Shadowing Practice: REPLACED BY RETHINKS How to Pitch Anything: 10-20-30 Rule by Guy Kawasaki - Learn English Speaking with Video

Well, guess what kind of pilot you need to be in a pitch?

You need to be Tom Cruise, right?

So in the first 30 seconds you say, my name is Guy Kawasaki.

I'm Chief Evangelist of Canva, Canva's aid in the business of democratizing design.

We're an online design server so you can create graphics faster than you can boot Photoshop.

That's the Tom Cruise explanation.

Getting to the point is critical in all communication, but especially storytelling and pitching.

My name's Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.

Today, I'm excited to speak with Guy Kawasaki.

Guy is a renowned author, speaker, and entrepreneur.

He was chief evangelist for Apple in the late 1980s and early 90s.

Currently, Guy works for Canva, which he co -founded.

He hosts a podcast and has authored many books, including his latest, Remarkable, Nine Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference.

Welcome, Guy.

Guy, I had a great time chatting with you on your Remarkable podcast.

It's such a fun conversation.

I'm looking forward to our conversation here.

Well, I hope we can exceed what we did there.

Well, thank you so much.

Should we get started?

Yes.

When you craft a story, what are the things that you are thinking about in terms of sequencing, how you start, how you end?

What's your thought process?

It starts with the awareness that you have to entertain your audience.

I think too many people as speakers, they think, oh, my God, I need to inform my audience.

and I need to like get my pitch across.

I need to get my story across.

You know, my people are telling me, you know, these are the three key points.

And so what happens is you're working from forward from what you want to do.

I want to tell my pitch.

I want to get my three stories across, or not even stories.

I want to get my three ideas across, my three key selling points across.

And what you have to do is you have to understand that it's not about you.

It's about them and if your audience wants to be entertaining

which is basically every audience I think

if you entertain people you have a chance of informing them

but if you all you're trying to do is inform them

and not entertainment you're not gonna pull it off first

and foremost what I hear you say is that stories are natural

and lean into just the comfort and natural way in which we tell stories And second, thinking about your job is to engage and entertain the audience,

and through that you can inform them.

And deciding the appropriate level of information, a lot of lessons in that has to do with reminding yourself what your purpose is, which is to engage and entertain,

and make sure that you just tell the stories as you normally would.

Conversation much better than formal presentations.

I bet you if we had like a hundred CEOs or CXOs out there and we said to them,

how many of you believe that the top priority in a presentation is to entertain?

Right.

It would be like zero.

Right.

Zero.

Right.

When I was coming up in the academic world learning how to be a teacher, one of my mentors recently passed away was Phil Zimbardo, and he pulled me aside and said, you know, as a professor,

your job is to transmit knowledge and information, but the way you do that is by entertaining.

You have to connect, be relevant, and engaging, and then the students want to learn, and that makes it so much easier.

And I think the same is true in storytelling and business.

You have to help your audience want the material.

I want to switch our gears here and talk about a form of storytelling, which is pitching.

And I know you spend a lot of time coaching people on pitching.

What is the advice you find yourself giving over and over again about what makes for a good pitch?

Oh, my God.

I thought you said we have to keep it to half an hour.

Okay.

Give me the top one or two things very quickly.

I'll tell you that the problem with most pitches,

it starts off with the fundamental idea that the purpose of a pitch is to get a check.

And so people have this fantasy that I am going to just use shock and awe.

This is going to be Desert Storm 3.

You know, I'm Norman Schwarzkopf, and I'm going to, like, hit him from the air, from the land and the sea.

And at the end of this 60 -minute period, they're going to just be so shocked and awed.

They're going to ask me for wire transfer instructions.

And right there, you're wrong in that.

Screws up the rest of your pitch because the purpose of a pitch is not to get the money.

The purpose of a pitch is to stay in the game and not get eliminated.

So as long as you're not a no, you still can be a yes.

So a pitch is a path to the next step, which is due diligence.

So just don't get eliminated.

That's problem number one.

Problem number two is that I think in every entrepreneur's life, they have gone to some panel

or watched some YouTube video where there's a panel of venture capitalists and some moderator who says,

so what do you look for in a deal?

And every venture capitalist says, I look for a world -class team with a world -class product in a world -class market.

and then the panelists they they keep going

and say yeah you know i'm looking for really great team

and we stand by our team we believes in our team you know we stick with our team

and so everybody hears this and they think oh my god

so i i gotta like i gotta convince them

that i have a world -class team

so they the ceo stands up in this pitch

and spends 15 minutes telling his or her life history that my great -grandfather came over in the Mayflower.

He landed in Connecticut.

He created this hardware store, which became Ace Hardware, and he made a ton of money.

So he endowed a chair at Dartmouth, and I got into Dartmouth, and from Dartmouth, I had a summer intern at Goldman Sachs, and the next year, I had an internship at McKinsey.

I came out west.

I worked for Google.

Then I worked for Microsoft off i took my dot net class

and like 15 minutes later like what the hell do you do like is it hardware software or whatever

so what i tell people in a pitch is you got

to think there's two kinds of airplanes one airplane is a 787

100

or 747 and or an a380

101

and the other kind of airplane is a fighter jet so

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if you're at sfo and you're in a 787 you have two miles of runway and you You can just go, ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba

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