James Dyson, Dyson

James Dyson is the founder and chairman of Dyson, a technology-led company present in 84 markets worldwide. He is an inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who has devoted his life to solving problems through new technologies. Under his leadership, Dyson created some of the most iconic household products in the world: the bagless vacuum cleaner, the Airblade hand dryer, bladeless fans, and the Supersonic hair dryer. Around half of Dyson's global team are engineers and scientists, with research interests spanning robotics, AI, machine learning, solid-state battery development, material science, and high-speed electric motors. After developing 5,127 failed prototypes and being rejected by every major manufacturer, Dyson launched his own company and reshaped the vacuum industry by the 1990s. He became known for his iterative engineering approach, his cyclonic separation technology that eliminated bags, and his ability to bring products to market against fierce opposition. His accomplishments include building Dyson into a multi-billion-dollar global enterprise, establishing Dyson Farming in 2013, founding the James Dyson Foundation in 2002 to inspire young engineers and run the annual James Dyson Award, and creating the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology in 2017—a degree program where students study while working full-time in Dyson's engineering team. Dyson was awarded a Knight Bachelor in 2007, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015, and appointed to the Order of Merit in 2016—the highest honor, and the only one within the monarch's personal gift. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/james-dyson Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com HubSpot: ⁠https://hubspot.com Function: https://functionhealth.com/senra Chapters (0:00) Introduction: A Love for History and Technology (0:48) The Inspiration Behind Writing a History of Great Inventions (2:01) The Importance of Learning from History (2:38) The Struggles and Triumphs of Starting Founders (3:53) Embracing Failure and the Joy of Experimentation (5:38) Discovering a Passion for Engineering (7:10) The Influence of Jeremy Fry (10:39) Lessons Learned from the Sea Truck (12:16) The Value of Naivety in Innovation (15:35) The Dyson Institute: A New Approach to Education (21:47) The Decision to Leave and Start the Ballbarrow (23:04) Reflections on Risk and Personal Loss (30:49) The Challenges of the Ballbarrow Business (37:24) The Importance of Persistence (37:46) Accidental Discoveries in Engineering (38:34) The Cyclone Vacuum Cleaner Invention (42:44) Challenges of Seasonal Products (45:15) The Struggles of Licensing and Manufacturing (49:06) The Coach House: Birthplace of Innovation (52:25) The Journey of Prototyping (55:42) The Role of Hands-On Work in Innovation (1:04:29) The Electric Car Project (1:08:44) Reflecting on Painful Experiences (1:09:33) High Energy and Health Optimization (1:10:59) Applying Skills to New Products (1:13:13) Focus and Single-Mindedness (1:16:14) The Journey of Dyson's Vacuum Cleaner (1:27:35) Dogged Determination and Success (1:36:09) The Influence of Early Life Experiences (1:37:40) Conclusion and Final Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Senra?

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

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, a healthy obsession with the past, I think, is I mean, I did Latin, Greek and ancient history at school. Yeah. And apparently of no use at all, but it is interesting how Greek civilization took place and how Roman civilization started and how it failed and how people governed. Well, oligarchy is good, dictatorship is good, or democracies, you know, it's interesting. And history repeats itself and it's repeating itself relatively quickly at the moment. So it's a history is interesting.

• 0:43David Senra?

  We were talking before we started recording, I have this obsession with reading everything that you have written. I read your first autobiography five times, your second one at least two times, but then, you know, people might know about this, but they don't know that you actually wrote a history of great inventions. And what I noticed about this is it was published, I think you were writing this in like 2001. What caused you like, why did you do this? You were building your company at the exact same time.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yes, because I'm really interested in inventions, how they happened, who did them, what personalities were behind them. And they're inspiring stories. And luckily, an editor of a big newspaper in Britain asked me to do it, so I agreed to do it. And actually, we published it as a series of color supplements to a weekend newspaper and then put it into a book.

• 1:34David Senra?

  How old were you when you started this, when you had this obsession with history?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Oh, from school, absolutely from school. Particularly Greek and Roman history. I mean, British history is really interesting and I know all the kings and queens, I know their dates. I'm not, I'm not a very clever person, actually, I'm not good at remembering things, but I have remembered all that history. And it jolly well does repeat itself, so you can learn really interesting things from history.

• 2:02David Senra?

  And this is what I've noticed, people are, you know, the best in the world at what they do, or near the best in the world at what they do, they all have this love of learning from history. Charlie Munger has one of my greatest favorite quotes about this. He says that learning from history is a form of leverage and you can actually, you know, use ideas people long dead and you'll find out that they were very similar to you. That they had the same, they went through the same struggles, the same, they had the same fears, they had the same insecurities, they had the same triumphs. And you can just pick up a book of somebody's life story, like the ones that I have in front of me. I told you before we started recording, I was going through, you know, very, I had this obsession and love with my work, just like you do. And in my case, was, was not invention, it was creating podcasting, podcasts.

• 2:43David Senra?

  And this book, I found it, you know, I think it was April 2018, the very first time. I, I read it and I'd already been struggling to start my podcast for two years with very, almost no success at all. Basically none, no success. And it took me five and a half years of struggle. And the reason this is so important to find it year two into that five and a half years, before I had any, you know, even remote level of success, is because I'm like, well, James, struggle, this book is 90% of it is you struggling for 14 years, building 5,127 prototypes and refusing to give up. You're also funny as hell in the book, where you're like, anytime if you think I'm, you know, have a little bit of ego,

• 3:23David Senra?

  just realize that I'm only, I'm only celebrating that I have the stubbornness of a mule. This is the note, so obviously I mark up the books like crazy and I was showing you this before we started recording. And this is really, I got to the very last page. And when I was recording my thoughts for the benefit of other people by making the podcast, this is what you inspired me to do, is like, I hope Dyson's story inspires you to say, when you get knocked down, all right then, let's give it another go.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, bouncing back is really important. And if you are exploring new territory, very experimenting, you're trying to do something different, which is what, you know, you and I want to do, you're gonna fail many times and you've got to bounce back from it. And actually, if you learn that failure is so much more interesting than success, because failure, you question it, well, why did it go wrong? And actually, the reason it goes wrong is often very, very interesting. Where something works, you say, great, that works. And you don't even stop to wonder why it worked. So if you, you've got to enjoy failure, as, that's a, sounds a difficult thing to do, but you have to enjoy failure if you want to improve things, if you want to not change the world, but change things and improve things.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Goes hand in hand. And it always saddens me that school doesn't really teach that. At school or university, the thing is to be brilliant and to get the answer right first time. And there are brilliant people who can do that, but for the rest of us, we're not brilliant. And to get there, we have to strive and we have to go through failure. And we realize that, you know, you don't get it right first time, you don't get it right second time. In my case, and I counted it, it's 5,127 times. One of the things I always want to say is that that sounds like a struggle. Okay, it was a struggle, but actually it was a hugely enjoyable struggle. The debt was mounting and I had three children and a wife and a home and a mortgage to pay like everybody else.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  But I had a real point in life, I had a real aim, and I had to get there. And the failures were interesting because I'd learned from every single one of them, almost every single one of them. Say more about that you had an aim in life, so a mission? How did you think of it then, while you're going through it? When I discovered that I loved engineering, because I did classics at school, I couldn't be further away from engineering. And then I went to study design and then discovered engineering. So engineering was new to me, it was like something new. And I had this sort of stupid thought when I was at college, that I wanted to design products, I wanted to engineer them, I wanted to develop their technology, and I wanted to manufacture them, and I wanted to sell them. So it's a sort of megalomania thought.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Why? Why is it megalomania thought? Because I was a penniless student in London, you know, how could I have this thought of being, you know, a global manufacturer? And I don't know how or why I had that thought, but there were interesting things happening at that time, because Concorde was happening, Issigonis brought out his Mini car, you know, which is still going today, by the way, hugely successful today. So there were, and it was about 15 years after the Second World War. So there was deprivation during the war and immediately afterwards. But suddenly, particularly in the mid-sixties, and I think particularly in London where I was, there was a feeling that, ah, we're free of the past, we can do something new and different.

• 6:50Speaker 01

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

• 7:10David Senra?

  So this is when you meet Jeremy Fry. I actually was not expecting to start our conversation the way we just did, but I'm glad it leads perfectly to how I really wanted to start, which is like, I want, if you can explain who Jeremy Fry was and the impact that he had on your life.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Well, I was at the Royal College of Art doing design and I was taught by a very famous structural engineer who worked with Foster and Rogers. And I became interested in engineering and I designed a Buckminster Fuller type structure for an impresario in London, it was a theatre for an impresario in London. And I went to this engineering company, this millionaire who had founded an engineering company, and asked him if he'd give money to the theatre. And he said, no, I'll give you a job. I can see you're an interesting guy, and I'll give you a job. So he started giving me jobs. And one of them was to design this high-speed landing craft, which was his invention, that I engineered it and designed it.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  And he then said, and I was a long-haired student with long hair, flared trousers, tight shirts, flowered shirts, all that sort of thing. He said, come and start the company, making and selling it. So I sort of looked at him a bit, so I don't know how to sell things. And he said, look, you're the engineer, you've chosen every square inch of that product or everything, you know it all, you're the best person to sell it. So that was, that was an interesting sort of revelation for me, because I'd always thought there were professions. And, you know, there was sales, this one profession, engineering was another, and manufacturing was another, and being a manager was another. And suddenly it was this entrepreneur himself saying to me, well, look, you're, you're an engineer and designer, you know all about the product, go and make it and go and sell

• 8:52Speaker 01

  it. So it broke down all the barriers for me. We became great friends and we had lots of discussions about engineering and, and shared this passion for engineering and for making things.

• 9:04David Senra?

  And you found somebody that also had an obsession with the past, past engineers, past designers, past inventors that you could actually have a deep conversations with about how they built their products, why they made these certain decisions, and then you use those to inform the work that you guys were doing, correct?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, he, he was a Friend of Isagornis, so I'd I'd never met Isagornis, but I heard about him from him. They used to do hill racing together, design cars that very, very light cars that raced up hills very quickly with very little power. So it's sort of very skinny engineering, minimalist engineering. And so he had quite a lot of stories from from that era. He was twenty years older than me, so he had seen a bit of life. During the war and and had done this racing car thing and established an engineering company. So he he just removed the barriers and that it was okay to be an obsessive engineer. And you you just do whatever it is you want to do, and then you go out and sell it.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  And hopefully, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, people will follow you. So, you know, to get that advice from someone at that crucial stage in my life was was, I might say, mind blowing. It was. It enabled me to carry on and and do things that everybody said I couldn't do. And then what do you think, because you worked on the sea truck for five years before you left? Yeah, about seven, because I I did two years of it when I was at college. I moonlighted and and designed it. While I was and made one while I was at college. And then I left college and ran the business making and selling it. What were some of the most important lessons from the seven years when you were doing the sea truck?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Oh, I think I learned everything from that. I learned how to manufacture, how to approach manufacturers and get them to make components. How to set up a factory, building the product, how to sell it overseas, how to find agents and distributors, all that sort of thing. And learn failures and successes with that, to learn that it's all about people. Not appearances or how big their company was. It's finding the right sort of person with the right sort of enthusiasm. Say say more about that. Probably if you're running a public company and you're choosing a distributor, let's say for Canada. It would be probably irresponsible to find an individual who is just starting up rather than choosing an established distributor.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  But of course, a person who's just starting up, okay, he hasn't got a name yet, but he's probably incredibly enthusiastic and will put everything behind it and work all hours to make it work. So it's the person, not the business, really, that you're backing.

• 11:40David Senra?

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

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Experience is an interesting thing, and Jeremy Frye taught me this. He hated experienced people. He also hated people with beards and something else. But anyway, but this was a different era. This was a different era. Oh, yeah, smoking pipes, that's right, because people used to smoke pipes back in the 60s. And beards were different in the 60s. But anyway, come back to the experience, that was the important thing. And I've discovered this, if you're experienced, you know how, 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 towards certain things.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  And often, it's something that hasn't worked previously that could work and is interesting to follow. So you're very open, and I love naivety, people asking silly questions, stupid questions, because it creates a different way of doing things. And we've got to find different ways of doing things all the time.

• 12:56David Senra?

  My friend Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, we had a conversation about this, where he actually thinks naivety is like one of the greatest assets a young entrepreneur or an inventor can have. Because he's like, if I knew how difficult it would be to make Spotify succeed at the beginning, I would not have done that.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Yes, naivety equals stupidity. I don't think that. I think that naivety is interesting because you're thinking really hard, how the hell do I do this? I don't know how to solve this problem. The experienced person might think they know how to solve it, but the naive person doesn't. So they're thinking much harder and more intelligently.

• 13:33David Senra?

  James Dyson is obsessed with crafting a high-quality product, and he's made some of the best products in the world by running tens of thousands of experiments throughout his life. Every single experiment was aimed at making a better product for his customer. That is exactly what the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp, does. Dyson reminds me of my friend Kareem, who's the co-founder and CTO of Ramp. I spend a lot of time talking to Kareem, and every single conversation centers around his obsession with crafting a high-quality product and using the latest technology to constantly create better experiences for his customers. This is exactly what James Dyson does. Kareem and James Dyson both believe that nothing is ever good enough and everything can be improved. Ramp has one of the most talented technical teams in finance, and they use rapid relentless

• 14:17David Senra?

  iteration to make their product better every day, just like Dyson. So far this year, Ramp has shipped over 300 new features. Ramp is completely committed to using AI to make a better experience for their customers and to automate as much of your business's finances as possible. In fact, Kareem just wrote this: "It is our duty to be first movers and push limits so we can make the greatest possible product experience for our customers." That sounds a lot like James Dyson to me. And it is why many of the fastest-growing and most innovative companies in the world are running their business on Ramp. Make sure you go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money. Let AI chase your receipts and close your books so you can use your time and energy building great things for your customers.

• 14:59David Senra?

  Because at the end of the day, that is what this is all about: building a product or service that makes someone else's life better. That is what I'm trying to do, that is what Dyson has dedicated his life to doing, and that is what Ramp has done too. Get started today by going to ramp.com. So Jeremy was in the business of hiring people like a young James Dyson. He's a smart, enthusiastic person that clearly wants to do this, as opposed to anybody that was, came from like another company or like even a competitor.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Exactly that.

• 15:29David Senra?

  You're doing this now. You still do this. Forty years later, fifty years later.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Yes, and we've taken it one stage further because we've started our own university. So we're taking seventeen and eighteen year olds and starting even younger. And they work in the business and they ask naive questions.

• 15:45David Senra?

  You cover the university in the book. Again, one of the things I personally learned from you is like differentiation for the sake of it. And so anything that I'm going to do, I look around. One of my heroes is Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. And he had this great line, he's like, my personal motto is, don't do anything somebody else can do. Can you explain exactly your, like, how you structured and how you, no, how you designed the Dyson University?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  University is very expensive.

• 16:13David Senra?

  Yes, especially in the United States.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Right, and it's getting as bad in England, yeah, and it's terrible. And you're saddled with that debt for a long time, I mean, sometimes twenty years. And in any case, a lot of the debt is not repaid. And we need to find a different way to teach people. And it's ridiculous because they're only taught for half the year. The rest of it is holidays. So you've got these big institutions, expensive institutions, with people only there part time. It's madness. And also, as I learnt when I was at college, working with an engineering company.

• 16:49David Senra?

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

• 16:52Speaker 01

  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. So, but I loved that experience. Working with people who are having to do things, not academics, people are having to do things and having to do them in a hurry. And I really enjoyed that. And I thought, well, why can't I give that opportunity to other people? So we started our own university. And it's a difficult thing to do because the government has to approve it. And for seven years, we had to work with another university. And none of them would work with us because they didn't like the, they saw us as big competitors. Because we pay our students.

• 17:33David Senra?

  Yeah, that's a, you're, you start with, why are we saddling these young people with an albatross of debt around their necks? That's going to limit their, you know, what they can actually pursue. They're going to be taking jobs that they're forced to take, that they don't want to take, maybe for money, as opposed to you following your, just, I don't even call it a passion. I think it's more like an obsession that you have. So, am I correct? There's no tuition?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Yes, there's tuition. We teach them two days a week.

• 17:56David Senra?

  Okay.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  And they work with us three days a week.

• 17:59David Senra?

  But you pay them for the three days?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  We pay them. We pay them forty-five thousand dollars a year. They have cars, they go on skiing holidays. So, there's normal people. They're not students. They're in a student group. We have about a hundred and seventy 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 do, having to make things work, having to do engineering, having to do marketing, or selling whatever it is, manufacturing. They like the reality of that. And it inspires them to learn the academic side. Because a lot of them said, you know, the academic side of engineering is difficult, it's hard. But I'm inspired to do it because I got to practice it every day.

• 18:39David Senra?

  As opposed to separating the two?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  As opposed to going to university and just having academia for four years. With us, they're, they're being inventors, they're developing technology, and they're learning exactly why they need to know the academic side, the theory.

• 18:54David Senra?

  Explain why it's better to have, in your opinion, a person with no experience than somebody that came from an existing company?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  The older you get, the more you try to apply your experience. And if you've come from an existing company, you may have picked up bad habits. I'm not saying we don't have bad habits at Dyson, but I'm saying you picked up the habits of that company, which may not be the right sort of attitude that we want. This attitude of constant change, constantly trying new things, trying to be different. For different sake, because it sets us on a different path. And some people find that difficult. Some people want to have a much more conventional way to do things.

• 19:34David Senra?

  And so if you you're hiring, you have 18 year olds working in Dyson. They're also going to school.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  One to 17 year olds as well.

• 19:41David Senra?

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

• 19:44Speaker 01

  To be honest, nobody really noticed any difference.

• 19:47David Senra?

  Okay, that's gonna be shocking for, for, at least for people that's like, they assume, okay, that you have to graduate high school in America, they have to go to college, maybe in many cases they have, they go to graduate school and then they're almost 30 by the time they start working. And you're like, no, hire the 18 year old. You gotta say more about this.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, because, you know, they're enthusiastic. They've come to us because they want to do real work. And they do real work. And just because they're not as experienced as graduates or someone in year four as opposed to year one, doesn't mean to say they don't have just the same to offer or even something better to offer, because they're even more naive. So it's, it works really, really well. And it's interesting.

• 20:28David Senra?

  I want to go back to the seven years with the sea truck. You, you write about Jeremy Fry in both books. And in many cases, you know, 50 years, in this book, 50 years after you, you spent time with him and worked with him. You said, there's a lot of ideas that you learned working with him that you still apply to this day at Dyson, which I think is very fascinating. It speaks to the power of ideas.

• 20:47Speaker 01

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

• 20:49David Senra?

  Oh, thank you.

• 20:49Speaker 01

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

• 20:52David Senra?

  I don't smoke quite, that's fine. And I don't have like the, you know, the hippie beard. So it's, this is fine. It'd break my heart to know Jeremy Fry wouldn't, wouldn't, because he's become almost my hero too.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  He would have changed over the years.

• 21:02David Senra?

  For sure. But one thing that's fascinating is, okay, this also speaks to, I'm one of the, I'm curious about your opinion on risk tolerance. Obviously, you have excessively high risk tolerance in both stories. But you're like, I have, I'm working for, you know, your mentor, who you think, I think is a genius. He treats you really, really well. He gave you complete autonomy and control. It's like, just go run this business. There's a great line in the book where you're like, he introduced you to completely different modus operandi of, of the way to operate, where you're like. We need somebody to know about aerodynamics. He's like, well, the Range Rover's down there. Like, the lake's right there. Like, tie a piece of wood behind a boat and record what happens and then change it.

• 21:47David Senra?

  And but you had, I think, a wife and at least one child when you left to do the ball barrel?

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Uh, two.

• 21:53David Senra?

  Two, okay, so two kids. You have, I think, a mortgage. So you have a family to take care of. You have a great, high-paying job, right? Uh, you have, you're working hand-in-hand with somebody you greatly admire that has taught you a ton in seven years. And yet, you're like, I need to go out and be an entrepreneur and do my own thing. Okay, so I'll talk about that. But then the second thing that I didn't understand, no matter how many times I read this, why didn't you let him fund that?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  That was a really stupid decision.

• 22:23David Senra?

  Maybe that's why I couldn't understand it.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  And in fact, he and ultimately, when I started the vacuum cleaner business, we did fund it together.

• 22:29David Senra?

  Yes. Which we'll get to.

• 22:31Speaker 01

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

• 22:48David Senra?

  Before we get there, just the decision to leave a great...

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 22:52David Senra?

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

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I've thought a bit about that. And I think it's partly because my father died when I was eight, nine. And I think, I think that had a sort of profound effect on me that I didn't realize at the time. Because I felt very different to other people. Because I was at boarding school and the headmaster was very kind. And he allowed me to stay on for 10 years without paying any fees. So that was an extraordinary act of kindness. But everybody else had parents, two parents. There weren't single-parent families in those days. And even if the two had split up, they appeared to come together to come and see their child at school. But I had just my mother coming to see me, my impoverished mother coming to see me. So I felt different.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  And also, I think if you've lost a parent at that age, life can't get much worse. So you're prepared to take risks because you've started from a horrible starting point.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Risk has become a sort of thing I need to live with. I need to live on the knife edge all the time.

• 24:09David Senra?

  You still feel that way today?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  I still feel that today, yes. And it doesn't make me unhappy, don't get me wrong. But I like living for the moment in danger. Because you're onto something new, you're doing something different. And it's risky, the result is not sure at all. In fact, it's very unsure, very dangerous. And I don't mind that. It doesn't keep me awake at nights.

• 24:37David Senra?

  So it starts when your father dies. He died really young, forty, he was forty years old?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, forty, yeah.

• 24:42David Senra?

  When you were nine. It's one of the most, I don't want to start tearing up. Because that part just destroys me. And I guess I'll talk about this now. I want to go back to the risk and making that jump. I think one of the most profound impacts that your second book has is you're writing this sixty years after your father dies. And you're talking about your grandson Mick. And you realize now as a sixty-nine-year-old man with a lifelong set of experiences, just how vulnerable you were. Because he's still taking his, your grandson Mick is still taking his stuffed animal to bed. And now you're left alone with a nine-year-old boy who needs his father.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, he had a profound influence on me. He had to do everything. I mean, he loved producing plays. He loved directing them. I've got notes in his little Shakespeare books, crossing out lines and making notes about things. And he did puppet shows, he played the recorder. He taught rugby, he taught hockey. He just wanted to do everything. And I'm a bit like that. And I was certainly like that at school. Especially if it didn't involve academia. But it was, and he was like that.

• 26:02David Senra?

  I just thought of a connection maybe I didn't make previously. He wanted to change professions towards the end of his life.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  He fought in the war in Burma. We call it the forgotten war.

• 26:16David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 01

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

• 26:27David Senra?

  Okay.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  So he'd been away from his wife for six years. In the first six, six years of their life together. Then he had three years, being a classics master at school. And then he got cancer. And so he was in and out of hospital for the next seven years.

• 26:43David Senra?

  Did he have the opportunity to work for the BBC or something like that?

• 26:46Speaker 01

  That's what he wanted to do.

• 26:46David Senra?

  That's what he wanted to do, but never had the opportunity.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  But never had the opportunity to do.

• 26:49David Senra?

  And now I'm thinking, I just asked you the question was like, how the hell do you leave this fantastic position to go off on your own? You realize, well, I had the opportunity to. Or like your dad, unfortunately, for, for a situation outside of his control, never got that opportunity.

• 27:04Speaker 01

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

• 27:12David Senra?

  Your mom passed away early too.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, she, she got cancer as well in her 50s.

• 27:16David Senra?

  55?

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, at 55.

• 27:18David Senra?

  My mom passed away from cancer early too.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. A horrible disease.

• 27:24David Senra?

  Did you ever, this is nothing related to what I would think I was going to talk to you about, but your dad passes away at 40, your mom in her mid 50s. You've lived much longer than both of them. When you were younger, were you worried that you were going to die young too?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  No, it never occurred to me.

• 27:38David Senra?

  Interesting.

• 27:39Speaker 01

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

• 27:52David Senra?

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

• 28:00Speaker 01

  I'll, I'll try and keep going.

• 28:02David Senra?

  No, no, no.

• 28:05David Senra?

  We're gonna do, I wanna come to Dyson HQ and I wanna record more things. I wanna like see the headquarters and everything else. So yeah, you have a reason to live.

• 28:14David Senra?

  In addition to your beautiful family and everything else. One of the byproducts of reading a bunch of biographies of dead people is you get to the end and it's not that you got to the end of the book, you got to the end of somebody's life story. And it's not morbid, but you have this constant reminder that our time here is limited and don't waste a single day. I think about that. I have intolerance to wasting even 24 hours. And it's actually like a powerful motivator and just a great byproduct of the profession I've chose. I wanna go back to you're going, taking risk for the sake of, for the sake of risk. You wanna be your own man, I think is the line that you have in the book when you leave. So I understand that. We're gonna get to the ball barrow, but can you say more?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  So that was the point. You did ask me that question and why I didn't ask Jeremy Fire to help fund that thing. It's because I wanted to do something on my own.

• 29:01David Senra?

  And you felt?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  I'd worked for somebody and I wanted to do something entirely on my own.

• 29:06David Senra?

  But you'd still be the entrepreneur.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  But it was a terrible decision, but that's, that's how I felt at the time.

• 29:10David Senra?

  Why not take money from him?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Cause I felt I'd, I'd worked with him. He'd been my mentor.

• 29:16David Senra?

  Okay.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  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 being, having other people help fund me. So it was a really stupid decision and you do make stupid decisions in life. And I learned from my mistake. And so when I started the vacuum can, I went back to someone who, you know, understood entrepreneurship, who had been an entrepreneur rather than people who hadn't been entrepreneurs.

• 29:42David Senra?

  We, we were talking about this earlier, you and I were talking about this earlier, where there is now a new class of capital available to entrepreneurs that is not institutional venture capital. That's obviously still exists, but you have a lot of people that have had incredible success like yourself, but I've become friends with Michael Dell and this is something that he's interested in and providing alternative funding solutions.

• 30:04David Senra?

  Two entrepreneurs from an entrepreneur knows exactly what they're going through. That is not a professional investor. That is not, doesn't even, 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.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:19David Senra?

  I want to go through the list of mistakes because you always say this and I love it. I have the first version of your second biography, which is Invention of Life. I think it's changed now. I think you were going to name it like failure is more interesting than success or more fun than success.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  It shows what a lousy marketer I am. Yeah, the publishers quite rightly said it won't sell.

• 30:41David Senra?

  So let's focus on the failures and the mistakes that you made with the ball barrel. What still like sticks out in your mind about that?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Right at the beginning, having people fund it, help fund it. Because I had to put up a guarantee. My brother in law put up a guarantee.

• 30:58David Senra?

  The guarantee is against your house?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  The guarantee was against my house.

• 31:01David Senra?

  Okay.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Fortunately, I had a house by then. My brother in law put up a guarantee and we borrowed money from the bank. By the way, interest rates went to 22% while we were doing that business. And that was the killer. So I borrowed money again when I started the ball barrel, the vacuum cleaner business. So it's not borrowing money that's a problem. It's involving people who don't understand startups and the pain you have to go through.

• 31:31David Senra?

  What did they not understand?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  They just didn't understand the business, what it's like. For example, the ball barrel is copied in America by an ex employee and another company. And they wanted to go after him and teach him a lesson. And I said, no, no, no, let him do it. If he wants to do it, let him do it and we'll come into America and we'll sell ours against his. He'll pave the way and we'll come and sell our original version. But they wanted vengeance. So we spent a lot of money trying to sue them, you know, 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.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  I didn't have any money, I borrowed it, but I was, it was money that had been given to me by a bank. So it was my money, even though I was on the line for it and my wife had to sign the house away and all our possessions and all that sort of thing. Um, so I was making my decisions for me. I wasn't having to worry about investors and what they might think. Which, which when I was doing the ball bearing business, I was always doing that, you know, I was having to ring them up and say, do you think we should do this? Is it okay if I do this?

• 32:43David Senra?

  You seem to have an inherent, I don't want to interrupt you, an inherent distaste for anybody else having any kind of control over what you're doing.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  No, not that at all. That's not what I meant.

• 32:57David Senra?

  Okay.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  I'm glad you raised that. That's not what I meant. For example, I have non-executive directors. I run the business as though it was a public business, but it's a private business.

• 33:05David Senra?

  Okay.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  And I think it's very important to have good people advising you. Now, what I meant was, when I, when I, 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? You know, will it make a better product? Will it sell more? All that sort of thing. That's very, very, very single-minded. Not have to worry about investors at all. Had to worry about the bank balance, but I didn't have to worry about investors, which made me very single-minded. And, you know, if, if there's a failure, it's my failure. It's all down to me. Whereas if you've got other people, then, you know, other people are making joint decisions. So I really enjoyed not having anyone to turn to.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Whereas with the ball bearing business, there are other directors, there are other investors, so I had to worry about what they thought. Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I did. But, but if you're on your own, you make the decision with entirely the right reason.

• 34:05David Senra?

  What do you think? That you thought was important that they did not for that specific product.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  When we started selling the ball bearer, the retailers, first of all, there weren't big hardware chains. They were individual owned hardware stores.

• 34:21David Senra?

  So there's no Home Depot or Lowe's.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  No, none of that, which makes life a lot easier. You might not think that, but it does make life a lot easier if you're manufacturing something. So we had to sell through wholesalers who sold to all the individual retailers. And garden centers, where you go and buy garden stuff, they were all individually owned. So you had to have teams of salespeople going around all these things, trying to sell products to them. Oh yes, we can take one this week and one or the other. It was a completely mad system. Now, I'd started the business selling direct to people through little adverts in the newspaper, tiny little adverts. And people would send, they had checks in those days, people used to send checks. It was pre-credit cards.

• 35:05David Senra?

  You have a great line about this in the book. You said, "The entrenched professional will always resist longer than the independent consumer."

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So exactly that. And that was the point. The illustration of that is when I went around trying to sell to garden centers and hardware stores, they were not interested. They actually laughed. They said, "That thing with the big red ball, no one will ever buy that." But they did buy it from these little ads. So I wanted to go on expanding the idea of selling direct and not having a middle person and not having to have salespeople. But they said, "Oh no, look, you're being successful. I think now is the time to do it properly and get a factory and sell the normal way through retailers."

• 35:46David Senra?

  Did you push back against that decision?

• 35:48Speaker 01

  A bit, yes. Now, I said, "Look, we're doing quite well now. No, we're not going to borrow money. We're not dependent on anybody. We're just placing these ads and seeing what happens." And okay, the business might be very small, but it's okay, actually. It's wiping its face. But then we got into debt and the debt got bigger and the debt went to 22% interest rate. I mean, a company's lucky if it can make, you know, 5% profit or 10% net profit, but we're fighting at 22%. Penalty all the time.

• 36:24David Senra?

  The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20% of their data because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts and conversations. Unless you have HubSpot. HubSpot is where all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. Because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com. So there's another thing that happened where you made the mistake of assigning, this was your invention. This is your, the ball barrel was your creation. You made some other products, but we can skip over that for now. And then you filed a patent.

• 37:06David Senra?

  It was patentable and you transferred the patent, not to yourself, but to the company. And then when they kicked you out of the company, they then took your company and your patent.

• 37:16Speaker 01

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

• 37:23David Senra?

  Yes.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  And they didn't believe in it.

• 37:25David Senra?

  This is why I'm obsessed with people so far, for every single person I talk to for the show, they've done what they do for excessively long period of time, anywhere from 20 to 45 years. And I think you just, you see this over and over in these stories, like you're, people are way too big of a rush. It's like you're going to have these happy accidents. You just stay in the game long enough to get lucky because it's a byproduct of the stuff you're doing. In the case of, you're working on the ball barrel, right? And you discover what a cyclone is because you were solving a problem with the ball barrel. There's no way you could have predicted at the beginning that you could apply it to another domain and then wipe the floor with all your competitors. Can you explain what you were doing and how you accidentally discovered the cyclone for the first time?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  The important thing is, is to observe things all the time for an engineer and work out how they work. And also, incidentally, you're always working out how to make them work better. Would it be better if I did this? Isn't there a better way of doing that? And, and that, that always happens with all the inventions. They don't just come out of the sky. They occur because you observe something. So curiosity and observation and trying to understand things is the way to come up with new ways of doing things. And so it was with the, with the vacuum cleaner. As you said, we, we had this huge plant that sprayed the frames with powder.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  A lot of the powder missed the frames because there's just being this sort of open things, masses of it, missing it. And you suck it, we were sucking it away onto a cloth filter, huge cloth filter, which clogged all the time. Like a vacuum bag. Like a vacuum bag, you see, so that's, you make the connection, you see, you make the connection. And what clever people did was have this huge cyclone. So I got a quote for one and we, no way we could afford it. So over a couple of weekends, we built one and it was thirty foot high. And it, we had to make a hole in the roof of the factory to stuff the, has chimney, a sort of outlet at the top. And a cyclone separates dust from air. So there's, between you and I, there's a lot of dust. And a cyclone will separate that by centrifugal force.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  So it's, if you, if you drive at a, a corner of a road, very fast in your Porsche, you, if you drive too fast, you spin off into the ditch. And so that is with a dust particle. A dust particle, though the ones between us are floating, they're very, they're very fine. If you make them go around a corner at very high speed, they get flung out to the edge, into the ditch. So a cyclone is a, a circular container and you apply enormous centrifugal force to the dust particles within it and they all get flung to the outside wall. And the only way out is from the centre, a chimney in the centre. So that's, that's the basic principle of a cyclone. So I made, I, yes, I'd used vacuuming inside everybody else and they always seemed to

• 40:13Speaker 01

  make this screaming noise and, and not pick things up. And one weekend, I, I was cleaning the house and the bag was full. What, no, it said the bag was clogged, which is a slightly different thing. Anyway, I, so I, I looked around for a new bag, couldn't find one in the house. So I opened it up, emptied it out and then gaffer taped it back up again and shoved it back in. Still no suction. So I thought, that's odd. I thought, fuck, you know, it didn't suck because the bag was full. And suddenly realised, the bag was empty and something else was at play here. And I emptied it up, I took the gaffer tape off and emptied it up and there was a fine lining of fine dust around the inside of the bag.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  And I suddenly realised that the suction is created by airflow, which has to go through the pores of the bag. But this fine dust is clogging the pores. It's not the fact the bag's full, it's the fact that the bag is clogged. They call it a bag full indicator, that's a lie. It's a bag clogged indicator. So I felt pretty angry about this. I did go, got out and went, drove to a shop, bought a new bag and put it in. And I had good suction for a short while and then it dropped off again and it said bag full. It wasn't bag full, the bag's clogged. So I got pretty angry about this, but, and I came to a realization, it's not a very clever realization,

• 41:38Speaker 01

  that all the air is trying to go through these little holes in the bag and it's so easy for them to be clogged. And then, of course, I remembered the big cyclone, huge thirty foot cyclone, we'd built at the factory to stop the cloth getting clogged in the dust. Instead, we were spinning it out successfully by centrifugal force and never clogged. So I thought, why don't we have one of those thirty foot cyclones inside a vacuum cleaner, you know, a foot high? So it wasn't very clever, really. So I built one out of.

• 42:08David Senra?

  It's very clever.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Well, not really.

• 42:10David Senra?

  No, it's very clever.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  It's not very clever. So I built one very quickly in the kitchen at home out of cardboard and kaffa tape again. I took the bag off my upright vacuum cleaner, replaced it with a bit of hose and this cardboard mini version of the thirty foot one we built at work out of steel and pushed it around. And I was pushing around the first vacuum cleaner that never loses suction. So I thought I had a good idea, so I filed a patent and I offered it to the Borbauer company.

• 42:43David Senra?

  Why? Because you guys are doing all these like gardening products, right? I don't think, were you making anything else that wasn't related to gardening before this at the work? And then I think one of your main observations was like, this is not the best business because it's seasonal.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  It's horrible.

• 42:59David Senra?

  Right.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  A seasonal product is awful.

• 43:02David Senra?

  So why don't we, especially in England?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  But people buy vacuum cleaners all the time, so, you know, every day, and that's what I want. Because with a seasonal product, you know, there's a fallow period where you sell nothing. And then spring comes along and hopefully, you know, you start to sell. So it's a, and you sell, the weather makes a huge difference to what you sell. And if you have a bad spring, it's a wet spring, you never make up for that. So if you, if you change your product, make it better, you don't actually know one year to the next, whether it's an improvement or not, whether it's sold more. It all depends on the weather. So you've got to employ people during the winter when you don't need them, and then the summer you need more people. It's just a horror, seasonal business is a horrible business.

• 43:45David Senra?

  Avoid seasonal business.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  So I pity anyone who runs a ski resort or.

• 43:49David Senra?

  So you take this, this vacuum cleaner, all right, guys, I have the solution to our problems.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:54David Senra?

  It's a genius invention, it's very clever, even though you keep saying it's not clever. Uh, I have this clever invention and their response is.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Their response is if there was a better vacuum cleaner, who would electrocute them or the existing people would have done it?

• 44:06David Senra?

  I love that you started our conversation that history repeats. The way I say is like, human nature repeats. And so I think history rhymes, but human nature is very constant in this idea of, no, I can't possibly imagine a future that's different from our present, just for some reason, the mass, majority of humans just cannot do that, like extra, like step in thought process. And obviously, I think you're gifted with that.

• 44:30Speaker 01

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

• 44:36David Senra?

  From Jeremy Fry is ridiculous.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  It's not true.

• 44:39David Senra?

  There's a great line in the book where it's like, Jeremy Fry ridiculed experts.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, well, no, he wasn't that rude, but I mean, yes, he, he said, don't trust an expert.

• 44:49David Senra?

  Yeah, again, a very old idea. Andrew Carnegie said the same thing, Henry Ford said the same thing, this is happening a hundred years before you were trying to make a vacuum cleaner.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  You know where it was repeated, it was during, it was during COVID.

• 44:59David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  We're following the science.

• 45:01David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  We're listening to what the scientists say.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  And I said, don't listen to what the scientists say, but don't do everything they say. You know, apply common sense.

• 45:10David Senra?

  So you get, this is something interesting because this is one thing I don't think I understand. At least your thought process.

• 45:18David Senra?

  Now you're kicked out, you lose your patent, you lose, how long, it was five years that you're working on? So you did seven years on the sea truck, then another five years. And now you're like, okay. Why, was there another product? You knew you wanted to invent, you knew you wanted, I think, invent more than manufacture. I think now you love manufacturing once you became one, but you were an inventor for?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Well, no, no, I was a manufacturer and a full manufacturer with the sea truck and with the ball bearer.

• 45:46David Senra?

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

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Yes, I thought that, yes, I thought, look, I've done all that. Why can't I just invent and design things and license them to other people? Like an author, you know, writes a book and someone else sells it.

• 46:00David Senra?

  Which is surprising to me because you clearly liked control. You don't want to rely on other people.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Bad decision.

• 46:07David Senra?

  Okay, anyways.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  It was a bad decision, that was a bad idea.

• 46:13David Senra?

  Because you have to worry about what's going on in other person's, there's like horror stories. They're trying to sell these licenses and we can talk about this in the books. Because like you might have one guy that's really enthusiastic and you come back two months later and he's gone.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  And someone else thinks the opposite, you know, it was a nightmare and I was becoming a lawyer. Because I was doing license agreements all the time and then worrying all that happens when they cancel it and all that sort of thing.

• 46:37David Senra?

  What came to mind when you mentioned earlier, the mistake that you thought your ball barrel partner, your partners in the ball barrel had where they want to chase this guy down in lawsuits. Right before he passed away, unfortunately, I got to spend three hours at Charlie Munger's house. And it's me and other, two other young entrepreneurs and he was just giving us advice for three hours. And one thing, he's just like, don't waste your time with lawsuits. He's like, anytime I got screwed over by people, he's like, I didn't sue them, I just knew, realized that's a, you can't do a good deal with a bad person and I just moved on. He's like, the lawyers are going to suck you dry, it's a distraction from your main business, like you just have to keep moving on. So now you go, okay, I'm going to do the vacuum cleaner. You immediately thought of Jeremy Fry or you had a different way initially to start this business?

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Because I'd been having directors and investors who knew nothing about business.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  I thought I'd go back to someone who I'd really enjoyed working with and who clearly understood about starting businesses, as an enthusiastic about it, like Michael Dell.

• 47:30David Senra?

  The five years that you said since left his employment, you still had a relationship with him?

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, yeah, you're still a friend.

• 47:37David Senra?

  Okay. Okay. And so you go to talk to him and he gets it immediately?

• 47:41Speaker 01

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

• 47:48David Senra?

  What was the other day?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  The other the other one was, I mean, they now have it, but when you sand something, the dust used to go everywhere.

• 47:55David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  So I had a device that that collect that collected it in a bag, funnily enough, or a little cyclone while you were sanding something or drilling something. I mean, it exists now, but when I started 50 years ago, whenever it was, that it didn't exist. But we decided that wasn't, you know, big time. It was a it was a sort of peripheral thing. So we wanted to do something important.

• 48:17David Senra?

  And then whose idea was it? Let's not focus on manufacturing. Let's try to create a working prototype and then take the licensing route. Was it you or Jeremy?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  I think it was both of us. I mean, both of us have been manufacturers, he much more than me. And we both said, look, we're really inventors. Let's let's engineers, let's just do that bit. And if the invention is good enough, surely people will license it.

• 48:41David Senra?

  And then this is where we now.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Delusion.

• 48:45David Senra?

  Yeah. You have to deal with other humans that are very difficult.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Not just humans.

• 48:50David Senra?

  So now this is the point, this is what I talked about where this book changed my life, because this is the point where you have an idea, you have the stubbornness of a mule, you have obsession. I have a lot of these same traits. I think you have them, obviously, to a greater degree, and maybe we'll see how my life plays out. But now this is the coach house, right? And so for America, I had to look this up. I was like, what the hell's a coach house? It's actually like, I heard in other interviews, like, it's like the app of the garage for Steve Jobs. It's like, I'm working in the garage, so we call it a coach house. Do you have any savings? Are you in debt?

• 49:21Speaker 01

  No, I'm not in debt. I'm in debt. I got into debt when I was a student.

• 49:26David Senra?

  Do you not understand how unusual that idea is? I have no money. I'm in debt. Let me do this other super risky thing that I... You don't even have a working prototype yet.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  No, no, no. It's just an idea, really. I have a little cardboard one.

• 49:41David Senra?

  Take me in your mindset, then. What do you think was driving you? Were you anger, like the desire to prove yourself? The love of the product? What was actually happening at that point? That is an unusual decision to make, a decision that your entire empire now rests upon. It's an incredible time in your life.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Hmm. Well, I saw a problem with a product that everybody uses every day. A vital product to clean their homes. And I, as a user, I hated it because we have this bag that clogs and then you have to go and buy another bag and so on. But more than anything, it's the performance is lousy. I mean, if you have a 100-watt light bulb, it's supposed to give 100 watts all the time. But this vacuum cleaner light bulb starts off at 100 watts and ends up at 20 watts pretty quickly. So it's deeply unsatisfactory. So I thought if I can solve that problem, I thought if I could solve that problem, other people would buy that product. It's no substance. It's just an idea.

• 50:39David Senra?

  What was the chance that you gave yourself a success that you could actually solve the problem? You were pretty self-confident you could?

• 50:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 50:46David Senra?

  They're getting crazier.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  No, of course, of course not. You don't know you can solve it.

• 50:52David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  But you've just got to try. And that's true today, you know? When we're trying to solve, we don't know we can solve. We don't know that we can make a motor go at 130,000 RPM when existing motors only go 50,000 RPM.

• 51:04David Senra?

  I want to talk about motors.

• 51:05Speaker 01

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

• 51:09David Senra?

  Okay, so I want to talk about motors. Let me forget about that.

• 51:14David Senra?

  That's like one of the most, you inadvertently said one of the most inspiring things. Like, no, I didn't, no, I have no money. No, I'm in debt. And just a simple flaky idea that it's intolerable that the product that I'm buying does not work. I'm just gonna make a working version, and if I make a working version, other people will buy.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  At that point, you're right to focus in on that moment because ideas are so fragile and they're easily knocked away by anybody.

• 51:39David Senra?

  That's why experts are dangerous.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Experts are dangerous.

• 51:42David Senra?

  Henry Ford said in his autobiography, which I think was published in like 1910, "If I ever wanted to sabotage my competitors, I'd fill their ranks with experts. They know so much about why something won't work, they'll get no work done."

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 51:55David Senra?

  You have a very, your philosophy and his philosophy, there's a lot of like overlap and echoes of that.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  History repeats itself.

• 52:01David Senra?

  Human nature.

• 52:01Speaker 01

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

• 52:09David Senra?

  Well, you made a good point. I heard another, and you said in the book, I heard another interview. It's just like you're asking people to invent the future. That's not their job. That's your job. What are you doing?

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:17David Senra?

  Let's focus back in on this very important point or time in your life that you just, you mentioned. So you set up in the coach house, you're in debt, you have no more money. So how are you funding things? I know your wife is like selling art, but like, do you go immediately to the bank, take out another mortgage? Like, what do you actually do?

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Exactly that. I went to the bank to take out a mortgage and Jeremy Fry guaranteed part of it. So he said, we need, I don't know, 50,000 pounds or something for the last two years. So he put up a guarantee for 25,000 and I put up a guarantee for 25,000. So that got the thing started.

• 52:55David Senra?

  Why could you do it for so cheap? Cause your only expense was your time?

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes, I'm working at home. The only expense is my time and a few cheap materials. I couldn't buy a lathe or equipment. I was doing it all with little blackened deckers 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 pounds. And I could roll cyclones, you know, they're a funny shape, like a sort of upside down cone. And solder them together. So I was doing everything by hand.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  But I could do that. I mean, it works. You can do things for nothing. You don't need to spend a lot of money.

• 53:37David Senra?

  And you thought, I'll be able to figure this out two years.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:41David Senra?

  It took how long?

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Five, five years, and I'm still doing it.

• 53:49David Senra?

  You're not under, you're not under great financial strain at the moment.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Actually, I thought, I thought I'd do it quicker than two years. I thought I'd do it within a year. But I discovered there were all sorts of problems. And also with almost any idea, you find that when you start to apply for patents, that people who've tried to do it before and patented things. There's very, very few patents we file.

• 54:11David Senra?

  And you absolutely, that was, that was, that was, you had to have something that was patentable, right?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:15David Senra?

  Okay.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:16David Senra?

  Cause you're not, there's no.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Well, cause we were going to try and license it.

• 54:18David Senra?

  Yes.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  So, so we had to have a good, strong patent.

• 54:21David Senra?

  Okay.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  And which we had, we ended up having a good, strong patent because we, we made an interesting discovery by accident. Cause if you're doing enough experiments, you're trying to be logical, what you're doing. But sometimes uh,

• 54:38Speaker 01

  something occurs that's not logical. And it works. So you've just got to keep trying. Luck will happen to you.

• 54:47David Senra?

  This is why you're such a big believer in the Edisonian principle of design. Where I think in the book you say the biggest problem you have with young people, even though you like working with them, is teaching them one change at a time. Record what happens. Their instinct has come in here, something's not working, let's change 15 things. And your point is, how do you know what of the 15 things you have done have changed? So at this point, you're doing, you have thick, like, I know a lot about you because I've been studying you for nine years. You've worked, you've been working with your hands your entire life. Are you still working with your hands?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Uh, no, not much.

• 55:18David Senra?

  Okay.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 55:19David Senra?

  Your fingers are.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  They're useless. I can't do anything with them now.

• 55:22David Senra?

  Yeah, but.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  They're arthritis.

• 55:23David Senra?

  This is like somebody that like, you know, lifts a lot of weights, but with their hands. I'm like, I was not prepared for how, like, your hands are huge and your fingers are, they don't fit the rest of your body.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  No, they're, they're, they're workman's hands.

• 55:36David Senra?

  Yes, they're not.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  You know this wretched fingerprint thing at airports? It doesn't work for me. They're warm, thin. There's no, there's no line. And it's fun, actually, working with your hands and your brain. It's something that, that schools despise for some reason.

• 55:49David Senra?

  This is gonna sound really weird to you. Maybe it won't, but because my entire work is all digital, right? I read a book, I sit down. I record into a microphone that's digital, it's connected to a computer, it goes out into the world, I don't, you know, I just see numbers go up on a screen, it's just, I'm by myself the whole time. I, one thing that I do, which is kind of working with my hands, is I've insisted on, I edit all the transcripts of every single episode by hand, and that is literally me going in there and changing a sentence, or a word, or adding punctuation. If I ever do anything else, or in addition, even just for fun, it has to be something physical. Like, I don't want to just have, I feel I'm missing out on something, and I'm trying to approximate that by like, physically touching, you know, a piece of paper, this is why the

• 56:32David Senra?

  books look like they do, and I don't read digital copies. Like, I like, I sit down with a pen, a ruler, you know, post-it notes, scissors, like, I feel like it's like arts and crafts over here, but there's just some weird satisfaction I get out of working with my hands. My hands don't look like yours, though, from like, you know, five decades of this.

• 56:51Speaker 01

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

• 56:57David Senra?

  The entire world that we inhabit is physical.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Well, yes, exactly. I mean, that's how man started.

• 57:02David Senra?

  Somebody built this, and like, the building that we're in.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, but we want to be intellectuals, I'm not getting 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.

• 57:20David Senra?

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

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Great, yeah.

• 57:23David Senra?

  History again, talking about history repeating. Hey, why do you think, I love what you said, we're gonna go back to this, but you have this great thing that, growing up in Britain at the time you did, you know, they still remember Churchill and World War II and everything else, you know, like, well, one thing that we learned and we were taught was like, we're not the weak ones. Like, we can actually persevere through unbelievably difficult times where it looks like the end is near, and not give up, and actually come on the other side as the victor. I think that was very important. So, you've borrowed the money, you're doing one prototype a day, two?

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, one or two a day, yeah, day after day after day.

• 57:59David Senra?

  And you say in the book, you know, I can celebrate now because my company, you know, we're doing like 300 million a year, I think, when the book ends or something like that, but I'd be lying to you if I says there were days where I'd fail all day long, go in the house covered in dust and dirt, and essentially like... Getting to bed thinking I may just go on building prototype after prototype after prototype and never succeeding forever. What was your inner monologue during that time? Like, how were you convincing yourself not to quit?

• 58:29Speaker 01

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

• 58:32David Senra?

  Okay.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Expectation. I don't mean, 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, you know, why is it better, or where's it taking me? So it's a, it's a journey of discovery, which is interesting. I mean, it doesn't sound, from the outside, it sounds very boring and worrying and all that sort of thing. And it, true, it was worrying, the debt was getting bigger all the time. But I was getting a little closer, a little closer, and a little closer. 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.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Because, you know, I, our engineers do their own tests and build their own prototypes. Because there's something funny about the process of actually making the prototype yourself that you learn. And when it fails, it may have been something you noticed as you were gluing it together or machining a part, that the, that sort of visceral experience makes you get forward. Whereas if you, someone else builds a prototype and someone else does the test and you look at the test results, you haven't, you haven't got that same involvement, that same utter understanding of it.

• 59:53David Senra?

  The understanding, again quoting Charlie Munger, his whole point was that he thought the, that the spreading of the theory of comparative advantage is actually really dangerous. Because like, yeah, you can outsource, like, oh, this country over here can manufacture and we'll do finance. He's like, but there's, there's knowledge and trial and error. And the company, the country or the, yeah, the country that is doing the manufacturing is actually learning at a way faster rate than you because all day long, they're just doing trial and error. So it's not, he's like, the problem with people that come with the theories is it's the first order effect is fine. You're not considering, you're just ignoring the second, third, fourth, fifth order effects and what's going to happen over a long period of time. I've never heard anybody, it was in this book called Poor Charlie's 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.

• 1:00:38David Senra?

  I think Munger is actually right about this.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, it's experiencing the whole thing is absolutely critical.

• 1:00:44David Senra?

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

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Well, I was imagining that if I can make it work, that I could then go and show it to the existing manufacturers of these flawed vacuum cleaners with horrible bags in them, smelly, noisy, dusty, expensive bags, that someone would snap it up. That's what, that's, that was the, what was in my mind. And they wouldn't necessarily make me rich, but it might get me out of debt.

• 1:01:21David Senra?

  Money and finance is not a driver cue.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  No, no, I have to survive and live, of course. And, and money can sometimes be a good determinant of whether what you've done is successful or not. Not always, sometimes it's, it's just not. So I don't necessarily develop products to make enormous commercial success. It's nice to do that, but sometimes you do it because you want to do it. It might, it might be a small success.

• 1:01:51David Senra?

  I, I think there's a very like simple genius to your approach in company building. And I think this is why I keep recommending your books over and over again, because there is just a simple, beautiful, elegant genius to the way that you think. So this is-

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  The hairdryer is probably a good example of that.

• 1:02:05David Senra?

  I used it this morning. Excellent.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Because you know, we were making vacuum cleaners and cooling products and heating products and so on. And we, we'd done this tiny motor and we thought we can make an even smaller one if we'd done that motor. We can make an even smaller one and that would make a great hairdryer instead of those bulky great motors they have in at the moment. So that was the start of it.

• 1:02:28David Senra?

  And these are discovered by Trauner?

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Well, very early on in the vacuum cleaner business, we were buying these big, heavy vacuum cleaner motors. I've got one here, but I mean, they're big, you know? And they 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. So quite early on, we realized that we needed to develop a new type of electric motor. Because electric motors, this sort of thing, haven't really changed for 150 years. It's the same Faraday idea.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  So we, rather cheekily, as people who don't make electric motors, we thought, let's make a new type of motor.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  So I recruited some people from British universities who are academics, who knew about electric motors. And we started as a non-electric motor man, in fact, developing our own motor. It took a long time, it took 10 years.

• 1:03:30David Senra?

  10 years before you had success in that too?

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And you can say we were being stupid and all that sort of thing, but no one had done this before. No one had done, made a motor go 140,000 RPM.

• 1:03:42David Senra?

  Let's jump, we're going to jump back and forth.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  The dentist, the dentist drill, but that only lasts a few seconds.

• 1:03:48David Senra?

  So let's jump back and forth between the history of building a company and what you're doing now.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:52David Senra?

  When you're thinking about the products you're making now,

• 1:03:57David Senra?

  are you starting with, because you seem to be, my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, one of the best companies in the world at making motors, electric motors.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:05David Senra?

  And so I feel that now you're like, what else? We have this skill set, we have, the company's 45 years old, something like that. What, we have this, you know, world-class skill set. Are there other products that we find deficient, in need of renewal, that we can apply our ability and world-class talent at building electric motors to? Is that the, is that a process of product development for you?

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  It can be.

• 1:04:29David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:33David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Because. It's sitting in your. We make electric motors, we make filtration and cooling devices. Let's talk about the car. Developing batteries. Let's talk about the car. So we thought, oh, we should do an electric car. When was this? Twenty fourteen. Okay. And I looked at the what the indices were predicting and they said two percent electric cars by twenty thirty. And I thought they've got that wrong. That can't be right. So we started developing electric car. We're developing batteries, by the way, new technology, we still are. So. Wait, you manufacture your own batteries too? Not yet, not yet. But you want to. We want to, yeah. What a surprise, you want controller or?

• 1:05:16David Senra?

  I didn't understand that.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  New technology ones, not ordinary ones. Yeah. So we said we're developing batteries, with 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. What and then we got to twenty seventeen and Dieselgate happened. So the first three or four years Tesla was everything. Tesla was doing everything very successfully.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  But no one was taking any notice of that. They all thought Tesla was a flash on 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 PR point of view, but also this horrific reaction to Dieselgate, that they had to get into electric cars. So all, most of the big manufacturers immediately jumped into electric cars and made them. And they make terrific loss on. Explain. Electric cars are very expensive things to make. Batteries are incredibly expensive. The electronics involved in the batteries are expensive. The batteries are very heavy.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  So it's a, it's a very different type of car and very expensive to make. I mean, much more expensive than an internal combustion engine. They were selling them at a loss for a complicated reason. Car manufacturers' emissions, which are controlled by law, are based on their overall emissions from their range of cars. So if they had.

• 1:06:51David Senra?

  Oh, not the individual model?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Not the individual model. So if they had a model which didn't emit anything, they could go on making big gas guzzling vehicles in which to make a lot of money. So they're prepared to lose money on the electric car to make the money on the big gas guzzling SUV or whatever it is.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  So but as a Tesla and us were just electric vehicle manufacturers. Tesla's brilliant and, you know, thirty billion dollars gone into a huge investment. I'm little company on my own and I have faced a very uncertain future trying to sell an electric car in that sort of setup. And if you have fairly no volume, you're new manufacturer, all your costs are thirty percent higher because you're not buying very many seats in the seat manufacturer or very many tires in the tire manufacturer and so on. So all your costs are much higher. I mean, you that because.

• 1:07:51David Senra?

  You had a series of structural disadvantages.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Huge disadvantages. And Tesla overcame that through sheer scale and might and investment. But, you know, we didn't have that sort of money. We couldn't take that sort of risk, so we stopped it.

• 1:08:05David Senra?

  And how much did you spend on R and D for that?

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Well, we spent about seven hundred and fifty thousand.

• 1:08:10David Senra?

  Seven hundred and fifty?

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Million, million.

• 1:08:11David Senra?

  Oh.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Seven hundred and fifty million dollars. I keep working in pounds, half a million, half a billion pounds.

• 1:08:16David Senra?

  Okay, so seven hundred and fifty million?

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18David Senra?

  And you have, you have the actual prototype sitting in your headquarters, I think, in Singapore?

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah, we've got one there.

• 1:08:26David Senra?

  Is there anyone that you can at least drive or they're just, they don't exist?

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  There was one we could drive very slowly, but health and safety meant we couldn't take out, we built one of the final sort of.

• 1:08:36David Senra?

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

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  No, no, no, that's a model in Singapore. No, no, we've got it in one of our hangars on our airfield.

• 1:08:43David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44David Senra?

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

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:08:47David Senra?

  It's too painful? Like, would you get in a seven, a car that cost you seven hundred and fifty million?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  One of the, everybody said, you know, you must have learnt a lot from that experience. So the answer is I learnt absolutely nothing.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  What do you mean? I mean, it was fun to do, but we... It was fun to do? It was fun to do, and half the people were snapped up by other manufacturers, and half the people working on it came to work on and do vacuum cleaners and other things. I didn't even think of the emotional... Think about it, if you worked on something for a decade, it ain't going anywhere. They must feel... Yeah, quite a decade, five or six years. Five or six years. Yeah. No, it's an awful thing to do, but sadly, we didn't really learn anything from it. Yeah.

• 1:09:33David Senra?

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• 1:10:16David Senra?

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• 1:10:59David Senra?

  What is an example of you taking the existing skill set that Dyson has built up over many decades and applying it successfully to a new product then? That did not come from, like, that's the actual, like, sequence of events? That you didn't identify the product first, you're just like, well, we have the skill set, what can we apply it to? Did you have hair dryers? What's like an example of that?

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, the, I think the way we approached the car was slightly dangerous.

• 1:11:25David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Because we were saying, look, we've got these skill sets.

• 1:11:30David Senra?

  And you were trying to match it.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  And we would say, oh, well, it looks, it would go very well in a car, without really saying, you know, is that going to be a successful product? Is it going to be a breakthrough product? Well, it might have been a breakthrough product if we had managed to do the battery. And certainly our motors we developed were very efficient motors. And an electric car is all about efficiency, aerodynamic efficiency, drive motor efficiency, and so that you can have better, smaller batteries. Power consumption is a big thing. About six to a quarter of the power is taken up by air conditioning and heating, for example. So if you can make that more efficient, you can make your car go further. So it's all really about how far can you go on a battery?

• 1:12:15David Senra?

  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.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  No, it's a very good question. I didn't answer it properly. There's two ways. One is you realize you have a technology and you can make a hair dryer.

• 1:12:29David Senra?

  How many of these do you make now? Motors?

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Oh, we've made about 150 million of them.

• 1:12:34David Senra?

  A year, though, now?

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, we make about 30 million a year.

• 1:12:37David Senra?

  And it's very interesting, in the book you said that companies, other companies, try to get you to make motors for them, and you adamantly refuse. Is that still correct?

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 1:12:46David Senra?

  And I love what you said, because you want your engineers focused exclusively on your own products. The importance of focus as opposed to retrofitting your technology to somebody else's product in somebody else's shop.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  It's not a good commercial decision, that, by the way, the one I've taken.

• 1:13:00David Senra?

  Yeah, but you're.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Because I could have a division that dealt with other people supplying meters to other people, which I'm sure would make money.

• 1:13:09David Senra?

  Okay, this is very interesting. I think this is missing in business. We talked about before we started recording, I had this idea of anti-business billionaire, these people that are so obsessed with the quality of the product they're making, that's their number one, they just want to make the best possible product. They do things that may seem irrational because it would improve the quality of the product. And the point I'd make is there's, I think you're one of them, there's a series of people I've read about, where people like that, that are just obsessed with making the best product for customers to solve an actual real need and retain control, they wind up with the money anyways, but that's not the motivator. So why, explain your rationale, and I think it's a right rationale, but I'm very curious if you can actually articulate it.

• 1:13:53David Senra?

  Why do you not set up this other division that you wouldn't have to run, that would just make a bunch of money doing this thing? Why don't you do that?

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Because that doesn't excite me.

• 1:14:02David Senra?

  Thank you. People forget the point of life is for living.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  I know, that's for making money. It's developing a technology and coming out with different radical products, that's what interests me, not making money per se.

• 1:14:15David Senra?

  How long have you had the discipline to adhere to that? I'm just following excitement, I'm following curiosity, I'm following interest. How, have you been like that forever?

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:52David Senra?

  Say more about that.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Well, if you get big, there's a tendency to think you've got lots of people, so you can do everything, but you can't. You can't do everything, you can't do everything well, and you probably can't do everything anyway. So the important thing is to decide what's really the most important thing and just do that. And there are going to be things you don't do, and there's going to be some failures because you're not doing things, but if you're doing something really, really well. Then you'll be okay.

• 1:15:21David Senra?

  How do you go about deciding what's the most important thing for you?

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  Well, that's the fun.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  That's fun. I mean, it's you decide the most important thing and that's an important decision.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  And you say, well, I haven't got time to do the other things. I won't do it. Will one of those kill me? I don't know. Probably not. So I'll concentrate on the thing I really want to do, which I think is the right thing to do.

• 1:15:46David Senra?

  Is single mindedness and focus the same thing to you or do you mean different things?

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Yes, it's the same thing.

• 1:15:50David Senra?

  It's the same thing.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  And if your brain isn't very big, which mine isn't, it's a much better way to do to run your life. It's just to concentrate on one thing at a time.

• 1:16:00David Senra?

  But you have multiple product lines.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's stretching my brain a bit.

• 1:16:04David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  But yes, um, yes, and I'm learning to manage that in myself. And I've got lots of wonderful people around me helping me, including my son now.

• 1:16:15David Senra?

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

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Eight years, probably.

• 1:16:21David Senra?

  Okay, so you're focused. And then was the washing machine the second?

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Washing machine came on quite early after about four or five years.

• 1:16:27David Senra?

  But it didn't work.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  It did work.

• 1:16:30David Senra?

  It works.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Very well. Don't say that to me.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  No, and I made another mistake with that, which was that, um, you know, I've been making vacuum cleaners at about $300, $200, $300. The washing machine was $1,200, $1,300. So it's more expensive than other people's washing machines.

• 1:16:55David Senra?

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

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  I wasn't, I wasn't learning from history. My marketing people said, if you make it cheaper, you'll sell a lot more.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  Right. So for the last time in my life, I listened to them and

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  you know, marketing people get on selling things, not decide what product should be or how much it should be sold for. So I listened to them and we didn't sell anymore. We just lost more money. And the other directors, non-executive directors, said, you've got to stop that because you're losing money at it. Actually, if I'd been on my own, I'd have probably gone on with it and put the price up. But, you know, sometimes you have to listen to other people, and they were probably right. So we brought it behind us and got on with what we were doing.

• 1:17:44David Senra?

  They're still in operation, though.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I use them.

• 1:17:47David Senra?

  So you have your own Dyson washing machine?

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's great. It's great. And people have now copied a lot of the ideas, like the big door. You know, if you're trying to put a duvet in a tiny little hole. So, and it was very expensive to make, actually, and I should have learnt my lesson from that because it had two drums, it had two motors and a gearbox. It had a lot of things that other washing machines don't have, but it did a very good job. It was a very good washing machine.

• 1:18:15David Senra?

  It begs the question, are there any other Dyson products that you own that are not available to consumers? What else have you made for yourself?

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  I keep crying about those. I keep crying about it.

• 1:18:25David Senra?

  Tell me after, please. I want to hear about this. I want to go back to this because I do think it's one of the most important things. The way I just described this, like this crazy experience I've been on, which, you know, I'm probably at the, when I'm done, probably going to read more biographies and autobiographies of, you know, entrepreneurs and founders and inventors than anybody else in the world. And, you know, everybody's always like, give me like a top 10 list or like break it, like, can you condense down what you've learned so far? And I was like, well, if I can condense it down to a one word of how different these people are to most people, like the most people in, you know, mass of humanity, it's focus. They're unbelievable, it's one word, it's like they're unbelievably focused. I still, if you don't mind me just asking you another question, just see if you have anything more to say about this, because it's something like I'm obsessed with as well. How do you figure out what to focus on for you?

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

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

• 1:19:30David Senra?

  But what are you following there? Is it intuition? Is it just, I can't get this off of my mind? Like, what is actually happening?

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  It's partly intuition, but I don't believe intuition is feeling or guesswork.

• 1:19:42David Senra?

  Oh.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  I think.

• 1:19:44David Senra?

  You got to elaborate on that.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Intuition is much more interesting because it's all sorts of influences. It could be, it could be history, it could be all sorts of things that form an opinion that, that you define as intuition, but actually it's not. It's a whole lot of hundreds, thousands of things you've experienced, which help you make a decision, or give you an insight, or give you hope.

• 1:20:13David Senra?

  What do you think is guiding you to the right, to focus on the right thing?

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  That's the hard thing. I mean, ultimately, it's intuition. But intuition isn't just, it's not very fair. It's, it's not a feeling, you know, you know, it, it's, you, you, your, your brain has been fed with hundreds of different things. And from that, you make a decision. And you can't rationalize it and say, oh, that's that, that, that, that, that, that, therefore this equals that. It's an intuition that I could be right, I could be wrong, but I think I'm going to back that I'm right about this. And then you've got to make it work.

• 1:20:56David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:08David Senra?

  And they, and they tried to, your partners at Ballbearer tried to blow it away.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Everybody tried, my friends tried to blow it away. What on earth are you doing?

• 1:21:14David Senra?

  But it took hold of you right away?

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:16David Senra?

  And then did your, your confidence deepen as you get down the path? Uh. Or were you pretty adamant, like, no, I'm not going to give up until I solve this problem at the beginning?

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  It's that.

• 1:21:25David Senra?

  At the beginning.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got the bug and I'm not, I'm going, I'm going to go on, I'm going to make it work. And, you know, it's took five thousand one day, much longer than I thought it would and all that sort of thing, and I got deeper and deeper into debt. But I was going to make it work. I got a rat by a tail, I'm not going to let it go. I've got to make it work. I've got to. And the more, the bigger the debt got, I suppose the pressure became greater and greater.

• 1:21:52David Senra?

  The pressure did, but did you have like a, you had to have lulls in confidence and like doubt about that period?

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  Well, of course I had doubts and made it work.

• 1:22:01David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. You can't pretend you don't have doubts.

• 1:22:04David Senra?

  Were you talking to anybody about this?

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Did we? My wife. Nobody else, no.

• 1:22:09David Senra?

  Not even Jeremy?

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  No, no, no. Actually, I bought him out.

• 1:22:15David Senra?

  Let's go back to that. Okay. Can you explain why you bought him out?

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19David Senra?

  This was, this was after failing for, if I remember correctly, after failing to try to license it?

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:22:24David Senra?

  The first successful license was Japan, right?

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Uh, no.

• 1:22:28David Senra?

  The one that made money, you were making like 70,000 a year.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:22:32David Senra?

  And they sold it not even to, you weren't even sure they used it because it was like pink, right?

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  No, they did use it.

• 1:22:37David Senra?

  I thought you said in the book, they like, they may have just been there for like some kind of art.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe. No, no. They didn't sell very many, but they did sell some. And I never discovered how many they sold because they were very secretive about it. But they did pay me the minimum royalties.

• 1:22:51David Senra?

  That's when you bought Jeremy out?

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  Yes. We had a big lawsuit.

• 1:22:55David Senra?

  Is this to Amway?

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:22:57David Senra?

  Oh, God.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  And he hated lawsuits. So when that started, he wanted to get out. So I.

• 1:23:04David Senra?

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

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  No, not at all. No. And we remained very good friends afterwards. He just said, I hate lawsuits and my financial advisor thinks the vacuum cleaner is going nowhere. And he owned 49% of the business.

• 1:23:17David Senra?

  So what did you buy an offer?

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  I bought him out.

• 1:23:19David Senra?

  How much money though?

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  45,000 pounds.

• 1:23:23David Senra?

  This is another thing. We haven't.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  His children never forget, they will never forgive me.

• 1:23:27David Senra?

  So.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  I've remained friendly with his children, but they will never forgive me.

• 1:23:30David Senra?

  I think people will know this, you know, hopefully in the introduction or whatever the case is, but you own 100% of Dyson.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:39David Senra?

  Is one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think it's that, but.

• 1:23:43David Senra?

  Because I've heard stories. That's fine. We don't talk about it. And you bought out your forty nine percent partner for forty five thousand pounds. All right, so what happens? Now you're on your own.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely on my own.

• 1:23:59David Senra?

  And you stayed, I know you have executive.

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  I had to fight the lawsuit, had to fight that lawsuit with Amway.

• 1:24:04David Senra?

  Yes.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  For five years.

• 1:24:06David Senra?

  Yes.

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Borrowing money, selling actions in the lawsuit, lawyers on contingency, all that type of thing. And it took five years of my life.

• 1:24:14David Senra?

  The only income was the drip of license agreements for that.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:22David Senra?

  At one point that you said, to hell with it, I'm doing this on my own. I meant not licensing, like I'm going to manufacture and control it from soup to nuts.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  Yes, it was at the end of the lawsuit, actually, that's when I decided I had enough of this licensing game. I'm going to do it myself.

• 1:24:38David Senra?

  But you have no money.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  And I'm no money.

• 1:24:40David Senra?

  And.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  I'm sick of traveling because I was traveling to Japan, America all the time and I was just sick of it. And I got meningitis from it, I think, from an airplane. So I thought that I'm going to stop and I'm going to have a little cottage industry making vacuum cleaners in Britain.

• 1:24:56David Senra?

  That was the, okay, but then you have to borrow, I think it was like six hundred thousand pounds.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:25:02David Senra?

  For tooling.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  For the tooling.

• 1:25:04David Senra?

  And you did that how?

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Well, I went to various venture capitalists, the sort of people who ought to lend to startups. And the kind of response I got was, well, you know, it's not a very interesting area. We're investing in restaurants, fast food restaurants at the moment. Or we're not lending to you because you're an engineer. If you bring someone from the industry to run it, then we might consider backing it. Those are the sort of responses I was getting from venture capitalists, as we used to call them. But and so in the end, I went to my local bank, the clearing bank.

• 1:25:38David Senra?

  And you're putting up as collateral my house again.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25:43David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  I'm getting quite used to this, by the way. Deirdre has to keep signing the awful gray forms for signing away the house. So, um, yeah, I borrowed, and they lent me a huge amount of money, actually. I mean, it was nineteen ninety-two. There was a big housing crisis. The banks had lots of, you know, return properties.

• 1:26:03David Senra?

  Wait, there was a guy, isn't, didn't somebody like inside the bank vouch for you?

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  The Loysbank ran the system. Instead of going to a man sitting in a branch of the bank and borrowing from them, they had a sort of flying doctor who went around businesses. So he was a real business expert and he, he didn't work from an office. He just went around people's businesses. Very interesting man, actually. And he, the, the bank refused his request for the loan. So he went to the ombudsman within the bank and persuaded them to lend me the money. And it was a crazy thing for them to do, actually, because, uh, you know, this guy is setting up business to make vacuum cleaners to compete with all the big multinationals. What on earth is he doing? And living in a log couch house in, near Bath.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  When you think about it, it's completely mad.

• 1:26:56David Senra?

  Yes.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  And when we were making a profit and everything was okay, I said to him, why did you lend it to us? And why did you get, go through the hoops to lend me that money? Which was so, a risky thing to do at a time of deep recession, when they repossess, had to repossess so many houses. He said, um, oh, well, I went home to my mother, my, my wife, and said, what do you think of a vacuum cleaner without a bag? And she said, brilliant, exactly what I want. And he said, I also saw that you had fought a five-year lawsuit in America. And I saw that you had determination. So I was very lucky. It was a real piece of luck.

• 1:27:35David Senra?

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

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, doggedness, never, never, never giving up. Just carrying on and not worrying what other people are saying. You know, my friends said, you're completely mad. What are you doing, spending all the, every day in that shed with all that dust around?

• 1:27:59David Senra?

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

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Everybody thought I was mad.

• 1:28:05David Senra?

  How did you receive that like feedback or that criticism?

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  The more I got it, the more encouraged I became actually. Because I don't know, I remember when I was trying to license it to, I went to all the people who are now my competitors and a lot of others as well. And they all turned it down. They were all quite interested in it, but turned it down. And the more it was turned down, the more I realized I had something.

• 1:28:33David Senra?

  You believed you were right.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34David Senra?

  You had no doubt.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because they never really gave a good reason.

• 1:28:40David Senra?

  Well, for the vacuum, the existing manufacturers, there's a great story in the book. You know, again, I'm going to quote Charlie Mark, he's one of my heroes, like never ever think about anything when you should be thinking about the power of incentives. He's like incentives rule human, like they drive so much of human behavior. And I'm thinking of Charlie when I'm reading your book. And it's like, yeah, you know what? Turns out it's really hard to sell. I know you don't like this word, the bagless vacuum cleaner. You think it should be like no loss of suction.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:04David Senra?

  Suction vacuum cleaner. I'm just going to use the term for the story. It's really hard to sell a bagless vacuum cleaner to people who make $500 million a year selling vacuum bags.

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  Well, it was partly that. It was partly that. And partly I realized they didn't want to change.

• 1:29:20David Senra?

  Human history repeating.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's what encouraged me. I mean, although each rejection, I should have got more and more depressed.

• 1:29:29David Senra?

  You had the opposite reaction.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  They had the opposite reaction. These guys don't want to change.

• 1:29:33David Senra?

  I'm going to, I think this is going to be one of the most important things I learned from this conversation is this idea, assuming that you're doing things for the right reason, you're following your curiosity, you're completely obsessed with what you're doing. This idea of taking essentially what's a negative and turning it into fuel. You're turning it into fuel. You're trying to dissuade me and it's only making me more dogged. I think your dogged determination is a great line, by the way.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Yes, it's not, well, no, the They're rejecting it without having a good reason.

• 1:30:01David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  That's what was interesting.

• 1:30:02David Senra?

  Yeah. You would have listened if they found a design flaw or if they told you.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:30:07David Senra?

  Something there, but you're like, no, I am right where everybody else is wrong. Difference for the sake of it. That is how you build insanely best products in your category. You seem to be able to build a best product in every category you create, but also how you create value, like in durable value. So you're actually doing something differently and better than everybody else.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  But that's what I'm trying to do, different and advanced.

• 1:30:29David Senra?

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

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:39David Senra?

  All right, you gotta say more about that. That is a crazy thing to say.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  Yes, because sometimes, for example, with the vacuum cleaner, tipping the dirt out of a bin, some people say it's worse than displacing the bag because it creates a bit of dust.

• 1:30:56David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  So not, I mean, not everything is always perfect about something which makes progress. And eventually you overcome the problem. But so not everything is better. Sometimes not everything is better. But the good overcomes the bad. It's much better than the bad.

• 1:31:16David Senra?

  But difference is you're essentially organizing design principle. It has to be different. You're not going to make, there's no reason.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  No, it's got to be better. It's got to be better.

• 1:31:25David Senra?

  It has to be better.

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, in my opinion.

• 1:31:27David Senra?

  Yes. But you're not going to make like another me too product.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  No, no, no, because I don't want to do that. I'm not motivated to do that. And I built a team around me who are motivated to take risks and do something different and better, always.

• 1:31:46David Senra?

  So let's go back to you buy the tooling. I'm not going to redo the entire book. We'll skip over the issue that you having to move the tooling and you're having issues. But then eventually you have this great line in the book. You end one of this chapter. These are like my favorite, like some of my favorite three paragraphs in the entire book. And it's on total control. And you say, "From the first sprouting of the idea, through 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 parentheses, "are mule," because you're only celebrating your stubbornness, "sees it right through. As I often have said, I aim not to be clever, but to be dogged.

• 1:32:28David Senra?

  And my doggedness had gotten me so far to a point where I had my very own cyclonic vacuum cleaner at last. On May 2nd, 1992, I found myself looking at the first fully operational, visually perfect Dyson Dual Cyclone. I was 31 years old when I tore the bag off my Hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole. May 2nd, 1992 was my 45th birthday."

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Still heavily in debt.

• 1:33:00David Senra?

  Do you remember that day?

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, no, I do. Yes, I do. Yeah, I remember, I remember quite a lot of my birthdays. But yes, that was really important because to get to that point had taken me 11 years, I think, wasn't it? 11 years, something like that. And a lot of money. And I was hugely in debt. But I had the first prototype that worked.

• 1:33:25David Senra?

  Outside of your family, is that period of your life the period you're most proud of?

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't, no, it's all, it's all, it carries on, doesn't stop. So I don't, I don't ever sort of stop and think, now's the moment to be proud. In fact, I don't really like pride.

• 1:33:47David Senra?

  Why?

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  It's sort of self-serving. It's never good enough, so you can't be proud.

• 1:33:55David Senra?

  Explain more.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  Well, I'm never satisfied. I mean, there's always something wrong. I've got to go on improving it.

• 1:34:01David Senra?

  You talk about this in this book, that the engineering mindset, if you're reading this, I think you even say it, like, if you're reading this, you have this mindset, you know, like, it never turns off. You're never satisfied. You can't just go home, like, oh, everything's, this is great. You just see the imperfections. Or, I don't know, is it really focusing on imperfections, or just focusing on the missing improvement?

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  It's just knowing that things could be better.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  That there's a better way of doing it, that I haven't done it well enough, that I've got to make it better. I'm just driven like that. So I'm never satisfied. And I think satisfaction is a pretty dangerous thing, anyway.

• 1:34:36David Senra?

  Say more.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Well, because there's a kind of smugness to it, that I'm perfect, and I don't need to do any better than this. I can relax. And I just don't think like that. I'm always wanting to do something better.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  My wife hates it, because when we're exploring the car or something, I always think there's something better around the corner. And she wants to stop and enjoy where we are at the moment. So, I mean, I do accommodate her on that. But, I mean, that's how I think and feel.

• 1:35:07David Senra?

  But does that lead to, but you seem to be very, like, happy, and, like, not content, that's not the right, but you seem to be like a happy person. Where this is not like a torturous inner monologue, where all you see is, like, you're never satisfied, and you see the things that could be fixed.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  It is slightly torturous, but it's what I do.

• 1:35:26David Senra?

  I feel the same way, though. But, like, it could also lead you to, you know, periods of, like, very, like, dark, like, unhappiness. How do you, how do you not let it?

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  Well, I suppose I'm lucky, because I don't think it makes me that unhappy. I mean, I have moments of unhappiness, but...

• 1:35:44David Senra?

  Give me an example of a moment of unhappiness.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  Well, you know, lawsuit goes wrong, or something, or an experiment doesn't work, and I hope it would, those sort of things. But I bounce back from them very quickly. They're just minor, no.

• 1:35:57David Senra?

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

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:02David Senra?

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

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  Never stopped. Yes, yeah, yeah, I'd say that's true. And I think my father's death has quite a lot to do with that, coming back to that. And I was in a sort of a group, because we lived in a school, in a public school, in a private school is probably a better expression. And the other teachers' children was the same sort of age, so we were a group. And we had the run of the school grounds during the holidays. But I was the youngest, so the others were up to five years older than me. So I was always dealing with people who were bigger and stronger than me, or cleverer than me. And so I think it made me always strive.

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  So I think a combination of being the youngest, because I was the youngest of three children anyway, and younger than this group that I went around with, made me try to punch above my weight a bit, and made me very determined. Because in order to succeed at anything, I had to be really, really good. In order to beat them at tennis, or whatever it was, or in a race, I had to be punching above my weight. So I think that and losing my father, so losing, realizing I was on my own, and I was away at boarding school on my own. So that whole combination made me the sort of character I am.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Made me never satisfied, always wanting to find something better, and bouncing back from failures.

• 1:37:40David Senra?

  That's a 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's 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.

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  Well, thank you, David. It's great to hear your story as well, how you succeeded. Thank you very much.

• 1:38:01David Senra?

  I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.