0:02
You have a weird combination of you built some of the greatest modern technology, but you have this obsession with and love of the past, which I think is very interesting. - Yeah.
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A healthy obsession with the past.
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I did Latin, Greek, and ancient history at school. - Yeah.
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- And apparently of no use at all, but it is interesting how Greek civilization took place, and how Roman civilization started, and how it failed, and how people governed. - Mm-hmm. Were oligarchies good? Were dictatorships good? Or are democracies?
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And all that, it's interesting.
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And history repeats itself, and it's repeating itself rather too quickly at the moment.
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So, history is interesting.
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- We were talking before we started recording, I have this obsession with reading everything that you have written.
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I've read your first autobiography five times, your second one at least two times.
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But then people might know about this but they don't know that you actually wrote, "A History of Great Inventions."
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And what I noticed about this is it was published...
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I think you were writing this in like 2001. What caused you like... - Yeah. - Why did you do this?
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- You were building your company at the exact same time. - Yes.
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Because I'm really interested in inventions, how they happened, who did them, what personalities were behind them.
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And they're inspiring stories.
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And luckily, an editor of a big newspaper in Britain asked me to do it. So, I agreed to do it.
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And actually, we published it as a series of color supplements to a weekend newspaper and then put it into a book.
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- How old were you when you started this, when you had this obsession with history? - Oh, from school. Absolutely from school.
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But particularly Greek and Roman history.
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I mean, British history is really interesting, and I know all the kings and queens, I know their dates.
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I'm not a very clever person, actually.
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I'm not good at remembering things, but I have remembered all that history.
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And it jolly well does repeat itself, so you can learn really interesting things from history.
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- And this is what I've noticed, people that are the best in the world at what they do, or near the best in the world at what they do, they all have this love of learning from history.
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Charlie Munger, has one of my favorite quotes about this.
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He says that learning from history is a form of leverage, and you can actually use ideas of people long dead, and you'll find out that they were very similar to you.
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They went through the same struggles.
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They had the same fears, they had the same insecurities, they had the same triumphs, and you can just pick up a book of somebody's life story, like the ones that I have in front of me.
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I told you before we started recording, I was going through very-- I had this obsession and love with my work, just like you do, and in my case, it was not invention, it was creating podcasts.
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And this book I found it, I think it was April 2018, the very first time.
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I read it, and I'd already been struggling to start my podcast for two years with almost no success at all.
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Basically none, no success.
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And it took me five and a half years of struggle, and the reason this is so important to find at year two into that five and a half years, before I had any even remote level of success, is because I'm like, "Well, James struggled."
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This book, 90% of it is you struggling for 14 years, building 5,127 prototypes and refusing to give up. - Mm-hmm.
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- You're also funny as hell in the book, where you're like, "Anytime, if you think I have a little bit of ego, just realize that I'm only celebrating that I have the stubbornness of a mule." - Mm-hmm.
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- This is the note, so obviously I mark up the books like crazy, and I was showing you this before we started recording. And this is really...
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I got to the very last page, and when I was recording my thoughts for the benefit of other people by making the podcast, this is what you inspired me to do, it's like, "I hope Dyson's story inspires you to say, when you get knocked down, 'All right then, let's give it another go.'" - Mm-hmm.
3:52
Yeah, bouncing back is really important, and if you are exploring new territory, if you're experimenting and trying to do something different, which is what you and I want to do, you're going to fail many times, and you've got to bounce back from it.
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And actually if you learn that failure is so much moreinteresting than success.
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Because failure, you question it.
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"Well, why did it go wrong?"
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And actually, the reason it goes wrong is often very, very interesting.
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Where if something works, you say, "Great, that works," and you don't even stop to wonder why it worked.
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So, you've got to enjoy failure, that sounds like a difficult thing to do, but you have to enjoy failure if you want to improve things, if you want to not change the world, but change things and improve things. Goes hand in hand.
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And it always saddens me that school doesn't really teach that.
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At school or university, the thing is to be brilliant, and to get the answer right the first time.
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And there are brilliant people who can do that, but for the rest of us, we're not brilliant.
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And to get there, we have to strive, and we have to go through failure, and we realize that you don't get it right the first time, and you don't get it right the second time.
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In my case, and I counted it, it's 5,127 times.
5:07
One of the things I always want to say is that that sounds like a struggle.
5:10
Okay, it was a struggle, but actually, it was a hugely enjoyable struggle.
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The debt was mounting, and I had three children, and a wife, and a home, and then a mortgage to pay, like everybody else.
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But I had a real point in life, I had a real aim, and I had to get there.
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And the failures were interesting because I learned from every single one of them, almost every single one of them.
5:33
- Say more about that you had an aim in life, was it a mission?
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How did you think of it then, while you were going through it?
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- Well, when I discovered that I loved engineering, because I did classics in school.
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Like, - Yeah - I couldn't be further away from engineering, and then I went to study design and then discovered engineering.
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So, engineering was new to me, it was like something new.
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And I had this sort of stupid thought when I was at college that I wanted to design products, I wanted to engineer them, I wanted to develop their technology, and I wanted to manufacture them, and I wanted to sell them.
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So, it's a sort of megalomania thought. - Why?
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Why is it megalomania thought?
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- Because I was just a penniless student in London, you know?
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How could I have this thought of being a global manufacturer?
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And I don't know how or why I had that thought, but there were interesting things happening at that time, because Concord was happening.
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Issigonis brought out his Mini car, which is still going today, by the way. Hugely successful today. - Yeah.
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- And it was about 15 years after the Second World War, so there was deprivation during the war and immediately afterwards.
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But suddenly, particularly in the mid-'60s, and I think particularly in London where I was, there was a feeling that, "Ah, we're free of the past.
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We can do something new and different."
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And Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Buckminster Fuller, all these people were having really expansive and revolutionary thoughts about design, engineering, buildings, and so on.
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So, I was very lucky, to be part of that era.
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And I think I caught the bug, and I had this very cheeky idea that that's what I wanted to be.
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- So, this is when you meet Jeremy Fry.
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I actually, was not expecting to start our conversation the way we just did, but I'm glad.
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It leads perfectly to how I really wanted to start, which is like, if you can explain who Jeremy Fry was and the impact that he had on your life. - Mm-hmm.
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Well, I was at the Royal College of Art doing design, and I was taught by a very famous structural engineer who worked with Foster and Rogers, and I became interested in engineering.
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And I designed a Buckminster Fuller-type structure for an impresario in London.
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It was a theater for an impresario in London.
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And I went to this engineering company, this millionaire who had founded an engineering company, and asked him if he'd give money to the theater.
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And he said, "No, but I'll give you a job.
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I can see you're an interesting genius, and I'll give you a job."
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So, he started giving me jobs, and one of them was to design this high-speed landing craft, which was his invention, but I engineered it and designed it.
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And he then said, and I was a long-haired student with long hair, flared trousers, tight shirts, flowered shirts, all that sort of thing.
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He said, "Come and start the company, making it and selling it."
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So, I sort of looked at him a bit and said, "I don't know how to sell things."
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And he said, "Look, you're the engineer.
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You've chosen every square inch of that product everything. You know it all.
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You're the best person to sell it."
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So, that was an interesting sort of revelation for me, because I'd always thought there were professions.
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And sales was one profession, engineering was another, manufacturing was another, and being a manager was another.
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And suddenly it was this entrepreneur himself saying to me, "Well, look, you're an engineer and designer, and you know all about the product.
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Go and make it, and go and sell it."
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So, it broke down all the barriers for me.
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We became great friends, and we had lots of discussions about engineering and shared this passion for engineering and for making things.
9:04
- And you found somebody that also had an obsession with the past, past engineers, past designers, past inventors that you could actually have deep conversations with about how they built their products, why they made these certain decisions. - Mm-hmm.
9:15
- And then you used those to inform the work that you guys were doing, correct?
9:18
- Yes, I mean, he was a friend of Issigonis.
9:18
So, I'd never met Issigonis, but I heard about him from him. - Mm-hmm.
9:26
- They used to do hill racing together, design cars, very, very light cars that raced up hills very quickly with very little power.
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So, it's sort of very skinny engineering, minimalist engineering.
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And so, he had quite a lot of stories from that era.
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He was 20 years older than me.
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So, he had seen a bit of life during the war and had done this racing car- - Mm-hmm. - ...
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thing, and established an engineering company.
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So, he just removed the barriers that it was okay to be an obsessive engineer.
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And you just do whatever it is you want to do, and then you go out and sell it.
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And hopefully, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, people will follow you.
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So, to get that advice from someone at that crucial stage in my life was, well, I'd say mind-blowing.
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It enabled me to carry on and do things that everybody said I couldn't do.
10:22
- And then what do you think, because you worked on the Sea Truck for five years before you left?
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- Yeah, about seven, because I did two years of it- - Seven years. - ... when I was at college.
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I moonlighted and designed it, and made one while I was at college, and then I left college and, ran the business making and selling it.
10:39
- What were some of the most important lessons from the seven years when you were doing the Sea Truck?
10:43
- Oh, I think I learned everything from that.
10:43
I learned how to manufacture, how to approach manufacturers and get them to make components, how to set up a factory, building the product, how to sell it overseas, how to find agents and distributors, all that sort of thing, and learn failures and successes with that, to learn that it's all about people, not appearances or how big their company was.
11:05
It's finding the right sort of person with the right sort of enthusiasm. - Say more about that.
11:11
- Probably if you're running a public company and you're choosing a distributor, let's say for Canada, it would be probably irresponsible to find an individual who is just starting out rather than choosing an established distributor.
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But, of course, the person who's just starting out, okay?
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He hasn't got a name yet, but he's probably incredibly enthusiastic and will put everything behind it and work all hours to make it work.
11:37
So, it's the person, not the business, really, that you're backing.
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- My friend Josh Kushner has this great quote when you have to decide, when you're partnering with somebody, do you decide the most experienced, the most educated, or who wants it the most?
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You always choose the person that wants it the most.
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- Experience is an interesting thing, and Jeremy Fry taught me this.
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He hated experienced people.
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He also hated people with beards and something else. - Oh, no.
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- But anyway, but this was a different era. - Oh, no.
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- This was a different era.
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Oh, yeah, smoking pipes, that's right, because people used to smoke pipes back in the '60s.
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And beards were different in the '60s.
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But anyway, come back to the experience thing, which is the important thing.
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And I've discovered this, if you're experienced, you know why not to do something, or how not to do something.
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Whereas if you're naive and you're a young engineer, you've just qualified, or you're still training, you don't have that negativity towards certain things.
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And often it's something that hasn't worked previously that could work and is interesting to follow. So, you're very open.
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And I love naivete, people asking silly questions, stupid questions, because it creates a different way of doing things, and we've got to find different ways of doing things all the time.
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- My friend, Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, we had a conversation about this where he actually thinks naivete is like one of the greatest assets a young entrepreneur or an inventor can have, because he's like, "If I knew how difficult it would be to make Spotify succeed at the beginning, I would not have done that." - Yeah. Yeah.
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Naivety equals stupidity. I don't think that.
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I think that naivety is interesting because you're thinking really hard, "How the hell do I do this?
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I don't know how to solve this problem."
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The experienced person might think they know how to solve it, but the naive person doesn't.
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So, they're thinking much harder and more intelligently.
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- James Dyson is obsessed with crafting a high-quality product, and he's made some of the best products in the world by running tens of thousands of experiments throughout his life Every single experiment was aimed at making a better product for his customer.
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That is exactly what the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp, does.
13:50
Dyson reminds me of my friend Karim, who's the co-founder and CTO of Ramp.
13:52
I spend a lot of time talking to Karim, and every single conversation, centers around his obsession with crafting a high-quality product and using the latest technology to constantly create better experiences for his customers.
14:05
This is exactly what James Dyson does.
14:05
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14:13
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14:20
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14:33
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14:40
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14:44
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14:49
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15:06
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15:10
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15:15
So, Jeremy was in the business of hiring people like a young James Dyson.
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Just like this smart, enthusiastic person that clearly wants to do this, as opposed to anybody that came from another company or even a competitor. - Exactly that. Yeah. - You're doing this now.
15:30
You still do this 40 years later, - Yeah. - 50 years later. - Yes.
15:34
And we've taken it one stage further, because we've started our own university.
15:38
So, we're taking 17 and 18-year-olds and starting even younger, and they work in the business and they ask naive questions.
15:45
- You cover the university in the book.
15:45
Again, one of the things I've personally learned from you is differentiation for the sake of it. - Mm-hmm.
15:53
- And so, anything that I'm going to do, I look around...
15:56
One of my heroes is Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. - Mm-hmm. Right.
15:59
- And he had this great line, he's like, "My personal motto is, don't do anything somebody else can do."
16:03
Can you explain exactly how you structured and how you designed Dyson University?
16:11
- University is very expensive. - Yes.
16:13
Especially in the United States. - Right.
16:13
[inaudible] And it's getting as bad in England. Yeah, and it's terrible.
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And you're saddled with that debt for a long time.
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I mean, sometimes 20 years.
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And in any case, a lot of the debt is not repaid.
16:27
And we need to find a different way to teach people.
16:30
And it's ridiculous because they're only taught for half the year, the rest of it is holidays.
16:37
So, you've got these big institutions, expensive institutions, with people only there part-time. It's madness.
16:44
And also, as I learnt when I was at college working with an engineering company- - Because you were working with Jeremy while you were still in school. - While I was...
16:52
Yes, I was sort of moonlighting.
16:54
The college knew what I was doing and approved of it, but it wasn't what normal students did.
16:56
So, but I loved that experience, working with people who are having to do things, not academics, people having to do things and having to do them in a hurry.
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And I really enjoyed that.
17:12
And I thought, "Well, why can't I give that opportunity to other people?"
17:16
So, we started our own university.
17:19
And it's a difficult thing to do because the government has to approve it.
17:23
And for seven years, we had to work with another university, and none of them would work with us because they didn't like...
17:28
They saw us as big competitors because we pay our students. - Yeah.
17:33
You're start with, why are we saddling these young people with an albatross- - Mm-hmm. - ...
17:38
of debt around their necks that's going to limit their...
17:38
you know, - what they can actually pursue?
17:42
They're going to be taking jobs that they're forced to take that they don't- - Mh-hmm. - ...
17:45
want to take maybe for money, as opposed to you following your just, I don't even call it a passion, I think it's more like an obsession that you have. - Mm-hmm. - So, am I correct? There's no tuition? - Yes, there's tuition.
17:54
We teach them two days a week. - Okay.
17:57
- And they work with us three days a week.
17:59
- But you pay them for the three days? - We pay them.
18:00
We pay them $45,000 a year.
18:03
They have cars, they go on skiing holidays.
18:05
So, they're just normal people. They're not students.
18:08
They're in a student group.
18:08
We have about 170 of them altogether.
18:12
But they're interspersed throughout the company, and they love that.
18:15
They love working with people who are earning money and having to make things work, having to do engineering, having to do marketing or selling whatever it is, manufacturing.
18:25
They like the reality of that, and it inspires them to learn the academic side.
18:31
Because a lot of them said the academic side of engineering is difficult. It's hard.
18:34
But I'm inspired to do it because I got to practice it every day.
18:39
- As opposed to separating the two?
18:40
- As opposed to going to university and just having academia for four years.
18:45
With us, they're being inventors, they're developing technology, and they're learning exactly why they need to know the academic side, the theory.
18:54
- Explain why it's better to have, in your opinion, a person with no experience than somebody that came from an existing company.
19:01
- The older you get, the more you try to apply your experience.
19:06
And if you've come from an existing company you may have picked up bad habits.
19:09
I'm not saying we don't have bad habits at Dyson, but I'm saying you've picked up the habits of that company, which may not be the right sort of attitude that we want, this attitude of constant change, constantly trying new things, trying to be different for different's sake, because it sets us on a different path.
19:24
And some people find that difficult.
19:29
Some people want to have a much more conventional way to do things.
19:34
- And so, if you're hiring, you have 18-year-olds working in Dyson, they're also going to school.
19:38
- One or two 17-year-olds as well.
19:40
- Okay, 17, 18-year-olds. What is that like?
19:44
- To be honest, nobody really notices any difference.
19:47
- Okay, that's going to be shocking for at least people who they assume, okay?
19:51
That you have to graduate high school in America, they have to go to college, and maybe in many cases, they go to graduate school, and then they're almost 30 by the time they start working. And you're like, - Yeah. - "No. Hire the 18-year-old."
20:02
- You've got to say more about this. - Yeah.
20:03
Well, because they're enthusiastic.
20:06
They've come to us because they want to do real work and they do real work.
20:12
And just because they're not as experienced as graduates or someone in year four as opposed to year one doesn't mean to say they don't have just the same to offer or even something better to offer because they're even more naive.
20:24
So, it works really, really well, and it's interesting.
20:28
- I want to go back to the seven years with the Sea Truck.
20:32
You write about Jeremy Fry in both books, and in many cases, 50 years in this book, 50 years after you spent time with him and worked with him.
20:40
You said there's a lot of ideas that you learned working with him that you still apply to this day at Dyson, which I think is very fascinating - Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
20:45
- and speaks to the power of ideas, and just...
20:47
- I don't have a prejudice against beards, by the way. - Oh, thank you.
20:49
- Yeah, I think I probably retained the pipe one, but not the beard one. - I don't smoke a pipe. - That's fine.
20:53
- And I don't have like, the hippie beard- - No, no. - ... so, this is fine.
20:56
I mean, it'd break my heart to know Jeremy Fry, because he's become almost my hero too.
21:00
- He would've changed over the years. - For sure.
21:03
But one thing that's fascinating is, okay, this also speaks to...
21:07
I'm curious about your opinion on risk tolerance.
21:11
Obviously, you have excessively- - Mm-hmm. - ...
21:13
high risk tolerance in both stories.
21:15
- But you're like, "I'm working for..."
21:15
your mentor, who you think is a genius. - Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
21:22
- He treats you really, really well.
21:22
He gave you complete autonomy and control.
21:25
He's like, "Just go run this business."
21:27
There's a great line in the book where you're like...
21:30
He introduced you to a completely different modus operandi of the way to operate, where you're like, "We need somebody to know about aerodynamics."
21:38
He's like, "Well, the Range Rover's down there.
21:40
Like, the lake's right there.
21:41
Like, tie a piece of wood- - Mm-hmm. - ...
21:44
behind a boat and record what happens and then change it." - Mm-hmm. Yeah.
21:47
- But you had a wife and at least one child when you left to do the Ballbarrow? - Two. - Two. Two children, yeah. - Okay, so two kids. You have a mortgage. - Married, yeah.
21:56
- So, you have a family to take care of.
21:58
You have a great high-paying job. - Mm-hmm. - Right?
22:00
You're working hand-in-hand with somebody you greatly admire that has taught you a ton in seven years, and yet you're like, "I need to go out and be an entrepreneur and do my own thing." - Mm-hmm.
22:11
- Okay, so I want to talk about that.
22:11
But then the second thing that I didn't understand no matter how many times I read this is, why didn't you let him fund that?
22:19
- That was a really stupid decision.
22:23
- Maybe that's what I couldn't understand it.
22:23
- Because, and in fact, and ultimately, when I started the vacuum cleaner business, we did fund it together. - Yes. So, that... - Which we'll get to. - Yeah. - Okay.
22:32
- That was a really stupid decision, because he was someone who understood about starting businesses, how difficult it was.
22:38
And in fact, I went to borrow money off my brother-in-law and another party who didn't understand the difficulties of starting businesses and the growth pains and so on.
22:47
- Before we get there, just the decision to leave a great... - Yes, yes. Yeah.
22:52
- It's almost like you seek... - Yeah.
22:54
- Oh, tell me if I'm wrong with this.
22:56
I know you seek difference for the sake of it.
22:58
In that time period, you may not be like this now, in that time period, it felt like you were seeking risk for the sake of risk. - Yeah.
23:04
No, I've thought a bit about that, and I think it's partly because my father died when I was eight or nine, and I think that had a sort of profound effect on me that I didn't realize at the time, because I felt very different to other people, because I was at boarding school, and the headmaster was very kind, and he allowed me to stay on for 10 years without paying any fees, so that was an extraordinary act of kindness.
23:30
But everybody else had parents, two parents.
23:34
There weren't single-parent families in those days.
23:38
And even if the two had split up, they appeared to come together to come and see their child at school.
23:42
But I had just my mother coming to see me, my impoverished mother coming to see me. So, I felt different.
23:48
And also, I think if you've lost a parent at that age, life can't get much worse.
23:55
So, you're prepared to take risks, because you've started from a horrible starting point.
24:02
Risk has become a sort of thing I need to live with.
24:06
I need to live on the knife edge all the time.
24:09
- You still feel that way today?
24:10
- I still feel that today, yes.
24:10
And it doesn't make me unhappy.
24:14
Don't get me wrong, but I like living for the moment in danger because you're onto something new, you're doing something different, and it's risky.
24:27
The result is not sure at all.
24:29
In fact, it's very unsure and very dangerous. And I don't mind that.
24:35
It doesn't keep me awake at night.
24:37
- So, it starts when your father dies at...
24:39
He died really young he was 40 years old? - Yeah, 40, yeah, yeah. - When you were nine. - Mm-hmm. It's one of the most...
24:43
I don't even want to start talking about it.
24:45
I'll start tearing up - Yeah.
24:46
because, like, that part just destroys me.
24:49
And I guess I'll talk about this now.
24:50
I want to go back to the risk and making that jump.
24:54
I think one of the most profound impacts that your second book has is that you're writing this 60 years after your father dies. - Mm-hmm.
25:02
- And you're talking about your grandson, Mick.
25:02
And you realize, now as a 69-year-old man with a lifelong set of experiences, just how vulnerable you were, because your grandson, Mick is still taking his stuffed animal to bed.
25:21
And now you're left alone.
25:21
A nine-year-old boy needs his father. - Yeah. No.
25:26
He had a profound influence on me. He had to do everything.
25:34
I mean, he loved producing plays, he loved directing them.
25:39
I've got notes in his little Shakespeare books, crossing out lines and making notes about things.
25:42
And he did puppet shows, he played the recorder, he taught rugger, he taught hockey.
25:51
He just wanted to do everything.
25:51
And I'm a bit like that, and I was certainly like that at school, especially if it didn't involve academia. And he was like that.
26:02
- I just thought of a connection maybe I didn't make previously.
26:07
He wanted to change professions towards the end of his life.
26:13
- He fought in the war in Burma.
26:14
We call it The Forgotten War. - Okay. - Yeah.
26:16
- And it really was, and it was a nasty, nasty war, a long way away.
26:21
And he came back from that in 1946, and in 1949, he contracted cancer. - Okay.
26:28
- So, he'd been away from his wife for the first six years of their life together.
26:34
Then he had three years being a classics master at school, and then he got cancer.
26:40
And so, he was in and out of hospital- - Okay. Well, there was... - ...
26:41
for the next seven years.
26:43
Did he have an opportunity to work for the BBC or something like that?
26:45
- That's what he wanted to do.
26:46
- That's what he wanted to do- - Yeah, yeah. - ...
26:48
but never had the opportunity.
26:48
- But never had the opportunity to do it.
26:49
- And now I'm thinking, I just asked you the question, it was like, "How the hell do you leave this fantastic position to go off on your own?"
26:56
You realized, well, I had the opportunity to, whereas, like your dad- - Mm-hmm. - ...
26:59
unfortunately for a situation - outside of his control, never got that opportunity.
27:04
- No, he had his life stolen from him at the age of 40, and then, yeah, I'm almost 80, so twice as long as he did.
27:12
- Your mom passed away early too. - Yes.
27:14
She got cancer as well in her 50s. - At 55? - Yeah. No, at 55.
27:18
- My mom passed away from cancer early too. - Mm-hmm. Yeah. A horrible disease. - Did you ever...
27:24
This is nothing related to what I think I was going to talk to you about, but your dad passes away at 40, your mom in her mid-50s, you've lived much longer than both of them. - Yeah.
27:34
- When you were younger, were you worried that you were going to die young too? - No.
27:37
That never occurred to me. - Interesting.
27:39
- No, never occurred to me.
27:41
I think it made me want to get the most out of life fast, maybe impatient to live my life.
27:52
-Funny, I obviously have a habit and an obsession with reading biographies.
27:55
Most of the people I read biographies of are not like you, they're actually dead.
27:59
And I think this unexpected...
27:59
- Well, I'll try and keep going. - No, no.
28:02
I want to come to Dyson HQ and I want to record more things.
28:09
I want to like, see the headquarters and everything else.
28:11
So, you have a reason to live. - Mm-hmm.
28:14
- In addition to your beautiful family and everything else.
28:16
One of the byproducts of reading a bunch of biographies of dead people is you get to the end, and it's not that you got to the end of the book, you got to the end of somebody's life story.
28:25
And it's not morbid, but you have this constant reminder that our time here is limited and don't waste a single day. I think about that.
28:31
I am intolerant to wasting even 24 hours.
28:35
I think it's, actually like a powerful motivator and just a great byproduct of the profession I've chose.
28:39
I want to go back to you taking risks for the sake of risks.
28:45
"You want to be your own man," I think, is the line that you have in the book when- - Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. - ... you leave. - So, I understand that.
28:49
We're going to get to the Ballbarrow, but can you say more...
28:51
- So, that was the point.
28:53
You did ask me that question of- - Yeah. - ...
28:55
why I didn't ask Jeremy Fry to help fund the thing.
28:58
It's because I wanted to do something on my own. - And you felt...
29:01
- I'd worked for somebody and I wanted to do something entirely on my own.
29:06
- But you'd still be the entrepreneur. You'd still be...
29:08
- But it was a terrible decision, but that's how I felt at the time.
29:10
- But why not take money from him?
29:13
- Because I felt I'd worked with him, he'd been my mentor. - Okay.
29:16
- And I wanted to just go off and do it on my own.
29:19
It was to prove something to myself, I suppose.
29:22
It was a stupid decision because I was still having other people help fund me. - Yeah.
29:28
- So, it was a really stupid decision, and you do make stupid decisions in life, and I learned from my mistake.
29:33
And so, when I started the vacuum cleaner, I went back to someone who understood entrepreneurship, who had been an entrepreneur, rather than people who hadn't been entrepreneurs.
29:42
- We were talking about this earlier, you and I were talking about this earlier, where there is now a new class of capital available to entrepreneurs that is not institutional venture capital, that obviously still exists, - Mm-hmm.
29:53
but you have a lot of people that have had incredible success, like yourself.
29:57
But I've become friends with Michael Dell and this is something that he's interested in, in providing alternative funding solutions to entrepreneurs from an entrepreneur that knows exactly - Mm-hmm.
30:07
what they're going through, that is not a professional investor, not trying to make more returns.
30:13
They have more money than they'll ever spend.
30:15
They literally love entrepreneurs and want to help entrepreneurs, I think it's really important. - Yeah.
30:19
- I want to go through the list of mistakes, because you always say this and I love it.
30:24
I have the first version of your second biography, which is "Invention of Life."
30:27
I think it's changed now.
30:29
Yeah, I think you were going to name it like, "Failure is More Interesting Than Success" or "More Fun Than Success."
30:36
- It shows what a lousy marketer I am.
30:37
Yeah, the publishers quite rightly said it won't sell.
30:41
- So, let's focus on the failures and the mistakes that you made. With the Ballbarrow.
30:46
What still sticks out in your mind about that?
30:49
- Right at the beginning, having people help fund it, because I had to put up a guarantee.
30:53
My brother-in-law put up a guarantee.
30:58
- The guarantee is against your house?
30:58
- The guarantee was against my house. - Okay.
31:02
- Fortunately, I had a house by then.
31:02
My brother-in-law put up a guarantee, and we borrowed money from the bank.
31:08
By the way, interest rates went to 22% while we were doing that business and that was the killer. - Yeah. Mm-hmm.
31:16
- So, I borrowed money again when I started the Ballbarrow, the vacuum cleaner business.
31:23
So, it's not borrowing money that's the problem, it's involving people who don't understand startups and the pain you have to go through.
31:31
- What did they not understand?
31:33
- They just didn't understand the business what it's like.
31:38
For example, the Ballbarrow was copied in America by an ex-employee and another company.
31:46
And they wanted to go after him and teach him a lesson. And I said, "No, no, no. Let him do it.
31:50
If he wants to do it, let him do it.
31:53
And we'll come into America and we'll sell ours against his.
31:58
He'll pave the way, and we'll come sell our original version."
32:01
But they wanted vengeance, so we spent a lot of money trying to sue them, to no good effect, really. So, that's one example.
32:09
The real thing I learned is that it's much better to put your own money in.
32:16
I didn't have any money, I borrowed it, but it was money that had been given to me by a bank, so it was my money even though I was on the line for it, and my wife had to sign the house away - Mm-hmm.
32:26
and all our possessions and all that sort of thing.
32:29
So, I was making my decisions for me.
32:32
I wasn't having to worry about investors and what they might think.
32:35
Which, when I was doing the Ballbarrow business, I was always doing that, you know?
32:39
I was having to ring them up and say, "Do you think we should do this?
32:41
Is it okay if I do this?"
32:43
You seem to have an inherent, I don't want to interrupt you, distaste for anybody else having any kind of control over what you're doing. No, not that at all. That's not what I meant. - Okay.
32:57
- I'm glad you raised that. That's not what I meant.
32:59
For example, I have no executive directors.
33:01
I run the business as though it was a public business.
33:04
but it's a private business. - Okay.
33:05
- And I think it's very important to have good people advising you.
33:10
Now, what I meant was, when I'm entirely on my own and I make a decision, I make a decision without reference, certainly in the early days, to anybody else.
33:20
Is it the right decision for the business?
33:22
Will it make a better product? Will it sell more? All that sort of thing.
33:26
That's very single-minded.
33:28
Didn't have to worry about investors at all.
33:30
I had to worry about the bank balance, but I didn't have to worry about investors, which made me very single-minded.
33:36
And if there's a failure, it's my failure. It's all down to me.
33:41
Whereas if you've got other people, then other people are making joint decisions.
33:46
So I really enjoyed not having anyone to turn to.
33:50
Whereas with the Ballbarrow business, there were other directors, there were other investors, so I had to worry about what they thought.
33:57
Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I did.
33:59
But if you're on your own, you make the decision for entirely the right reason.
34:05
- What do you think that you thought was important that they did not, for that specific product?
34:11
When we started selling the Ballbarrow, the retailers...
34:15
First of all, there weren't big hardware chains.
34:19
They were individually owned hardware stores.
34:21
- So, there was no Home Depot or Lowe's or any... - No Home Depot. - Okay.
34:23
- No, none of that, which makes life a lot easier.
34:24
You might not think that, but it does make life a lot easier- - Yeah. ...
34:28
-if you're manufacturing something.
34:29
So, we had to sell through wholesalers who sold to all the individual retailers.
34:35
And garden centers, where you go and buy garden stuff, they were all individually owned.
34:40
So, you had to have teams of salespeople going round all these things trying to sell products to them.
34:46
"Oh, yes, we can take one this week," and then, "See there, one more there."
34:49
I mean, it was a completely mad system.
34:53
Now, I'd started the business selling direct to people through little adverts in the newspaper, tiny little adverts, and people would send their checks.
35:02
In those days, people used to send checks. It was pre-credit cards.
35:05
- You have a great line about this in the book.
35:06
You said, "The entrenched professional will always resist longer than the independent consumer." - Yes, exactly.
35:12
So, exactly that, and that was the point.
35:16
The illustration of that is when I went round trying to sell to garden centers and hardware stores, they were not interested.
35:23
They actually laughed, and they said, "That thing with the big red ball, no one'll ever buy that."
35:28
But they did buy it from these little ads.
35:31
So, I wanted to go on expanding the idea of selling direct, and not having a middle person, and not having to have salespeople.
35:38
But they said, "Oh, no, look, you're being successful, and I think now is the time to do it properly and get a factory, and sell the normal way through retailers."
35:46
Did you push back against that decision? - A bit, yes.
35:49
- And I said, "Look, we're doing quite well now.
35:51
No one will have toborrow money.
35:52
We're not dependent on anybody.
35:55
We're just placing these ads and seeing what happens.
35:58
And okay, the business might be very small, but it's okay, actually. It's wiping its face."
36:04
But then we got into debt, and the debt got bigger, and the debt went to a 22% interest rate.
36:11
I mean, a company's lucky if it can make, you know, 5% profit or 10% net profit.
36:18
But we're fighting a 22% penalty all the time.
36:24
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36:30
And most businesses are only using 20% of their data, because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations, unless you have HubSpot.
36:40
HubSpot is where all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter.
36:44
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36:54
So, there's another thing that happened where you made the mistake of assigning-- This was your invention.
36:59
The Ballbarrow was your creation.
37:01
You made some other products, but we can skip over that for now.
37:04
And then you filed a patent.
37:06
It was patentable, and you transferred the patent, not to yourself, but to the company. - Mm-hmm.
37:11
- And then when they kicked you out of the company, they then took your company and your patent. - Yes.
37:16
Yes, they took everything.
37:18
But actually, there's a silver lining to all of that, which is that I had offered them the vacuum cleaner. - Yes.
37:24
- And they didn't believe in it.
37:25
- This is why I'm obsessed with people-- So far, for every single person I've talked to for this show, they've done what they do for an excessively long period of time, anywhere from 20 to 45 years.
37:34
And I think you just-- You see this over and over in these stories.
37:37
It's like people are in way too big of a rush.
37:40
It's like, you're going to have these happy accidents.
37:41
You just stay in the game long enough to get lucky.
37:44
Because as a byproduct of the stuff you're doing, in the case of the-- You were working on the Ballbarrow, right?
37:49
And you discover what a cyclone is because you were solving a problem with the Ballbarrow.
37:54
There's no way you could have predicted at the beginning that you could apply it to another domain and then wipe the floor with all your competitors.
37:59
Can you explain what you were doing and how you accidentally discovered the cyclone for the first time?
38:03
The important thing is to observe things all the time, for an engineer, and work out how they work.
38:09
And also, incidentally, you're always working out how to make them work better.
38:14
"Would it be better if I did this?
38:14
Isn't there a better way of doing that?"
38:17
And that always happens with all inventions.
38:21
They don't just come out of the sky.
38:21
They occur because you observe something.
38:26
So, curiosity and observation, and trying to understand things is the way to come up with new ways of doing things.
38:34
And so it was with the vacuum cleaner, as you said.
38:36
We had this huge plant that sprayed the frames with powder.
38:43
A lot of the powder missed the frames because you're spraying these sort of open things.
38:46
There are masses of it missing it. And you suck it.
38:49
We were sucking it away onto a cloth filter, a huge cloth filter, which clogged all the time. - Like a vacuum bag. - Like a vacuum bag.
38:56
You see, so that's-- You make the connection, you see? You make the connection.
38:59
And what clever people did was have this huge cyclone.
39:04
So, I got a quote for one, and no way we could afford it.
39:07
So over a couple of weekends, we built one, and it was 30 feet high.
39:12
And we had to make a hole in the roof of the factory to stuff the-- It has a chimney as a valve that's at the top.
39:19
And a cyclone separates dust from air.
39:22
So between you and I, there's a lot of dust.
39:25
And a cyclone will separate that by centrifugal force.
39:29
So if you drive at a corner of a road very fast in your Porsche, if you drive too fast, you spin off into the ditch.
39:39
And so that is with a dust particle.
39:41
A dust particle, though the ones between us are floating, they're very fine.
39:46
If you make them go round a corner at very high speed, they get flung out to the edge, into the ditch.
39:51
So, a cyclone is a circular container, and you apply enormous centrifugal force to the dust particles within it, and they all get flung to the outside wall.
40:03
And the only way out is from the center, a chimney in the center.
40:06
So that's the basic principle of a cyclone.
40:09
So I made the-- Yes, I'd used a vacuum cleaners like everybody else, and they all seemed to make this screaming noise, and not pick things up.
40:16
And one weekend, I was cleaning the house, and the bag was full.
40:22
Well, no, it said the bag was clogged, which is a slightly different thing.
40:27
Anyway, so I looked around for a new bag, couldn't find one in the house.
40:31
So, I opened it up, emptied it out, and then gaffer-taped it back up again and shoved it back in. Still no suction.
40:40
So I thought, "That's odd."
40:42
I thought, you know, that it didn't suck because the bag was full.
40:45
And I suddenly realized the bag was empty, and something else was at play here.
40:50
And I opened it up, I took the gaffer tape off, and opened it up, and there was a fine lining of fine dust around the inside of the bag.
40:58
And I suddenly realized that the suction is created by airflow, which has to go through the pores of the bag.
41:06
But this fine dust is clogging the pores.
41:09
It's not the fact the bag's full, it's the fact that the bag is clogged.
41:12
They call it a bag full indicator. That's a lie.
41:15
It's a bag-clogged indicator.
41:15
So, I felt pretty angry about this.
41:19
And I did go-- Got out, and went and drove to a shop and bought a new bag and put it in, and I had good suction for a short while, and then it dropped off again, and it said, "Bag full."
41:28
No, it wasn't bag full, the bag's clogged.
41:32
So I got pretty angry about this.
41:34
And I came to a realization, it's not a very clever realization, that all the air is trying to go through these little holes in the bag, and it's so easy for them to be clogged.
41:44
And then, of course, I remembered the big cyclone, huge, 30-foot cyclone we built at the factory to stop the cloth from getting clogged with dust.
41:52
Instead, we were spinning it out successfully by centrifugal force. It never clogged.
41:56
So I thought, "Why don't we have one of those 30-foot cyclones inside a vacuum cleaner, you know, a foot high?"
42:05
So it wasn't very clever, really.
42:07
So, I built one out of cardboard. - It's very clever. - Well, not really. - No, it's very clever. - It's not very clever.
42:12
So I built one very quickly in the kitchen at home out of cardboard and gaffer tape again.
42:18
I took the bag off my upright vacuum cleaner, replaced it with a bit of hose and this cardboard mini version of the 30-foot one we built at work out of steel, and pushed it around.
42:31
And I was pushing around the first vacuum cleaner that never loses suction.
42:36
So, I thought I had a good idea, so I filed a patent.
42:39
And I offered it to the Ballbarrow company. - Why?
42:44
Because you guys were doing all these, like, gardening products, right? Mm-hmm.
42:48
I don't think you-- Were you making anything else that wasn't related to gardening before this at Ballbarrow? - No.
42:52
And then, I think one of your main observations was like, "This is not the best business, because it's seasonal." - Oh, it's horrible. - Right?
42:59
- A seasonal product is awful. - Where? Yeah.
43:01
So, why don't we-- Especially in England?
43:04
But people buy vacuum cleaners all the time. - Yeah.
43:06
-So, in every day, and that's what I want.
43:08
Because with a seasonal product, there's a fallow period where you sell nothing.
43:14
And then spring comes along, and hopefully, you start to sell. So it's not... And you sell...
43:21
The weather makes a huge difference to what you sell.
43:24
And if you have a bad spring, it's a wet spring, you never make up for that.
43:28
So, if you change your product to make it better, you don't actually know one year to the next whether it's an improvement or not, whether it's sold more, because it all depends on the weather.
43:37
So you've got to employ people during the winter when you don't need them, and then in the summer, you need more people.
43:42
Seasonal business is a horrible business.
43:44
Avoid seasonal businesses.
43:44
- So, I pity anyone who runs a ski resort or...
43:48
- So, you take this vacuum cleaner, right?
43:51
"All right, guys, I have the solution to our problems." - Yes.
43:53
- It's a genius invention.
43:55
It's very clever, even though you keep saying it's not clever.
43:57
"I have this clever invention." And their response is?
44:00
- Their response is, "If there was a better vacuum cleaner, Hoover and Electrolux and all the existing people would have done it."
44:06
- I love that you started our conversation that, "History repeats." - Mm-hmm.
44:09
- The way I say is like, And so, I think history rhymes, but human nature is very constant, and this idea of "No, I can't possibly imagine a future that's different from our present-" - Mm-hmm. ...
44:21
-just for some reason, the mass majority of humans just cannot do that- - Mm-hmm. ...
44:26
-extra step in the thought process. And obviously, - Well...
44:29
- I think you're gifted with that.
44:30
- And there's an assumption that experts do things correctly or in the most clever.
44:35
- What you learned from Jeremy Fry is ridiculous. - Fry, it is not true. - Yeah, it's not true.
44:39
- And there's a great line in the book where it's like, "Jeremy Fry ridiculed experts." - Yes. Yeah.
44:43
Well, no, he wasn't that rude.
44:46
But I mean, yes, he said, "Don't trust an expert." Yeah. Again, a very old idea.
44:49
Andrew Carnegie said the same thing.
44:52
Henry Ford said the same thing.
44:53
This is happening a hundred and seven years- - Gone. ...
44:55
-before you were trying to make your vacuum cleaner.
44:56
- And you know where it was repeated? - Where? - It was during COVID. - Yeah.
44:59
- We're following the science. - Yeah.
45:01
- We're listening to what the scientists say.
45:04
And I said, "Listen to what the scientists say, but don't do everything they say," you know? - Yeah. - Apply common sense.
45:12
- This is something interesting, because this is one thing I don't think I understand, at least your thought process.
45:17
Now, you're kicked out, you lose your patent, you lose-- How long?
45:22
Was it five years that you were working on the Ballbarrow? - Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
45:25
-So, you did seven years on the Sea Truck, then another five years, - Mm-hmm. Yeah.
45:28
and now you're like, "Okay."
45:29
Why was there another product?
45:29
You knew you wanted to invent.
45:33
You knew you wanted-- I think invent more than manufacture.
45:36
I think now you love manufacturing once you became one.
45:38
But you were an inventor for- - Well, no, no, I was a manufacturer.
45:42
And a full manufacturer with the Sea Truck and with the Ballbarrow.
45:46
But at the beginning of the vacuum cleaner, you wanted to just invent - Yes. - and license. - Yes. I thought that, yes.
45:50
I thought, "Well, I've done all that.
45:53
Why can't I just invent and design things and license them to other people?"
45:57
Like an author writes a book, and someone else sells it.
46:00
Which is surprising to me because you clearly liked control.
46:05
You don't want to rely on other people. - A bad decision. - Oh, okay. - I knew it. - It was a bad decision. No, it was a bad idea. - Okay. - But...
46:13
- Because you have to worry about what's going on in that other person's-- And then there's like, horror stories that you're trying to sell these licenses. - Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
46:19
- And we can talk about this.
46:20
In the books-- Because, like, you might have one guy that's really enthusiastic, and you come back two months later, and he's Gone. - gone. Yeah.
46:26
And someone else probably thinks the opposite. It was a nightmare.
46:29
And I was becoming a lawyer because I was doing license agreements all the time and then worrying about what happens when they cancel it and all that sort of thing.
46:37
- What came to mind when you mentioned earlier the mistake that you thought your partners in the Ballbarrow had, where they went and chased this guy down in lawsuits? - Mm-hmm.
46:43
- Right before he passed away, unfortunately, I got to spend three hours at Charlie Munger's house.
46:48
And it's me and two other young entrepreneurs, - Mm-hmm.
46:50
and he was just giving us advice for three hours.
46:52
And one thing, he's just like, "Don't waste your time with lawsuits."
46:54
He's like, "Anytime I got screwed over by people," he's like, "I didn't sue them.
46:57
I just realized that you can't do a good deal with a bad person, and I just moved on.
47:01
He's like, "The lawyers are going to suck you dry.
47:03
It's a distraction from- - Mm-hmm. ... -your main business."
47:04
"Like, you just have to keep moving on."
47:06
So now you go, "Okay, I'm going to do the vacuum cleaner."
47:10
You immediately thought of Jeremy Fry, or you had a different way initially to start this business?
47:16
- Because I'd been having directors and investors who knew nothing about business, Yeah.
47:22
I thought I'd go back to someone who I really enjoyed working with and who clearly understood about starting businesses, and someone enthusiastic about it, like Michael Dell.
47:31
- The five years that you since left his employment, - Mm-hmm.
47:34
- you still had a relationship with him? - Oh, yes.
47:35
Yeah, no, he was still a friend, yeah. - Okay. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Okay. - Yeah.
47:39
- And so you go to talk to him, and he gets it immediately?
47:41
- Yes, gets it immediately.
47:43
I actually had two ideas, but he and I were both more attracted to the vacuum cleaner.
47:48
- What was the other idea?
47:48
- The other one was-- I mean, they now have it, but when you sand something, the dust used to go everywhere. - Yeah.
47:55
So, I had a device that collected it in a bag, funnily enough, or a little cyclone, while you were sanding something or drilling something.
48:04
I mean, it exists now, but when I started 50 years ago, whenever it was, it didn't exist.
48:10
But we decided that wasn't, you know, big time.
48:14
It was a sort of peripheral thing.
48:16
So, we wanted to do something important.
48:17
- And then whose idea was it, "Let's not focus on manufacturing, let's try to create a working prototype, and then take the licensing route?" Was it you or Jeremy?
48:26
- I think it was both of us.
48:27
I mean, both of us had been manufacturers, he much more than me.
48:31
And we both said, "Look, we're really inventors, engineers. Let's just do that bit.
48:37
And if the invention is good enough, surely people will license it." Huh!
48:43
- And then this is where we now- - Delusion. Yeah.
48:46
You have to deal with other humans that are very difficult. - Not just humans.
48:50
So, now this is the point, this is what I talked about, where this book changed my life, because this is the point where you have an idea, you have the stubbornness of a mule. Mm-hmm. You have an obsession.
49:01
I have a lot of these same traits.
49:02
I think you have them, obviously, to a greater degree, and maybe we'll see how my life plays out.
49:06
But now this is the Coach House, right?
49:06
And so for America, I had to look this up.
49:10
I was like, "What the hell is a Coach House?"
49:12
It's actually like, I heard in other interviews, it's like the garage for Steve Jobs. - Yes, exactly.
49:15
- It's like, "I'm working in the garage." - Yeah.
49:17
- So, we call it a Coach House. Do you have any savings? Are you in debt?
49:21
What is your financial- - No, no, I'm in debt. I'm in debt.
49:24
I got into debt when I was a student.
49:26
- Do you not understand how unusual that idea is?
49:29
"I have no money, I'm in debt, let me do this other super risky thing that I..." - Mm-hmm.
49:34
- You don't even have a working prototype yet. - No. No.
49:35
No, it's just an idea, really.
49:39
I have a little cardboard one.
49:39
Take me in your mindset then.
49:43
What do you think was driving you?
49:44
Were you anger, like, the desire to prove yourself, the love of the product?
49:48
What was actually happening at that point?
49:50
That is an unusual decision to make, a decision that your entire empire now rests upon. -Hmm. Hmm.
49:54
That's an incredible time in your life. - Hmm.
49:56
Well, I saw a problem with a product that everybody uses every day, a vital product to clean their homes.
50:05
And as a user, I hated it, because they have this bag that clogs, and then you have to go and buy another bag, and so on.
50:12
But more than anything, it's the performance that's lousy.
50:15
I mean, if you have a | 100-watt light bulb, it's supposed to give 100 watts all the time.
50:20
But this vacuum cleaner light bulb starts off with 100 watts and ends up at 20 watts pretty quickly.
50:24
So, it's deeply unsatisfactory.
50:28
So I thought if I can solve that problem, I thought, if I could solve that problem, other people would buy that product. It's no substance. It's just an idea.
50:39
- What was the chance that you gave yourself at success that you could actually solve the problem?
50:41
You were pretty self-confident you could? - No. - We're getting crazier. No, of course not.
50:49
You don't know you can solve it. - Yeah.
50:52
- But you've just got to try.
50:52
And that's true today, you know.
50:56
When we're trying to solve, we don't know we can solve.
50:58
We don't know that we can make a motor go at 130,000 RPM- - Okay. ...
51:02
-when existing motors only go 15,000 RPM.
51:04
- I want to talk about motors.
51:04
So don't let me forget that.
51:06
- You know, you don't know. You just got to do it.
51:09
- Okay, so I want to talk about motors. - Yeah.
51:10
- Don't let me forget about that.
51:13
That's like, one of the most-- You inadvertently said one of the most inspiring things.
51:16
Like, "No, I didn't think I was going to succeed. No, I have no money. No, I'm in debt." - Yeah.
51:19
- It's just a simple, flaky idea that, "It's intolerable that the product that Exactly.
51:24
I'm buying does not work.
51:24
I'm just going to make a working version."
51:26
"And if I make a working version, other people will buy."
51:28
- And to that point, you're right to focus in on that moment, because ideas are so fragile, and they're easily knocked away by anybody.
51:39
- That's why experts are dangerous. - Everybody.
51:40
- It's why experts are dangerous. - Experts. Experts are dangerous.
51:42
Henry Ford said in his autobiography, which I think was published in like, 1910, "If I ever wanted to sabotage my competitors, I'd fill their ranks with experts.
51:50
They know so much about why something won't work, they'll get no work done." - Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
51:54
You have a very-- Your philosophy and his philosophy, there's a lot of overlap- - Mm-hmm. and echoes to that.
51:58
- History repeats itself. - Human nature does.
52:01
- If you ask people what they want, they want a faster horse, you know?
52:04
That repeats itself time and time again, many times every day.
52:09
- Well, you made a good point.
52:09
I heard another, and you said in the book, and I heard in other interviews, it's just like, you're asking people to invent the future. That's not their job.
52:14
- Yes, you don't [unintelligible]. - That's your job. - Yeah. - What are you doing? - Yeah.
52:17
- Let's focus back in on this very important point, or time in your life, that you mentioned.
52:22
So, you set up in the Coach House.
52:22
You're in debt, you have no more money.
52:27
So, how are you funding things?
52:27
I know your wife is like, selling art, but do you immediately go to the bank, take out another mortgage?
52:32
Like, what do you actually do? - Exactly that.
52:35
I went to the bank to take out a mortgage, and Jeremy Fry guaranteed part of it.
52:42
So, we said we need, I don't know, whatever, £50,000 or something, to last two years.
52:47
So, he put up a guarantee for £25,000, and I put up a guarantee for £25,000.
52:53
So, that got the thing started.
52:55
- Why could you do it for so cheap, because your only expense was your time? - Yes. - Okay.
52:59
- Yes, I'm working at home.
53:01
My only expense is my time and a few cheap materials.
53:04
I couldn't buy a lathe or equipment. - Okay.
53:06
- I was doing it all with little Black & Deckers and things like that by hand.
53:11
I was making cyclones by rolling them in rollers.
53:15
I went and bought some antique metal rollers down at a junk store for £25, and I could roll cyclones.
53:22
They're a funny shape, like a sort of upside-down cone, and solder them together.
53:28
So, I was doing everything by hand, but I could do that. I mean, it works.
53:32
You can do things for nothing.
53:35
You don't need to spend a lot of money.
53:37
- And you thought, "I'll be able to figure this out in two years." - Yes. - It took how long? - Five years. And I'm still doing it.
53:50
You're not under great financial strain at the moment.
53:54
Actually, I thought I'd do it quicker than two years.
53:56
I thought I'd do it within a year.
53:58
But I discovered there were all sorts of problems.
54:00
And also, with almost any idea, you find that when you start to apply for a patent, that people have tried to do it before and patented things.
54:09
There's very, very few patents we file where- - And you...
54:11
absolutely-- You had to have something that was patentable, right? Because you- - Yes. Oh, yes, yes.
54:15
- Okay, because there's no- Well, because we were going to try and license it, - Yes.
54:18
- so we had to have a good, strong patent. - Okay.
54:21
- Which we ended up having a good, strong patent, because we made an interesting discovery by accident.
54:28
Because if you're doing enough experiments, you're trying to be logical in what you're doing, but sometimes something occurs that's not logical, and it works.
54:43
So, you've just got to keep trying. Luck will happen to you.
54:47
- This is why you're such a big believer in the Edisonian principle of design, where, - Mm-hmm.
54:51
- I think in the book, you say that the biggest problem you have with young people, even though you like working with them, is teaching them, "One change at a time." - Mm-hmm. - "Record what happens."
54:59
Their instinct is, "Come in here, something's not working. Let's change 15 things."
55:03
And your point is, "How do you know what of the 15 things you have done, have changed?"
55:07
So, at this point, you're doing-- You have thick-- Like, I know a lot about you because I've been studying you for nine years.
55:14
You've been working with your hands your entire life.
55:16
Are you still working with your hands? - No, not much. - Okay. - No, no, no.
55:19
- Your fingers are- - They're useless.
55:20
I can't do anything with them now, they're...
55:22
- Yeah, but this is like somebody that, you know, lifts a lot of weights, but with their hands.
55:26
I'm like, "I was not prepared for how..." - Yeah.
55:29
- Like, your hands are huge, and your fingers are-- They don't fit the rest of your body.
55:33
- No, they're a workman's hands.
55:36
- In fact, you know this- - Yes, they're not- ...
55:37
-wretched fingerprint thing at airports? It doesn't work for me. They're worn thin. There's no line there.
55:43
And it's fun, actually, working with your hands and your brain.
55:46
It's something that schools despise, for some reason.
55:49
- This is going to sound really weird to you, maybe it won't, but because my entire work is all digital, right? I read a book. I sit down.
55:55
I record into a microphone that's digital, it connects to your computer, it goes out into the world.
56:01
I don't, you know, I just see numbers go up on a screen.
56:03
It's just, I'm by myself the whole time. - Mm-hmm.
56:07
- One thing that I do, which is kind of working with my hands, is I've insisted on-- I edit all the transcripts of every single episode by hand.
56:14
And that is literally me going in there and changing a sentence or a word, or adding punctuation.
56:20
If I ever do anything else, or in addition, even if it's just for fun, it has to be something physical.
56:24
Like I don't want to just have... - Mm-hmm.
56:26
- I feel I'm missing out on something.
56:27
And I'm trying to approximate that by, like, physically touching, you know, pieces of paper.
56:32
This is why the books look like they do, and I don't read digital copies. - Hmm. Mm-hmm.
56:35
-Like, I sit down with a pen, a ruler, you know, Post-it notes, and scissors. - Mm-hmm.
56:41
- Like, I feel like it's like arts and crafts over here, - Mm-hmm.
56:43
- but there's just some weird satisfaction I get out of working with my hands.
56:47
My hands don't look like yours, though - Mm-hmm. ...
56:49
-from like, five decades of this.
56:50
- I mean, it's something that's slightly despised at school, people who are good with their hands, who can mend cars and do plumbing, and so on.
56:57
- But the entire world that we inhabit is physical. - Well, yes, exactly.
56:59
I mean, that's how man started.
57:02
- Somebody built this, and, like, the building that we're in. - Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
57:05
No, but we want to be intellectuals and not get involved in the dirty work.
57:09
And it's a great shame, because I think that's why we've lost, as countries, the ability to make things.
57:13
Manufacturing is vanishing.
57:17
For manufacturing made America great, it made Britain great.
57:20
- It's the Industrial Revolution.
57:20
- It makes any country that's good at it great. - Right, yeah. - Mm-hmm. - History again. - Yeah, yeah.
57:23
- Talk about history repeating. Hey, why do you think... - Yeah, yeah.
57:26
I love what you said-- We're going to go back to this, but you have this great thing that, growing up in Britain at the time you did, they still remember Churchill and World War II and everything else.
57:36
Well, one thing that we learned and we were taught was like, 'We're not the weak ones.'
57:39
Like, we can actually persevere through unbelievably difficult times where it looks like the end is near and not give up, Mm-hmm.
57:45
and actually come on the other side as the victor."
57:47
I think that was very important. - Mm-hmm.
57:48
- So, you borrowed the money, you're doing one prototype a day? Two?
57:54
- Yeah, one or two a day.
57:56
Yeah, day after day after day.
57:58
- And you say in the book, "I can celebrate now because my company, we're doing like 300 million a year," I think, when the bookends or something like that.
58:07
"But I'd be lying to you if I said that there weren't days where I'd fail all day long, go in the house covered in dust and dirt, - Mm-hmm.
58:15
- and essentially, like, get into bed thinking I may just go on building prototype after prototype after prototype and never succeeding forever."
58:24
What was your inner monologue during that time?
58:27
Like, how were you convincing yourself not to quit? - Hmm.
58:29
Well, there's hope, a thing called hope. - Okay. - Expectation.
58:34
I don't mean expecting something to work.
58:37
I mean the excitement of going in the next day and seeing if the next experiment is better, or why it is better, or where it's taking me?
58:46
So it's a journey of discovery, which is interesting.
58:51
I mean, it doesn't sound, from the outside, it sounds very boring and worrying, and all that sort of thing.
58:55
And true, it was worrying.
58:58
The debt was getting bigger all the time.
59:01
But I was getting a little closer, a little closer, and a little closer, and a little closer.
59:05
Hadn't yet made it work, and I hadn't got a product, but I was actually enjoying the process, even getting covered in dust, because our engineers do their own tests and build their own prototypes.
59:20
And because there's something funny about the process of actually making the prototype yourself that you learn, and when it fails, it may have been something you noticed as you were gluing it together or machining a part, that sort of visceral experience makes you get forward.
59:43
Whereas if someone else builds a prototype, and someone else does the test, and you look at the test results, you haven't got that same involvement, that same utter understanding of it. - The understanding.
59:54
Again, quoting Charlie Munger, his whole point was that he thought that the spreading of the theory of comparative advantage is actually really dangerous, because, yeah, you can outsource like, "Oh, this country over here can manufacture, and we'll do finance." - Mm-hmm.
1:00:08
- He's like, but there's knowledge in trial and error, and the country that is doing - Mm-hmm.
1:00:14
the manufacturing is actually learning at a way faster rate than you, because- - Yeah. ...
1:00:17
-all day long they're just doing trial and error. So it's not... - Yeah.
1:00:20
- He's like, the problem with people that come with the theories is the first-order effect is fine.
1:00:24
You're not considering, you're just ignoring the second, third, fourth, and fifth-order effects, and - Yeah.
1:00:28
- what's going to happen over a long period of time. - Yeah.
1:00:30
- I've never heard anybody-- It was in this book called "Poor Charlie's Almanack."
1:00:33
I was like, "I've never even- - Yeah. ...
1:00:34
-thought of that before."
1:00:35
I went to school for business, and they teach you all these things.
1:00:36
I'm like, "This is stupid.
1:00:36
I think Munger's actually right about this." - Yeah, no.
1:00:39
No, experiencing the whole thing is absolutely critical.
1:00:44
- But were you taking it a day at a time?
1:00:44
Did you allow yourself to think how far...
1:00:50
Was it literally just what was in front of you?
1:00:52
Or were you thinking about what this is going to be a month from now, two years from now, during this time?
1:00:58
- Well, I was imagining that if I can make it work, that I could then go and show it to the existing manufacturers of these flawed vacuum cleaners with horrible bags in them, smelly, noisy, dusty, expensive bags, that someone would snap it up.
1:01:14
That's what was in my mind.
1:01:18
And it wouldn't necessarily make me rich, but it might get me out of debt.
1:01:22
- Money and finance is not a driver to you?
1:01:26
- No, no, I have to survive and live, of course.
1:01:29
And money can sometimes be a good determinant of whether what you've done is successful or not.
1:01:35
Not always, sometimes it's just not.
1:01:38
So, I don't necessarily develop products to make enormous commercial success. It's nice to do that.
1:01:45
But sometimes you do it because you want to do it.
1:01:49
It might be a small success.
1:01:51
- I think there's a very simple genius to your approach in company building, and I think this is why I keep recommending your books over and over again, because there is just a simple, beautiful, elegant genius to the way that you think.
1:02:02
So this is- - The hair dryer is probably a good example of that.
1:02:05
- I used it this morning. - Oh. It's excellent.
1:02:08
Because, you know, we were making vacuum cleaners, and cooling products, and heating products, and so on.
1:02:13
And we had done this tiny motor, and we thought we could make an even smaller one.
1:02:19
If we'd done that motor, we can make an even smaller one, and that would make a great hair dryer instead of those bulky great motors they have at the moment.
1:02:27
So, that was the start of it.
1:02:28
But everyone- - And these are discovered by trial and error? - Yes.
1:02:33
Well, very early on in the vacuum cleaner business, we were buying these big, heavy vacuum cleaner motors.
1:02:37
Haven't got one here, but I mean, they're big, you know.
1:02:40
And they go at 30,000 RPM, and the theory is, the faster you make a motor go, the smaller it can be, the fewer materials it can have, and the more electrically efficient it is.
1:02:53
So, quite early on, we realized that we needed to develop a new type of electric motor, because electric motors and this sort of thing haven't really changed for 150 years.
1:03:04
It's the same Faraday idea.
1:03:08
And rather cheekily, as people who don't make electric motors, we thought, "Let's make a new type of motor."
1:03:16
So I recruited some people from British universities, who were academics who knew about electric motors, and we started as a non-electric motor manufacturer developing our own motor.
1:03:28
It took a long time, it took 10 years.
1:03:30
- 10 years before you had success on that too? - Yes, yeah, yeah.
1:03:32
And you can say we were being stupid and all that sort of thing, but no one had done this before.
1:03:36
No one had made a motor go 140,000 RPM. - Let's jump.
1:03:42
We're going to jump back and forth between- - The dentist drill, but that only lasts a few seconds.
1:03:48
- So, let's jump back and forth between the history of building a company and what you're doing now. - Yeah, yeah.
1:03:52
- When you're thinking about the products you're making now, are you starting with-- Because you seem to be, in my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, one of the best companies in the world at making motors, electric motors. - Yes, yeah.
1:04:05
-And so I feel that now you're like, "What else-- We have this skill set, we have-- The company is 45 years old, something like that.
1:04:13
We have this, you know, world-class skill set.
1:04:15
Are there other products that we find deficient, in need of renewal, that we can apply our ability and world-class talent at building electric motors to?"
1:04:25
Is that a process of product development for you? - It can be. - Okay.
1:04:29
- And we had the brilliant idea of doing an electric car. - Yeah.
1:04:35
- Because we- - It's sitting in your...
1:04:37
- We make electric motors, we make filtration and cooling devices, and we're developing batteries.
1:04:43
- Let's talk about the car.
1:04:45
Let's talk about the car.
1:04:46
So, we thought, "Oh, we should do an electric car." - When was this? - 2014. - Okay.
1:04:53
- And I looked at what the industries were predicting, and they said 2% electric cars by 2030.
1:05:00
And I thought, "They've got that wrong. That can't be right."
1:05:03
So we started developing an electric car.
1:05:05
And we're developing batteries, by the way, new technology, we still are.
1:05:08
So the batteries- - Wait, you manufacture your own batteries too? - Not yet. Not yet. - But you want to. - We want to, yeah.
1:05:14
What a surprise, you want control over that.
1:05:16
- I'd love- - I'd understand that.
1:05:17
New technology ones, not ordinary ones. - Yeah.
1:05:20
- So we said, "We're developing batteries with electric motors are one of our things.
1:05:26
Air treatment is another one of our things."
1:05:28
That's pretty much an electric car.
1:05:32
So, we started developing one.
1:05:35
And then, we got to 2017, and Dieselgate happened.
1:05:39
The first three or four years, Tesla was everything.
1:05:42
Tesla was doing everything very successfully.
1:05:46
But no one was taking any notice of that.
1:05:48
They all thought Tesla was a flash in the pan or something.
1:05:52
They were ignoring it because it was such a different thing for them to do.
1:05:56
They make internal combustion engines, not electric motors and batteries.
1:06:00
So, the Dieselgate changed all that.
1:06:03
They realized, partly from a PR point of view, but also this horrific reaction to Dieselgate, that they had to get into electric cars.
1:06:12
So, all, most of the big manufacturers immediately jumped into electric cars and made them.
1:06:17
And they're making a terrific loss on them. - Explain.
1:06:21
- But electric cars are a very expensive things to make.
1:06:23
Batteries are incredibly expensive.
1:06:25
The electronics involved in the batteries are expensive.
1:06:28
Their batteries are very heavy.
1:06:30
So, it's a very different type of car and very expensive to make.
1:06:35
Much more expensive than the internal combustion engine.
1:06:37
They were selling them at a loss for a complicated reason.
1:06:42
Car manufacturers' emissions, which are controlled by law, are based on their overall emissions from their range of cars.
1:06:51
So if they had- - Oh, not the individual model?
1:06:51
- Not the individual model.
1:06:54
So if they had a model which didn't emit anything, they could go on making big gas-guzzling vehicles on which they make a lot of money.
1:07:03
So they're prepared to lose money on the electric car to make the money on the big gas-guzzling SUV or whatever it is.
1:07:11
But Tesla and us were just electric vehicle manufacturers.
1:07:19
And Tesla's brilliant, and 30 billion dollars has gone into a huge investment.
1:07:23
I'm little company on my own, and I have faced a very uncertain future trying to sell an electric car in that sort of setup.
1:07:34
And, if you have fairly low volume and you're a new manufacturer, all your costs are 30% higher because you're not buying very many seats from the seat manufacturer or very many tires from the tire manufacturer and so on.
1:07:48
So, all your costs are much higher.
1:07:48
And we knew that- You had a series of structural disadvantages. - Huge disadvantages. - Yeah.
1:07:54
And Tesla overcame them through sheer scale and might and investment.
1:07:59
But we didn't have that sort of money.
1:07:59
We couldn't take that sort of risk, so we stopped it.
1:08:04
And how much did you spend on R&D for that?
1:08:07
Well, we spent about 750,000.
1:08:10
- Seven hundred- - Million, million. - Oh. - 750 million dollars.
1:08:14
I keep working in pounds.
1:08:14
Half a million, half a billion pounds. - Okay, so 750 million. - Yeah.
1:08:19
And you have-- Do you have the actual prototype sitting in your headquarters, I think, in Singapore? Yeah.
1:08:25
Oh, yeah, we've got one there.
1:08:26
Is there anyone that you can at least drive?
1:08:27
- Or they just don't exist? - No.
1:08:29
There was one we could drive very slowly, but health and safety meant we couldn't take it out.
1:08:32
We built one of the final sort of - prototype- - Where's that one?
1:08:36
- Is that the one in Singapore? - Yeah, but-- No.
1:08:36
No, that's a model in Singapore.
1:08:38
No, we've got it in one of our hangars on our airfield. Okay. Yeah.
1:08:44
Do you ever get in it anymore and - just drive around? - No, no, no. It's too painful?
1:08:48
Would you get in a car that cost you 750 million?
1:08:52
Everybody said, "You must have learned a lot from that experience."
1:08:55
And the answer is I learned absolutely nothing. - What do you mean?
1:08:59
- I mean, it was fun to do, but we- - It was fun to do?
1:09:04
- Yeah, it was fun to do, and half the people were snapped up by other manufacturers, and half the people working on it came to work on and do - vacuum cleaners and other things.
1:09:13
- Oh, I didn't even think of it emotionally-- Think about it, if you worked on something for a decade, it ain't going anywhere.
1:09:19
- They must feel- - Yeah, well, yeah.
1:09:21
Yeah, maybe not quite a decade.
1:09:21
- Five or six years, yeah. - Five or six years?
1:09:23
No, it was an awful thing to do.
1:09:27
And sadly, we didn't really learn anything from it. Yeah.
1:09:33
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1:10:59
What is an example of you taking the existing skillset that Dyson has built up over many decades and applying it successfully to a new product, then?
1:11:09
That did not come from-- That's the actual sequence of events.
1:11:13
That you didn't identify the product first.
1:11:13
You're just like, "Well, we have the skillset.
1:11:16
What can we apply it to?"
1:11:18
Did you do that with hair dryers?
1:11:18
What's like, an example of that? Yes.
1:11:21
I think the way we approached the car was slightly dangerous. Okay.
1:11:26
Because we were saying, "Look, we've got these skill sets."
1:11:30
- And you were trying to match it.
1:11:30
- And we would say, "Oh, well, it looks like it would go very well in a car," without really saying, is that going to be a successful product?
1:11:39
Is it going to be a breakthrough product?
1:11:41
Well, it might have been a breakthrough product if we had managed to do the battery.
1:11:45
And certainly, our motors we developed were very efficient motors.
1:11:49
And an electric car is all about efficiency.
1:11:51
For aerodynamic efficiency, drive major efficiency and so that you can have better, smaller batteries.
1:11:59
- Power consumption is a big thing. - Mm-hmm.
1:12:02
Sixth to a quarter of the power is taken up by air conditioning and heating, for example.
1:12:08
So if you can make that more efficient, you can make your car go further.
1:12:11
So it's all really about how far you can go on a battery.
1:12:15
How do you come up with a new product?
1:12:15
I know you're very secretive, you don't talk about things you haven't released yet- No, it's a very good question.
1:12:19
I didn't answer it properly. Yeah, there's two ways.
1:12:24
One is you realize you have a technology and you can make a hair dryer.
1:12:29
How many of these do you make now? - Motors?
1:12:31
- Oh we've made about 150 million of them. - A year though now?
1:12:34
- A year, we make about 30 million a year.
1:12:37
And it's very interesting, in the book you said that companies, other companies, try to get you to make motors for them and you adamantly refused.
1:12:44
- Is that still correct? - That's correct.
1:12:45
And I love what you said because you want your engineers' focus exclusively on your own products.
1:12:51
It's the importance of focus as opposed to retrofitting your technology to somebody else's product in somebody else's shop.
1:12:57
It's not a good commercial decision that, by the way. - The one I've taken.
1:12:59
- Yeah, but you are- Because I could have a division that dealt with other people supplying motors to other people, which I'm sure would make money. Okay.
1:13:09
This is very interesting.
1:13:11
I think this is missing in business.
1:13:13
We talked about before we started recording, I had this idea of an anti-business billionaire.
1:13:17
These people that are so obsessed with the quality of the product they're making, that's their number one, they just want to make the best possible product, they do things that may seem irrational because it would improve the quality of the product.
1:13:29
And the point I'd make is because there's, I think you're one of them, there's a series of people I've read about where people like that are just obsessed with making the best product for customers to solve an actual real need and retain control, they wind up with the money anyways.
1:13:44
But that's not the motivator.
1:13:46
So why, explain your rationale, and I think it's the right rationale, but I'm very curious if you can actually articulate it, why do you not set up this other division that you wouldn't have to run that would just make a bunch of money doing this thing? Why don't you do that?
1:14:00
Because that doesn't excite me. Thank you.
1:14:03
You know- People forget the point of life is for living.
1:14:06
I know, that's making money.
1:14:06
And it's developing a technology and coming out with different radical products, that's what interests me. Not making money per se.
1:14:15
How long have you had the discipline to adhere to that?
1:14:15
I'm just following excitement, I'm following curiosity, - I'm following interest. - Mm-hmm. How?
1:14:22
How long have you been like that forever? I think so, yes. Yes. Yeah.
1:14:24
I'm very single-minded and not being distracted by things.
1:14:31
And actually, it's really important that because when you start running a business or doing things, you have too much to do. There's too much to do.
1:14:43
So you have to make, all the time you have to make a choice, what's the most important thing to do?
1:14:49
If you get to be a big business, that's still important. Say more about that.
1:14:54
Well, if you get big, there's a tendency to think you've lots of people, so you can do everything.
1:15:00
But you can't, because you can't do everything.
1:15:01
You can't do everything well, and you probably can't do everything anyway.
1:15:07
So the important thing is to decide what's really the most important thing and just do that.
1:15:12
And there are going to be things you don't do, and there's going to be some failures because you're not doing things, but if you're doing something really well, then you'll be okay.
1:15:21
How do you go about deciding what's the most important thing for you? Well, that's the fun. That's fun.
1:15:26
I mean, you decide the most important thing, and that's an important decision.
1:15:34
And you say, "Well, I haven't got time to do the other things, I won't do it."
1:15:38
Will one of those kill me? I don't know. Probably not.
1:15:41
So I'll concentrate on the thing I really want to do, which I think is the right thing to do.
1:15:46
Is single-mindedness and focus the same thing to you?
1:15:49
- Or do you mean different things?
1:15:49
- Yes, it's the same thing. - It's the same thing. - Same thing.
1:15:51
And if your brain isn't very big, which mine isn't, it's a much better way to run your life is just to concentrate on one thing at a time.
1:16:00
But you have multiple product lines.
1:16:03
Yeah, that's stretching my brain a bit. Yeah.
1:16:05
But yes, and I'm learning to manage that in myself.
1:16:10
And I've got lots of wonder people around me, helping me, including my son now.
1:16:14
I know you did the vacuum cleaner first, and you did the vacuum cleaner as the only product at Dyson for how long? - Eight years probably. - Okay. - Yes, yeah. - So you were focused.
1:16:21
And then was the washing machine the second?
1:16:24
The washing machine came on quite early, after about four or five years. But it didn't work... - It did work.
1:16:29
It worked but- - It worked very well. Don't say that to me.
1:16:34
No, and I made another mistake with that, which was that I'd been making vacuum cleaners at about 300 dollars, 200 dollars, and 300 dollars.
1:16:45
The washing machine was 1200 dollars, 1300 dollars at the start.
1:16:50
So it was more expensive than other people's washing machines.
1:16:55
Yeah, but the vacuum cleaner was more expensive than other vacuum cleaners, though.
1:16:57
Yeah, I wasn't learning from history.
1:16:57
And my marketing people said, "If you make it cheaper, you'll sell a lot more." All right.
1:17:07
So, for the last time in my life, I listened to them.
1:17:11
And marketing people be getting on selling things, not decide what the product should be or how much it should be sold for.
1:17:21
So I listened to them and we didn't sell any more, we just lost more money.
1:17:25
And the other directors, the non-executive directors, said, "You've got to stop that because we're losing money at it."
1:17:32
Actually, if I'd been on my own, I'd have probably gone on with it and put the price up.
1:17:37
But sometimes you have to listen to other people, and they were probably right.
1:17:41
So we put it behind us and got on with what we were doing.
1:17:44
They're still in operation, though. Oh, yeah. I use them.
1:17:46
I mean- So, you have your own - Dyson washing machine? - Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's great.
1:17:52
And people have now copied a lot of the ideas, like the big door.
1:17:56
If you're trying to put a duvet in a tiny little hole.
1:18:00
So, and it was very expensive to make actually.
1:18:04
And I should have learned my lesson from that.
1:18:06
Because it had two drums, it had two motors and a gearbox.
1:18:09
It had a lot of things other washing machines don't have.
1:18:12
But it did a very good job.
1:18:12
It was a very good washing machine.
1:18:15
It begs the question, are there any other Dyson products that you own that are not available to consumers?
1:18:21
- What else have you made for yourself?
1:18:21
- I'll keep quiet about this.
1:18:23
- I'll keep you quiet about it. - Tell me after, please.
1:18:26
I want to hear about this.
1:18:28
I want to go back to this, because I do think it's one of the most important things.
1:18:31
The way I just described this is like this crazy experience I've been on, which I'm probably at the-- when I'm done, probably going to read more biographies and autobiographies of entrepreneurs and founders and inventors than anybody else in the world.
1:18:42
And, everybody's always like, "Give me like a top 10 list," or, "Break it, can you condense down what you've learned so far?"
1:18:49
And I was like, well, if I can condense it down to one word, how different these people are to most people, the most people in the mass of humanity, it's focus. It's one word.
1:18:58
It's like they're unbelievably focused.
1:19:02
I still, if you don't mind me just asking another question, just to see if you have anything more to say about this, because it's something I'm obsessed with it as well, how do you figure out what to focus on for you?
1:19:13
That's a very good question.
1:19:16
I think it's something which you believe could work, and that's a breakthrough.
1:19:21
It's something completely different.
1:19:24
It's going to do such a job much better, and that's what you think.
1:19:28
- But, of course, you can only think it.
1:19:28
- But what are you following there? Is it intuition?
1:19:31
Is it just, "I can't get thisoff of my mind"?
1:19:33
- What is actually happening? - It's partly intuition.
1:19:36
But I don't believe in intuition is feeling or guesswork. Oh.
1:19:43
- I think in- - You got to elaborate on that.
1:19:46
Intuition is much more interesting because it's all sorts of influences.
1:19:51
It could be history, it could be all sorts of things that form an opinion that you define as intuition. But actually, it's not.
1:20:03
It's a whole lot of hundreds, thousands of things you've experienced which help you make a decision or give you an insight or give you hope.
1:20:13
What do you think is guiding you to focus on the right thing? That's the hard thing.
1:20:17
Ultimately, it's intuition.
1:20:20
But intuition isn't just airy-fairy.
1:20:26
It's not a feeling, you know.
1:20:31
Your brain has been fed with hundreds of different things. Mm-hmm.
1:20:36
And from that, you make a decision.
1:20:39
And you can't rationalize it and say, "Oh, that's that, and therefore, this equals that."
1:20:45
It's an intuition that I could be right, I could be wrong, but I think I'm going to back that I'm right about this.
1:20:53
And then you've got to make it work. Yeah. But it's very fragile.
1:20:58
That early idea, I came back to that with the vacuum cleaner, the Cyclone idea.
1:21:00
It's a very fragile idea. You can blow it away. It's worth nothing.
1:21:08
And they tried to your - partners at Bulbar tried to blow it away - Yes. Oh, everybody tried.
1:21:11
My friends tried to blow it away.
1:21:13
- What on earth are you doing?
1:21:13
- But it took hold of you right away? - Yes. Yes.
1:21:16
- And then, did your confidence deepen as you get down the path?
1:21:20
Or were you pretty adamant, like, "No, I'm not going to give up until I solve this problem," - at the beginning? - It's that. - At the beginning. Wow. - Yeah.
1:21:25
I got the bug, and I'm going to go on.
1:21:26
I'm going to make it work.
1:21:29
And, this took five thousand pounds, much longer than I thought it would and all that.
1:21:34
So then I got deeper and deeper into debt.
1:21:34
But, I was going to make it work. I got a rat by the tail.
1:21:40
I'm not going to let it go.
1:21:40
I've got to make it work. I've got to.
1:21:46
And the bigger the debt got, I suppose, the pressure became greater and greater.
1:21:52
The pressure did, but you had to have lows in confidence and doubt throughout that period.
1:21:58
Well, of course, I had doubts - and made it work. - Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:22:01
You can't pretend you don't have doubts.
1:22:04
Were you talking to anybody about this?
1:22:05
Deirdre, my wife, and nobody else. No. Not even Jeremy? No.
1:22:10
No, no actually, I bought him out. - Let's go back to that. Okay.
1:22:17
- Which is kind of important.
1:22:17
- Can you explain why you bought him out?
1:22:19
And this was after failing for, if I remember correctly, - after failing to try to license it? - Yes.
1:22:24
The first successful license was Japan, right? No.
1:22:28
- The first successful one- - Oh, yeah. The one that made money.
1:22:30
You were making, like, 70,000 a year. - Yes. Yes.
1:22:31
- And they sold it not even to-- You weren't even sure they used it because it was like pink, right? No, they did use it. They did.
1:22:37
I thought you said in the book that they may have just been there for like, some kind of art. Maybe. No.
1:22:41
They didn't sell very many, but they did sell some.
1:22:45
And I never discovered how many they sold because they were very secretive about it.
1:22:49
But they did pay me the minimum royalties.
1:22:51
That's when you bought Jeremy out? Yes. We had a big lawsuit. - Is this the Amway? - Yes. Oh, God. And he hated lawsuits.
1:22:59
So when that started, he wanted to get out.
1:23:03
Was that contentious between you?
1:23:05
- Did it damage your relationship? - No, no. Not at all. No.
1:23:07
And we remained very good friends afterwards.
1:23:09
He just said, "I hate lawsuits.
1:23:11
And my financial advisor thinks the vacuum cleaner is going nowhere."
1:23:14
And he owned 49% of the business.
1:23:17
- So he said I bought him out.
1:23:17
- So what'd you buy him off with? How much money though? 45,000 pounds.
1:23:23
This is another thing we haven't-- - We have- - His children, - they will never forgive me.
1:23:25
- So- I've remained friendly with his children, but they will never forgive me.
1:23:30
I think people will know this, you know, hopefully, in the introduction or whatever the case is, but you own 100% of Dyson. Yes.
1:23:38
It is one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world.
1:23:42
- Well, I don't think it's that, but- - Oh, because I've heard stories. Mm-hmm. That's fine.
1:23:45
We don't have to talk about it.
1:23:48
And you bought out your 49% partner for 45,000 pounds. Mm-hmm. Right.
1:23:54
So what happens-- Now you're on your own. Yeah. Completely on my own.
1:23:59
And you stayed-- I know you have - executive directors and everything.
1:24:01
- I had to fight the lawsuit.
1:24:02
Had to fight that lawsuit with Amway. Yes. For five years. Yes.
1:24:07
Borrowing money, selling actions in the lawsuit, lawyers on contingency, all that type of thing.
1:24:12
And it took five years of my life.
1:24:14
The only income was the drip - of license agreements for that partner? - Yeah. Yes.
1:24:18
A drip of license agreements just kept me going.
1:24:22
At what point did you say, "To hell with it, I'm doing this on my own"?
1:24:25
I mean, not licensing, like, "I'm going to manufacture and control it from soup to nuts." Yes.
1:24:30
It was at the end of the lawsuit, actually.
1:24:34
That's when I decided I'd had enough of this licensing game - and I'm going to do it myself. - But you have no money. And I... No money.
1:24:38
And- I'm sick of traveling because I was traveling to Japan and America all the time and I was just sick of it.
1:24:45
And I got meningitis from it.
1:24:47
- I think from an airplane. - Oh.
1:24:48
So, I thought that I'm going to stop and I'm going to have a little sort of cottage industry making vacuum cleaners in Britain. That was the-- Right. Okay.
1:24:58
But then you have to borrow, I think it was like 600,000 pounds? - Yes. Yeah, right. - For tooling. For the tooling. And you did that how?
1:25:05
Well, I went to various venture capitalists, the sort of people who ought to lend to startups.
1:25:10
And the kind of response I got was, "Well, you know, it's not a very interesting area.
1:25:15
We're investing in restaurants, fast food restaurants at the moment," or, "We're not lending to you because you're an engineer.
1:25:22
If you bring someone from the industry to run it, then we might consider backing it."
1:25:26
Those are the sort of responses I was getting from venture capitalists, as we used to call them, but...
1:25:32
And, so in the end, I went to my local bank, the clearing bank.
1:25:38
And you're putting up as collateral- My house. - Again? - Yes. Okay.
1:25:43
I'm getting quite used to this, - by the way. - Yeah.
1:25:45
Deirdre has to keep signing the awful gray forms for signing away the house. So, yeah, I borrowed...
1:25:53
And they lent me a huge amount of money, actually. I mean, it was 1992.
1:25:57
There was a big housing crisis.
1:26:00
The banks had lots of, you know, returned properties.
1:26:03
- So I said- - Wait, there was a guy.
1:26:05
Is it-- Didn't somebody, like, inside the bank vouch for you?
1:26:09
Lloyds Bank ran a system.
1:26:09
Instead of going to a man sitting in a branch of the bank and borrowing from them, they had a sort of flying doctor who went around businesses.
1:26:20
So, he was a real business expert.
1:26:22
And he didn't work from an office, he just went round people's businesses.
1:26:26
Very interesting man, actually.
1:26:28
And the bank refused his request for the loan, so he went to the ombudsman within the bank and persuaded them to lend me the money.
1:26:39
And it was a crazy thing for them to do, actually.
1:26:41
Because, you know, this guy is setting up a business to make vacuum cleaners to compete with all the big multinationals.
1:26:48
What on earth is he doing living in a little coach house near Bath?
1:26:53
You know, when you think about it, it's completely mad. Yes.
1:26:56
And when we were making a profit and everything was okay, I said to him, "Why did you lend it to us?
1:27:00
You know, why did you go through the hoops to lend me that money?"
1:27:05
Which was such a risky thing to do at a time of deep recession when they'd repossessed, had to repossess so many houses.
1:27:13
He said, "Oh, well, I went home to my mother and my wife, and said, 'What do you think of a vacuum cleaner without a bag?'
1:27:20
And she said, 'Brilliant. Exactly what I want.'"
1:27:23
And he said, "I also saw that you had fought a five-year lawsuit in America, and I saw that you had determination." So I was very lucky.
1:27:31
I mean, it's a real piece of luck.
1:27:34
Do you think that is the key to succeed?
1:27:39
Is determination more important than-- I mean, we talked about focus, but determination is much more important than intelligence. Yes. Yes. Doggedness. Never, never giving up.
1:27:49
Just carrying on and not worrying about what other people are saying.
1:27:52
You know, my friends said, "You're completely mad.
1:27:54
What are you doing spending over everyday in that shed with all that dust around?"
1:27:59
So, most people around you were trying to dissuade you - from what you were doing? - Yes, yes.
1:28:02
Everybody thought I was mad.
1:28:05
How did you receive that feedback or that criticism?
1:28:08
The more I got it, the more encouraged I became, actually.
1:28:08
Because they-- But I don't know.
1:28:14
I remember when I was trying to license it, I went to all the people who are now my competitors, and a lot of others as well, and they all turned it down.
1:28:25
They were quite interested in it but turned it down.
1:28:28
And the more it was turned down, the more I realized I had something.
1:28:33
- You believed you were right. - Yeah. - You had no doubt. - Yeah.
1:28:36
Because they never really gave a good reason.
1:28:40
Well, for the vacuum, the existing manufacturers, there's a great story in the book.
1:28:45
You know, again, I'm going to quote Charlie Munger because he's one of my heroes, he's like, "Never ever think about anything when you should be thinking about the power of incentives."
1:28:50
He's like, "Incentives rule, human...
1:28:52
Like, they drive so much of human behavior."
1:28:55
And I'm thinking of Charlie when I'm reading your book, and it's like, yeah, you know what?
1:28:58
It turns out it's really hard to sell.
1:29:00
I know you don't like this word, the bagless vacuum cleaner.
1:29:02
You think it should be like, no loss of - suction suction vacuum cleaner. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right, yeah.
1:29:05
I'm just going to use the term for the story.
1:29:08
It's really hard to sell a bagless vacuum cleaner to people who make 500 million dollars a year selling vacuum bags.
1:29:13
Well, it was partly that.
1:29:13
It was partly that, and partly I realized they didn't want to change.
1:29:20
- Human history of cleaning. - Yeah.
1:29:20
And that's what encouraged me.
1:29:24
Although each rejection, I mean, I should have got more and more depressed.
1:29:28
- And you had the opposite reaction.
1:29:28
- I had the opposite reaction.
1:29:31
- These guys don't want to change.
1:29:31
- I'm going to-- I think this is going to be one of the most important things I learned from this conversation, is this idea.
1:29:37
Assuming that you're doing things for the right reason, you're following your curiosity, you're completely obsessed with what you're doing, this idea of taking essentially what is a negative and turning it into fuel.
1:29:47
- You're turning it into fuel. - Yeah.
1:29:48
You're trying to dissuade me and it's only making me more dogged.
1:29:52
I think your dogged determination is a great line, by the way. Yes, it's not.
1:29:56
Well, no, they're rejecting it without having a good reason. Yeah.
1:30:01
- That's what was interesting. - Yeah.
1:30:03
You would've listened if they found a design flaw or - if they told you there was - Exactly.
1:30:07
something there, where you're like, "No, no, I am right where everybody else is wrong."
1:30:10
Difference for the sake of it.
1:30:11
That is how you build insanely the best products in your category.
1:30:15
You seem to be able to build the best product in every category that you create, but also how you create value is a lot like in durable value, so that you're actually doing something differently and better than everybody else That's what I'm trying to do.
1:30:25
A different and an advance.
1:30:29
- Yeah, but you also have a crazy line - Taking things further- in this book, which I don't know if you remember, but you would be different even if it was worse.
1:30:35
I don't know if you still believe that now. Oh, yes. Yes.
1:30:36
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:30:39
All right, you got to say more about that.
1:30:40
- Well, yes, because, I mean, - That is a crazy thing to say.
1:30:42
sometimes the-- For example, with the vacuum cleaner, tipping the dirt out of a bin, someone would say, some people would say it's worse than disposing of a bag - because it creates a bit of dust. - Yeah.
1:30:57
So, there aren't-- I mean, not everything is always perfect about something which makes progress.
1:31:04
And eventually you overcome the problem, but not everything is better.
1:31:08
Sometimes not everything is better.
1:31:12
But the good overcomes the bad.
1:31:12
It's much better than the bad.
1:31:16
But the difference is you're essentially organizing design principle. It has to be different.
1:31:19
You're not going to make-- - There's no reason for any- - No, no, it's got to be better. - It's got to be better. - I know what you mean. - It has to be better. - Yeah, in my mind. - In your-- yes. - Yeah, yeah.
1:31:28
But it has to-- You're not going to make, like, another me-too product? No.
1:31:31
No, there's-- No, because I don't want to do that.
1:31:36
I'm not motivated to do that, and I've built a team around me who are motivated to take risks and do something different and better always.
1:31:46
So, let's go back to you buy the tooling-- I'm not going to like redo the entire book.
1:31:50
We'll skip over the issue that you're having to move the tooling and you're having issues.
1:31:54
But then eventually you have this great line in the book, you end one of these chapter, these are like my favorite, like some of my favorite three paragraphs in the entire book, and it's on total control.
1:32:05
And you say, "From the first sprouting of the idea, the research and development, testing and prototyping, model making and engineering drawings, tooling, production, sales and marketing, all the way into the homes of the nation, it is most likely to succeed if the original visionary," and you put into parentheses, "or mule," because you're only celebrating your stubbornness, - sees it right through. - Mm-hmm.
1:32:24
As I often have said, I aim not to be clever but to be dogged, and my doggedness had gotten me so far to a point where I had my very own cyclonic vacuum cleaner at last.
1:32:34
On May 2nd, 1992, I found myself looking at the first fully operational, visually perfect Dyson dual cyclone.
1:32:44
I was 31 years old when I tore the bag off my Hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole.
1:32:50
May 2nd, 1992 was my 45th birthday." Still heavily in debt.
1:33:00
Do you remember that day? Oh, yeah, no, I do. Yes, I do.
1:33:04
Yeah, I remember quite a lot of my birthdays.
1:33:06
But no, that was really important because, to get to that point had taken me 11 years, I think, wasn't it? 11 years? Something like that.
1:33:17
And a lot of money, and I was hugely in debt.
1:33:22
But I had the first prototype that worked.
1:33:25
Outside of your family, is that period of your life the period you're most proud of?
1:33:33
No, no, I don't-- No, it's all a-- It carries on. It doesn't stop.
1:33:38
So, I don't ever sort of stop and think, "Now's a moment to be proud."
1:33:43
In fact, I don't really like pride. Why?
1:33:47
It's sort of self-serving. Yeah.
1:33:50
It's never good enough, so you can't be proud. Explain more.
1:33:55
Well, I'm never satisfied.
1:33:55
I mean, there's always something wrong.
1:34:00
I've got to go on improving it.
1:34:01
- So- - You talk about this in this book, that the engineering mindset, if you're reading this, I think you even say it, like if you're reading this and you have this mindset, you know like it never turns off, - and you're never satisfied. - Mm-hmm.
1:34:10
You can't just go home and be like, "Oh, everything's-- this is great."
1:34:13
You just see the imperfections or not even-- I don't know.
1:34:16
Is it really focusing on the imperfection or just focusing on the missing improvement?
1:34:20
It's just knowing that things could be better, that there's a better way of doing it, that I haven't done it well enough, that I've got to make it better.
1:34:26
I'm done just driven like that.
1:34:31
- Say- - So I'm never satisfied.
1:34:33
And I think satisfaction is a pretty dangerous thing anyway. Say more.
1:34:37
Well, because there's a kind of smugness to it, that I'm perfect and I don't need to do any better than this. I can relax.
1:34:47
And I just don't think like that.
1:34:49
I'm always wanting to do something better.
1:34:52
And my wife hates it, because when we're exploring in the car or something, I always think there's something better round the corner, and she wants to stop and enjoy where we are at the moment.
1:35:01
I mean, I do accommodate her on that, but I mean, that's how I think and feel.
1:35:07
But does that lead to-- But you seem to be very, like, happy and, like, not content, that's not the right word, but you seem to be like a happy person, this is not like a torturous inner monologue where all you see is like, you're never satisfied and you see the things that could be fixed.
1:35:22
It is slightly torturous. - So, okay. - But it's what I do.
1:35:26
- It's what excites me- - I feel the same way, though.
1:35:28
- But it can also lead you to, you know, - It's what excites- - periods of like, very dark, like, unhappiness. How do you not let it...
1:35:37
Well, I suppose I'm lucky because I don't think it makes me that unhappy.
1:35:40
I mean, I have moments of unhappiness, because- Give me an example of a moment of unhappiness.
1:35:45
Well, you know, when a lawsuit goes wrong or something, or an experiment doesn't work and I hoped it would, those sort of things.
1:35:53
But I bounce back from them very quickly.
1:35:53
They're just minor, you know.
1:35:57
Is that more of like you got better with the wisdom of age and experience? No. No.
1:36:00
No, I've always been like that.
1:36:02
So, you've basically been the same person.
1:36:04
- And you just never stopped. - Yes. Never stopped. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'd say that's true.
1:36:09
And I think my father's death has quite a lot to do with that, coming back to that.
1:36:16
And I was in a sort of a group, because we lived in a school, in a public school or in a private school is probably a better expression.
1:36:26
And the other teachers' children were the same sort of age, so we were a group, and we had the run of the school grounds during the holidays.
1:36:36
But I was the youngest, so the others were up to five years older than me.
1:36:40
So, I was always dealing with people who were bigger and stronger than me or cleverer than me.
1:36:45
And so, I think it made me always strive.
1:36:49
So I think a combination of being the youngest, because I was the youngest of three children anyway, and younger than this group that I went around with made me try to punch above my weight a bit and made me very determined, because in order to succeed at anything, I had to be really, really good in order to beat them at tennis or whatever it was, or in a race.
1:37:09
I had to be punching above my weight.
1:37:13
So I think that, and losing my father, so realizing I was on my own, and I was away at boarding school on my own, so that whole combination made me the sort of character I am, made me never satisfied, always wanting to find something better, and bouncing back from failures.
1:37:40
That's the perfect spot to end this conversation.
1:37:42
James, they say never meet your heroes, they're 100% wrong.
1:37:45
I don't feel ashamed at all. You're one of my heroes.
1:37:49
This conversation has been excellent.
1:37:50
Out of all the people that I've studied and met, you're definitely the person I try to emulate the most.
1:37:55
I really appreciate you taking the time. Well, thank you, David.
1:37:56
It's great to hear your story as well.
1:37:58
- And how you've succeeded. - Thank you very much. - Thank you very much. - All right.
1:38:01
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
1:38:01
Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast Founders.
1:38:08
For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work.
1:38:16
Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.