you have a weird uh combination of like you build some of the greatest modern technology but you're you have this obsession with and love of like the past which i think is very interesting yeah a healthy obsession with the past i think it is i mean i did latin greek and ancient history at school yeah and apparently of no use at all but it is it is interesting how greek civilization took place and how roman civilization started and how it failed and how people governed, were oligarchies good, were dictatorships good, or democracies.
It's interesting.
And history repeats itself.
And it's repeating itself rather too quickly at the moment.
So history is interesting.
We were talking before we started recording.
I have this obsession with reading everything that you have written.
I read your first autobiography five times, your second one at least two times.
But then you know, people might know about this, but they don't know that you actually wrote a history of great inventions.
And what I noticed about this is it was published.
I think you were writing this in like 2001, right?
What caused you, like, why did you do this?
You were building your company at the exact same time.
Yes, because I'm really interested in inventions how they happened, who did them?
What personalities were behind them?
And they're inspiring stories.
And luckily, an editor of a big newspaper in Britain asked me to do it, so I agreed to do it.
And actually we published it as a series of color supplements to a weekend newspaper and then put it into a book.
How old were you when you had this obsession with history?
Oh, from school.
Absolutely from school.
Particularly Greek and Roman history.
I mean, British history is really interesting, and I know all the kings and queens.
I know their dates.
I'm not a very clever person, actually.
I'm not good at remembering things, but I have remembered all that history.
And it – Jolly World does repeat itself.
So you can learn really interesting things from history.
And this is what I've noticed.
People 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.
Charlie Munger has one of my greatest favorite quotes about this.
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, that they had the same.
They went through the same struggles, the same.
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.
I told you before we started recording i was going through, 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.
And this book, I found it, I think it was April 2018, the very first time I read it.
And I'd already been struggling to start my podcast for two years with very – almost no success at all.
Basically none.
No success.
And it took me five and a half years of struggle.
And the reason this is so important, to find it 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 –.
This book is 90 of it.
Is you struggling for 14 years, building 5127 prototypes and refusing to give up?
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.
This is the note.
So obviously I mark up the books like crazy and I was showing you this before we started recording.
Yeah.
This is really – 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.
All right.
Yeah, bouncing back is really important.
And if you are exploring new territory experimenting, you're 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.
And actually, if you learn that failure is so much more interesting than success.
Because failure, you question it.
Well, why did it go wrong?
And actually, the reason it goes wrong is often very, very interesting.
When something works, you say, great, that works.
And you don't even stop to wonder why it works.
So you've got to enjoy failure.
That sounds 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.
It goes hand in hand.
And it always saddens me that school doesn't really teach that.
At school or university, the thing is to be brilliant and to get the answer right first time.
And there are brilliant people who can do that, but for the rest of us, we're not brilliant.
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 first time, you don't get it right second time.
In my case, and I counted it, it's 5,127 times.
One of the things I always want to say is that that sounds like a struggle.
Okay, it was a struggle, but actually it was a hugely enjoyable struggle.
The debt was mounting and I had three children and a wife and a home and a mortgage to pay, like everybody else.
But I had a real point in life.
I had a real aim and I had to get there.
And the failures were interesting because I'd learned from every single one of them, almost every single one of them.
Say more about that you had an aim in life.
Submission?
How did you think of it then while you were going through it?
When I discovered that I loved engineering, because I did classics at school.
I couldn't be further away from engineering.
And then I went to study design and then discovered engineering.
So engineering was new to me.
It was like something new.
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.
So it's a sort of megalomania thought.
Why?
Why is it a megalomania thought?
Because I was a penniless student in London.
How could I have this thought of being a global manufacturer?
And I don't know how or why I had that thought.
But There were interesting things happening at that time because Concorde was happening.
Issigonis brought out his mini car, which is still going today, by the way.
He's successful today.
And it was about 15 years after the Second World War.
So there was deprivation during the war and immediately afterwards.
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.
We can do something new and different.
And Norman Foster, Richard Rogers Buckminster, Fuller all these people were having really expansive and revolutionary thoughts about design engineering, buildings and so on.
So I was very lucky to be part of that era.
And I think I caught the bug out of this very cheeky idea that that's what I wanted to be.
So this is when you meet Jeremy Fry.
I actually was not expecting to start our conversation the way we just did, but I'm glad it leads perfectly to how I really wanted to start, which is like I want if you can explain who Jeremy Fry was and the impact that he had on your life.
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.
And I designed a Buckminster Fuller-type structure for an impresario in London.
It was a theater for an impresario in London.
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.
And he said, no, I'll give you a job.
I can see you're an interesting journalist.
I'll give you a job.
So he started giving me jobs.
And one of them was to design this high-speed landing craft, which was his invention, that I engineered it and designed it.
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.
He said, come and start the company, making and selling it.
So I sort of looked at him a bit.
So I don't know how to sell things.
And he said, look, You're the engineer.
You've chosen every square inch of that product or everything.
You know it all.
You're the best person to sell it.
So that was an interesting sort of revelation for me, because I'd always thought there were professions.
And, you know, there's sales.
There's one profession.
Engineering was another.
Manufacturing was another.
And being a manager was another.
And suddenly it was this entrepreneur himself saying to me well look, you're an engineer and designer.
You know all about the product.
Go and make it and go and sell it.
So it broke down all the barriers for me.
We became great friends and we had lots of discussions about engineering and shared this passion for engineering and for making things.
And you found somebody that also had an obsession with the past engineers, past designers, past inventors that you could actually have deep conversations with about how they built their products, why they made the certain decisions, and then use those to inform the work that you guys were doing correct.
Yes, I mean, he was a friend of Isagenis.
So I'd never met Isagenis, but I heard about him from him.
They used to do hill racing together design cars very, very light cars that raced up hills very quickly with very little power.
So sort of very skinny engineering, minimalist engineering.
And so he had quite a lot of stories from that era.
He was 20 years older than me, so he had seen a bit of life during the war and had done this racing car thing and established an engineering company.
So he just removed the barriers and that it was okay to be an obsessive engineer and you just do whatever it is you want to do, and then you go out and sell it.
And hopefully, like the Pied Papper of Hamelin, people will follow you.
So you know, to get that advice from someone at that crucial stage in my life was, I might say, mind-blowing.
It enabled me to carry on and do things that everybody said I couldn't do.
And then what do you think, because you worked on the sea truck for five years before you left?
Yeah, about seven, because I did two years of it when I was at college.
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.
What were some of the most important lessons from the seven years when you were doing the sea truck?
Oh, I think I learned everything from that.
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.
It's finding the right sort of person with the right sort of enthusiasm.
Say more about that.
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.
But, of course, the person who's just starting out okay, 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.
So it's the person, not the business really, that you're backing.
Friend Josh Kushner has this great quote where you have to decide.
When you're partnering with somebody you know, you decide the most experienced, the most educated or who wants it the most.
You always choose the person that wants it the most.
Experience is an interesting thing.
Jeremy Fry taught me this.
He hated experienced people.
You also hated people with beards and something else.
But this was a different era.
This was a different era.
Oh, smoking pipes.
That's right.
Because people used to smoke pipes back in the 60s.
And beards were different in the 60s.
But anyway, come back to the experience, which is the important thing.
And I've discovered this.
If you're experienced, you know why not to do something or how not to do something.
Whereas if you're naive and you're a young engineer, you're disqualified or you're still training.
You don't have that negativity towards certain things.
And often it's something that hasn't worked previously that could work and is interesting to follow.
So you're very open.
And I love naivety, 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.
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, naivety equals stupidity.
I don't think that.
I think that naivety is interesting because you're thinking really hard.
How the hell do I do this?
I don't know how to solve this problem.
The experienced person might think they know how to solve it, but the naive person doesn't.
So they're thinking much harder and more intelligently.
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So Jeremy was in the business of hiring people like a young James Dyson.
Smart, enthusiastic person that clearly wants to do this, as opposed to anybody that came from another company or even a competitor.
Exactly that.
You're doing this now.
You still do this.
Yeah.
40 years later, 50 years later.
Yes, and we've taken it one stage further because we've started our own university.
So we're taking 17- and 18-year-olds and starting even younger.
And they work in the business, and they ask naive questions.
You cover the university in the book.
Again one of the things I personally learned from you.
It's like differentiation for the sake of it.
And so anything that I'm going to do, I look around.
One of my heroes is Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid.
And he had this great line.
He's like, my personal motto is don't do anything somebody else can do.
Can you explain exactly how you structured and how you designed the Dyson University?
Yeah.
University is very expensive.
Especially in the United States.
And it's getting as bad in England.
It's terrible.
You're saddled with that debt for a long time.
I mean, sometimes 20 years.
And in any case, a lot of the debt is not repaid.
And we need to find a different way to teach people.
And it's ridiculous because they're only taught for half the year.
The rest of it is holidays.
So you've got these big institutions, expensive institutions with people only there part-time.
It's madness.
And also, as I learned when I was at college working with an engineering company.
Because you were working with Jeremy while you were still in school.
Yes, I was sort of moonlighting.
The college knew what I was doing and approved of it.
But it wasn't what normal students did.
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.
And I really enjoyed that.
And I thought, well, why can't I give that opportunity to other people?
So we started our own university.
And it's a difficult thing to do because the government has to approve it.
And for seven years we had to work with another university and none of them would work with us, because they saw us as big competitors, because we pay our students.
Yeah.
You start with.
Why are we settling these young people with an albatross of debt around their necks that's going to limit their you know what they can actually pursue.
They're going to be taking jobs that they're forced to take, that they don't 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.
So am I correct?
There's no tuition.
Yes, there's tuition.
We teach them two days a week.
And they work with us three days.
But you pay them for the three days.
We pay them.
They pay them $45,000 a year.
They have cars.
They go on skiing holidays.
So there's normal people.
They're not students.
They're in a student group.
We have about 170 of them all together.
But they're interspersed throughout the company.
And they love that.
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.
They like the reality of that and it inspires them to learn the academic side, because a lot of them said you know, the academic side of engineering is difficult, it's hard, but i'm inspired to do it because i got to practice it every day, as opposed to separating the two, as opposed to going to university and just having academia for four years 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.
Explain why it's better to have, in your opinion, a person with no experience than somebody that came from an existing company.
The older you get, the more you try to apply your experience.
And if you've come from an existing company, you may have picked up bad habits.
I'm not saying we don't have bad habits at Dyson, but I'm saying you 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 sake, because it sets us on a different path.
And some people find that difficult.
Some people want to have a much more conventional way to do things.
And so if you're hiring, you have 18-year-olds working in Dyson.
They're also going to school.
One or two 17-year-olds as well.
Okay, 17, 18-year-olds.
What is that like?
To be honest, nobody really notices any difference.
Okay, that's going to be shocking for at least for people.
They assume, okay, they have to graduate high school in America.
They have to go to college.
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, no, hire the 18-year-old.
You've got to say more about this.
Yeah, well, because, you know, they're enthusiastic.
They've come to us because they want to do real work.
And they do real work.
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.
So it works really, really well.
And it's interesting.
I want to go back to the seven years with the sea truck.
You write about Jeremy Fry in both books and in many cases in this book, 50 years after you spent time with him and worked with him, 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.
It speaks to the power of ideas.
I don't have the prejudice against Beards, by the way.
Oh, thank you.
I think I probably retained the pipe one, but not the beard.
I don't smoke quite this fine.
And I don't have like the, you know, the hippie beard.
So it's fine.
It'd break my heart to know Jeremy Fry wouldn't, because he's become almost my year.
He would have changed over the years.
For sure.
But one thing that's fascinating is okay, this also speaks to.
I'm curious about your opinion on risk tolerance.
Obviously, you have excessively high risk tolerance in both stories.
But you're like I have – I'm working for your mentor who you think I think is a genius.
He treats you really, really well.
He gave you complete autonomy and control.
He's like just go run this business.
There's a great line in the book where you're like –.
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.
He's like, well, the Range Rover's down there.
Like, the lake's right there.
Like, tie a piece of wood behind a boat and record what happens and then change it.
But you had, I think, a wife and at least one child when you left to do the ball barrel?
Two.
Okay, so two kids.
You have, I think, a mortgage.
So you have a family to take care of.
You have a great high-paying job, right?
You have...
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.
So I want to talk about that.
The second thing that I didn't understand, no matter how many times I read this why didn't you let him – fund it?
That was a really stupid decision because um, and in fact he and ultimately, when i started the vacuum cleaner business, we did fund it together.
Yes uh, so that which we'll get to yeah, that was a really stupid decision because he was someone who understood about starting businesses, how difficult it was.
In fact, I went to borrow money off my brother-in-law and another party who didn't understand the dividends of starting businesses and the growth pains and so on.
Before we get there, just the decision to leave a great – it's almost like you seek –.
Tell me if I'm wrong with this.
I know you seek difference for the sake of it.
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, right?
Yeah, no, I've thought a bit about that.
And I think it's partly because my father died when I was eight, 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.
But everybody else had parents, two parents.
There weren't single parent families in those days.
And even if the two had split up, they appeared to come together to come and see their child at school.
But I had just my mother coming to see me, my impoverished mother coming to see me.
So I felt different.
And also, I think if you've lost a parent at that age... life can't get much worse.
So you're prepared to take risks because you've started from a horrible starting point.
Risk has become a sort of thing I need to live with.
I need to live on the knife edge all the time.
You still feel that way today?
I still feel that today, yes.
And it doesn't make me unhappy, 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.
The result is not sure at all.
In fact, it's very unsure, very dangerous.
And I don't mind that.
It doesn't keep me awake at night.
So it starts when your father dies.
He died really young.
He was 40 years old?
He was 40, yeah.
When you were nine.
It's one of the most... I don't even want to start talking about it.
I'll start tearing up, because that part just destroys me.
And you...
I guess I'll talk about this now.
I want to go back to the risk and making that jump.
I think one of the most profound impacts that your second book has is you're writing this 60 years after your father dies and you're talking about your grandson, Mick.
And you realize now, as a 69-year-old man with a lifelong set of experiences, just how vulnerable you were.
Because he's still taking his, your grandson Mick is still taking his stuffed animal to bed.
And now you're left alone with a nine-year-old boy who needs his father.
Yeah, no, he had a profound influence on me.
He had to do everything.
I mean, he loved producing plays.
He loved directing them.
I've got notes in his little Shakespeare books, crossing out lines and making notes about things.
And he did puppet shows.
He played the recorder.
He taught rugger.
He taught hockey.
He just wanted to do everything.
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.
I just thought of a connection maybe I didn't make previously.
He wanted to change professions towards the end of his life.
He fought in the war in Burma.
We call it the Forgotten War.
And it really was.
And it was a nasty, nasty war a long way away.
And he came back from that in 1946.
And in 1949, he contracted cancer.
So he'd been away from his wife for six years, the first six years of their life together.
Then he had three years being a classics master at school, and then he got cancer.
And so he was in and out of hospital for the next seven years.
Did he have an opportunity to work for the BBC or something like that?
That's what he wanted to do.
That's what he wanted to do, but never had the opportunity.
But never had the opportunity.
And now I'm thinking.
I just asked you the question how the hell do you leave this fantastic position to go off on your own?
You realize well, I had the opportunity to where your dad, unfortunately for a situation outside of his control, never got that opportunity.
No, he had his life stolen from him at the age of 40.
I mean, you know, I'm almost 80, so twice as long as he did.
Your mom passed away early, too.
Yes, she got cancer as well in the 50s.
55?
Yeah, 55.
My mom passed away from cancer early, too.
Yeah.
Horrible disease.
Did you ever?
This is nothing related to what I would think I was going to talk to you about, but your dad passed away at 40, your mom in her mid-50s.
You've lived much longer than both of them.
When you were younger, were you worried that you were going to die young too?
No, it never occurred to me.
Interesting.
No, never occurred to me.
I think it made me want to get the most out of life fast, maybe impatient to live my life.
Funny, I obviously have a habit and obsession with reading biographies.
Most of the people I read biographies of are not like you.
They're actually dead.
And I think this unexpected... I'll try and keep going.
No, no, no.
We're going to do... I want to come to Dyson HQ and I want to record more things.
I want to, like, see the headquarters and everything else.
So, yeah, you have a reason to live.
In addition to your beautiful family.
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.
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.
I am intolerant to wasting even 24 hours.
I think it's actually like a powerful motivator and just a great byproduct of the profession I've chose.
I want to go back to –
You're taking risk for the sake of risk.
You want to be your own man, I think is the line that you have in the book when you leave.
So I understand that.
We're going to get to the ballbarrow.
But can you say more?
So that was the point.
You did ask me that question of why I didn't ask Jeremy Fry to help fund that thing.
It's because I wanted to do something on my own.
I'd worked for somebody.
I wanted to do something entirely on my own.
But you'd still be the entrepreneur.
But it was a terrible decision.
But that's how I felt at the time.
Why not take money from him?
Because I felt I'd worked with him.
He'd been my mentor.
And I wanted to just go off and do it on my own.
It was to prove something to myself, I suppose.
It was a stupid decision because I was still having other people help fund me.
So it was a really stupid decision.
And you do make stupid decisions in life.
And I learned from my mistake.
And so when I started the vacuum care, I went back to someone who understood entrepreneurship, who had been an entrepreneur, rather than people who hadn't been entrepreneurs.
We were talking about this earlier.
You and I were talking about this earlier, where uh there is now a new class of capital available to entrepreneurs that is not institutional venture capital that's obviously still exists but you have a lot of people that have had incredible success like yourself but i've become friends with michael dell and this is something that he's interested in and providing alternative funding solutions Two entrepreneurs from an entrepreneur knows exactly what they're going through.
That is not a professional investor.
That is not trying to make more returns.
They have more money than they'll ever spend.
They literally love entrepreneurs and want to help entrepreneurs.
I think it's really important.
I want to go through the list of mistakes because you always say this and I love it.
I have the first version of your second biography, which is Invention of Life.
I think it's changed now.
I think you were going to name it like failure is more interesting than success or more fun than success.
The publishers quite rightly said it won't sell.
So let's focus on the failures and the mistakes that you made with the ball barrel.
What still like sticks out in your mind about that?
Right at the beginning, having people fund it, help fund it, because I had to put up a guarantee.
My brother-in-law put up a guarantee.
The guarantee is against your house?
The guarantee was against my house.
Fortunately, I had a house by then.
My brother-in-law put up a guarantee and we borrowed money from the bank.
By the way, interest rates went to 22%. while we were doing that business.
And that was the killer.
So I borrowed money again when I started the ball bearer, the vacuum cleaner business.
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.
What did they not understand?
They just didn't understand the business, what it's like.
For example, the ball bearer was copied in America. by an ex-employee and another company.
And they wanted to go after him and teach him a lesson.
And I said, no, no, no, let him do it.
If he wants to do it, let him do it.
And we'll come into America and we'll sell ours against his.
He'll pave the way and we'll come and sell our original version.
But they wanted vengeance.
So we spent a lot of money trying to sue them in no good effect, really.
So that's one example.
The real thing I learned is that it's much better to put your own money in.
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 and all our possessions and all that sort of thing.
So I was making my decisions for me.
I wasn't having to worry about investors or what they might think.
Which when I was doing the ball bearing business, I was always doing that.
I was having to ring them up and say, do you think we should do this?
Is it okay if I do this?
You seem to have an inherent I don't want to interrupt you an inherent 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.
I'm glad you raised that.
That's not what I meant.
For example, I have non-executive directors.
I run the business as though it was a public business, but it's a private business.
And I think it's very important to have good people advising you.
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.
Is it the right decision for the business?
Will it make a better product?
Will it sell more?
All that sort of thing.
That's very, very single-minded.
You don't have to worry about investors at all.
I had to worry about the bank balance, but I didn't have to worry about investors, which made me very single-minded, and you know my.
If there's a failure, it's my failure, it's all down to me, whereas if you've got other people, then you know other people are making joint decisions, so i really enjoyed not having anyone to turn to, whereas with the ballberry business there are other directors, there are other investors, so i had to worry about what they thought.
Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I did.
But if you're on your own, you make the decision for entirely the right reason.
What do you think that you thought was important that they did not for that specific product?
When we started selling the ball bearer the retailers first of all there weren't big hardware chains.
They were individual-owned hardware stores.
So there was no Home Depot or Lowe's?
No, none of that, which makes life a lot easier.
You might not think that, but it does make life a lot easier if you're manufacturing something.
So we had to sell through wholesalers who sold to all the individual retailers.
And garden centers, where you can buy garden stuff, They were all individually owned.
So you had to have teams of salespeople going around all these things trying to sell products to them.
Oh, yes, we can take one this week.
It was a completely mad system.
Now, I'd started the business selling direct to people through little adverts in the newspaper.
Tiny little adverts.
And people would send checks in those days.
People used to send checks.
It was pre-credit cards.
You have a great line about this in the book.
You said, the entrenched professional will always resist longer than the independent consumer.
Yes, exactly.
So exactly that.
And that was the point.
The illustration of that is when I went around trying to sell to garden centers and hardware stores.
They were not interested.
They actually laughed.
They said, that thing with the big red ball, no one will ever buy that.
But they did buy it from these little ads.
So I wanted to go on expanding the idea of selling direct and not having a middle person, and not having to have salespeople.
But they said, oh, no, look, you're being successful.
I think now is the time to do it properly and get a factory and sell the normal way through retailers.
Did you push back against that decision?
A bit, yes.
No, I said, look, we're doing quite well now.
We're not having to borrow money.
We're not dependent on anybody.
We're just replacing these ads and seeing what happens.
And, okay, the business might be very small, but it's okay, actually.
It's wiping its face.
But then we got into debt, and the debt got bigger, and the debt went to 22% interest rate.
I mean a company's lucky if it can make 5 profit or 10 net profit, but we're fighting a 22 penalty all the time.
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So there's another thing that happened where you made the mistake of assigning this was your invention.
The ball bearer was your creation.
You made some other products, but we can skip over that for now.
And then you filed a patent.
It was patentable.
And you transferred the patent, not to yourself, but to the company.
And then when they kicked you out of the company, they then took your company and your patent.
Yes.
Yes, it took everything.
But actually, there's a silver lining to all of that, which I'd offered them the vacuum cleaner.
Yes.
And they didn't believe in it.
This is why I'm obsessed with people.
So far.
For every single person I've talked to for the show, they've done what they do for excessively long period of time, anywhere from 20 to 45 years.
And I think you just you see this over and over in these stories like people are way too big of a rush.
It's like, you're going to have these happy accidents.
You just stay in the game long enough to get lucky, because there's a byproduct of the stuff you're doing.
In the case of, you're working on the ball barrel, right?
And you discover what a cyclone is because you were solving a problem with the ball barrel.
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.
Can you explain what you were doing and how you accidentally discovered to Saigon for the first time?
The important thing is to observe things all the time for an engineer and work out how they work.
And also, incidentally, you're always working out how to make them work better.
Would it be better if I did this?
Isn't there a better way of doing that?
And that always happens with all the inventions.
They don't just come out of the sky.
They occur because you observe something.
So curiosity and observation and trying to understand things is the way to come up with new ways of doing things.
And so it was with the vacuum cleaner.
As you said, we had this huge plant that sprayed the frames with powder.
A lot of the powder missed the frames because we were spraying sort of open things.
There's masses of it missing it.
And 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.
You make the connection.
You see, you make the connection.
And what um clever people did um was have this huge cyclone.
So i got a quote for one and we could no way we could afford it.
So over a couple of weekends we built one and it was 30 foot high and, uh it, we had to make a hole in this roof of the factory to stuff the has chimney, a sort of outlet at the top, and a cyclone separates dust from air.
So there's between you and i there's a lot of dust and And a cyclone will separate that by centrifugal force.
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.
And so that is with a dust particle.
A dust particle, though the ones between us are floating, they're very fine.
If you make them go around a corner at very high speed, they get flung out to the edge, into the ditch.
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.
And the only way out is from the center, the chimney in the center.
So that's the basic principle of a cyclet.
Yes, I'd use vacuuming inside everybody else, and they always seem to make this screaming noise and not pick things up.
And one weekend I was cleaning the house and the bag was full.
Well, no, it said the bag was clogged, which is a slightly different thing.
Anyway, so I looked around for a new bag, couldn't find one in the house.
So I opened it up, emptied it out, and then gaffer taped it back up again and shoved it back in.
Still no suction.
So I thought, that's odd.
I thought vacuum, you know, it didn't suck because the bag was full.
I suddenly realized the bag was empty and something else was at play here.
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.
And I suddenly realized that the suction is created by airflow which has to go through the pores of the bag.
But this fine dust is clogging the pores.
It's not the fact the bag's full.
It's the fact that the bag is clogged.
They call it a bag full indicator.
That's a lie.
It's a bag clogged indicator.
So I felt pretty angry about this.
I did go, got out, 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.
It wasn't bag full.
The bag's clogged.
So I got pretty angry about this, and I came to a realization.
It's not a very clever realization, but all the air is trying to go through these little holes in the bag, and it's so easy for them to be clogged.
And then, of course, I remembered the big cyclone, huge 30-foot cyclone.
We built at the factory to stop the cloth getting clogged in the dust.
Instead, we were spinning it out successfully by centrifugal force.
It never clogged.
So I thought why don't we have one of those 30 foot cyclones inside a vacuum cleaner?
You know, a foot high.
So it wasn't very clever, really.
So I built one out of cardboard.
It's very clever.
Well, not really.
No, it's very clever.
It's not very clever.
So I built one very quickly in the kitchen at home out of cardboard and gaffer tape again.
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.
And I was pushing around the first vacuum cleaner that never loses suction.
So, I thought I had a good idea.
So, I filed a patent and I offered it to the Burberry company.
Why?
Because you guys are doing all this like gardening products, right?
Were you making anything else that wasn't related to gardening before this at Burberry?
And then I think one of your main observations like this is not the best business because it's seasonal.
It's horrible.
A seasonal product is awful.
So why don't we?
Especially in England?
But people buy vacuum cleaners all the time, so every day, and that's what I want.
Because with a seasonal product, there's a fallow period where you sell nothing, and then spring comes along and hopefully you start to sell.
And you sell... The weather makes a huge difference to what you sell.
And if you have a bad spring, it's a wet spring, you never make up for that.
So if you change your product and 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.
It all depends on the weather.
So you've got to employ people during the winter, when you don't need them, and then the summer you need more people.
It's just a horrible—seasonal business is a horrible business.
Avoid seasonal businesses.
So I pity anyone who runs a ski resort.
So you take this vacuum cleaner.
All right, guys, I have the solution to our problems.
Yes.
It's a genius invention.
It's very clever, even though you keep saying it's not clever.
I have this clever invention, and their response is— Their response is, if there was a better vacuum cleaner— who an Electrolux and all the existing people would have done it.
I love that you started our conversation that history repeats.
The way I say is like human nature repeats.
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.
Just for some reason, the vast majority of humans just cannot do that extra step in thought process.
And obviously, I think you're gifted with that.
And there's an assumption that experts do things correctly or in the most clever way.
Which you learned from Jeremy Fry is ridiculous.
It's not true.
There's a great line in the book where it's like, Jeremy Fry ridiculed experts.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, no, he wasn't that rude.
But I mean, yes, he said don't trust an expert.
Yeah.
Again, a very old idea.
Andrew Carney said the same thing.
Henry Ford said the same thing.
This happened a hundred years before you were trying to make a recommendation.
You know where it was repeated.
It was during COVID.
Yeah.
We're following the science.
Yeah.
We're listening to what the scientists say.
And I said, don't listen to what the scientists say, but don't do everything they say.
Apply common sense.
So this is something interesting, because this is one thing I don't think I understand, at least your thought process.
Now you're kicked out.
You lose your patent.
You lose how long?
It was five years that you're working on the bump?
Yeah.
So you did seven years on the C truck and another five years.
And now you're like, okay, why?
Was there another product?
You knew you wanted to invent.
You knew you wanted, I think, invent more than manufacture.
I think now you love manufacturing once you became one.
But you were an inventor for decades.
Well, no, no.
I was a manufacturer, a full manufacturer with the C truck and with the ball barrow.
But at the beginning of the vacuum cleaner, you wanted to just invent and license.
Yes.
Yes.
I thought, look, I've done all that.
Why can't I just invent and design things and license them to other people?
Like an author writes a book and someone else sells it.
Which is surprising to me because you clearly liked control.
You don't want to rely on other people.
A bad decision.
Okay.
It was a bad decision.
No, it was a bad idea.
Because you have to worry about what's going on in that other person's shot.
And there's like horror stories trying to sell these licenses.
We can talk about this 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.
And someone else thinks the opposite.
You know, it was a nightmare.
And I was becoming a lawyer.
Because I was doing license agreements all the time and then worrying what happens when they cancel it and all that sort of thing.
What came to mind when you mentioned earlier the mistake that you thought your partners in the ball barrel had, where they want to chase this guy down in lawsuits.
Right before he passed away, unfortunately, I got to spend three hours at Charlie Munger's house.
And it's me and two other young entrepreneurs and he was just giving us advice for three hours.
And one thing, he's just like, don't waste your time with lawsuits.
He's like, anytime I got screwed over by people, he's like, I didn't sue them.
I just realized that you can't do a good deal with a bad person.
And it just moved on.
He's like, the lawyers are going to suck you dry.
It's a distraction from your main business.
Like, you just have to keep moving on.
So now you go OK, I'm going to do the vacuum cleaner.
You immediately thought of Jeremy Fry, or you had a different way initially to start this business.
Because I'd been having directors and investors who knew nothing about business.
I thought I'd go back to someone who I'd really enjoyed working with and who clearly understood about starting businesses.
I was enthusiastic about it, like Michael Dell.
The five years that you since left his employment, you still had a relationship with him?
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
He's still a friend.
Yeah.
Okay.
And so you go to talk to him and he gets it immediately?
Yes.
Gets it immediately.
Actually, I had two ideas.
He and I were both more attracted to the vacuum cleaner.
What was the other idea?
The other one was I mean, they now have it, but when you sand something, the dust used to go everywhere.
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.
I mean, it exists now, but when I started 50 years ago, whenever it was, it didn't exist.
But we decided that wasn't big time.
It was a sort of peripheral thing.
So we wanted to do something important.
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?
I think it was both of us.
I mean, both of us have been manufacturers.
He much more than me.
And we both said, look, we're really inventors.
Let's engineers.
Let's just do that bit.
And if the invention is good enough, surely people will license it.
And then this is where we now... Delusion.
Yeah.
You have to deal with other humans that are very difficult.
Not just humans.
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.
You have obsession.
I have a lot of these same traits.
I think you have them obviously to a greater degree.
And maybe we'll see how my life plays out.
But now this is the coach house.
And so for America, I had to look this up.
I was like, what the hell is a coach house?
It's actually like, I heard in other interviews, it's like the app, the garage for Steve Jobs.
It's like, I'm working in the garage.
We call it a coach house.
Do you have any savings?
Are you in debt?
No, I'm not in debt.
I'm in debt.
I got into debt when I was a student.
Do you not understand how unusual that idea is?
I have no money.
I'm in debt.
Let me do this other super risky thing that you don't even have a working prototype yet.
No.
No.
No, it's just an idea, really.
I have a little cardboard one.
Take me in your mindset, then.
What do you think was driving you?
Were you anger, like, the desire to prove yourself, the love of the product?
What was actually happening at that point?
That is an unusual decision to make, a decision that your entire empire now rests upon.
That's an incredible time in your life.
Hmm.
Well, I saw a problem with a product that everybody uses every day, a vital product to clean their homes.
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.
But more than anything, it's the performance is lousy.
I mean, if you have a 100-watt light bulb, it's supposed to give 100 watts all the time.
But this vacuum cleaner light bulb starts off at 100 watts and ends up at 20 watts pretty quickly.
So it's deeply unsatisfactory.
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.
What was the chance that you gave yourself that success that you could actually solve the problem?
You were pretty self-confident you could?
No.
We're getting crazier.
No, of course not.
You don't know you can solve it, but you've just got to try.
And that's true today.
When we're trying to solve it, we don't know we can solve it.
We don't know that we can make a motor go at 130,000 RPM when existing motors only go 15,000 RPM.
I want to talk about motors.
You don't know.
You've just got to do it.
Okay, so I want to talk about motors.
Let me figure out about that.
Okay.
That's like one of the most – you inadvertently said one of the most inspiring things.
Like, no, I didn't – no, I have no money.
No, I'm in debt.
Just a simple flaky idea that it's intolerable that the product that I'm buying does not work.
I'm just going to make a working version.
And if I make a working version, other people will buy.
At that point, you're right to focus in on that moment because ideas are so fragile.
And they're easily knocked away by anybody.
It's why experts are dangerous.
It's why experts are dangerous.
Experts are dangerous.
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.
They know so much about why something won't work.
They'll get no work done.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Your philosophy and his philosophy, there's a lot of like overlap.
History repeats itself.
Right.
Human nature.
If you ask people what they want, they want a faster horse.
You know, that repeats itself time and time again, many times every day.
Well, you made a good point.
I heard another, and you said in the book, I heard another interview.
It's just like you're asking people to invent the future.
That's not their job.
That's your job.
What are you doing?
Yeah.
Let's focus back in on this very important point or time in your life that you just mentioned.
So you set up in the coach house. you're in debt, you have no more money.
So how are you funding things?
I know your wife is like selling art, but like, do you go immediately to the bank take out another mortgage?
Like, what do you actually do?
Exactly that.
I went to the bank to take out a mortgage and Jeremy Fry guaranteed part of it.
So he said we need, I don't know, 50,000 pounds or something to last two years.
So he put up a guarantee for 25,000 and I put up a guarantee for 25,000.
So that got the thing started.
Why could you do it for so cheap?
Because your only expense was your time?
Yes.
Yes, I'm working at home.
The only expense is my time and a few cheap materials.
I couldn't buy a lathe or equipment.
I was doing it all with little black and decos and things like that by hand.
I was making cyclones by rolling in rollers.
I went and bought some antique metal rollers down at a junk store for 25 pounds.
And I could roll cyclones.
You know, they're a funny shape, like a sort of... upside down cone and solder them together.
So I was doing everything by hand.
But I could do that.
I mean, it works.
You can do things for nothing.
You don't need to spend a lot of money.
And you thought, I'll be able to figure this out two years.
Yes.
It took how long?
Five.
Five years.
And I'm still doing it.
You're not under great financial strain at the moment.
Actually, I thought I'd do it quicker than two years.
I thought I'd do it within a year.
But I discovered there were all sorts of problems.
And also with almost any idea.
You find that when you start to apply for a patent, that people who tried to do it before and patented things
There's very, very few patents we file.
And you absolutely... You had to have something that was patentable, right?
Yes.
Oh, yes.
Or because we were going to try and license it.
So we had to have a good, strong patent.
Okay.
Which we ended up having a good, strong patent because...
We made an interesting discovery by accident.
Because if you're doing enough experiments, you're trying to be logical what you're doing.
But sometimes something occurs that's not logical and it works.
So you've just got to keep trying.
Luck will happen to you.
This is why you're such a big believer in the edisonian principle of design, where i think in the book you say the biggest problem you have with young people, even though you like working with them, is teaching them one change at a time.
Record what happens.
Their instinct is come in here, something's not working, let's change 15 things.
And your point is, how do you know what of the 15 things you have done have changed?
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.
You've been working with your hands your entire life.
Are you still working with your hands?
No, not much.
Your fingers are... They're useless.
I can't do anything with them now.
They're arthritis.
This is like somebody that lifts a lot of weights, but with their hands.
I'm like I was not prepared for how Your hands are huge and your fingers are.
They don't fit the rest of your body.
Yeah.
No, they're workman's hands.
In fact, you know this wretched fingerprint thing at airports?
It doesn't work for me.
They're worn thin.
There's no line.
And it's fun, actually, working with your hands and your brain.
It's something that schools despise for some reason.
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.
I record into a microphone that's digital.
It's connected to a computer.
It goes out into the world.
I don't, you know, I just see numbers go up on a screen.
I'm by myself the whole time.
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.
And that is literally me going in there and changing a sentence or a word or adding punctuation.
If I ever do anything else, or in addition, even just for fun, it has to be something physical.
Like I don't want to just have.
I feel I'm missing out on something and I'm trying to approximate that by like, physically touching, you know, pieces of paper.
This is why the books look like they do, and I don't read digital copies.
Like, I like, I sit down with a pen, a ruler, you know, post-it notes, scissors.
Like I feel like it's like arts and crafts over here, but there's just some weird satisfaction I get out of working with my hands.
My hands don't look like yours though from, like you know, five decades of 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.
But the entire world that we inhabit is physical.
Well, yes, exactly.
That's how man started.
Somebody built this and the building that we're in.
We want to be intellectuals.
I'm not getting involved in the dirty work.
And it's a great shame, because I think that's why we've lost, as countries, the ability to make things.
Manufacturing is vanishing.
Manufacturing made America great.
It made Britain great.
It makes any country that's good at it great.
Great.
Yeah.
History again.
Talk about history repeating.
Hey, why do you think – 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.
One thing that we learned and we were taught was we're not the weak ones.
We can actually persevere through unbelievably difficult times where it looks like the end is near, and not give up and actually come on the other side as the victor.
I think that was very important.
So you've borrowed the money.
You're doing one prototype a day, two?
Yeah, one or two a day.
Yeah, day after day after day.
And you say in the book you know I can celebrate now because my company, you know we're doing like 300 million a year, I think when the book ends, or something like that.
But I'd be lying to you if I said there were days where I'd fail all day long, go in the house covered in dust and dirt and essentially like get into bed thinking I may just go on building prototype after prototype, after prototype and never succeeding forever.
What was your inner monologue during that time?
Like how were you convincing yourself not to quit?
Well, there's hope, a thing called hope, expectation.
I don't mean expecting something to work.
I mean the excitement of going in the next day and seeing if the next experiment is better, or why is it better, or where is it taking me?
So it's a journey of discovery, which is interesting.
I mean, it doesn't sound from the outside.
It sounds very boring and worrying and all that sort of thing.
And true, it was worrying.
The debt was getting bigger all the time.
But I was getting a little closer, a little closer, and a little closer.
I 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.
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 apart that that sort of visceral experience makes you get forward.
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.
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 like yeah, you can outsource like oh, this country over here can manufacture and we'll do finance.
He's like, but there's knowledge in trial and error.
The country that is doing the manufacturing is actually learning at a way faster rate than you, because all day long they're just doing trial and error.
The problem with people that come up with the theories is the first order effect is fine.
You're just ignoring the second third fourth, fifth order effects and what's going to happen over a long period of time.
I've never heard anybody, it was in this book called Poor Charlie's Almanac.
I was like, I've never even thought of that before.
I went to school for business and they teach you all these things.
I'm like, this is stupid.
I think Munker's actually right about this.
Yeah, no, experiencing the whole thing is absolutely critical.
But were you taking it at data time?
Did you allow yourself to think how far, was it literally just what was in front of you?
Like or were you thinking what this is going to be a month from now, two years from now, during this time?
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.
That was what was in my mind.
And it wouldn't necessarily make me rich, but it might get me out of debt.
Money and finance is not a driver to you.
No.
No, I have to survive and live, of course.
And money can sometimes be a good determinant of whether what you've done is successful or not.
Not always.
Sometimes it's just not.
So I don't necessarily develop products to make enormous commercial success.
It's nice to do that, but sometimes you do it because you want to do it.
It might be a small success.
I think there's a very simple genius to your approach in company building.
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.
The hair dryer is probably a good example of that.
I used it this morning.
It's excellent.
Because you know we were making vacuum cleaners and cooling products and heating products and so on.
And we'd done this tiny motor and we thought we can make an even smaller one if we'd done that motor.
We can make an even smaller one and that would make a great hairdryer instead of those bulky, great motors they have at the moment.
So that was the start of it.
And these are discovered by…
Yes.
Well, very early on in the vacuum cleaner business we were buying these big heavy vacuum cleaner motors.
I've got one here, but I mean, they're big, you know.
And they get 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.
So quite early on we realized that we needed to develop a new type of electric motor, because electric motors, this sort of thing, haven't really changed for 150 years.
It's the same Faraday idea.
So, rather cheekily, as people who don't make electric motors, we thought let's make a new type of motor.
So I recruited some people from British universities who are academics who knew about electric motors.
And we started as a non-electric motor manufacturer, developing our own motor.
It took a long time, took 10 years.
10 years before you had success in that too?
Yeah, yeah.
And you can say we were being stupid and all that sort of thing, but no one had done this before.
No one had made a motor go 140,000 RPM.
Let's jump, we're going to jump back and forth.
The dentist drill, but that only lasts a few seconds.
Let's jump back and forth between the history of building a company and what you're doing now.
When you're thinking about the products you're making now, Are you starting with – because you seem to be my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong one of the best companies in the world at making motors, electric motors?
Yes.
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.
We have this world-class skill set.
Are there other products that we find deficient, in need of renewal, that we can apply our – and world-class talent at building electric motors to?
Is that a process of product development for you?
It can be.
Okay.
And we have the brilliant idea of doing an electric car.
Yeah.
Because... It's sitting in your... We make electric motors.
We make filtration and cooling devices.
Let's talk about the car.
And we're developing batteries.
Let's talk about the car.
So we thought, oh, we should do an electric car.
When was this?
2014.
Okay.
And I looked at what the indices were predicting and they said 2% electric cars by 2030.
And I thought they've got that wrong.
That can't be right.
Uh, so we started developing electric car.
We're developing batteries, by the way, new technology, we still are.
So the battery, batteries not yet, not yet.
Uh well, you want to, we want to.
Yeah, what a surprise.
You want controller, and i didn't understand that.
New technology once, not ordinary ones yeah, um.
So we said we're developing batteries with electric motors are one of our things.
Uh, air treatment is another one of our things.
That's pretty much an electric car.
So we started developing one.
And then we got to 2017, and Dieselgate happened.
So the first three or four years, Tesla was everything.
Tesla was doing everything very successfully.
But no one was taking any notice of that.
They all thought Tesla was a... flash in the pan or something.
They were ignoring it because it was such a different thing for them to do.
They make internal combustion engines, not electric motors and batteries.
So Dieselgate changed all that.
They realized partly from a PR point of view, but also this horrific reaction to Dieselgate that they had to get into electric cars.
So most of the big manufacturers immediately jumped into electric cars and made them.
And they make a terrific loss on them.
Explain.
Electric cars are very expensive things to make.
Batteries are incredibly expensive.
The electronics involved in the batteries are expensive.
Batteries are very heavy.
So it's a very different type of car and very expensive to make.
I mean, much more expensive than an internal combustion engine.
They were selling them at a loss for a complicated reason.
Car manufacturers' emissions which are controlled by law are based on their overall emissions from their range of cars.
Oh, not the individual model?
Not the individual model.
So if they had a model which didn't emit anything, they could go on making big gas guzzling vehicles in which they make a lot of money.
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.
But Tesla and us were just electric vehicle manufacturers.
Tesla's brilliant and $30 billion has gone into a huge investment.
I'm a little company on my own and I have faced a very uncertain future trying to sell an electric car in that sort of setup.
And if you have fairly low volume in your new manufacturer, all your costs are 30 higher Because you're not buying very many seats in the seat manufacturer or very many tires in the tire manufacturer, and so on.
So all your costs are much higher.
And we knew that.
You had a series of structural disadvantages.
Huge disadvantages.
And Tesla overcame them through share scale and might and investment.
But, you know, we didn't have that sort of money.
We couldn't take that sort of risk.
So we stopped it.
And how much did you spend on R&D for that?
Well, we spent about 750,000.
A million.
A million.
750 million dollars.
I keep working in pounds.
Half a million.
Half a billion pounds.
Okay, so 750 million.
Yeah.
And you have...
You have the actual prototype sitting in your headquarters, I think, in Singapore.
Yeah, we've got one there.
Is there anyone that you can at least drive or they don't exist?
There was one we could drive very slowly, but health and safety meant we couldn't take out.
We built one of the final sort of...
Where's that one?
Is that the one in Singapore?
No, no, no.
That's a model in Singapore.
No, no.
We've got it in one of our hangars on our airfield.
Okay.
Do you ever get in it anymore and just drive around?
No, no, no.
It's too painful?
Like, would you get in a car that costs you $750 million?
Everybody said, you know, you must have learned a lot from that experience.
And the answer is I learned absolutely nothing.
What do you mean?
I mean, it was fun to do, but we... It was fun to do.
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.
Oh, I didn't even think of the emotional.
Think about if you worked on something for a decade and it didn't go anywhere.
They must feel... for quite a decade, five or six years.
Five or six years.
No, it's an awful thing to do.
And sadly, we didn't really learn anything from it.
Yeah.
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What is an example of you taking the existing skill set that Dyson has built up over many decades and applying it successfully to a new product?
Then
That's the actual sequence of events.
It's that you didn't identify the product first.
You're just like well, we had the skill set.
What can we apply it to?
Did you have hair dryers?
What's an example of that?
Yes.
I think the way we approach the car is slightly dangerous.
Okay.
Because we were saying, look, we've got these skill sets.
And you were trying to match it.
And we would say oh, it would go very well in a car, without really saying is that going to be a successful product?
Is it going to be a breakthrough product?
Well, it might have been a breakthrough product if we had managed to do the battery.
And certainly our motors we developed were very efficient motors.
An electric car is all about efficiency quite aerodynamic efficiency, drive motor efficiency and so that you can have better, smaller batteries.
Power consumption is a big thing.
About a sixth to a quarter of the power is taken up by air conditioning and heating, for example.
So if you can make that more efficient, you can make your car go further.
So it's all really about how far can you go on a battery.
How do you come up with a new product?
I know you're very secretive.
You don't talk about things you haven't released yet.
No, it's a very good question.
I didn't answer it properly.
There's two ways.
One is you realize you have a technology And you can make a hairdryer.
How many of these do you make now, motors?
Oh, we've made about 150 million of them.
A year, though, now?
Yeah, we make about 30 million a year.
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 refuse.
Is that still correct?
That's correct.
And I love what you said, because you want your engineers focused exclusively on your own products.
It's the importance of focus, as opposed to retrofitting your technology to somebody else's product in somebody else's shop.
It's not a good commercial decision, that, by the way, the one I've taken.
Because I could have a division that dealt with other people supplying motors to other people, which I'm sure would make money.
Okay.
This is very interesting.
I think this is missing in business.
We talked about before we started recording, I had this idea of anti-business billionaire.
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.
And the point I'd make is there's I think you're one of them.
There's a series of people I've read about where people like that 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, but that's not the motivator.
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?
Because that doesn't excite me.
Thank you.
People forget the point of life is for living.
I know.
That's for making money.
It's developing a technology and coming out with different radical products.
That's what interests me, not making money per se.
How long have you had the discipline to adhere to that?
I'm just following excitement.
I'm following curiosity.
I'm following interest.
How?
Have you been like that forever?
I think so, yes.
Yes.
Yeah, I'm very single-minded um, and not being distracted by things, and actually it's really important that because um, when you, when you start running a business or doing things uh, you have too much to do, there's too much to do, so you have to make all the time, you have to make a choice what's the most important thing to do?
What's the most important thing to do if you get to be a big business?
That's still important.
Say more about that.
Well, if you get big, there's a tendency to think you've got lots of people, so you can do everything.
But you can't.
You can't do everything.
You can't do everything well, and you probably can't do everything anyway.
So the important thing is to decide what's really the most important thing and just do that.
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, really well... then you'll be okay.
How do you go about deciding what's the most important thing for you?
Well, that's the fun.
That's fun.
I mean, you decide the most important thing, and that's an important decision.
And you say, well, I haven't got time to do the other things.
I won't do it.
Will one of those kill me?
I don't know.
Probably not.
So I'll concentrate on the thing I really want to do, which I think is the right thing to do.
Is single-mindedness and focus the same thing to you, or do you mean different things?
Yes, it's the same thing.
It's the same thing.
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.
But you have multiple product lines.
Yeah, that's stretching my brain a bit.
Yeah.
But yes, yes, and I'm learning to manage that.
In myself.
I've got lots of wonder people around me helping me, including my son.
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, so you were focused.
And then was the washing machine the second?
The washing machine came on quite early, after about four or five years.
But it didn't work.
It did work.
It worked very well.
Don't say that to me.
No, and I made another mistake with that, which was that You know I've been making vacuum cleaners at about 300 200, 300.
The washing machine was $1,200, $1,300.
So it was more expensive than other people's washing machines.
Yeah, but the vacuum cleaner was more expensive than other vacuum cleaners.
I wasn't learning from history.
My marketing people said, if you make it cheaper, you'll sell a lot more.
So for the last time in my life, I listened to them.
And you know marketing people get on selling things, not decide what product should be or how much it should be sold for.
So I listened to them and we didn't sell anymore.
We just lost more money.
And the other directors non-executive directors said you've got to stop that because you're losing money at it.
Actually, if I'd been on my own, I'd have probably gone on with it and put the price up.
But sometimes you have to listen to other people and they were probably right, put it behind us and got on with what we were doing.
They're still in operation, though.
Oh, yeah, I use them.
So you have your own Dyson washing machine?
Yeah, it's great.
It's great.
And people have now copied a lot of the ideas, like the big door.
If you're trying to put a duvet in this tiny little hole.
And it was very expensive to make, actually.
And I should have learned my lesson from that, because it had two drums, had two motors and a gearbox.
It had a lot of things that other washing machines don't have.
But it did a very good job.
It's a very good washing machine.
It begs the question are there any other Dyson products that you own that are not available to consumers?
What else have you made for yourself?
I'm keeping quiet about that.
Tell me after, please.
I want to hear about this.
I want to go back to this because I do think it's one of the most important things.
The way I just described this, like this crazy experience I've been, on which you know, I'm probably at the probably gonna read more biographies and autobiographies of you know, entrepreneurs and founders and inventors than anybody else in the world.
And you know, everybody's always like give me like a top 10 list or like break it, like can you condense down what you've learned so far?
And I was like well, if I can condense it down to a one word of how different these people are to most people in the mass of humanity.
It's focus.
It's one word.
It's like they're unbelievably focused.
I still, if you don't mind me, just asking you another question just to see if you have anything more to say about this, because it's something I'm obsessed with as well.
How do you figure out what to focus on for you?
That's a very good question.
I think it's something which you believe could work.
And that's a breakthrough.
It's something completely different.
It's going to do a job much better.
And that's what you think.
But of course you can only think it.
But what are you following there?
Is it intuition?
Is it just, I can't get this off of my mind?
Like what is actually happening?
It's partly intuition, but I don't believe in intuition is a feeling or guesswork.
Oh, you gotta elaborate on that.
Intuition is much more interesting because it's all sorts of influences.
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.
It's the 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.
What do you think is guiding you to focus on the right thing?
That's the hard thing.
I mean, ultimately, it's intuition.
But intuition isn't just...
It's not very fair.
It's not a feeling.
Your brain has been fed with hundreds of different things.
And from that, you make a decision.
And you can't rationalize it and say oh, that's that that that that that that that, that that.
Therefore, this equals that.
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.
And then you've got to make it work.
Yeah.
But it's very fragile.
That early idea, I came back to that with the vacuum cleaner, you know, the cyclone idea.
It's a very fragile idea.
You can blow it away.
It's worth nothing.
And your partners at Balbero tried to blow it away.
Everybody tried.
My friends tried to blow it away.
What on earth are you doing?
They took hold of you right away?
Yes.
And did your confidence deepen as you get down the path?
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.
I got the bug and I'm going to go on.
I'm going to make it work.
And, you know, it took 5,000, much longer than I thought it would and all that sort of thing.
And I got deeper and deeper into debt.
But I was going to make it work.
I got a rat by a tail.
I'm not going to let it go.
I've got to make it work.
I've got to.
And the bigger the debt got, I suppose the pressure became greater and greater.
The pressure did, but did you have like a lot?
You had to have lulls and confidence and like doubt throughout that period.
Well, of course I had doubts and made it work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can't pretend you don't have doubts.
Were you talking to anybody about this?
Did you?
My wife?
Nobody else.
Not even Jeremy?
No, no, no.
Actually, I bought him out.
Let's go back to that.
Can you explain why you bought them out?
And this was after failing for, if I remember correctly, after failing to try to license it.
Yes.
The first successful license was Japan, right?
No.
The one that made money.
You're making like $70,000 a year.
Yes.
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.
I thought you said in the book they like, they may have just been there for like some kind of art.
Maybe, maybe.
They didn't sell very many, but they did sell some.
And I never discovered how many they sold because they're very secretive about it.
But they did pay me the minimum royalties.
That's when you bought Jeremy out?
Yes.
We had a big lawsuit.
Is this the Amway?
Yes.
Oh, God.
And he hated lawsuits.
So when that started, he wanted to get out.
Was that contentious between you?
Did it damage your relationship?
No, not at all.
No.
And we remained very good friends afterwards.
He just said, I hate lawsuits.
And my financial advisor thinks the vacuum cleaner is going nowhere.
And he owned 49% of the business.
So what did you buy an offer?
I bought him out.
How much money, though?
£45,000.
Yeah.
This is another thing.
His children will never forgive me.
I've remained friendly with his children, but they will never forgive me.
I think people will know this.
You know, hopefully in the introduction or whatever the case is, but you own 100.
Of Dyson.
Yes.
Is one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world.
Well, I don't think it's that.
Because I've heard stories.
That's fine.
We don't talk about it.
And you bought out your 49% partner for £45,000.
Okay.
So what happens?
Now you're on your own.
Yeah.
Completely on my own.
And you stayed.
I know you have executive directors.
I had to fight the lawsuit.
I had to fight that lawsuit with Amway.
Yes.
For five years.
Yes.
Borrowing money, selling actions in the lawsuit, lawyers on contingency, all that type of thing.
It took five years of my life.
The only income was the drip of license agreements for that point?
Yes.
A drip of license agreements just kept me going.
At one point, you said, to hell with it, I'm doing this on my own.
I meant not licensing, like I'm going to manufacture and control it from soup to nuts.
Yes, it was at the end of the lawsuit, actually.
That's when I decided I had enough of this licensing game.
I'm going to do it myself.
But you have no money.
No money.
And I'm sick of traveling because I was traveling to Japan, America all the time.
I was just sick of it.
And I got meningitis from it, I think, from an airplane.
So I thought that I'm going to stop and I'm going to have a little cottage industry making vacuum cleaners in Britain.
That was the... Okay.
But then you have to borrow, I think it was like 600,000 pounds?
Yes.
Yeah.
For tooling.
For the tooling.
And you did that how?
Well, I went to various venture capitalists.
There's all the people who ought to lend to startups.
And the kind of response I got was, well, you know, it's not a very interesting area.
We're investing in restaurants, fast food restaurants at the moment.
Or we're not lending to you because you're an engineer.
Yeah.
If you bring someone from the industry to run it, then we might consider backing it.
Those are the sort of responses I was getting from venture capitalists, as we used to call them.
And in the end, I went to my local bank, the clearing bank.
And you're putting up as collateral?
My house.
Again?
Yes.
Okay.
I'm getting quite used to this, by the way.
Deirdre has to keep signing the awful gray forms, signing away the house.
So, yeah, I borrowed.
They lent me a huge amount of money, actually.
I mean, it was 1992.
There was a big housing crisis.
The banks had lots of, you know, return properties.
Wait, there was a guy.
Didn't somebody like inside the bank vouch for you?
Lloyds Bank ran the system.
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.
So he was a real business expert.
And he didn't work from an office.
He just went around people's businesses.
Interesting man, actually.
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.
And it was a crazy thing for them to do actually, because you know this guy setting on business to make vacuum cleaners to compete with all the big multinationals.
What on earth is he doing, living in a little coach house near Bath?
When you think about it, it's completely mad.
Yes.
When we were making a profit and everything was okay, I said to him, why did you lend it to us?
Why did you go through the hoops to lend me that money, which was sort of a risky thing to do at a time of deep recession when they had to repossess so many houses?
He said oh well, I went home to my mother, my wife, and said what do you think of a vacuum cleaner without a bag?
And she said, brilliant, exactly what I want.
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.
It's a real piece of luck.
Do you think that is the key to succeed?
Is a determination more important?
I mean, we talked about focus, but determination is much more important than intelligence.
Yes, yes, doggedness.
Never giving up, just carrying on and not worrying what other people are saying.
You know my friend has said you're completely mad when you're spending every day in that shed with all that dust around.
So most people around you were trying to dissuade you from where you're going?
Yes, yes.
Everybody thought I was mad.
How did you receive that feedback or that criticism?
The more I got it, the more encouraged I became, actually.
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.
They were all quite interested in it, but turned it down.
And the more it was turned down, the more I realized I had something.
You believed you were right.
You had no doubt.
Yeah.
Because they never really gave a good reason.
Well, for the vacuum, the existing manufacturers, there's a great story in the book.
You know, again, I'm going to quote Charlie Martin.
He's one of our heroes.
He's like never, ever think about anything when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.
He's like, incentives rule humans.
They drive so much of human behavior.
And I'm thinking of Charlie when I'm reading your book.
And it's like, yeah, you know, it turns out it's really hard to sell.
I know you don't like this word, the bagless vacuum cleaner.
You think it should be like no loss of suction vacuum cleaner.
I'm just going to use the term for the story.
It's really hard to sell a bagless vacuum cleaner to people who make 500 million a year selling vacuum bags.
Well, it was partly that.
It was partly that.
And partly I realized they didn't want to change.
Human history repeating.
Yeah, and that's what encouraged me.
I mean, although each rejection, I should have got more and more depressed.
You had the opposite reaction.
I had the opposite reaction.
These guys don't want to change.
I think this is going to be one of the most important things I learned from this conversation is this idea
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.
You're turning it into fuel.
You're trying to dissuade me, and it's only making me more dogged.
I think your dogged determination is a great line, by the way.
Yes, it's not.
Well, no, they're rejecting it without having a good reason.
That's what was interesting.
Yeah.
You would have listened if they found a design flaw or if they told you something there.
But you're like, no, no, I am right where everybody else is wrong.
Difference for the sake of it.
That is how you build an insanely best products in your category.
You seem to be able to build a best product in every category you create.
But also how you create value, like a durable value.
So you're actually doing something differently and better than everybody else.
That's what I'm trying to do, different and then advance.
We also have a crazy line in this book which I don't know if you remember, but you would be different even if it was worse.
I don't know if you still believe that now.
Oh, yes, yes.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, you got to say more about that.
That is a crazy thing to say.
Yes, because sometimes, for example, with the vacuum cleaner tipping the dirt out of a bin, some people say it's worse than displacing the bag.
Because it creates a bit of dust.
So there aren't... I mean, not everything is always perfect about something which makes progress.
And eventually you overcome the problem.
So not everything is better.
Sometimes not everything is better.
But the good overcomes the bad.
It's much better than the bad.
But the difference is you're essentially organizing design principle.
It has to be different.
You're not going to make...
No, it's got to be better.
It has to be better.
In my opinion.
Yes, but you're not going to make another Me Too product.
No, because I don't want to do that.
I'm not motivated to do that.
I built a team around me who are motivated to take risks and do something different and better always.
Let's go back to you buy the tooling.
I'm not going to redo the entire book.
We'll skip over the issue that you're having to move the tooling and you're having issues, but then eventually you have this great line in the book.
You end one of this chapter.
These are like my favorite, like some of my favorite three paragraphs in the entire book.
And it's on total control.
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 in parentheses our mule, because you're only celebrating your stubbornness sees it right through.
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.
On May 2nd 1992 I found myself looking at the first fully operational, visually perfect Dyson dual cyclone.
I was 31 years old when I tore the bag off my Hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole.
May 2nd, 1992 was my 45th birthday.
Still heavily in debt.
Do you remember that day?
Oh, yeah.
No, I do.
Yes, I do.
Yeah, I remember quite a lot of my birthdays.
But yes, that was really important because...
To get to that point had taken me 11 years, I think it was 11 years, something like that.
And a lot of money.
And I was hugely in debt.
But I had the first prototype that worked.
Outside of your family, is that period of your life the period you're most proud of?
No, no, I don't.
No, it's all, it carries on, doesn't stop.
So I don't ever sort of stop and think now's the moment to be proud.
In fact, I don't really like pride.
Why?
It's sort of self-serving.
It's never good enough.
So you can't be proud.
Explain more.
Well, I'm never satisfied.
I mean, there's always something wrong.
I've got to go on improving it.
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 you have this mindset.
You know, like it never turns off.
You're never satisfied.
You can't just go home like, oh, everything's, this is great.
You just see the imperfections.
I don't know.
Is it really focusing on the imperfections or just focusing on the missing improvement?
It's just knowing that things could be better, there's a better way of doing it, that i haven't done it well enough that um, i've got to make it better.
I'm just driven like that, so i'm never satisfied, and i think satisfaction is a pretty dangerous thing.
Anyway, say more well, because there's a kind of smugness to it.
That that i've i'm perfect and i don't need to do any better than this.
I can relax.
And I just don't think like that.
I'm always wanting to do something better.
My wife hates it because when we're exploring the car or something, I always think there's something better around the corner.
And she wants to stop and enjoy where we are at the moment.
So, I mean, I do a commentator on that, but, I mean, that's how I think and feel.
But does that lead to – but you seem to be very, like, happy and, like, not content.
That's not the right – but you seem to be like a happy person, where this is not like a torturous – inner monologue, where all you see is you're never satisfied and you see the things that could be fixed.
It is slightly torturous, but it's what I do.
I feel the same way, though.
It excites me.
It can also lead you to periods of very dark unhappiness.
How do you not let it...
Well, I suppose I'm lucky because I don't think it makes me that unhappy.
I mean, I have moments of unhappiness.
Give me an example of a moment of unhappiness.
Well, you know, a lawsuit goes wrong or something, or an experiment doesn't work, and I hoped it would, those sort of things.
But I bounce back from them very quickly.
They're just minor things.
Is that more of like you got better with the wisdom of age and experience?
No, no, I've always been like that.
So you've basically been the same person and you just never stopped?
Never stopped.
Yes, yeah, yeah, I'd say that's true.
And I think my father's death has quite a lot to do with that, coming back to that.
And I was in a sort of a group because we lived in a school, in a public school, in a private school is probably a better expression.
And the other teacher's children was the same sort of age.
So we were a group and we had the run of the school grounds during the holidays.
But I was the youngest.
So the others were up to five years older than me.
So I was always dealing with people who were bigger and stronger than me or cleverer than me.
And so I think it made me always strive.
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, I had to be punching above my weight.
So I think that and losing my father.
So losing, 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.
That's the perfect spot to end this conversation.
James, they say never meet your heroes.
They're 100% wrong.
I don't feel ashamed at all.
You're one of my heroes.
This conversation has been excellent.
Out of all the people that I've studied and met, you're definitely the person I try to emulate the most.
I really appreciate you taking the time.
Well, thank you, David.
It's great to hear your story as well and how you succeeded.
Thank you very much.
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