James Dyson: 5,127 Prototypes

You have a weird combination: you built some of the greatest modern technology, but you have this obsession with and love of the past, which I think is very interesting.

A healthy obsession with the past. I did Latin, Greek, and ancient history at school.

Yeah.

Apparently, it’s of no use at all, but it is interesting how Greek civilization took place, how Roman civilization started, how it failed, and how people governed.

Were oligarchies good? Were dictatorships good? Or are democracies?

All of that is interesting. History repeats itself, and it’s repeating itself rather too quickly at the moment. History is interesting.

We were talking before we started recording. I have this obsession with reading everything that you have written. I’ve read your first autobiography 5 times and your second one at least 2 times. People might know this, but they don’t know that you actually wrote A History of Great Inventions. What I noticed about this is that it was published—I think you were writing this in 2001. What caused you to do this? You were building your company at the exact same time.

Yes. I’m really interested in inventions: how they happened, who did them, and what personalities were behind them. They’re inspiring stories. Luckily, an editor of a big newspaper in Britain asked me to do it, so I agreed. 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 started this obsession with history?

From school. Absolutely from school, but particularly Greek and Roman history. British history is really interesting, too. I know all the kings and queens, and 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. It jolly well does repeat itself, so you can learn really interesting things from history.

This is what I’ve noticed: people who are the best in the world at what they do, or near the best in the world at what they do, all have this love of learning from history. Charlie Munger has one of my favorite quotes about this. He says that learning from history is a form of leverage, and you can use the ideas of people long dead. You’ll find out that they were very similar to you. They went through the same struggles. They had the same fears, the same insecurities, and the same triumphs. 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 that I was going through a very—I had this obsession and love with my work, just like you do. In my case, it was not invention; it was creating podcasts. I found this book, I think it was April 2018, for the very first time. I read it, and I’d already been struggling to start my podcast for 2 years with almost no success at all—basically none.

It took me 5 and a half years of struggle. The reason this is so important is that I found it in year 2 of that 5-and-a-half-year period, before I had any remote level of success. I thought, “Well, James struggled.” This book is 90% about you struggling for 14 years, building 5,127 prototypes and refusing to give up.

You’re also funny as hell in the book. 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. Obviously, I mark up the books like crazy, and I was showing you this before we started recording. 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: “I hope Dyson’s story inspires you to say, when you get knocked down, ‘All right then, let’s give it another go.’”

Bouncing back is really important. If you are exploring new territory, experimenting, and trying to do something different, which is what you and I want to do, you’re going to fail many times, and you’ve got to bounce back from it.

Actually, failure is so much more interesting than success. Failure makes you question it: “Why did it go wrong?” The reason it goes wrong is often very, very interesting. Whereas, if something works, you say, “Great, that works,” and you don’t even stop to wonder why it worked.

You’ve got to enjoy failure. That sounds like a difficult thing to do, but you have to enjoy failure if you want to improve things—not change the world, but change things and improve things. It goes hand in hand.

It always saddens me that school doesn’t really teach that. At school or university, the thing is to be brilliant and get the answer right the first time. There are brilliant people who can do that, but the rest of us aren’t brilliant. To get there, we have to strive and go through failure. We realize that you don’t get it right the first time, and you don’t get it right the second time. In my case, I counted it: 5,127 times.

One of the things I always want to say is that this sounds like a struggle. Okay, it was a struggle, but actually, it was a hugely enjoyable struggle. The debt was mounting, and I had 3 children, a wife, and a home, and then 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. The failures were interesting because I learned from every single one of them—almost every single one of them.

Say more about having an aim in life. Was it a mission? How did you think about it then, while you were going through it?

When I discovered that I loved engineering—I did classics in school, so I couldn’t have been further away from engineering—I went to study design and then discovered engineering. Engineering was new to me. It was something new.

I had this sort of stupid thought when I was at college that I wanted to design products, engineer them, develop their technology, manufacture them, and sell them. It was a sort of megalomaniacal thought.

Why? Why was it a megalomaniacal thought?

Because I was just a penniless student in London. How could I have this thought of being a global manufacturer? I don’t know how or why I had that thought, but there were interesting things happening at that time because Concord was happening. Issigonis brought out his Mini car, which is still going today, by the way—hugely successful today.

It was about 15 years after the Second World War, so there had been deprivation during the war and immediately afterward. But suddenly, particularly in the mid-1960s, and 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.”

Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Buckminster Fuller—all these people were having really expansive and revolutionary thoughts about design, engineering, buildings, and so on. I was very lucky to be part of that era. I think I caught the bug, and I had this very cheeky idea that that’s what I wanted to be.

So this is when you met Jeremy Fry. I actually wasn’t 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: Can you explain who Jeremy Fry was and the impact that he had on your life?

I was at the Royal College of Art studying design, and I was taught by a very famous structural engineer who worked with Foster and Rogers. I became interested in engineering.

I designed a Buckminster Fuller-type structure for an impresario in London. It was a theater for an impresario in London. I went to this engineering company, founded by a millionaire, and asked him if he’d give money to the theater. He said, “No, but I’ll give you a job. I can see you’re an interesting genius, and I’ll give you a job.”

He started giving me jobs, and one of them was to design this high-speed landing craft, which was his invention, but I engineered and designed it. He then said—and I was a long-haired student with long hair, flared trousers, tight shirts, flowered shirts, all that sort of thing—“Come and start the company, making it and selling it.”

I looked at him a bit and said, “I don’t know how to sell things.” He said, “Look, you’re the engineer. You’ve chosen every square inch of that product—everything. You know it all. You’re the best person to sell it.”

That was an interesting revelation for me because I’d always thought there were professions. Sales was one profession, engineering was another, manufacturing was another, and being a manager was another. Suddenly, this entrepreneur himself was saying to me, “Well, look, you’re an engineer and designer, and 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. We shared this passion for engineering and for making things.

You found somebody who also had an obsession with the past—past engineers, past designers, and past inventors—and with whom you could have deep conversations about how they built their products and why they made certain decisions. Then you used those conversations to inform the work that you were doing together, correct?

Yes. He was a friend of Alec Issigonis. I’d never met Issigonis, but I heard about him from Jeremy.

They used to do hill racing together—designing very, very light cars that raced up hills very quickly with very little power.

It’s very skinny engineering—minimalist engineering. 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, had done this racing-car thing, and established an engineering company.

He removed the barriers: it was okay to be an obsessive engineer. You just do whatever it is you want to do, and then you go out and sell it. Hopefully, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, people will follow you. To get that advice from someone at that crucial stage in my life was, I’d say, mind-blowing. It enabled me to carry on and do things that everybody said I couldn’t do.

What do you think you learned from that? You worked on the Sea Truck for 5 years before you left, right?

About 7, because I did 2 years of it when I was at college.

7 years.

I moonlighted and designed it, and made one while I was at college. Then I left college and ran the business making and selling it.

What were some of the most important lessons from those 7 years when you were doing the Sea Truck?

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, and how to build the product. I learned how to sell it overseas, how to find agents and distributors—all that sort of thing—and learned from failures and successes.

I learned 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.

If you’re running a public company and choosing a distributor, let’s say, for Canada, it would probably be irresponsible to find an individual who’s just starting out rather than choosing an established distributor. But the person who’s just starting out hasn’t got a name yet, and he’s probably incredibly enthusiastic. He’ll 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.

My friend Josh Kushner has this great quote. When you have to decide, when you’re partnering with somebody, do you choose the most experienced, the most educated, or who wants it the most? You always choose the person who wants it the most.

Experience is an interesting thing, and Jeremy Fry taught me this. He hated experienced people. He also hated people with beards and something else.

Oh, no.

This was a different era.

Oh, no.

Smoking pipes, that’s right, because people used to smoke pipes back in the ’60s. Beards were different in the ’60s.

But let’s come back to the experience thing, which is the important thing. 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’ve just qualified or you’re still training, you don’t have that negativity toward certain things.

Often, it’s something that hasn’t worked previously that could work and is interesting to follow. So, you’re very open. 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, and I had a conversation about this. He thinks naivety is one of the greatest assets a young entrepreneur or inventor can have because he said, “If I knew how difficult it would be to make Spotify succeed at the beginning, I would not have done that.”

Naivety equals stupidity. I don’t think that. I think 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.

So, Jeremy was in the business of hiring people like a young James Dyson—smart, enthusiastic people who clearly wanted to do this, as opposed to anybody who came from another company or even a competitor.

Exactly that. Yeah.

You’re doing this now. You still do this 40 years later.

Yeah.

50 years later.

Yes. And we’ve taken it one stage further because we’ve started our own university. We’re taking 17- and 18-year-olds and starting even younger, and they work in the business and ask naive questions.

You cover the university in the book. Again, one of the things I’ve personally learned from you is differentiation for the sake of it.

Mm-hmm.

Anything that I’m going to do, I look around. One of my heroes is Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid.

Mm-hmm. Right.

He had this great line. He said, “My personal motto is, ‘Don’t do anything somebody else can do.’” Can you explain exactly how you structured and designed the Dyson University?

University is very expensive.

Yes, especially in the United States.

Right. It’s getting as bad in England, and it’s terrible. You’re saddled with that debt for a long time—sometimes 20 years. In any case, a lot of the debt is not repaid.

We need to find a different way to teach people. It’s ridiculous because they’re only taught for half the year; the rest of it is holidays. So, you’ve got these big, expensive institutions with people only there part-time. It’s madness.

And also, as I learnt when I was at college working with an engineering company—

Because you were working with Jeremy while you were still in school.

While I was—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.

I loved that experience, working with people who were having to do things—not academics, but people who had to do things and had to do them in a hurry. I really enjoyed that, and I thought, “Why can’t I give that opportunity to other people?”

So, we started our own university. It’s a difficult thing to do because the government has to approve it. For 7 years, we had to work with another university, and none of them would work with us because they didn’t like us. They saw us as big competitors because we pay our students.

You start with, “Why are we saddling these young people with an albatross of debt around their necks that’s going to limit 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 following your—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 2 days a week.

Okay.

And they work with us 3 days a week.

But you pay them for the 3 days?

We pay them. We pay them $45,000 a year. They have cars, and they go on skiing holidays. So, they’re just normal people. They’re not students; they’re in a student group.

We have about 170 of them altogether, 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, marketing, selling, whatever it is, manufacturing.

They like the reality of that, and it inspires them to learn the academic side. A lot of them said the academic side of engineering is difficult. It’s hard, but they’re inspired to do it because they get to practice it every day.

As opposed to separating the 2?

As opposed to going to university and just having academia for 4 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 who came from an existing company.

The older you get, the more you try to apply your experience. 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 you've picked up the habits of that company, which may not be the right sort of attitude that we want: this attitude of constant change, constantly trying new things, trying to be different for difference's sake, because it sets us on a different path. Some people find that difficult. Some people want to have a much more conventional way of doing things.

And so, if you're hiring, you have 18-year-olds working at Dyson, and they're also going to school.

One or two 17-year-olds as well.

Okay, 17- and 18-year-olds. What is that like?

To be honest, nobody really notices any difference.

Okay, that's going to be shocking, at least to people who assume that you have to graduate high school in America, go to college, and maybe, in many cases, go to graduate school, and then you're almost 30 by the time you start working. And you're like—

Yeah.

“No. Hire the 18-year-old.”

You've got to say more about this.

Yeah. Well, because they're enthusiastic. They've come to us because they want to do real work, and they do real work. Just because they're not as experienced as graduates, or someone in year 4 as opposed to year 1, doesn't mean they don't have just as much 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 7 years with the Sea Truck. You write about Jeremy Fry in both books, and in many cases, 50 years in this book—50 years after you spent time with him and worked with him. You said there are a lot of ideas you learned while working with him that you still apply to this day at Dyson, which I think is very fascinating—

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

—and speaks to the power of ideas, and just—

I don't have a prejudice against beards, by the way.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah, I think I probably retained the pipe, but not the beard.

I don't smoke a pipe.

That's fine.

And I don't have the hippie beard—

No, no.

—so this is fine. It'd break my heart to not know Jeremy Fry, because he's become almost my hero, too.

He would've changed over the years.

For sure. But one thing that's fascinating is that this also speaks to—I’m curious about your opinion on risk tolerance. Obviously, you have an excessively high risk tolerance in both stories.

Mm-hmm.

But you're working for a mentor whom you 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—

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

“We need somebody to know about aerodynamics.”

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And he's like, “The Range Rover's down there. The lake's right there. Tie a piece of wood behind a boat, record what happens, and then change it.”

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

But you had a wife and at least one child when you left to do the Ballbarrow?

Two. Two children, yeah.

Okay, so two kids. You have a mortgage.

Married, yeah.

So you have a family to take care of. You have a great, high-paying job. You're working hand in hand with somebody you greatly admire who taught you a ton in 7 years, and yet you're like, “I need to go out and be an entrepreneur and do my own thing.”

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so I want to talk about that. But the second thing that I didn't understand, no matter how many times I read this, is: why didn't you let him fund that?

That was a really stupid decision. Because he was someone who understood how to start businesses and how difficult it was. In fact, when I started the vacuum cleaner business, we did fund it together.

Yes. So that—

Which we'll get to.

Yeah.

Okay.

That was a really stupid decision, because he was someone who understood about starting businesses and how difficult it was. In fact, I went to borrow money from my brother-in-law and another party who didn't understand the difficulties of starting businesses, the growth pains, and so on.

Before we get there, let's talk about the decision to leave a great job.

Yes, yes. Yeah.

It's almost like you seek—

Yeah.

Tell me if I'm wrong about this. I know you seek difference for the sake of it. In that time period, you may not be like this now, but in that time period, it felt like you were seeking risk for the sake of risk.

Yeah. No, I've thought a bit about that, and I think it's partly because my father died when I was 8 or 9. I think that had a profound effect on me that I didn't realize at the time, because I felt very different from other people. I was at boarding school, and the headmaster was very kind. 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—2 parents. There weren't single-parent families in those days. Even if the 2 had split up, they appeared to come together to 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.

Also, I think if you've lost a parent at that age, life can't get much worse. You're prepared to take risks because you've started from a horrible starting point. Risk has become something 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. 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 and very dangerous. I don't mind that. It doesn't keep me awake at night.

So it starts when your father dies at 40? He died really young—he was 40 years old?

Yeah, 40, yeah, yeah.

When you were 9.

Mm-hmm.

I don't even want to start talking about it. I'll start tearing up—

Yeah.

—because that part just destroys me. 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 that you're writing this 60 years after your father dies. 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 your grandson, Mick, is still taking his stuffed animal to bed. And now you're left alone. A 9-year-old boy needs his father.

No. He had a profound influence on me. He had to do everything. He loved producing plays, and he loved directing them. I've got notes in his little Shakespeare books, crossing out lines and making notes about things. He did puppet shows, he played the recorder, he taught rugger, and he taught hockey.

He just wanted to do everything. I'm a bit like that, and I was certainly like that at school, especially if it didn't involve academia. He was like that.

I just thought of a connection that I may not have made previously. He wanted to change professions toward the end of his life.

He fought in the war in Burma. We call it the Forgotten War.

Okay.

Yeah. And it really was. It was a nasty, nasty war, a long way away. He came back from that in 1946, and in 1949, he contracted cancer.

Okay.

He'd been away from his wife for the first 6 years of their life together. Then he had 3 years being a classics master at school, and then he got cancer. He was in and out of hospital for the next 7 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—

Yeah, yeah.

—but never had the opportunity.

But never had the opportunity to do it.

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 realized, well, I had the opportunity to, whereas your dad—

Mm-hmm.

—unfortunately, because of a situation outside of his control, never got that opportunity.

No, he had his life stolen from him at the age of 40. I'm almost 80, so twice as long as he did.

Your mom passed away early, too.

Yes. She got cancer as well, in her 50s.

At 55?

Yeah, no, at 55.

My mom passed away from cancer early, too.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. A horrible disease.

Did you ever—when your dad passed away at 40 and 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. That never occurred to me.

Interesting.

No, it never occurred to me. I think it made me want to get the most out of life fast, maybe made me impatient to live my life.

Funny, I obviously have a habit and an obsession with reading biographies. Most of the people I read biographies of are not like you; they're actually dead. And this unexpected—

Well, I'll try and keep going.

No, no. I want to come to Dyson HQ and record more things. I want to see the headquarters and everything else. So you have a reason to live, in addition to your beautiful family and everything else.

Mm-hmm.

One of the byproducts of reading a bunch of biographies of dead people is that 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. It's not morbid, but you have this constant reminder that our time here is limited, so don't waste a single day.

I think about that. I am intolerant of wasting even 24 hours. I think it's actually a powerful motivator and just a great byproduct of the profession I've chosen.

I want to go back to you taking risks for the sake of risks. “You want to be your own man,” I think, is the line that you have in the book when you leave.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

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—

Yeah.

—why I didn’t ask Jeremy Fry to help fund the thing. It’s because I wanted to do something on my own. I’d worked for somebody, and 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.

But 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.

Yeah.

So, it was a really stupid decision, and you do make stupid decisions in life. I learned from my mistake. So, when I started the vacuum cleaner, I went back to someone who understood entrepreneurship, who had been an entrepreneur, rather than people who hadn’t been entrepreneurs.

We were talking about this earlier, where there is now a new class of capital available to entrepreneurs that is not institutional venture capital, which obviously still exists. But you have a lot of people who have had incredible success, like yourself. I’ve become friends with Michael Dell, and this is something that he’s interested in: providing alternative funding solutions to entrepreneurs from an entrepreneur who knows exactly—

Mm-hmm.

—what they’re going through, who is not a professional investor and 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.

Yeah.

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 “Failure Is More Interesting Than Success” or “More Fun Than Success.”

It shows what a lousy marketer I am. The publishers quite rightly said it wouldn’t sell.

So, let’s focus on the failures and the mistakes that you made. With the Ballbarrow, what still sticks out in your mind about that?

Right at the beginning, having people 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.

Okay.

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.

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

So, I borrowed money again when I started the vacuum cleaner business. 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 Ballbarrow was copied in America by an ex-employee and another company. They wanted to go after him and teach him a lesson. I said, “No, no, no. Let him do it. If he wants to do it, let him do it. We’ll come into America and 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, to 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—

Mm-hmm.

—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 and what they might think.

When I was doing the Ballbarrow business, I was always having to ring them up and say, “Do you think we should do this? Is it okay if I do this?” I didn’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 if there’s a failure, it’s my failure. It’s all down to me. Whereas if you’ve got other people, then other people are making joint decisions. So, I really enjoyed not having anyone to turn to. With the Ballbarrow business, there were other directors and other investors, so I had to worry about what they thought. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but I did.

You seem to have 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.

Okay.

I’m glad you raised that. That’s not what I meant. For example, I have no executive directors. I run the business as though it were a public business, but it’s a private business. I think it’s very important to have good people advising you.

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 single-minded. I didn’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 if there’s a failure, it’s my failure. It’s all down to me.

Whereas if you’ve got other people, then other people are making joint decisions. So, I really enjoyed not having anyone to turn to. With the Ballbarrow business, there were other directors and 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 Ballbarrow, first of all, there weren’t big hardware chains. They were individually owned hardware stores.

So, there was no Home Depot or Lowe’s or anything?

No Home Depot.

Okay.

No, none of that, which makes life a lot easier—

Yeah.

—if you’re manufacturing something. We had to sell through wholesalers who sold to all the individual retailers. Garden centers, where you go and buy garden stuff, were all individually owned. So, you had to have teams of salespeople going around all these places, trying to sell products to them. “Oh, yes, we can take one this week,” and then, “See there, one more there.” It was a completely mad system.

I’d started the business selling direct to people through little adverts in the newspaper—tiny little adverts—and people would send their 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. 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, and 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, not having a middle person, and not having to have salespeople. But they said, “Oh, no, look, you’re being successful, and I think now is the time to do it properly and get a factory and sell the normal way through retailers.”

Did you push back against that decision?

A bit, yes. I said, “Look, we’re doing quite well now. No one will have to borrow money. We’re not dependent on anybody. We’re just placing these ads and seeing what happens. 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 a 22% interest rate. A company’s lucky if it can make 5% profit or 10% net profit, but we were fighting a 22% penalty all the time.

So, there’s another thing that happened where you made the mistake of assigning—this was your invention. The Ballbarrow was your creation. You made some other products, but we can skip over that for now. Then you filed a patent. It was patentable, and you transferred the patent, not to yourself, but to the company.

Mm-hmm.

And then, when they kicked you out of the company, they took your company and your patent.

Yes. Yes, they took everything. But actually, there’s a silver lining to all of that, which is that I had offered them the vacuum cleaner.

Yes. This is why I’m obsessed with people. So far, for every single person I’ve talked to for this show, they’ve done what they do for an excessively long period of time—anywhere from 20 to 45 years. I think you see this over and over in these stories. People are in way too big of a rush. You’re going to have these happy accidents. You just stay in the game long enough to get lucky.

As a byproduct of the stuff you were doing—in the case of the Ballbarrow, you were working on it, right?—you discovered what a cyclone was because you were solving a problem with the Ballbarrow. 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 the cyclone 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 things work better: “Would it be better if I did this? Isn't there a better way of doing that?” That always happens with inventions. They don't just come out of the sky; they occur because you observe something. 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 you were spraying these sort of open things. There were masses of powder missing them. We sucked it away onto a cloth filter—a huge cloth filter—which clogged all the time.

Like a vacuum bag.

You see, so that's where you make the connection. You make the connection. What clever people did was have this huge cyclone. I got a quote for one, and there was no way we could afford it. So, over a couple of weekends, we built one, and it was 30 feet high. We had to make a hole in the roof of the factory to put the chimney through. It has a chimney, which is a vent, at the top.

A cyclone separates dust from air. Between you and me, there's a lot of dust. A cyclone will separate that by centrifugal force. If you drive around a corner very fast in your Porsche, and you drive too fast, you spin off into the ditch. That's what happens with a dust particle.

The dust particles 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. A cyclone is a circular container, and you apply enormous centrifugal force to the dust particles within it. They all get flung to the outside wall, and the only way out is from the center, through a chimney in the center. That's the basic principle of a cyclone.

So, I made the connection. I'd used vacuum cleaners like everybody else, and they all seemed to make this screaming noise and not pick things up. One weekend, I was cleaning the house, and the bag was full. Well, no, it said the bag was full, which is a slightly different thing.

Anyway, I looked around for a new bag and couldn't find one in the house. So I opened it up, emptied it out, gaffer-taped it back up again, and shoved it back in. There was still no suction. I thought, “That's odd.” I thought it didn't suck because the bag was full, and I suddenly realized the bag was empty and something else was at play here.

I opened it up, took the gaffer tape off, and there was a fine lining of dust around the inside of the bag. I suddenly realized that the suction is created by airflow, which has to go through the pores of the bag. But this fine dust was clogging the pores. It's not the fact that 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. I felt pretty angry about this. I got out, drove to a shop, bought a new bag, put it in, and had good suction for a short while. Then it dropped off again, and it said, “Bag full.” No, it wasn't bag full; the bag was clogged.

So I got pretty angry about this, and I came to a realization. It's not a very clever realization: all the air is trying to go through these little holes in the bag, and they're so easy to clog. Then, of course, I remembered the huge, 30-foot cyclone we built at the factory to stop the cloth from getting clogged with dust. Instead, we were spinning the dust out successfully by centrifugal force. It never clogged.

I thought, “Why don't we have one of those 30-foot cyclones inside a vacuum cleaner, a foot high?” It wasn't very clever, really. I built one very quickly in the kitchen at home out of cardboard and gaffer tape. 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.

I was pushing around the first vacuum cleaner that never loses suction. I thought I had a good idea, so I filed a patent and offered it to the Ballbarrow company.

Why? Because you guys were doing all these gardening products, right? I don't think you were making anything else that wasn't related to gardening at Ballbarrow.

No.

And then, I think one of your main observations was, “This is not the best business, because it's seasonal.”

Oh, it's horrible.

Right?

A seasonal product is awful.

So why don't we make vacuum cleaners? Especially in England, people buy vacuum cleaners all the time.

Yeah. Every day. That's what I want. With a seasonal product, there's a fallow period where you sell nothing. Then spring comes along, and hopefully you start to sell. It's not a good business.

The weather makes a huge difference to what you sell. If you have a bad spring—a wet spring—you never make up for that. If you change your product to make it better, you don't actually know from one year to the next whether it's an improvement or not, whether it sold more, because it all depends on the weather.

You've got to employ people during the winter, when you don't need them, and then in the summer you need more people. A seasonal business is a horrible business. Avoid seasonal businesses.

So, I pity anyone who runs a ski resort.

So, you take this vacuum cleaner, right? “All right, guys, I have the solution to our problems. 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, Hoover and Electrolux and all the existing people would have done it.”

I love that you started our conversation with “History repeats.”

Mm-hmm.

The way I say it is that history rhymes, but human nature is very constant. This idea of, “No, I can't possibly imagine a future that's different from our present”—for some reason, the vast majority of humans just cannot do that extra step in the thought process. Obviously, I think you're gifted with that.

Well, there's an assumption that experts do things correctly or in the most clever way.

What you learned from Jeremy Fry is ridiculous.

No, it is not true.

Yeah, it's not true. There's a great line in the book where it's like, “Jeremy Fry ridiculed experts.”

Yes. Well, no, he wasn't that rude. But, yes, he said, “Don't trust an expert.” Again, it's a very old idea. Andrew Carnegie said the same thing. Henry Ford said the same thing. This was happening 107 years before you were trying to make your vacuum cleaner.

And do you know where it was repeated?

Where?

It was during COVID.

Yeah.

“We're following the science.”

Yeah.

“We're listening to what the scientists say.” And I said, “Listen to what the scientists say, but don't do everything they say. Apply common sense.”

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. How long was it? Was it 5 years that you were working on the Ballbarrow?

Yes.

You did 7 years on the Sea Truck, then another 5 years, and now you're like, “Okay.” Why was there another product? You knew you wanted to invent. You knew you wanted to invent more than manufacture. I think now you love manufacturing, once you became one. But you were an inventor for—

Well, no, no, I was a manufacturer. I was a full manufacturer with the Sea Truck and with the Ballbarrow.

But at the beginning of the vacuum cleaner, you wanted to just invent and license.

Yes. I thought, “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.

Oh, okay.

I knew it.

It was a bad decision.

No, it was a bad idea.

Okay.

But—

Because you have to worry about what's going on in that other person's company. Then there are horror stories when you're trying to sell these licenses. You might have one guy who's really enthusiastic, and you come back 2 months later and he's gone.

Gone. Yeah, and someone else probably thinks the opposite. It was a nightmare. I was becoming a lawyer because I was doing license agreements all the time, and then worrying about what happened when they canceled them and all that sort of thing.

What came to mind when you mentioned earlier the mistake you thought your partners in the Ballbarrow had made, where they went and chased this guy down in lawsuits?

Mm-hmm.

Right before he passed away, unfortunately, I got to spend 3 hours at Charlie Munger's house. It was me and 2 other young entrepreneurs, and he was just giving us advice for 3 hours. One thing he said was, “Don't waste your time with lawsuits. Anytime I got screwed over by people, I didn't sue them. I just realized that you can't do a good deal with a bad person, and I just moved on.”

He said, “The lawyers are going to suck you dry. It's a distraction from your main business. You just have to keep moving on.” So now you go, “Okay, I'm going to do the vacuum cleaner.” Did you immediately think of Jeremy Fry, or did you initially have a different way 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 I really enjoyed working with, who clearly understood how to start businesses and was enthusiastic about it, like Jeremy Fry.

In the 5 years since you left his employment, did you still have a relationship with him?

Yes, he was still a friend.

So you go to talk to him, and he gets it immediately?

Yes, he gets it immediately. I actually had 2 ideas, but he and I were both more attracted to the vacuum cleaner.

What was the other idea?

The other one was—I mean, they have it now—but when you sanded something, the dust used to go everywhere. I had a device that collected it in a bag, funnily enough, or in a little cyclone, while you were sanding or drilling something.

It exists now, but when I started 50 years ago, whenever it was, it didn’t exist. We decided it wasn’t big-time. It was a sort of peripheral thing, so we wanted to do something important.

Whose idea was it to say, “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. We had both been manufacturers, although he much more than me, and we both said, “Look, we’re really inventors and engineers. Let’s just do that bit. If the invention is good enough, surely people will license it.”

Delusion. You have to deal with other humans, who are very difficult.

Not just humans. This is the point I talked about where this book changed my life. This is the point where you have an idea, the stubbornness of a mule, and an obsession. I have a lot of those same traits. I think you have them, obviously, to a greater degree, and maybe we’ll see how my life plays out.

This is the Coach House, right? For America, I had to look this up. I was like, “What the hell is a Coach House?” It’s actually, as I’ve heard you say in other interviews, like the garage for Steve Jobs.

Yes, exactly.

It’s like, “I’m working in the garage.”

Yeah.

Did you have any savings? Were you in debt?

No, I was in debt. I got into debt when I was a student.

Don’t you understand how unusual that idea is? “I have no money, I’m in debt, and I’m going to do this other super-risky thing.” You didn’t even have a working prototype yet.

What was driving you? Was it anger, the desire to prove yourself, or the love of the product? What was actually happening at that point? That’s an unusual decision to make—a decision that your entire empire now rests upon.

That’s an incredible time in your life. I saw a problem with a product that everybody uses every day, a vital product to clean their homes. As a user, I hated it because it had a bag that clogged, and then you had to go and buy another bag, and so on.

More than anything, the performance was lousy. If you have a 100-watt light bulb, it’s supposed to give 100 watts all the time. But this vacuum cleaner starts off with 100 watts and ends up at 20 watts pretty quickly. It’s deeply unsatisfactory.

I thought that if I could solve that problem, other people would buy the product. It had no substance. It was just an idea.

What chance did you give yourself of actually solving the problem? Were you pretty self-confident that you could?

No.

We’re getting crazier. Of course not. You don’t know that you can solve it.

You’ve just got to try. That’s true today, too. When we’re trying to solve something, we don’t know that we can solve it. We don’t know that we can make a motor go at 130,000 RPM when existing motors only go at 15,000 RPM.

I want to talk about motors, so don’t let me forget that.

You don’t know. You’ve just got to do it.

I want to talk about motors. Don’t let me forget about that. That’s one of the most inspiring things you inadvertently said: “No, I didn’t think I was going to succeed. No, I have no money. No, I’m in debt.”

It’s just a simple, flaky idea: the product I’m buying does not work. I’m just going to make a working version. If I make a working version, other people will buy it.

Exactly. You’re right to focus on that moment, because ideas are so fragile, and they’re easily knocked away by anybody.

That’s why experts are dangerous.

Everybody.

It’s why experts are dangerous.

Experts are dangerous. Henry Ford said in his autobiography, which I think was published in 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.”

Yeah, exactly. Your philosophy and his philosophy have a lot of overlap and echoes.

History repeats itself.

Human nature does.

If you ask people what they want, they want a faster horse. That repeats itself time and time again, many times every day.

You made a good point. I heard another one from you, and you said it in the book and in other interviews: you’re asking people to invent the future. That’s not their job.

Yes, you don’t [unintelligible].

That’s your job.

Yeah.

What are you doing?

Yeah.

Let’s focus back in on this very important time in your life. You set up in the Coach House. You’re in debt, and you have no more money. How are you funding things? I know your wife was selling art, but did you immediately go to the bank and take out another mortgage? What did you actually do?

Exactly that. I went to the bank to take out a mortgage, and Jeremy Fry guaranteed part of it. We said we needed, I don’t know, whatever, £50,000 or something to last 2 years. He put up a guarantee for £25,000, and I put up a guarantee for £25,000. That got the thing started.

How could you do it so cheaply, because your only expense was your time?

Yes, I was working at home. My only expense was my time and a few cheap materials. I couldn’t buy a lathe or equipment. I was doing it all with little Black & Decker tools and things like that, by hand.

I was making cyclones by rolling them in rollers. I went and bought some antique metal rollers down at a junk store for £25, and I could roll cyclones. They’re a funny shape, like a sort of upside-down cone, and I soldered them together.

I was doing everything by hand, but I could do that. It works. You can do things for nothing. You don’t need to spend a lot of money.

You thought, “I’ll be able to figure this out in 2 years.”

Yes.

How long did it take?

5 years, and I’m still doing it.

You’re not under great financial strain at the moment.

Actually, I thought I’d do it more quickly than 2 years. I thought I’d do it within a year, but I discovered there were all sorts of problems.

With almost any idea, when you start to apply for a patent, you find that people have tried to do it before and patented things. There are very, very few patents we file where—

You absolutely had to have something that was patentable, right? Because you—

Yes. We were going to try to license it, so we had to have a good, strong patent.

Right.

We ended up having a good, strong patent because we made an interesting discovery by accident. If you’re doing enough experiments, you’re trying to be logical in what you’re doing, but sometimes something occurs that isn’t logical, and it works. 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. I think in the book you say that the biggest problem you have with young people, even though you like working with them, is teaching them: “One change at a time. Record what happens.”

Their instinct is to come in and say, “Something’s not working. Let’s change 15 things.” Your point is, “How do you know which of the 15 things you’ve changed made the difference?”

I know a lot about you because I’ve been studying you for 9 years. You’ve been working with your hands your entire life. Are you still working with your hands?

No, not much. They’re useless. I can’t do anything with them now.

This is like somebody who lifts a lot of weights, but with their hands. I was not prepared for how huge your hands are. Your fingers don’t fit the rest of your body.

No, they’re a workman’s hands. In fact, that wretched fingerprint thing at airports doesn’t work for me. They’re worn thin. There’s no line there.

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, although maybe it won’t. My entire work is digital. I read a book, sit down, and record into a microphone. It connects to your computer and goes out into the world. I just see numbers go up on a screen. I’m by myself the whole time.

One thing I do that’s a little like working with my hands is that I’ve insisted on editing all the transcripts of every single episode by hand. That’s literally me going in there and changing a sentence or a word, or adding punctuation. If I ever do anything else, or anything in addition, even if it’s just for fun, it has to be something physical.

I feel I'm missing out on something. I'm trying to approximate that by physically touching pieces of paper. This is why the books look like they do, and I don't read digital copies.

Mm-hmm.

I sit down with a pen, a ruler, Post-it notes, and scissors.

Hmm. Mm-hmm.

I feel like it's arts and crafts over here, but there's some weird satisfaction I get out of working with my hands. My hands don't look like yours, though.

Mm-hmm.

That's from 5 decades of this.

I mean, it's something that's slightly despised at school: people who are good with their hands, who can mend cars and do plumbing, and so on.

But the entire world that we inhabit is physical.

Well, yes, exactly. That's how man started.

Somebody built this—the building that we're in.

Yeah. No, but we want to be intellectuals and not get involved in the dirty work. 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's the Industrial Revolution.

It makes any country that's good at it great.

Right, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

History again.

Yeah.

Talk about history repeating.

Yeah. 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 remembered Churchill and World War II and everything else. One thing that we learned and 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 out on the other side as the victor. I think that was very important.

Mm-hmm.

So you borrowed the money, and you were doing 1 prototype a day? 2?

Yeah, 1 or 2 a day, day after day after day.

And you say in the book, “I can celebrate now because my company is doing, I think, £300 million a year when the book ends or something like that. But I'd be lying to you if I said that there weren't days where I'd fail all day long, go into the house covered in dust and dirt—”

Mm-hmm.

—and essentially get into bed thinking, “I may just go on building prototype after prototype after prototype and never succeed forever.” What was your inner monologue during that time? How were you convincing yourself not to quit?

Well, there's hope—a thing called hope.

Okay.

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 it is better, or where it's taking me. So it's a journey of discovery, which is interesting. 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, 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. There's something funny about the process of actually making the prototype yourself that you learn from. When it fails, it may have been something you noticed as you were gluing it together or machining a part. That sort of visceral experience makes you move forward. Whereas if someone else builds a prototype, 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 the spreading of the theory of comparative advantage was actually really dangerous, because you can outsource: “This country over here can manufacture, and we'll do finance.”

Mm-hmm.

He's like, “But there's knowledge in trial and error, and the country that is doing—”

Mm-hmm.

—the manufacturing is actually learning at a way faster rate than you, because—

Yeah.

—all day long they're just doing trial and error.

Yeah.

He's like, the problem with people who come with the theories is that the first-order effect is fine. You're just ignoring the second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-order effects, and what's going to happen over a long period of time.

Yeah.

I've never heard anybody talk about that. It was in this book called Poor Charlie's Almanack. 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 Munger's actually right about this.”

Yeah. No, experiencing the whole thing is absolutely critical.

But were you taking it a day at a time? Did you allow yourself to think how far ahead? Was it literally just what was in front of you, or were you thinking about what this was going to be a month from now, 2 years from now, during this time?

Well, I was imagining that if I could make it work, 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—and that someone would snap it up. That's what was in my mind. It wouldn't necessarily make me rich, but it might get me out of debt.

Money and finance are not drivers for you?

No, no. I have to survive and live, of course. 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 successes. 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 to company building, and I think this is why I keep recommending your books over and over again, because there's 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.

Oh, it's excellent. We were making vacuum cleaners, cooling products, heating products, and so on. We had done this tiny motor, and we thought we could make an even smaller one. If we'd done that motor, we could make an even smaller one, and that would make a great hair dryer instead of those bulky, great motors they have at the moment. So that was the start of it. But everyone—

And these are discovered by trial and error?

Yes. Very early on in the vacuum cleaner business, we were buying these big, heavy vacuum cleaner motors. I haven't got one here, but they're big, you know. They go at 30,000 RPM, and the theory is, the faster you make a motor go, the smaller it can be, the fewer materials it can have, and the more electrically efficient it is.

Quite early on, we realized that we needed to develop a new type of electric motor, because electric motors and this sort of thing hadn't really changed for 150 years. It's the same Faraday idea. 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 were academics who knew about electric motors, and we started, as a non-electric-motor manufacturer, developing our own motor. It took a long time. It took 10 years.

10 years before you had success on that, too?

Yes. 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.

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.

Yeah.

When you're thinking about the products you're making now, are you starting with—because you seem to be, in my understanding, one of the best companies in the world at making motors, electric motors. I feel that now you're like, “What else? We have this skill set. The company is 45 years old, something like that. We have this world-class skill set and world-class talent at building electric motors. Are there other products that we find deficient, in need of renewal, that we can apply that ability to?” Is that a process of product development for you?

It can be.

Okay.

And we had the brilliant idea of doing an electric car.

Yeah.

Because we make electric motors, filtration and cooling devices, and we're developing batteries.

Let's talk about the car. Let's talk about the car. So you thought, “Oh, we should do an electric car.” When was this?

2014.

Okay.

I looked at what the industry was predicting, and they said 2% electric cars by 2030. I thought, “They've got that wrong. That can't be right.” So we started developing an electric car. We're developing batteries, by the way—new technology. We still are.

Wait, you manufacture your own batteries, too?

Not yet. Not yet.

But you want to.

We want to, yeah. What a surprise—you want control over that.

I'd love—

I'd understand that. New-technology ones, not ordinary ones.

Yeah.

So we said, “We're developing batteries. Electric motors are one of our things. Air treatment is another one of our things.” That's pretty much an electric car. So we started developing one. Then we got to 2017, and Dieselgate happened.

The first 3 or 4 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 because of this horrific reaction to Dieselgate, that they had to get into electric cars. Most of the big manufacturers immediately jumped into electric cars and made them. And they’re making a terrific loss on them.

Explain.

Electric cars are very expensive to make. Batteries are incredibly expensive, and the electronics involved in the batteries are expensive. The batteries are very heavy, so it’s a very different type of car and very expensive to make—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 the overall emissions from their range of cars.

Oh, not the individual model?

Not the individual model. So if they had a model that didn’t emit anything, they could go on making big gas-guzzling vehicles on which they make a lot of money. They’re prepared to lose money on the electric car to make money on the big gas-guzzling SUV, or whatever it is. But Tesla and we were just electric-vehicle manufacturers. Tesla is brilliant, and $30 billion has gone into a huge investment. I’m a little company on my own, and I faced a very uncertain future trying to sell an electric car in that sort of setup.

If you have fairly low volume and you’re a new manufacturer, all your costs are 30% higher because you’re not buying very many seats from the seat manufacturer or very many tires from the tire manufacturer, and so on. All your costs are much higher.

You had a series of structural disadvantages.

Huge disadvantages.

Yeah.

Tesla overcame them through sheer scale, might, and investment. But we didn’t have that sort of money. We couldn’t take that sort of risk, so we stopped it.

How much did you spend on R&D for that?

We spent about $750 million. I keep working in pounds—half a billion pounds.

Okay, so $750 million. Do you have the actual prototype sitting in your headquarters, I think, in Singapore?

Yeah, we’ve got one there.

Is there one that you can at least drive, or do they just not exist?

No. There was one we could drive very slowly, but health and safety meant we couldn’t take it out. We built one of the final prototypes.

Where’s that one? Is that the one in Singapore?

Yeah, but no. That’s a model in Singapore. We’ve got it in one of our hangars on our airfield.

Do you ever get in it anymore and just drive around?

No, no, no.

Is it too painful? Would you get in a car that cost you $750 million?

Everybody said, “You must have learned a lot from that experience.” The answer is, I learned absolutely nothing.

What do you mean?

It was fun to do, but we—

It was fun to do?

Yeah, it was fun to do. Half the people were snapped up by other manufacturers, and half the people working on it came to work on vacuum cleaners and other things.

I didn’t even think of it emotionally. Think about it: if you worked on something for a decade and it isn’t going anywhere—

Yeah, well, maybe not quite a decade.

Five or 6 years, yeah.

Five or 6 years? No, it was an awful thing to do. Sadly, we didn’t really learn anything from it.

What’s 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? That’s the actual sequence of events: you didn’t identify the product first. You were just like, “Well, we have the skill set. What can we apply it to?” Did you do that with hair dryers? What’s an example of that?

Yes. I think the way we approached the car was slightly dangerous. We were saying, “Look, we’ve got these skill sets.”

And you were trying to match it.

And we would say, “Well, it looks like it would go very well in a car,” without really asking, “Is that going to be a successful product? Is it going to be a breakthrough product?” It might have been a breakthrough product if we had managed to do the battery. Certainly, the motors we developed were very efficient motors. An electric car is all about efficiency: aerodynamic efficiency, drivetrain efficiency, and having better, smaller batteries.

Power consumption is a big thing.

Mm-hmm. One-sixth to one-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. It’s all really about how far you can 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 are 2 ways. One is you realize you have a technology and you can make a hair dryer.

How many of these do you make now?

Motors? We’ve made about 150 million of them.

A year, though, now?

A year? We make about 30 million a year.

It’s very interesting. In the book, you said that other companies tried to get you to make motors for them and you adamantly refused. Is that still correct?

That’s correct.

I love what you said, because you want your engineers to focus 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, by the way.

The one I’ve taken.

Okay. This is very interesting. I think this is missing in business. We talked about it before we started recording. I had this idea of an anti-business billionaire: people who are so obsessed with the quality of the product they’re making—that’s their number-one priority—they just want to make the best possible product. They do things that may seem irrational because they would improve the quality of the product.

I think you’re one of them. There’s a series of people I’ve read about who are just obsessed with making the best product for customers, solving an actual, real need, and retaining control. They wind up with the money anyway, but that’s not the motivator. So explain your rationale—and I think it’s the right rationale, but I’m very curious if you can articulate it. Why do you not set up this other division that you wouldn’t have to run, which 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 making money.

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 long have you been like that—forever?

I think so, yes. I’m very single-minded and not distracted by things. Actually, that’s really important, because when you start running a business or doing things, you have too much to do. There’s too much to do. So all the time, you have to make a choice: what’s the most important thing to do? If you get to be a big business, that’s still important.

Say more about that.

If you get big, there’s a tendency to think you have lots of people, so you can do everything. But you can’t, because you can’t do everything well, and you probably can’t do everything anyway. The important thing is to decide what’s really the most important thing and just do that. There are going to be things you don’t do, and there are going to be some failures because you’re not doing things, but if you’re doing something 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.

I mean, you decide the most important thing, and that's an important decision. You say, “Well, I haven't got time to do the other things. I won't do them.” 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.

Same thing. And if your brain isn't very big—which mine isn't—it's a much better way to run your life: just concentrate on 1 thing at a time.

But you have multiple product lines.

Yeah, that's stretching my brain a bit. But yes, I'm learning to manage that in myself. I've got lots of wonderful people around me helping me, including my son now.

I know you did the vacuum cleaner first, and you had the vacuum cleaner as the only product at Dyson for how long?

8 years, probably.

Okay.

Yes.

So you were focused. And then was the washing machine the second product?

The washing machine came on quite early, after about 4 or 5 years. But it didn't work—

It did work. It worked, but—

It worked very well. Don't say that to me. No, and I made another mistake with that, which was that I'd been making vacuum cleaners at about 300 dollars, 200 dollars, and 300 dollars. The washing machine was 1,200 dollars or 1,300 dollars at the start, so it was more expensive than other people's washing machines.

Yeah, but the vacuum cleaner was more expensive than other vacuum cleaners, though.

Yeah, 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. Marketing people should get on with selling things, not deciding what the product should be or how much it should be sold for.

I listened to them, and we didn't sell any more. We just lost more money on it. The other directors, the non-executive directors, said, “You've got to stop that because we're losing money on it.”

Actually, if I'd been on my own, I'd probably have gone on with it and put the price up. But sometimes you have to listen to other people, and they were probably right. So we put it behind us and got on with what we were doing.

They're still in operation, though.

Oh, yeah. I use them. I have my own Dyson washing machine. It's great. People have now copied a lot of the ideas, like the big door. If you're trying to put a duvet in a tiny little hole—

It was very expensive to make, actually, and I should have learned my lesson from that. Because it had 2 drums, 2 motors, and a gearbox, it had a lot of things other washing machines don't have. But it did a very good job. It was a very good washing machine.

It begs the question: Are there any other Dyson products that you own that aren't available to consumers? What else have you made for yourself?

I'll keep quiet about this.

I'll keep you quiet about it. 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 is like this crazy experience I've been on, which, when I'm done, I'm probably going to have read more biographies and autobiographies of entrepreneurs, founders, and inventors than anybody else in the world.

Everybody's always like, “Give me a top-10 list,” or, “Can you break it down? Can you condense what you've learned so far?” I was like, well, if I can condense it down to 1 word, it's how different these people are from most people, from the mass of humanity: focus. It's 1 word. They're unbelievably focused.

If you don't mind me asking another question, just to see if you have anything more to say about this, because I'm obsessed with it as well: How do you figure out what to focus on for you?

That's a very good question. I think it's something you believe could work, and that's a breakthrough. It's something completely different. It's going to do such a job much better, and that's what you think.

But, of course, you can only think it. What are you following there? Is it intuition? Is it just, “I can't get this off my mind”? What is actually happening?

It's partly intuition. But I don't believe intuition is a feeling or guesswork.

Oh. You've got to 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 a whole lot of hundreds or thousands of things you've experienced that help you make a decision, 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. Ultimately, it's intuition. But intuition isn't just airy-fairy. It's not a feeling. Your brain has been fed with hundreds of different things, and from that, you make a decision.

You can't rationalize it and say, “Oh, that's that, and 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. Then you've got to make it work.

Mm-hmm.

But it's very fragile. That early idea—I came back to that with the vacuum cleaner, the cyclone idea—is a very fragile idea. You can blow it away. It's worth nothing.

And your partners at Ballbarrow tried to blow it away?

Yes. Oh, everybody tried. My friends tried to blow it away: “What on earth are you doing?”

But it took hold of you right away?

Yes.

And then did your confidence deepen as you went 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. I got the bug, and I'm going to go on. I'm going to make it work.

This took 5 years, much longer than I thought it would, and all that. So then I got deeper and deeper into debt. But I was going to make it work. I got a rat by the 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 you had to have lows in confidence and doubt throughout that period.

Well, of course I had doubts, but I made it work. You can't pretend you don't have doubts.

Were you talking to anybody about this?

Deirdre, my wife, and nobody else.

Not even Jeremy?

No. Actually, I bought him out.

Let's go back to that, because it's kind of important. Can you explain why you bought him out? And this was after failing, if I remember correctly, to try to license it?

Yes.

The first successful license was Japan, right?

No, the first successful one—

Oh, yeah, the one that made money. You were 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 pink, right?

No, they did use it. They did. I thought you said in the book that they may have just been there for some kind of art.

Maybe.

No. They didn't sell very many, but they did sell some. I never discovered how many they sold because they were 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 lawsuit?

Yes.

Oh, God.

And he hated lawsuits. So when that started, he wanted to get out. He just said, “I hate lawsuits, and my financial advisor thinks the vacuum cleaner is going nowhere.” He owned 49% of the business, so he said I should buy him out.

Was that contentious between you? Did it damage your relationship?

No, not at all. We remained very good friends afterwards.

So what did you buy him out with? How much money, though?

£45,000. 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, hopefully in the introduction or whatever the case is, but you own 100% of Dyson.

Yes.

It is 1 of the most valuable privately held companies in the world.

Well, I don't think it's that, but—

Oh, because I've heard stories. That's fine. We don't have to talk about it. And you bought out your 49% partner for £45,000.

Mm-hmm.

Right. So what happens? Now you're on your own.

Yeah, completely on my own.

And you stayed—I know you have executive directors and everything.

I had to fight the lawsuit. I had to fight that lawsuit with Amway for 5 years: borrowing money, selling actions in the lawsuit, lawyers on contingency, all that type of thing. It took 5 years of my life.

The only income was a drip of license agreements.

For that partner?

Yeah. Yes, a drip of license agreements just kept me going.

At what point did you say, “To hell with it, I'm doing this on my own”? I mean, not licensing—“I'm going to manufacture and control it from soup to nuts.”

It was at the end of the lawsuit, actually. That's when I decided I'd had enough of this licensing game and was going to do it myself.

But you have no money.

No money. And I was sick of traveling because I was traveling to Japan and America all the time, and I was just sick of it. I got meningitis from it.

I think from an airplane.

So I thought, I'm going to stop, and I'm going to have a little cottage industry making vacuum cleaners in Britain.

Right. Okay. But then you had to borrow—I think it was about £600,000—for tooling?

Yes, for the tooling.

And how did you do that?

Well, I went to various venture capitalists, the sort of people who ought to lend to startups. 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.”

“If you bring someone from the industry to run it, then we might consider backing it.” Those were the sort of responses I was getting from venture capitalists, as we used to call them. In the end, I went to my local bank, the clearing bank.

And you’re putting up as collateral—

My house.

Again? Okay. I’m getting quite used to this, by the way.

Yeah. Deirdre has to keep signing the awful gray forms for signing away the house. I borrowed a huge amount of money, actually. It was 1992, and there was a big housing crisis. The banks had lots of repossessed properties.

Wait, there was a guy. Didn’t somebody inside the bank vouch for you?

Lloyds Bank ran a system where, instead of going to a man sitting in a branch of the bank and borrowing from him, they had a sort of flying doctor who went around businesses. He was a real business expert. He didn’t work from an office; he just went around people’s businesses. He was a very interesting man, actually.

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. It was a crazy thing for them to do, actually. This guy was setting up a business to make vacuum cleaners to compete with all the big multinationals. What on earth was he doing living in a little coach house near Bath? When you think about it, it was completely mad.

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?” It was such a risky thing to do at a time of deep recession, when they’d had to repossess so many houses.

He said, “I went home to my mother and my wife and said, ‘What do you think of a vacuum cleaner without a bag?’ And she said, ‘Brilliant. Exactly what I want.’” He also said, “I saw that you had fought a 5-year lawsuit in America, and I saw that you had determination.” So I was very lucky. It was a real piece of luck.

Do you think that is the key to success? Is determination more important than—I mean, we talked about focus, but determination is much more important than intelligence?

Yes. Doggedness. Never, never giving up. Just carrying on and not worrying about what other people are saying. My friends said, “You’re completely mad. What are you doing spending every day in that shed with all that dust around?”

So most people around you were trying to dissuade you from what you were doing?

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 quite interested in it but turned it down. The more it was turned down, the more I realized I had something.

You believed you were right.

Yeah.

You had no doubt.

Yeah. They never really gave a good reason.

Well, for the vacuum, the existing manufacturers—there’s a great story in the book. Again, I’m going to quote Charlie Munger because he’s one of my heroes. He said, “Never ever think about anything when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” Incentives rule. They drive so much of human behavior.

I’m thinking of Charlie when I’m reading your book, and it’s like, “Yeah, you know what? 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 called a no-loss-of-suction vacuum cleaner.

Yeah, that’s right.

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 of cleaning.

Yeah. And that’s what encouraged me. Although with each rejection, I should have gotten more and more depressed.

And 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: assuming that you’re doing things for the right reason, you’re following your curiosity, and you’re completely obsessed with what you’re doing, you can take what is essentially a negative and turn it into fuel.

You’re turning it into fuel.

Yeah. They’re trying to dissuade me, and it’s only making me more dogged. I think “dogged determination” is a great line, by the way.

Well, no. They were rejecting it without having a good reason.

That’s what was interesting.

Yeah.

You would have listened if they had found a design flaw or if they told you there was something there where you thought, “No, no, I am right where everybody else is wrong.”

Difference for the sake of it—that is how you build insanely great products in your category. You seem to be able to build the best product in every category that you create, but also, how you create value is a lot like durable value: you’re actually doing something differently and better than everybody else.

That’s what I’m trying to do: a difference and an advance.

Yeah, but you also have a crazy line in this book, which I don’t know if you remember. You would be different even if it was worse. I don’t know if you still believe that now.

Oh, yes. Yes.

All right, you’ve got to say more about that. That is a crazy thing to say.

Well, yes, because sometimes—for example, with the vacuum cleaner, tipping the dirt out of a bin, some people would say, is worse than disposing of a bag because it creates a bit of dust.

So not everything is always perfect about something that makes progress. Eventually, you overcome the problem, but 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 essentially your organizing design principle. It has to be different. You’re not going to make—

There’s no reason for any—

No, no, it’s got to be better.

It’s got to be better.

I know what you mean.

It has to be better, in my mind.

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, and I’ve built a team around me who are motivated to take risks and do something different and better, always.

So let’s go back to when you bought the tooling. I’m not going to redo the entire book. We’ll skip over the issue of having to move the tooling and the problems you had. But then eventually you have this great line. You end one of these chapters—these are some of my favorite 3 paragraphs in the entire book—and it’s on total control.

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, “or mule,” because you’re celebrating your stubbornness—“sees it right through.”

Mm-hmm. As I have often 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 2, 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 2, 1992, was my 45th birthday.

Still heavily in debt. Do you remember that day?

Oh, yeah, I do. I remember quite a lot of my birthdays. But no, that was really important because getting to that point had taken me 11 years, I think—something like that—and a lot of money. 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. It carries on; it doesn’t stop. I don’t ever stop and think, “Now’s a moment to be proud.” In fact, I don’t really like pride.

Why?

It’s sort of self-serving.

Yeah. It’s never good enough, so you can’t be proud. Explain more.

Well, I’m never satisfied. There’s always something wrong. I’ve got to go on improving it.

You talk about this in the book: the engineering mindset. If you’re reading this and you have this mindset, it never turns off, and you’re never satisfied. You can’t just go home and say, “Oh, everything’s great.” You just see the imperfections—or not even that. I don’t know. Is it really focusing on the imperfection, or just focusing on the missing improvement?

It’s just knowing that things could be better, that there’s a better way of doing it, that I haven’t done it well enough, and that I’ve got to make it better. I’m just driven like that.

Say more.

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: “I’m perfect, and I don’t need to do any better than this. I can relax.” I just don’t think like that. I’m always wanting to do something better.

My wife hates it because, when we’re exploring in 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. I do accommodate her on that, but that’s how I think and feel.

You seem to be very happy and not content—that's not the right word—but you seem to be a happy person. This isn't a torturous inner monologue where all you see is that you're never satisfied and you see the things that could be fixed.

It is slightly torturous.

So, okay.

But it's what I do. It's what excites me.

I feel the same way, though. But 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 have moments of unhappiness when a lawsuit goes wrong or an experiment doesn't work and I hoped it would—those sorts of things. But I bounce back from them very quickly. They're just minor.

Give me an example of a moment of unhappiness.

When a lawsuit goes wrong or an experiment doesn't work and I hoped it would.

Is that more like you got better with the wisdom of age and experience?

No. No. No, I've always been like that.

So you've basically been the same person, and you just never stopped.

Yes, never stopped. I'd say that's true. I think my father's death has quite a lot to do with that, coming back to that.

I was in a sort of group because we lived in a school—a public school, or a private school is probably a better expression. The other teachers' children were the same sort of age, so we were a group, and we had the run of the school grounds during the holidays. But I was the youngest, so the others were up to 5 years older than me.

I was always dealing with people who were bigger and stronger than me, or cleverer than me. I think it made me always strive. I was the youngest of 3 children anyway, and being younger than this group that I went around with made me try to punch above my weight a bit and made me very determined.

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.

I think that, combined with losing my father and realizing I was on my own—I was away at boarding school on my own—made me the sort of character I am. It 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've succeeded.

Thank you very much.