one is you know we're gonna make a better search engine in Google and you want to say that if so Google has 75,000 phd's and it's you two guys in the garage and you're gonna make a better search engine like why should I believe that I mean on the other hand it's possible I mean don't get me wrong it is possible but it's hard to be the star that yeah we're smarter than the 75,000 phd's at Google we're gonna build a better search engine that's a little stretch thank you so you know just with a bit of the lens on the founders so one of my favorite quotes of yours oh you're very careful company start because founders want to change the world not make a fast buck yeah so how can entrepreneurs find the right balance between changing the world and making money ah first of all I don't think the two are necessarily mutually exclusive indeed I would make the case that if you change the world you will probably make money having said that you know I I don't believe the converse is true which is if you make money you've changed the world I mean basically you could look at every investment banker and say okay that proves that you could make money and not make the world a better place so I think the way it works is you know if you make the world a better place you will probably get rewarded and make money so the key is to make the world a better place I you know I'm trying to find an example where people clearly made the world a better place and failed and didn't make money that's a hard you know I mean seriously think about that I have to think about that I don't think there's too many examples of that we'll come back to that so one thing that I've also really enjoyed you know hearing you talk about is pitching to investors yeah and can you share with us your insights into why asking for money is like online dating oh okay so I believe there's two kinds of extremes in online dating and one extreme there's eHarmony so a teen Harmonie you fill out 29 fields of psychographic information because your goal is to find them that your soul mate this is the man a woman that you're gonna spend the rest of your life with you're gonna be you know holding hands drinking white wine holding your sandals walking on Balmoral Beach completing each other's sentences your house is perfectly clean your children have you know straight A's straight path through the Uni in fact you're trying to decide well should they go to Dartmouth you'll Stanford University of New South Wales University of Western Australia everybody wants them so that's the purpose of eHarmony the opposite extreme of eHarmony is tinder and a tinder you look at a picture you say interesting not interesting interesting not interesting and I think the metaphor that I would recommend to you is that venture capital is tinder it is not eHarmony so I mean you think you're gonna find this investor you're going to be completing each other's sentences you're gonna find this psycho graphic match and you know all this kind of stuff and they're gonna support you because they said they invest in people what they forgot to say is they invest in people until you miss your forecast so so I I think you should wrap your mind around that it's a tinder world in venture capital it is not an eHarmony world you know you don't want them to be your friends you just want them to write you know the check and basically not do you harm so so that's one analogy I would use another analogy is an airplane analogy this is at the start of the pitch so because most opportune entrepreneurs have watched videos or attended conferences and for every panel on venture capital the moderator asks how do you decide what to invest in and every venture capitalists guess what they say we invest in the team because either they're stupid or they're intellectually dishonest because they know that they're invested in unproven teens with unproven markets with unproven technology I just described Apple Google Facebook Pinterest Instagram unproven team unproven market unproven technology but you know they're afraid that their limited partners in the audience and so you know if you're like the pension fund of the you know of Australia and you're sitting there and the one venture capitalist is yeah basically we invest in unproven teams and unproven markets with unproven businesses probably the pension managers not gonna say can I give you a hundred million dollars into your fund so they have to tell this lie oh yeah we invest in people so every entrepreneur thinks that venture invest in people and so what happens is I think we're gonna come back to the airplane analogy so what happens is in this pitch you got it in your brain at venture capitalist invests in people so you start your pitch with let me introduce my team because I want to show you that we have a world-class team well I hate to break it to you but by definition if you're pitching for seed capital you do not have a world-class team because if you had a world-class team you would not have to be doing this pitch so by definition you know you're an unknown quantity but you're gonna fabricate this story so you're gonna say I went to the University of New South Wales and I majored in engineering and then you know I took summer classes in Microsoft net and I intern at Goldman Sachs and then I had an internship at Google and so I'm a world-class entrepreneur now and you think I mean sure you can believe that I mean but you're not a world-class team so anyway so and they do this for each founder so now you're you like 15 minutes into the presentation and the investors are still wondering what the hell does this team do is it hardware is it software is it social media is an IOT we don't know we know that their relatives their ancestors came over to America on the Mayflower we know they landed in Plymouth we know they started the first you know ice harvesting business in Massachusetts and subsequently they started a refrigerator company and now they endowed a chair at Yale and we know their entire family history but we don't know is it hardware or software and so this is where the airplane analogy comes in and the airplane analogy is that two kinds of airplanes one is a triple 7 787 747 forty sevens are decommissioned but 747 and those are the kind of planes that take two miles of runway to get into the air and every time they take off you know a little angel sings because hallelujah you've defied gravity how do you get you know half a million pounds into the air or whatever those things weigh so that's one kind of airplane at the other extreme there's an f-18 on craft carrier in the aircraft carrier you know the deck is out 200 meters long and you have one and a half seconds to either reach velocity or you fall in the ocean and die okay so guess what kind of airplane you want to be in a venture capital pitch the f-18 but most people are the triple seven and they're trying to tell their in tires stories so that fifteen minutes later you finally know oh they make an online graphic service you know and so I guess the sweet spot going back to the 2x2 matrix is you want to be the f-18 pilot on tinder not the triple 7 pilot on eHarmony that's all you need to know okay okay well thank you for those hot tip for a perfect pitch well we can I are gonna give you more give you more pitch advice okay so tell a story about the genesis of your company cliff and I University of Western Australia in Perth teaching undergraduate students illustrator and Photoshop too expensive too hard to use people couldn't afford the hardware that we was required to really run Photoshop and we thought there must be a better way me and my co-founder Steve the only place we could use a computer was going to Stanford working for HP working for NASA and we thought there's got to be a better way computers should be smaller and cheaper and easier to use so we started Apple or my girlfriend was a toy collector selling toys online she collected Pez dispensers there was no way for her to sell her Pez dispensers so I started eBay by the way eBay tells that story total story okay but it's a great story so what I'm trying to tell you is tell that kind of story give people an emotional hook as opposed to the typical pitch which is 300 million Americans one in four owns a dog 75 million dogs each dog eats two cans of dog food per day total addressable market 150 million cans of dog food per day and dogs eat every day of the year we're not talking enterprise sales force B to B this is B to C or more accurately B to D dogs eat every day of the year a hundred and fifty million cans of dog food per day with my Rockstar co-founder programmer how hard could it be to get a mere 1% that is one and a half million cans of dog food per day times 365 we're talking five six hundred million cans of dog food per year worst case conservatively speaking before we go global listen I I have tinnitus in this year and I've lost hearing in this year it's because of all the that I've heard thirty years in Silicon Valley and so you know you you again tinder f18 tell a story right my buddy an hour to your might you know my co-founder art teaching college students they have such a hard time with Photoshop and illustrator we thought there must be a wetter a better way something that's online doesn't require an heavy computing lots of training and lots of expense so we created canva let me explain what canva is canva is an online graphics design service think of it as Photoshop for the rest of us in the time that you boot Photoshop we can make a graphic in canva that's the pitch that is freaking Steph 18 tinder okay that's how you should embrace pitch X one more tip okay because you're gonna get your money's worth in a perfect world you did what I just did tinder f18 rather than using the 300 million Americans one in fir'aun's a dog each dog needs to cancel dangku per day what you want to do is catalyze fantasy and the way you catalyze a fantasy is you do a demo I believe a demo is worth a thousand slides so you do a demo and you want to basically make heads explode you want to suck the eyeballs out of the people in the room and so you do a demo and canva it's very easy so you show you know these are the seven hundred different design types Instagram Pinterest Facebook sixteen by nine presentations book cover album covers posters flyers these are for each of these design types we have 200 templates so you want to create on our create one right now picket it change the text upload your photo doom done 30 seconds you've created this beautiful flyer with canva right and so what you're trying to do is you're not trying to go down this path well there are nine billion people on the Internet let's suppose that we get one percent of them which i think is 90 million 90 million people we get 90 million people they each make one graphic per day that's 90 million graphics per day but that's conservative they must make two graphics a day that's a hundred eighty million graphics a day and that's one percent penetration don't do that because the guy or the gal at nine o'clock did that ten o'clock did that one o'clock two o'clock everybody's did a big market how hard could it be to get 1% it's 1% of a big number is still a big number okay so instead you do this demo and in this perfect world you would do a demo and the venture capitalist the investor the prospective partner prospective customer prospective employee would catalyze fantasy in his her her brain by himself or herself they would see the demo and they would say so in 30 seconds that person created this totally great flier my spouse could use that my kids could use that every website could use that every business could use that everybody posting on Instagram needs that everybody making a facebook cover photo could do that everybody tweeting could use that and so you're sitting there convincing yourself OMG lots of people need canva we should invest in canva so you it's like pornography a little bit you're trying to catalyze a fantasy here instead of doing this top-down 1% of a large number is a large number catalyze a fantasy by getting to the demo all I can tell you about pitching so well I'm actually gonna literally throw what time is it to the last question have we been going an hour we have seriously time flies in Sydney what yeah we just want to throw one last and I mean literally throw one last question to someone in the audience know what we do one last question I'm it's not even dark it so we can continue the conversation outside and enjoy you know all night long I don't I'm in no particular rush because I'll give the mic to whomever has a question you've got my alex is gonna actually throw it ah that's good hey hello hi guys thanks thanks for coming here tonight so my question is you're involved in a lot of startups how do you identify what companies are going to be successful well first of all I'm not involved in a lot of startups really I'm only involved in two canva and another one called privee so privee is an online it's an anti social media app basically so think of it as kind of Instagram meets slack with privacy its priv why it's on Android and iOS please check it out and so I don't do this I'm 64 I'm at the end of my career I'm not looking for new challenges as you can tell by the way that I talk I'm not exactly afraid of burning bridges at this point what are you gonna do not offer me a job and and so I'm really not looking for investment I honestly I just want to surf I just I just love surfing and I just want to surf every day and just watch my canvas stock go up that's what I want seriously that's what I want to do so anybody you ask a serious question and I I subscribed and just to show you I'm internally intellectually consistent I love privy I I'll explain how I use pretty shortly and I love canva to products I use and so I invest in support stuff that I use if you came and pitch me on enterprise software I have no freaking idea how enterprise software works biotech I have no idea IOT I have no idea blockchain I don't even know what blockchain I can't figure out blockchain to save my life yeah so I wouldn't even meet with you about those things so it has to be something that I truly would use or truly do use and so I'll tell you the use case for privies so privy is double opt-in alright so you create an account and then you create albums in the album I have to invite you and you have to agree so it's double opt-in so this means that unless I'm an idiot and I invite a Russian troll there are no trolls in my album right so and there is no algorithm everybody sees everything in privy in that album so I have a Kawasaki Family album there are six members four kids my wife and I every post everybody sees no advertising and so we can do things in that circumstance we cannot do in others so you know mostly funny stuff right so me flopping off a surfboard dog pooping on my carpet you know stuff that's not exactly Instagram but for the five of us is the six of us it's extremely funny I have a group of another album of people that I surf with in Santa Cruz and so we post funny stuff about surfing and food but nothing else and so the use case is to have one for your family one for your Santa Cruz surf group one for your you know Sydney surf group one for your I don't know your Australian football colleagues that or whatever and and and these are things that again double opt-in no trolls no spam no nothing no advertising so it's those two things canva and prove you passed the test of I actually use it now it could be that you know me and the founder are the only two people in the world who use it but at least there's two people I mean so that's that's really my test what else throw over two we've got more in the audience Oh where's the mic hello hello yeah um do you think we're about to see widespread quantum computers around the world and you think that's what sort of changes another thing I don't know anything about next question yeah I'm sorry I I mean if like conceptually if you telling me that computers are gonna get really fast well yeah I mean uh I don't know if it's quantum computing but I don't know I don't know heart I mean I can't say yeah no I think they're gonna slow down from here on in that do you think yeah that there is the right time in someone's life to create a startup and is there a difference between passion and experience so if you're very young should you just go ahead and do it or should you go get some industry experience and then go after it I don't think both of those questions I don't think there is any specific right answer that you know again this this comes down to the the lack of scientific basis of business writing so you can say okay so Steve Jobs never finished college Steve Wozniak never finished college I think Bill Gates dropped out Mark Zuckerberg dropped out so okay so like you know that doesn't mean you should tell all your kids drop out of college you'll be the next Steve Jobs takes more than that so and I think if you really looked at the statistics the age of a start-up tech entrepreneur is much higher than you would think it's not just you know dropouts from MIT and but I don't I will tell you though honestly one of the hindrances to entrepreneurship is wisdom and I'll tell you why it's because as you get older you understand how little you really know and so like I know how little I know I know how much luck takes luck is a factor and I know so I also know how hard it is to do stuff and so when you know how it is to do stuff and how big a role luck plays and you know that that's like not conducive to entrepreneurship so when you're young and you don't know what you don't know that's very empowering and so I think there's a theory why you know two guys in a garage would go and decide to take on you know any company but when you're in your 40 50 60 and you have kids and you're trying to like have work-life balance okay so when you're young you have no work like that let's see I mean just that's one of the beauties of being young you don't need to have work-life balance like don't even if a young candidate is good I can say this I'm not in the u.s. so if a young candidate says I'm looking for work/life balance don't hire that person you want people to give their friggin lives to the company but you know when you're 40 and 50 and you have kids and spouses Avada and you're looking for work-life balance that's hard I mean I I wish I could tell you there's a way you could thread the needle have work-life balance it mean entrepreneur it's kind of not true I mean um I want you to ask you I was really like a visual world and everything is crap and here's you the white so you would speak into the white in a visual world where everyone's looking at one another and analyzing each other's you know lifestyles and objects and tinder and all that sort of thing how would you summarize this evening in one hashtag so no emoji one hashtag how would I summarize yes evening this evening in one house what what do you guys heard from me but your experience here your experience here in this room in Sydney so it's not it's my it's my experience on what happened or your experience of what you saw it's your hashtag so it's how you would describe it whether that's with a symbol or a word or a sentence I'll give you both answers so from my perspective what did I do tonight the hashtag would be out of control from your perspective it would be truth at last anymore I really I mean I'm like yes do you need to go hello I wanted to ask you about the successful Jeff paradox now what the successful jerk paradox is it jerks do they become successful or or is you know is it survivorship bias or or is that actually part of an aspect of being successful this is a very good question which came first so if you're a jerk you're more likely to succeed or because you succeed you can be a jerk I hope it's because you succeed you can become a jerk but having said that I hope that's true because to say the opposite would indicate that you need to be a jerk to succeed and I don't believe that's true I don't think you have to be a jerk to succeed so I would rather it be that if you succeed you can be a jerk with the caveat that you can be a jerk but you don't have to be a jerk so why not just succeed and be a nice person but this is one of the the dangers of again business writing so you know you could make the case it's very difficult especially with Silicon Valley types to separate correlation from causation right so you say all right so this guy who one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever he drove in the carpool lane by himself he parked in the handicap slot he humiliated people in public he you know regularly just shredded people and I'm gonna be like that because that's what it takes well you know for you know you could be a nice person to have succeeded as much right so that's and and I thought of it a lot of this kind of stuff happens when people always come to Silicon Valley because they think there's some kind of magic there that they're gonna like go on his tour of Silicon Valley and they're gonna have the scales remove from their eyes so this is also dangerous because every time I meet these groups I tell them listen don't confuse correlation and causation because you're gonna go on this tour of Facebook and Google and you're gonna see the people playing sand volleyball there's gonna be a Japanese restaurant next to a Thai place next to a barbecue place and there's gonna be free dental and there's gonna be a t-shirt workshop there's would be woodworking there's gonna be massages at your desk this would be Tibetan monks making you know kale juice for you and there's gonna be ping pong tables and there's gonna be vending machines where you put your badging and you can get any computer you want you're gonna see all that and you're gonna think that's what made Google and Facebook and Apple successful so you're gonna go back to your company and you're gonna start giving people massages and you're gonna giving them free food and there's gonna be volleyball and you're gonna have these off-site you know you're gonna have like yoga at lunch you know free dentists and the mechanic is gonna come and change your oil in the garage and all that what you basically have is a company with really happy employees so you know it's varied the reason why all that stuff occurs is because Silicon Valley it's very competitive you have to do that to attract talent but that's not what caused Google to be successful engineering caused Google to be successful and being in the right place at the right time any other questions yeah over here yeah first of all thank you very much for making me the second oldest person in the room and related to that of a question about the importance of the company you keep in your success might be a lot of people in Australia have this isolation complex right we're too far away from everything it's why so many people want to break into Silicon Valley because that's all the cool people are that's all the successful as well the high powered thing yeah exactly and the question is do you in order to be successful do you have to be around the the younger people who are doing things or the smarter people or the people who are already successful or can you go against the tide can you be your own success in to find success even though no one else around you is playing that game so you're saying you know should you intentionally hang around dumb lazy people I mean I can't make that case but we get out of the way you don't always pick the company you have your family your you know where you're happy to live I would say that if you were to rank the fact that it's gonna determine your success I wouldn't put those in the top ten I think it's much more about the company you keep in terms of who you recruited as opposed to you know who you go to the bar with I mean we have canva Atlassian and deputy writers that that's the new hot company around here too so I mean obviously they're freaking 6000 miles away fifteen hour flight I also gonna go down a real big rat hole right now I have to tell you that I think that Donald Trump is handing Canada and Australia and China the world's greatest opportunity because if you if I know your Prime Minister changes every six months but and that's a long one but I mean if you sat down he said now how can we encourage more people to immigrate to our country and to stay in our country and create great things here you could not have a better President of the United States than Donald Trump it's as if you and Trudeau and gel ping or however you pronounce his name planned it I mean if you are a smart person and you were thinking like I'm gonna go to Silicon Valley and I'm gonna apply to Stanford and I'm gonna go and start the next company and then but then you read like ok so they're they're building walls and they're tear gassing people and and there you know Russian bots are fixing the election like why would you go to America today I this is not good marketing it's just insanity so we're handing you do we're doing your mission love Americans right now I mean we could not be helping you more than by doing what we're doing so this is in a sense I answering your question i I I think the key is not so much this who you hang around with but you you should not have an inferiority complex that because we live in Australia or Canada that we're not Silicon Valley because there are at least three data points Atlassian deputy and camera that disproved that theory and so that's number one and number two you know the world is flat and I can tell you there are millions of people who use camera literally millions of people I've got hardly any of them knows that it's from Sydney Australia because quite frankly yet people don't care I don't think people wake up in the morning I want to build graphics with an American company you know it's not like I want a motorcycle made in America or a surfboard a little surf board meeting Byron Bay is not a bad idea but a surfboard mate you know it's not like all my friends use canva I'll go to canva.com and sign up you know you don't you know you don't go to who is and find out oh canva is Australian based I don't want to make graphics in Australia it's too isolated like what sorry what kind of idiot are you so so I think the key here another recommendation for you is you should always hire people better than yourself so if you're the CEO and you're engineering you have an engineering background it should be a source of pride to you that your VP of engineering is better at engineering than you and your VP of Finance is better at Finance and your VP of Marketing and VP of art like everybody should be better than you you should look around you're your executive staff and say with pride I might be the dumbest person in this room I mean that is oh my god that is like the perfect case right because click on the opposite if you went to your executive staff meeting and you look there on a room and you said I'm smarter than everybody in this room that is pathetic I mean you should be ashamed of yourself you are you you have caused the bozo explosion because B players hire C players and C players are D players and D players hire a player and pretty soon you have Z players and so I think it's very important that you know it should be a source of great pride that you hired people better than yourself because that's what makes companies great and if you look around the room and you're better than everybody then your standards are too low what else go ahead we're gonna wrap it up so you can mob guy on the terrace no I don't want any of you going on Twitter and say well you just rushed out of there he didn't even like get out stay in the terrace and have a drink and let people mob you I think they are okay so if you do that understand something if you talk to me on this side of me I cannot hear you okay so like don't start talking to me on this side and go on Twitter saying he just ignored me I'm not ignoring you I literally cannot hear you okay so you gotta talk to me on this side good tip and and if you can't get to me my email is Guy Kawasaki at gmail so it's my name a gmail it's not that hard to do I got in early on Gmail so it's yeah it's not me no Guy Kawasaki 503 Guy Kawasaki all right so thank you so much [Applause] you [Applause]

Channel: UNSW Community

Views: 669

Keywords: UNSW Sydney, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. University

Id: FJse6aRFdN0

Length: 84min 54sec (5094 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018