Guy Kawasaki—chief evangelist at Canva, former chief evangelist for Apple, and bestselling author—summed up insights gleaned from his years in tech and as host of the Remarkable People podcast, interviewing such luminaries as Margaret Atwood, Tony Fauci, Jane Goodall, and Steve Wozniak. Kawasaki spoke during the closing general session of ULI’s 2025 Fall Meeting in San Francisco and highlighted 10 ways of rethinking and reframing approaches to innovation:
- Look for pain: Kawasaki said that, in Silicon Valley, companies think of products as a vitamin, a supplement, or a painkiller—and a painkiller is worth the most. “When you have a migraine headache, you will pay almost anything to get rid of that headache.” He showed a screenshot of two graphics programs, Adobe Photoshop and Canva: “When you open up Photoshop and get this big blank, gray window with hundreds of icons and hundreds of menu items, [you think,] ‘I’ve got to hire a designer, I cannot possibly do this myself.’ This is the pain that Canva tries to remove.”
- Go and be: Kawasaki recommended getting into the mind and experience of the customer, going beyond Toyota’s principle of “go and see.” “If you want to see how people need a car that can hold two babies, two baby seats, two baby strollers, two baby bags, don’t read about it—go and watch people with babies. I think [that] even better than going and seeing is going and being, which means you are the parent.” He described a friend who, hired by a pharmaceutical company to help them get closer to their customers, asked the executives to breathe through a straw, then said, “I gave you a little slice of life of what it’s like to have asthma.” Kawasaki said, “What is the equivalent of breathing through a straw for you or your organization?”
- Stop thinking forward: Kawasaki showed a photograph of the first digital camera and its inventor, taken at Kodak in the 1970s. “How many of you use a Kodak digital camera today? None of you, right?” He believes that Kodak didn’t see the value of a digital camera because the company thought of itself as a chemical concern, applying chemicals to film that its customers exposed, then sent to a lab that added more chemicals to create a print or negative. “But if they [had] worked backwards from their customer, they would [have figured] out that they are in the memory preservation business,” Kawasaki said. “So, you may think of yourself as an architect or a builder or a developer, but think about what you really [provide]. Is it peace of mind? Is it the American dream?”
- Ask simple questions: Kawasaki said that people trying to be innovative often ask big, complex questions. “My experience [is that] innovation starts with very simple questions like these: Is there a better way? Isn’t this strange? Why has no one done this before?”
- Get to the next curve: According to Kawasaki, staying successful means looking ahead to the next curve. He gave the example of ice: in the late 1800s and early 1900s, ice sellers sawed blocks of ice from frozen lakes and ponds. Then came ice factories, then refrigerators. “None of the people who were ice harvesters became ice factories, and none of the people who had ice factories became refrigerator companies, because most companies start on one curve, they get good at that curve, and then they die on that curve.”
- Don’t worry, be crappy: Kawasaki showed a photograph of Steve Jobs with a Macintosh 128K. “It had a 400k floppy drive . . . . It sold for $2,500, but it was a revolutionary piece of crap. If we had waited for the perfect world, a bigger hard disk, bigger drives, we would have never shipped. You take your best shot, you ship it, and then you work backwards and figure out how to fix it.”
- Eat what you cook: To truly understand customers requires using the products you make and living where you’re designing, Kawasaki said. “If you found out that Tim Cook [chief executive officer of Apple] used a Windows laptop and an Android phone, I hope you would be disappointed.”
- Plant many seeds: When Apple released the Macintosh 128k in 1984, it included several programs: a graphics program and a word processor. The following year the company added Aldus Pagemaker. “The seed that became a mighty oak was Aldus Pagemaker. Desktop publishing was the product that saved Apple.” Kawasaki recounted what he learned when replacing the eucalyptus trees in his yard with oak trees. He gathered 400 acorns and planted the 200 that germinated. “Out of these 200, two years later, there’s four [saplings]. If I [had known] which one of those acorns was going to become a sapling, I would have just taken care of those four. But I had no way of knowing. Just like I didn’t know that Aldus PageMaker was going to be more important to us than the spreadsheets and databases.”
- Use all your weapons: Kawasaki said he uses AI every day as a writer, a research assistant, a devil’s advocate, a grammar checker, and a fact checker. “In your marketing, your ideas, your planning, it’s indispensable. Many people tell me they’re afraid that AI is going to take their job. The greater and more realistic danger is not that AI is going to take your job. It’s going to be somebody who can use AI better than you.”
- Make the decision right: It is less important to make the right decision, Kawasaki said, than to make the decision right. He gave the example of surfing, which involves many choices—where to start, where to take off, which direction to go in, when to stand up and turn. “At some point, you just turn and you paddle,” he said. “It’s not about making the right decision anymore.”
