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Guy Kawasaki talks about Apple, Garage, more
March 17, 2004 - 07:00 PST
by Dennis Sellers - Like Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Guy Kawasaki, the original Apple evangelist and a former Apple Fellow, is known for his charisma. And while still a fan of Apple products, don't look for him to return to Infinite Loop. "There's more chance that I'll play for the San Jose Sharks [the California hockey team] than return to Apple," he told MacMinute. "I'm 49 -- my days of trying to build or run empires are behind me. I just want to focus on my family, invest in great tech companies, make a few speeches, write a few books, and play hockey."
Still, his house is home to one beige G3, two orange iBooks, two white iBooks, one G4 PowerBook, one ruby iMac, and one blueberry iMac. Kawasaki himself often uses a 12-inch PowerBook G4 and "loves it."
"I'm pretty happy with all things Macintosh these days now that it boots so much faster," he says. "I wish multiple computers could back up to a .Mac account, but that's splitting hairs."
Other than going to the Apple store in Palo Alto, California (where he buys stuff at full retail price), Kawasaki says he doesn't have much going on with Apple these days.
"I am, however, strictly a Macintosh user," he adds. "You can take the evangelist out of Apple, but you can't take the Apple out of the evangelist."
Besides his Apple duties, he's been CEO of ACIUS and Fog City Software, a columnist for Macworld and MacUser magazines. He's also the author of seven books, including "Rules for Revolutionaries," "How to Drive Your Competition Crazy," "Selling the Dream" and "The Macintosh Way." Kawasaki holds a B.A. from Stanford University and a M.B.A. from UCLA, as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College. He's now CEO, managing director and chairman of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.
Garage Technology Ventures is a venture capital investment bank for emerging technology companies. Garage works with companies in three ways: they provide direct investment of venture capital, private placement services, and M&A advisory services. They combine senior management attention, a hands-on team approach, syndication ability, and a network of high-level contacts, all designed to enable early-stage technology companies to reach their strategic and financial goals.
"We are an early-stage venture capital firm -- looking for 'two guys in a garage' who are starting the next Apple," Kawasaki says.
Unfortunately, he doubts that the Windows dominance of the computing scene will be altered significantly at this point. It would take a true leapfrog -- something that eclipses Mac, Windows and Linux – to make this happen, he explains.
"I just hope my venture capital firm can find the garage where it's being done," Kawasaki says. As for Apple itself, he wouldn't mind seeing the company be the one to make the "true leapfrog." "I hope that somewhere inside Apple, there's another 'insanely great' team that is creating the computer that will make me want to throw away my Macintosh. This computer should be to the Macintosh what Macintosh was to the Apple II."
(This is another in our series of interviews with people influential in the development of the Mac over the past 20 years. Other stories with some of the original Mac team include:
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