Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki: The Man Who Invented the Job of Evangelist

In 1983, Apple needed a word for a job that did not yet exist: convincing outside software developers to bet their careers on a computer that had not shipped yet. The company settled on "evangelist," and handed the title to a 29-year-old Stanford psychology graduate named Guy Kawasaki, recruited by his old college roommate. He has spent the four decades since proving the job description was accurate.

From Kalihi Valley to Palo Alto

Kawasaki was born on August 30, 1954, in Honolulu, Hawaii, and raised in the Kalihi Valley neighborhood. His father, Duke Takeshi Kawasaki, worked as a fireman, a real estate broker, and eventually a Hawaii state senator; his mother, Aiko, kept house. He graduated from ʻIolani School in 1972, earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Stanford University in 1976, briefly attended UC Davis Law School before withdrawing, and finished an MBA at UCLA's Anderson School of Management in 1977. The psychology degree would turn out to matter more to his later career than the law-school detour or the business degree: Kawasaki's signature skill has always been reading what motivates people, not analyzing balance sheets.

Becoming "The Evangelist"

Kawasaki joined Apple in 1983 through his former Stanford roommate Mike Boich, who recruited him into a newly invented role: chief evangelist for the Macintosh. For four years his job was to persuade independent software developers — who had every reason to keep writing for the established IBM PC market — to build for a machine that did not yet have a market. He is widely credited with popularizing the very term "technology evangelism" as a marketing discipline, turning what could have been a conventional developer-relations job into something closer to a missionary role, complete with the zealotry the word implies. He left Apple in the mid-1980s to run his own software ventures, then returned in 1995 as an Apple Fellow specifically to hold the Macintosh developer community together during one of the company's roughest periods, before Steve Jobs's return reversed its fortunes.

A Restless Second Act

Kawasaki's post-Apple career reads as a long string of ventures rather than a single second act. He built ACIUS, a Macintosh database company, in the late 1980s; ran Fog City Software, maker of the Emailer email client; co-founded Garage Technology Ventures in 1997–98, an early-stage venture capital firm that invested in Pandora Radio, Tripwire, The Motley Fool, and D.light Design; launched Alltop, an RSS aggregation service; and ran Truemors, a user-generated news site sold to NowPublic in 2007. He served as a special advisor to Google following its 2013 acquisition of Motorola, and since April 2014 has held the title of chief evangelist at Canva, the online design platform — the same job description Apple invented for him three decades earlier, applied to a different product.

Author and Broadcaster

Across four decades Kawasaki has written fifteen books on marketing, entrepreneurship, and persuasion, including *The Macintosh Way* (1990), *The Art of the Start* (2004, later revised as *The Art of the Start 2.0*), *Enchantment*, and the memoir *Wise Guy* (2019). Since 2019 he has hosted the *Remarkable People* podcast, extending the same interviewing and storytelling instincts that made him an effective evangelist into a new medium. He has also held academic-adjacent appointments — executive fellow at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and adjunct professor at the University of New South Wales — and served as a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation from 2015 to 2016.

Family and Honors

Kawasaki is married and has four children, two of them adopted from Guatemala. He holds an honorary doctorate from Babson College, and has been a Mercedes-Benz USA brand ambassador. None of his honors are academic-science prizes; they cluster instead around marketing, entrepreneurship, and public speaking — the fields where his reputation was actually built.

Why Guy Is Called a Genius

Kawasaki's claim on the word "genius" is not a claim to scientific or technical brilliance — he built no hardware, wrote no code that shipped in the Macintosh, and holds no patents. What he is credited with, consistently across four decades of marketing writing that cites him, is inventing and then institutionalizing a specific persuasive discipline: technology evangelism, the practice of converting skeptical outsiders into committed advocates for a product before it has proven itself in the market. That is a genius of rhetoric and social influence rather than of invention — reading what a room of engineers or developers actually needs to hear, and having the psychological training and the salesman's instinct to say it convincingly. The honest counter-case is that Kawasaki's reputation rests heavily on being first and prolific rather than uniquely irreplaceable: Apple could plausibly have found another capable evangelist, and much of his later career consists of applying the same playbook — books, talks, a title borrowed from his Apple years — to new employers rather than producing new ideas. His genius, such as it is, is a genius of category creation and relentless self-application, not of technical originality.

Legacy

"Evangelist" is now a standard job title across the technology industry, appearing on org charts at companies that had nothing to do with Apple's 1983 invention of the role — a linguistic legacy arguably as durable as any product Kawasaki worked on. It shows up now at software firms with no connection to Cupertino, attached to people whose job, like his, is to build belief in a product ahead of the evidence. That a marketing title coined for one specific 1980s campaign migrated into the standard vocabulary of an entire industry is itself a measure of how completely Kawasaki's original framing took hold — even people who have never heard his name now do a job he is credited with naming.

Still active as Canva's chief evangelist and as a podcast host in his early seventies, Kawasaki remains, by his own account and everyone else's, doing the same job he was handed as a 29-year-old: making people believe in something before the evidence has caught up. The venture capital firm, the Google advisory role, the fifteen books, and the shifting employers across four decades all sit around that one constant — persuasion as a repeatable craft, practiced on a new product every few years rather than perfected once and left alone.

Achievements

• Holdings: Truemors
• Affiliated with Apple Inc., Google and Forbes
• Educated at Stanford University and University of California, Los Angeles