Technology evangelist

Non-professional technology evangelists may act out of altruism or self-interest (e.g., to gain the benefits of early adoption or the network effect).

[7] In Guy Kawasaki's own words, it meant "using fervor and zeal (but never money) to convince software developers to create products for a computer with no installed base, 128K of RAM, no hard disk, no documentation, and no technical support, made by a flaky company that IBM was about to snuff out.

[9] In 1987, Steve Ballmer introduced the technology evangelist role at Microsoft to build excitement and drive adoption of Windows and its development tools.

[10] The job is often closely related to both sales and training but requires specific technology marketing skills.

One of his positions maintain that the role of the evangelist becomes critical when addressing what he identified as the "chasm" that exists between early and mainstream adoption.

[13] A study by Frederic Lucas-Conwell[1] considers the principal characteristics of the technology evangelist role to include: Notable technology evangelists[13] in the commercial arena include Steve Jobs (Apple Inc.), Vint Cerf (Internet), Don Box, Guy Kawasaki, Chris Crawford,[14] Alex St. John, Robert Scoble, Myriam Joire (Pebble), Christian Allen (Epic Games), Mudasser Zaheer (Hewlett Packard Enterprise), and Dan Martin (MasterCard).