#25 Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson

What I learned from reading Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson --- I am a creator of products, a builder of things. [0:01] This book is the story of 15 years of struggle to finally invent, own, and sell his own product. [1:35] This is the exposition of a business philosophy which is very different from anything you might have encountered before. [2:11] The first 75% to 80% of the book is just struggle after struggle. [2:47] Dyson had a bunch of people that he looked up to that motivated him as a young man. Thomas Edison is one of those people. [4:51] Such reverence has been accorded to the miserable wheel —that perhaps that alone can account for the fact it was never improved. Perhaps millions of people in the last few years had ideas for improving it. All I did was take things a little further than just having an idea. [6:10] The look of the product —the intangible style that sets one thing apart from another—is still closest to my heart. [7:04] After the idea there is plenty of time to learn the technology. My first cyclonic vacuum cleaner was built out of cereal packets and masking tape long before I understood how it worked. [8:09] The greatest lesson for aspiring inventors was yet to come. The actual making of money. Paper stuff in thick wads which they finally give to you because you have done something good. [8:40] The best kind of business is one where you could sell a product at a high price with a good margin and in enormous volumes. That type of investment is long term, high risk, and not very British. Or at least it looks like a high-risk policy. It is not so likely to prove hazardous to one’s financial health as simply following the herd. [9:25] Difference for the sake of it. In everything. Because is must be better. From the moment the ideas strikes, to the running of the business. Difference, and retention of total control. [10:39] This is not even a business book. If anything it is a book against business, against the principles that have filled the world with ugly, useless objects. [11:37] Everybody told James over and over and over again “Who are you to think that you could invent a better vacuum cleaner? If that was possible Hoover would have done it already." [12:44] We all want to make our mark. We all want to make beautiful things and a little money. We all have our own ideas about how to do it. What follows just happens to be my way. [13:15] I have been a misfit throughout my professional life, and that seems to have worked for my advantage. Misfits are not born or made. They make themselves. [13:45] I took on the big boys at their own game, made them look very silly, just by being true to myself. [15:56] There was no dad to teach me how to run. There was no dad to tell me how great I was. Herb Elliot was a big name [in running] at the time, so I read a few books about him and discovered that his coach had told him that the way to develop stamina and strengthen the leg muscles was to run up and down sand dunes. This suited me fine. I would get up at six in the morning and run dunes for hours, or put on my running kit at ten o’ clock at night and not reappear until after midnight. Out there alone on the dunes I got a terrific buzz knowing that I was doing something that no one else was—they were all tucked away in bed. I knew I was training myself to do something better than anyone else would be able to do. [18:14] Running is a wonderful thing. It isn’t like a team sport where you depend on other people. There is no question of your performance being judged. You either run faster than everyone else or you do not. In running your performance is absolute. I was out there [on the sand dunes] learning how to do something, and getting a visible result. [19:34] As I started to win by greater and greater margins I did it [run sand dunes] more and more because I knew the reason for my success was that out on the sand dunes I was doing something else no one else was doing. They were all running around the track like a herd of sheep and not getting any quicker. Difference itself was making me come in first. [20:50] I was learning about the physical and psychological strength that keeps you competitive. I was learning about obstinacy. I was learning how to overcome nerves, and as I grew more and more neurotic about being caught from behind, I trained harder to stay in front. To this day it is the fear of failure, more than anything else, that keeps me working at success. [21:31] The only way to make a genuine breakthrough was to pursue a vision with single-minded determination in the face of criticism. [22:26] Isambard Kingdom Brunel was unable to think small, and nothing was a barrier to him. The mere fact that something had never been done before presented, to Brunel, no suggestion that the doing of it was impossible—he was fired by an inner strength and self-belief almost impossible to imagine in this feckless age. I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was. And at times in my life when I have encountered difficulty and self-doubt I have looked to his example to fire me on. [22:55] I have told myself, when people tried to make me modify my ideas, that the Great Western Railway could not have worked as anything but the vision of a single man, pursued with dogged determination that was nothing less than obsession. Throughout my story I will return to Brunel, and to other designers and engineers, to show how identifying with them, and seeing parallels with every stage of my own life, enabled me to see my career as a whole and to know that it would all turn out the way it has. [24:59] Remember that I am celebrating only my stubbornness. I am claiming nothing but the virtues of a mule. [25:42] So my dream was to be a Isambard Kingdom Brunel. [26:40] The public has been easily convinced by advertising, and receptiveness to revolution has dwindled. Such ‘invention’ as is now allowed is the prerogative of multinationals, not people. Where are our Wright Brothers? Where have the Edisons gone? And the Henry Fords? They are not here. We have broken new frontiers, but where are the names? Who invented the space shuttle? The nuclear submarine? The wind farm? When you go for backing for your crazy scheme it is not enough to be a man, you have to be a group of men. And where is the fun in that? [26:56] I learnt a crucial business principle: The only way to make real money is to offer the public something entirely new, that has style value as well as substance, and which they cannot get anywhere else. [28:03] College had taught me to revere experts and expertise. Jeremiah Fry ridiculed all that; as far as he was concerned, with enthusiasm and intelligence anything was possible. It was mind-blowing. And as we proceeded I could see that we were getting on extremely quickly. The more I observed his method, the more it fascinated me. [31:07] I learned one of the most crucial business lessons of my life; to stint on investment in the early stages, to try to sell a half-finished product, is to doom from the start any project you embark on. [32:13] People do not want all-purpose; they want high-tech specificity. [34:11] You simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. A consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two, or even several. [34:20] Only by trying to sell the thing that you have made yourself, by dealing with consumers’ problems and the product’s failings as they arise, can you really come to understand what you have done. Only the man who has brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on others, and demand a heavy price, with all his heart. [35:52] It was an interesting lesson in psychology, teaching me that the entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer. [36:26] Editorials are the very best way of convincing the public. One decent editorial counts for a thousand advertisements. [39:20] One fo the strains of this book is about CONTROL. If you have the intimate knowledge of a product that comes with dreaming it up and then designing it, then you will be the better able to sell it and then, reciprocally, to go back to it and improve it. From there you are in the best possible position to convince others of its greatness. To see it through all the way to its optimum point. To total fruition, if you like. [42:04] I was stopped by one of them with the words I was to hear over and over and over again for the next ten years. ‘But James, your idea can’t be any good. If there were a better kind of vacuum cleaner, Hoover would have invented it.' [48:07] We always want to create something new out of nothing, and without research, and without long hard hours of effort. But there is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence—and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap. [51:38] A vacuum cleaner designed entirely by me, incorporating innovations up to the very latest point at which my technology had arrived, to be produced and marketed and sold under my own exclusive direction was, to be frank, what this whole thing had been all about. [1:02:48] It was a fantastic environment to work in, for it was just engineers and designers, and no one to mess us around. There were no salesmen, no advertising people, no marketing managers, to interfere and try to guide us in their direction. We had nothing to do but deduce our own dream product. [1:04:48] Everyday products sell. Although it is harder to improve a mature product, if you succeed there is no need to create a market. Try out current products in your own home, and make a list of things that you don’t like about them. I found about 20 things wrong with my Hoover Jr. at the first attempt. [1:07:19] Total control. 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, it is most likely to succeed if the original visionary (or mule) sees it right through. [1:11:43] On 2 May 1992, I found myself looking at the first, fully operational, visually perfect, Dyson Dual Cyclone. I was thirty-one years old when I tore the bag off my Hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole. 2 May 1992 was my forty-fifth birthday. [1:12:24] We were selling more vacuum cleaners than anyone else despite costing twice as much. [1:14:32] In other words: if you make something, sell it yourself. And so we did. And absolutely nothing went bang. Except, of course, everyone else’s market slice. [1:17:57] Encourage employees to be different, on principle. This is part of my anti-brilliance campaign. Very few people can be brilliant. Those who are, rarely do anything worthwhile. You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant. And if you can’t be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think. [1:21:18] ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

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

• 0:00David Senra?

  I am a creator of products, a builder of things, and my name appears on them. That is how I make a living, and they are what have made my name at least familiar in a million homes. I lay no claim to the epitaph "household word", though I harbor a secret dream of synonymity and occasionally imagine a time years from today when Dyson replaces Hoover. Detached from me to such an extent that most people will have no idea that there was ever a man called Dyson. I like the idea of a child in the 21st century telling his friends he can't come out for a bit because mom wants me to Dyson my room. Long after my bones have crumbled

• 0:42David Senra?

  and I am no more than a potential clogging irritant for lesser machines. Okay, so that is from the introduction of just an absolutely wonderful book. I don't know if I've ever highlighted a book more than this one out of the 20 or 30 that I've read so far for this podcast. So that book is Against the Odds, an autobiography by James Dyson. So as you could see from that short little paragraph, his personality, I think, is more apparent in this book than I would say almost any other founders has been. Keep in mind, obviously, it's an autobiography where most of the books we cover are written by other people. But just this line, "I am no more",

• 1:26David Senra?

  he's talking about his bones are crumbled, and he's no more a potential clogging irritant for lesser machines. He, rightfully so, he's very proud of his products, and this book is the story of 15 years of struggle to finally invent, manufacture, and sell his own product. So let's get back into it. I don't want to, I want to cover as much of this as fast as possible. I do have a lot of highlights here, so let's see where we're gonna go. So I'm gonna stay in the introduction. It's where I start, it's where I immediately started reading, and I'm looking at the few pages now, and it's just, it's like I highlighted the whole thing. So let's, um, let's go back to the introduction. Um, okay, so this is gonna tell you why you should. Read the book.

• 2:11David Senra?

  He said, "This is also the exposition of a business philosophy, which is very different from anything you might have encountered before." So you're going to see here as we cover more of the book, he's not a typical businessman. He wasn't even interested in that. He wanted to be an artist and then later a designer, and then finally an engineer, which is if you talk to him today, is what he considers himself. He uses the word engineer. He still owns Dyson.

• 2:37David Senra?

  And he's worth about, his estimated net worth is around $5 billion to this day, or currently, rather, which is going to be really surprising when you consider the first, I would say 75%, 80% of the book, is just struggle after struggle after struggle, which I think is actually the most interesting parts of these books that we're talking about, because a lot of people can look at people like James Dyson or Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk, or any of these other people that we've talked about, like, "Wow, that guy's really special." But when you read their early lives, you realize like, no, they didn't just wake up and be that way. They had to make themselves into that person. And you definitely see that with him. So he talks about the exposition of a business philosophy, which is very different from anything you might have encountered before. It's because he has a lot of interesting ideas.

• 3:22David Senra?

  And one of my favorite parts, and we'll get towards the end, where he actually talks about his business philosophy. That's actually how this podcast is probably going to close. Okay, so let's skip to the next page. "It has all happened," he's still talking about, like, he's looking back before he gets into the story of his youth and who he was at a younger time. So he's talking about like, "How the hell did he wind up here?" He goes, "It has all happened, I really believe, because of the intrinsic excellence of the machine." He's talking about the Dyson vacuum cleaner, the cyclone, the digital cyclone, which he owns the patents on. "Because it is a better vacuum cleaner than anything that has gone before, and because it looks better than anything like it has ever looked."

• 4:06David Senra?

  The brand Hoover, his main competitor, obviously, is Hoover Vacuums, and it's the machine he was using, which irritated him so much that motivated him to try to make a better, to design a better vacuum cleaner to begin with. The brand Hoover became synonymous with this machine, and countless other industrial giants got rich on it. If anyone was going to step in and shake this global Farago up a bit, it was very unlikely to be me, an Englishman who wasn't a qualified engineer, without even a physics, physics degree to my name, riding on the crest of one moment of Edisonian illumination. So that Edisonian, he's obviously referencing somebody we've talked about on the podcast, and somebody I want to read another book on because he's so fascinating, that's Thomas Edison.

• 4:51David Senra?

  Dyson has a bunch of people that he looked up to that motivated him as a young man to, to become, to become an inventor, to become an engineer. And Edison is one of the people that he constantly references. And he likes Edison's approach to invention, which is just to try something and to keep trying until you figure it out. So there's that famous quote, he's like, "I didn't find, I didn't fail, I just found 10,000 ways it didn't work." That is very much Dysonian. I think he made, I'll cover it in the podcast shortly, but I think like 5,000 or 12,000 different prototypes before he manufactured his first vacuum cleaner.

• 5:35David Senra?

  So he's definitely, definitely in the Edisonian school of engineering, continuing now. And yet, that was how it turned out. "The bag," meaning the bag, the vacuum bag, "the bag was discarded forever and replaced with a little typhoon that spun at the speed of sound, in a chamber that couldn't clog. And the vacuum cleaner was in total control of its own awesome potential. I own it exclusively, and with it, you might say, the key to every household in the developed world." Still in the introduction, this is funny. So he talks about, Such reverence, he's talking about other inventions in history, such reverence has been accorded to the miserable wheel, that perhaps that alone can account for the fact that it was never improved.

• 6:19David Senra?

  Perhaps millions of people in the last few years had had ideas for improving it. All I did was take things a little further than just having the idea. So what he's referencing there is, he owned, partially owned a company, but was the inventor of something called the ball barrel, which when he was building like a farmhouse in the English countryside, he was like, "How the hell do wheelbarrows suck this bad if everybody uses them every day?" And he couldn't turn, it would sink in mud and do all sorts of stuff. So he designed basically a wheelbarrow that, instead of having a wheel, it had a ball. Then therefore you had greater control and you had 360 degree movement, and it didn't get stuck and it didn't sink.

• 7:03David Senra?

  This is on the next page, this is a random, a random sentence I highlighted that's interesting. "The look of the product, the intangible style that sets one thing apart from another, is still closest to my heart." So he's talking about the dual cyclone. When it first started getting, after he produced it and once the store started buying it, you'd walk into the store and you'd see 10 other vacuum cleaners that all looked the same, and then his. And he did that, obviously intentionally, and we'll go into a little bit more about the design of that. "My own success has been in observing objects in daily use, which it was always assumed could not be improved. By lateral thinking, the Edisonian approach," there's that word again, "it is possible

• 7:46David Senra?

  to arrive empirically," another word he uses constantly, "at an advance. Anyone can become an expert in anything in six months, whether it is hydrodynamics for boats, or cyclonic systems for vacuum cleaners," both of which he designed and he never had previous experience with. "After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology. My first cyclonic vacuum cleaner was built out of cereal packets and masking tape, long before I understood how it worked." After that initial eureka, it was a long haul to the dual cyclone, so-called because an outer cyclone rotating at 200 miles per hour removes

• 8:27David Senra?

  large debris and most of the dust, while an inner cyclone rotating at 924 miles per hour creates huge gravitational force and drives the finest dust, even particles of cigarette smoke, out of the air. But the greatest lesson for aspiring inventors was yet to come. The actual making of money. Paper stuff in thick wads, which they finally give to you because you've done something good. He's really, I'm really, he's just funny, man. He's funny. Well, I don't want to read that part because it's not going to make sense in isolation. It talks about how retaining control of the patent is so important. And he goes into detail about how you, in a few chapters, how he messed up at one point.

• 9:09David Senra?

  And when he was a young man inventing things, he would sign the patent over to the company instead of himself. So he wound up starting a company, inventing, he started a company based on an invention of his and then signed the patent over to his invention. And then he got kicked out, and then he gets kicked out of the company. So this is his, I would say, his ethos. "The best kind of business is one where you could sell a product at a high price with a good margin and in enormous volumes." That's what Dyson does. "For that, you have to develop a product that works better and looks better than existing one. That type of investment is long-term, high-risk, and not very British, or at least it looks like a high-risk policy. In the longer view, it is not half so likely to prove hazardous to one's

• 9:54David Senra?

  financial health as simply following the herd." Amen. Difference, now this is interesting. "Difference for the sake of it in everything." Okay, so let's go back to that. So it's not really high-risk, he's saying, "In the longer view, it is not so like, it's not so, it's not half so likely to prove hazardous to one's financial health as simply following the herd. Difference for the sake of it in everything." So this is the first time, I think, I've been introduced to this idea, where I do believe in contrarianism and trying to be different, but to be different so it's better. He arrives at doing a better vacuum cleaner because it's different, but it's better. But he's saying, even if it wasn't, you should, you should be yearning to be different for the sake of it.

• 10:39David Senra?

  That's a very interesting thought. And something he explores a little bit later. Um, difference for the sake of it in everything because it must be better from the moment the idea strikes to the running of the business. Difference and retention of total control. If, if you could, um, if, if there was a way to have a one sentence summary of this book, it'd be right there. Difference and retention of total control. Like most founders, James Dyson, which I don't know if he was like this his whole life, but after reading this book, I would say most likely, um, comes, arrives at this conclusion after, uh, based on experience. What he would call empiricism, but, uh, he was a control freak and he encourages you

• 11:24David Senra?

  in whatever you're working on to be a control freak as well. This is not a glib guide to instant wealth or effective management by Californian style happy talk and company outings to salt courses. This is, this is not even a business book. It is, if anything, a book against business, against the principles that have filled, filled the world with ugly, useless objects, unhappy people, and brought the country to its economic knees. So what he's talking about there is, uh, just similar, if you recall the podcast, uh, I did on Jim Clark, based on Michael Lewis's book, The New New Thing,

• 12:06David Senra?

  where Jim Clark very, he believed in the idea of new growth theory that the people actually, the makers, the engineers, the people that are actually creating the products and services that we're all using should be the ones that are chiefly rewarded. And everybody else should be, uh, secondary to that. I would say James Dyson definitely holds that view as well. Um, and so he constantly thought the business, uh, so excuse me, throughout the book trashes like the thought process of quote unquote businessmen in suits. And what he means by there is people selling, you know, a commoditized, undifferentiated product. And most of those people are what he calls fucking idiots. Um, and we'll see why, because a lot of them, everybody told him, I mean, over and over and over again, that, oh, James, who are you to, to think that you could invent a better vacuum cleaner?

• 12:50David Senra?

  If that was possible, Hoover would have done it already. Kind of um thinking uh that it's kind of in my opinion persuade pervasive rather in um Most of the books that we read when you you see that uh the objections that these founders Uh all have to deal with all seem have to deal with when they're very at starting out when They're very young and this is wrapping up the introduction here we all want to make Our mark we all want to make beautiful things and a little money we all have our own ideas About how to do it what follows just happens to be my way the first sentence the first paragraph Chapter one he goes though writing an autobiography I am not so terminally afflicted by

• 13:33David Senra?

  By solifism as to think you will want much of my parents birth and what J D Salinger Called all that David David Copper David Copperfield kind of crap I have been a misfit Throughout my professional life and that seems to have worked to my advantage so what He's talking about there is he talks a little bit about his childhood um and like the things That influenced him like his father dying which we're gonna get to in a minute but It's not you can read it in ten ten fifteen minutes so it does not take a long time to Read at all okay so he goes I've been a misfit throughout my professional life and That seems to have worked to my advantage misfits are not I love this part misfits

• 14:12David Senra?

  Are not born or made they make themselves and a stubborn opinionated child desperate To be different and to be right encounters only smaller refractions of the problems He will always experience and he carries the weight of that dislocation forever so He's describing his experience trying to go against the grain um so his dad he's Nine years old he's got two older two older brothers and his dad uh he said uh my father Died of cancer in nineteen fifty six combined with the loss of my father this made me very Competitive and in the wider picture there is really not so great a difference between

• 14:55David Senra?

  A rampaging industrial giant trying to sue you out of business and a hulking great fifteen Year old trying to knock you off a rock or duck you in the sea so he was bullied by Older boys and um something I think played heavily on him is that his dad died so young So no one really taught him how to be He looked to other, like, male figures for inspiration. And a lot of those happen to be engineers and business people, which plays heavily on the trajectory of his life. So he becomes very competitive. He's kind of like a troublemaker, like most of these entrepreneurs are. And I'm going to skip over a bunch of this, but I do want to cover something that he picks up.

• 15:40David Senra?

  This interesting parallel. Before I get there, let me read this one paragraph. "To take things back, though, for I am in danger of leaping straight into my inventing life at the first opportunity. I should go through a few little epiphanies in my childhood that might have contributed to my story, which is ultimately about how I took on the big boys at their own game, made them look very silly just by being true to myself. I do not plan to give you the whole biography." Thank you very much. "I am not quite so involved in my own self-importance that I imagine a day-by-day account of my life will hold your attention very long. Still, I think there is an odd thing in my growing up which might be illuminating." Okay, so I love this part. It's on the very next page, and we're going to get into some of that.

• 16:27David Senra?

  So he's trying to, again, he's growing up without a father. It's just his mom raising three boys. And he's looking for outlets to his competitive nature. And, well, let me just read this. "Another thing that happened about that time was that I discovered I was good at running. But just when I started to win some, to win some long-distance races, puberty took a grip of my fellows, and they all got huge. I was a very late developer, and so suddenly I was crap again. Back to the ignominy of second-rate academic performance, few friends, and no dad."

• 17:08David Senra?

  The first race I entered after my own balls had dropped was a revelation. I was 14 years old, a terribly mopey adolescent, and went into it expecting to come last. But as the race went on, over about three miles, all the other chaps started to slow down. This puzzled me a bit because I had been jogging along, thinking about this and that, rather enjoying the running, and wasn't tired at all. I had the impression that they were all running backwards, and suddenly, the leading pack was only a few yards in front. I gritted my teeth and ground out every last bit of energy I had to battle past them before we got to the line.

• 17:52David Senra?

  This success delighted me no end. I was not doing very well at school, and suddenly, I had something in which I could kick people's asses occasionally. I entered more and more races and won them all quite easily. Just as it had been with the bassoon, that's a, he tried to learn how to play the instrument called bassoon, there was no one to teach me how to run. This is really important. There was no dad to tell me how great I was, and it became a very introverted kind of obsession with me. Herb Elliot was a big name at the time, so I read a few books about him and discovered that his coach had told him that the way to develop stamina and strengthen the leg muscles was to run up and down sand dunes.

• 18:37David Senra?

  This suited me fine, because I had nothing else in Norfolk, that's the city he lived in, because if I had nothing else in Norfolk, I certainly had sand dunes. I liked the idea, and maybe I'm selfish for including this in there, but the fact that he gets this idea from reading books. So he's interested in running, so he reads about other runners, and then he winds up getting good ideas from there, he complied to his own life. That kind of is the reason why I'm reading these books as well. Uh, let's go back to that. I would, so this is what he does. "I would get up at 6:00 in the morning and run off into the wilds of Norfolk for hours, or put on my running kit at 10 o'clock at night and not reappear until after midnight. Out there alone on the dunes, I got a terrific buzz..." From knowing that I was doing something that no one else was.

• 19:21David Senra?

  They were all tucked up in bed at school. I felt like a pioneer, or an astronaut, or whatever kind of lone adventure felt right at the time. And I knew that I was training myself to do something better than anyone else would be able to do. Running is a wonderful thing. It isn't like a team sport where you depend on other people, or they depend on you. And there's no question of your performance being judged. You either run faster than everyone else, or you do not. In running, your performance is absolute. I was out there learning how to do something and getting a visible result. I experienced, in that sense, a very similar set of responses to the ones that made me move out of the arts later on and into a technical field, where my drawings would not be better or worse than other people

• 20:06David Senra?

  according to some spurious set of subjective criteria, but simply right or wrong. So he talks about this, that you don't wanna, you don't wanna go into a field where you need to rely on the subjective opinions of other people. So think of like, somebody trying out to be an actor, or like a singer on American Idol, or something like that. He, another way that I've heard people put that is like, I don't wanna rely on the good graces of other people. So if he's building a vacuum cleaner, it is either better, or it is not. And if it's better, then it logically follows that people will buy it. The act of running itself was not something I enjoyed. The best you could say for it was that it was lonely and painful.

• 20:50David Senra?

  But as I started to win by greater and greater margins, I did it more and more, because I knew the reason for my success was that out on, was that out on the sand dunes, I was doing something that no one else was doing. Apart from me and Herb, no one knew. They were all running around and round the track like a herd of sheep, and not getting any quicker. Difference itself was making me come first. See, we're, we're 18 pages into the book at this point. And he's constantly pounding this being different, being different, doing things that other people are not doing. In so many, and this is the, this is the summary of this entire part. In so many ways, it taught me the most significant lessons in all my youth.

• 21:31David Senra?

  I was learning about the physical and psychological strength that keeps you competitive. I was learning about obstinacy. I was learning to overcome nerves. And as I grew more and more neurotic about being caught from behind, I trained harder to stay in front. It is a horribly labored analogy, and it is flavored with the fickle seasoning of hindsight. But to this day, it is the fear of failure more than anything else which makes me keep working at success. Okay, so now we're skipping ahead. He is, he graduates high school, he goes to an art school in London. And he's thinking he's gonna be a painter, and then he starts studying interior design and engineering.

• 22:15David Senra?

  But this, this section is about people who inspired him. So, one of them is Buckminster Fuller. Mocked in the early stages of his career, Buckminster Fuller knew well that the only way to make a genuine breakthrough was to pursue a vision with single-minded determination in the face of criticism. If you try to change things, then you upset the establishment, which is why invention and vilification have always gone hand in hand. Here's another person that he inspires. And by the way, you could easily replace James Dyson, or excuse me, replace Buckminster Fuller with James Dyson's in that paragraph, and it would still be accurate. The next guy, the next person is Isambard Kingdom Brunel

• 22:59David Senra?

  was unable to think small, and nothing was a barrier to him. This is somebody else that he looks up to. The mere fact that something had never been done before presented to Brunel, no suggestion that the doing of it was impossible. He was fired by an inner strength and self-belief almost impossible to imagine in this feckless age. While I would never lay claim to the genius of a man like that, I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was. And at times in my life when I've encountered difficulty and self-doubt, I have looked to his example to fire me on. I think that's a natural, that's human nature. Looking at these people and realizing that if, whatever, like,

• 23:44David Senra?

  whatever you're going through, other people have gone through worse. And if you seek out those kind of examples, like kind of what we're doing here on the podcast, it keeps you going and realizing that it's not impossible. Okay, so a couple more paragraphs. ...down, he's still talking about Brunel here. So he says, "I have tried in my own way to draw on Brunel's dream of applying emergent technology in ways as yet unimagined. He was never afraid to be different or shocking. He never shrank the battles with the money men, and he had to overcome the most incredible resistance to his ideas. When he applied the system of the screw propeller to a transatlantic steamship, he actually filled a boat with people and sent them across the sea.

• 24:26David Senra?

  I have asked people only to push my inventions around, not to get inside them and try to float. And so I have sought out..." Here, here's, again, I'm gonna keep hammering this because I think, if he repeats something over and over again, which you'll realize if you read the book, I want to include it as much as possible on the podcast because it's obviously very important to him. She goes, "And so I have sought out originally for its own, I have sought out originality for its own sake, and modified it into a philosophy which demands difference from what exists, even if only to redefine a stale market. And I have told myself, when people tried to make me modify my ideas, that the great Western railway could not have worked as anything but the vision of a single man, pursued

• 25:10David Senra?

  with a dogged determination that was nothing less than obsession. Throughout my story, I will try to return to Brunel and to other designers and engineers to show how identifying with them and seeing parallels with every stage of my own life enabled me to see my career as a whole and to know that it all turned out the way it has. By which I am led to believe that, in the case of inventors, for vision, one might equally read well read stubbornness. Remember, that I am celebrating only my stubbornness. I am claiming nothing but the virtues of a mule."

• 25:51David Senra?

  So, um, he talks about why, looking up to people like Brunel, and Buckminster Fuller, and then eventually Jeremiah Fry, I think is his name.

• 26:02David Senra?

  He switches from art to engineering. And this is him talking about not relying on human judgment once more. "In art, you place yourself at the mercy of human judgment and its odious courtiers, human error and human weakness. In engineering and design, you are at the mercy only of natural law, physics, and the market, both developmental capital and income generated by response to the product. They are cruel taskmasters, but at least they are visible ones. The artist is equally enslaved to the market. The industrialist is just more honest about it. So my dream was to be a Brunel. But this was never an age of invention.

• 26:45David Senra?

  It has been an age when the great monopolies, companies, have been able to dictate that progress has ended. And they did this when they were satisfied not with their product, but with their control of its market. The public has been easily convinced by advertising, and receptiveness to revolution has dwindled. Furthermore, such invention as it now allowed is the prerogative of multinationals, not people." I love this part. "Where are our Wright brothers? Where have the Edison's gone? And the Henry Fords? We have broken new frontiers, but where are the names? Who invented the space shuttle? The nuclear submarine? The wind farm?

• 27:30David Senra?

  When you go for backing for your crazy scheme, it is not enough to be a man. You have to be a group of men. And where is the fun in that?" So he talks a little bit about, he was just trying to find ways to make money to pay, to earn extra money ways in school. So he starts selling, um, his friend was like producing cheap wine. And so he was importing it and then go, uh, from southern Spain. And then going around and selling it to other British people. And, uh, he's like, "I was making reasonable pocket money, flogging it by the case to the student union and staff. And, and I suppose it was here that I learnt the crucial business principle that would guide my later attempts at making money from invention.

• 28:12David Senra?

  The only way to make real money is to offer the public something entirely new that has style value as well as substance, and which they cannot get anywhere else." Okay, so skipping way ahead. He goes to work for this guy named Jeremy Fry.

• 28:31David Senra?

  And Fry was a local millionaire businessman and inventor, but he wasn't like the rest of the business people that James had interacted with up until that point. He would actually like get his hands dirty and he was involved in the engineering and very much, I would say, like the precursor to how James Dyson organized his own career. And so this is a little bit about how Jeremy Fry works. He did not, when an idea came to him, sit down and process it through pages of calculations. He didn't argue it through with anyone. He just went out and built it. So it was that, when I came to him in the midst of my efforts with the sea truck that

• 29:16David Senra?

  summer to say, "I have an idea." He would offer no more advice than to say, "You know where the workshop is. Go and do it." "But we'll need to weld this thing," I would protest. "Well, then, get a welder and weld it." That's Jeremy Fry. When I asked if we shouldn't talk to someone about it, say hydrodynamics, he would say, "The lake is down there. The Land Rover is over there. Take a plank of wood down to the lake, tow it behind a boat, and look at what happens." So he's, uh, he does this design for something that he just referenced there called a sea truck. So he's trying to make, imagine if a, uh, if a flat-bottom fishing boat and a pickup truck made love.

• 30:00David Senra?

  Their offspring would be the sea truck, which looks just like somebody put a truck on top of a flat-bottom fishing boat. And, uh, he's trying to figure out how to make it lighter and faster and do all these other things. And the idea is they could sell it for all kinds of things. A lot of people, a lot of different militaries buy it, farmers buy it, but it, uh, you're driving, right? Or, excuse me, you're boating and you could pull, it's so flat, you can pull right up on land and then people could get out easily. Um, and it, so people use it like, uh, I think he talks about it where, uh, it's like sheep farmers would use it, like to move their sheep. It's just all kinds of interesting things.

• 30:40David Senra?

  But, uh, right after that, I would say, this next paragraph, uh, really hits high, uh, hits on, um...

• 30:50David Senra?

  Dyson's complete lack of respect for experts. So he talks about, okay, Jeremy Fry is saying, hey, you know, you want to test something? Then the lake is down there, the Land Rover is over there, take a plank of wood down to the lake, tow it behind the boat and see what happens. Now, this was not a modus operandi that I had countered before. College had taught me to revere experts and expertise. Fry ridiculed all that. As far as he was concerned, with enthusiasm and intelligence, anything was possible. It was mind blowing. No research, no workings, no preliminary sketches. If it didn't want to work one way, he would just try it another way until it did.

• 31:34David Senra?

  And as we proceeded, I could see that we were getting on extremely quickly. The more I observed his method, the more it fascinated me. So, uh, this, this, that paragraph really sets like the, the little kernel of an idea that, hey, uh, Fry's doing exactly what I want to do. He's got his hands in all kinds of businesses based on products that he created himself. And he doesn't go around asking people how to do it or for permission. He just goes and see, sees what he can figure out on his own.

• 32:07David Senra?

  Uh, here's another crucial business lesson that James wants to tell us about. But I learned then, one of the most crucial business lessons of my life. To stint on investment in the early stages, to try to sell a half finished product is to doom from the start, any project you embark on. So this is happening because they, they design and start to try to sell this thing called the sea truck. And he realized that, uh, he, they needed a cabin, like he wanted to get like right, it just looked like, uh, like somebody put like the base of a truck on top of a boat. And he felt that he was having a problem selling it because they didn't finish the actual product.

• 32:51David Senra?

  And so he's, he's asking, uh, these people, like the people running the business, hey, I need to, let's, let's make this, this, um, like, let's get a cabin for it. And they start setting all these fake boundaries on them like, oh, okay. Sorry, Mr. Dyson, we want to see four sales a month and then we'll take that money and reinvest in a cabin. And then once he hits that, okay, sorry, we need eight sales. And they just keep moving the goalposts. And then, uh, it winds up, he goes, I got my cabin in the end and sales took off. Okay, so this is something he pounds on a lot. And I think this is even more important in the internet age than even when he was writing these words in the 90s. So he's gonna talk about this idea a lot.

• 33:35David Senra?

  But he goes, "My big mistake had been presenting the same craft," he's talking about the sea truck, "to each customer and telling them, 'This can be adapted to suit your needs. If someone wanted a driving boat, I would explain that it could be fitted with compressors, heaters, and a very slow diesel engine. If an oil company wanted a crew bus, I would tell them that suitable seating and a faster engine could be fitted. To the military, I said I would bulletproof the sides and engines. To constructors in search of a bridging tug, I said, 'Special buffers? High-power engine? No problem.' I convinced not a single one of them. People do not want all-purpose. They want high-tech specificity." And this goes hand in hand.

• 34:20David Senra?

  So he's always talking about narrowing what your product does, because people are not mixing your messages, which is kind of the same thing. So one is the actual creation of the product, and one is the marketing of the product. But he's saying, "People cannot understand more than one idea at a time, much less seven." So let me give you a real-world example. The Dyson vacuum cleaner is the best vacuum cleaner in the world, right? No bag means that the suction is, you get 100% suction 100% of the time. There's nothing clogging and leaving all the dirt and dust that you have in your house on the floor. But it also is very good for dry cleaning clothes. They never, ever marketed it as that. People found that out later on, on their own. Because when you introduce multiple messages, they don't understand. They're like, "Okay, so am I buying a vacuum cleaner or a dry cleaner?"

• 35:05David Senra?

  So this is what he has to say about that. "You simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. A consumer can barely handle one great idea, let alone two, or even several. Why tell them this thing was universally adaptable when universality mattered to the individual consumer, not a wit?" It was for the same reason that when I put the Dual Cyclone on the market, that I kept more or less quiet about its potential as a dry cleaning tool. How could I expect the public to believe that this was not only the best vacuum cleaner ever made, but also something completely different? And so, with a quite respectable product to present, I set off around the world to start selling it properly. It was time spent away from designing,

• 35:49David Senra?

  but it was to teach me above all else that only by trying to sell things that you have made yourself, by dealing with consumer products, problems, and the products failings as they arise, can you really come to understand what you have done, to bond with your invention and to improve it. Conversely, of course, only the man who has brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on others and demand a heavy price with all his heart. Okay, so skipping way ahead in the timeline. He decides, instead of working for other people with a sea truck, he wants to go out and do something on his own. So this is where he invents the ballbarrow. And he stumbles upon something that winds up being extremely important to the rest of his life.

• 36:34David Senra?

  He's going around, he has an invention that's clearly better than wheelbarrow, it works better. But when he tries to sell it to the people that sell wheelbarrows, like other stores and stuff, they're just, they're resistant. The same thing I said earlier, it's like, who are you? Like, why do you think, James Dyson, that you could make a better wheelbarrow? That's very strange. And he goes, "So even if it worked better, they wouldn't stock it, because why are we gonna stock it? The wheelbarrows we have now work perfect and we sell them just as is." So he says, based on this experience, he goes, "It was an interesting lesson in psychology, teaching me that the entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer." And he puts this into practice,

• 37:17David Senra?

  because no one's, no stores will buy the ballbarrow from him. So he's like, "Oh, I'm screwed." He goes, "In desperation, I turned to the newspapers. I did a nice little drawing of the ballbarrow and slapped down some direct response ads among the baldness cures and incontinence pants for the ballbarrow from Kirkland Dyson Designs, nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents." I say dollars, but everything's in pounds, but... I'll probably use them interchangeably, but just know he's writing in pounds and for some reason when I look at that, I say dollars. So Kirk Doug Turk Dyson Designs is the company that he founded with other people and their their main goal is to sell the ball barrel and they start inventing, he starts inventing

• 38:02David Senra?

  other products too, but that's what's going on. So just to make sure I'm clear, they're having no success getting stores to buy it from them. So it's like, you know what, just go in the newspaper, I'll put it in. The book actually shows, you know, just a tiny little ad, maybe 100 words and then it shows the drawing in black and white. So it's like, alright, well, if the stores aren't gonna buy it, let me see if the people will. And so he says, okay, the ball barrel and it's 1990, $19.95 or whatever. And, and what do you know? The checks started rolling in. I was astonished. This was the same object that had been rejected completely by builders and retailers who had been able to see it in the flesh and it was being brought, bought up by members of

• 38:47David Senra?

  the public who were sending off checks for 20 quid to a company no one had ever heard of, all on the strength of a weedy little drawing and a tiny newspaper advertisement. It was fantastic. We were getting a good class of customer from ads in the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph and the business began gradually to show a profit, producing up to 30 a day and shipping them off by post. From here on, things snowballed. Something he picks up on later, a few paragraphs down, journalists, some journalists saw this ad and started to write about it. And he talks about the difference between an editorial and an advertisement and he talks about this later in great detail. He has an entire chapter later on about advertising.

• 39:32David Senra?

  So he's not, he's not a big fan of it, but he does run some ads that are relatively famous. So he goes, it is also the very, it's talking about the editorial. It is also the very best way of convincing the public. One decent editorial counts for a thousand advertisements. Next page, he continues on this idea that he never lets go of. He goes, you need to be direct to your customer. I didn't, I need to, I guess, back up and explain before, so this makes sense. So he has a board of directors for this company, he's got other investors, he's got other people and one guy comes in to be head of sales and he convinces them to not do direct response ads anymore. And Dyson at the time objects, but he's overruled and he's mad about it.

• 40:16David Senra?

  And he says, "But in following his advice to abandon direct selling and supply shops via wholesalers, we began to lose that contact with the customer that was the basis of our success." So he talks about that over and over again. He's like, "Listen, you, person reading this book, whatever you're building, whatever you're creating, keep complete control of it and sell it yourself. Market it yourself. Do not outsource that." Do not, he basically wants to be completely vertically integrated. He does not, and you understand why when you read the book. Like he just, a lot of his problems were he's being let down by other people. And they have a very different business philosophy than he does. So what happens after this? "The business became cash negative and we started to find ourselves sinking into debt.

• 41:01David Senra?

  What was the response of the board? To expand." He's not happy about this either. And he goes, "The problem with that was that we were doing it all on borrowed money." So he went from a cash flow positive little business that was growing slowly but steadily to one where they abandoned the direct selling method, starting to outsource control to customer to retailers and then deciding, "Hey, we're not making enough money, so we're expanding." And that's one of the takeaways where it's like, the only time you expand a business is when it's actually doing well, not when you're just losing constantly money and then borrowing against it. Cause he finds himself in really dire economic times.

• 41:45David Senra?

  They're paying like, interest rates are about 25% on their debt at the time, which winds up crippling the company. So here he's talking about, he gets betrayed by his brother-in-law. They throw him out of the company. We're going to get there in a minute, but he talks, there's just two things that he learned in this failure. "One of the strains of this book is about control. If you have the intimate knowledge of a product that comes with dreaming it up and then designing it, I have been trying to say, then you will be the better, you will be, you will be the better able to sell it and then to go back to it and improve it." That's a weird word and sentence. From there, but the point stands.

• 42:27David Senra?

  From there, you are in the best possible position to convince others of its greatness and to inspire others to give it their very best efforts to developing it and to remain true to it and to see it through all the way to its optimum point, to total fruition, if you like. This is the part I mentioned earlier that he's basically explaining to you, the reader, the mistakes he made in his first company. Furthermore, I weep to recall it. I had, in my naked naivete, assigned the patent for the thing, meaning the ball barrel, to the company rather than to myself. I had no rights at all to the invention I had created and labored over for so long. It was not a mistake I was ever to make again. It wasn't a money thing, by the way.

• 43:12David Senra?

  It had nothing to do with me and my family being suddenly deprived of my $10,000 a year salary, nor the fact that I had been pickpocketed by my friends and family. It was a bigger loss than that. To lose my invention was like losing a limb. No, it was worse than that. It was like giving birth and then losing the child, and I was completely shattered by it. Okay, so I'm gonna skip ahead. This is right before he gets kicked out of Kirk Dyson. And this is when he already has the idea, when he was at home, and he's just that kind of personality. He's annoyed at how bad the Hoover Junior vacuum cleaner is he was using. And they were, at the time, they were also, he was learning about industrial design and manufacturing, because the ball barrel was so popular.

• 43:56David Senra?

  And he learned about something called a cyclone. And one night, he goes to a factory after they close, hops over the fence, and kind of tries to inspect it without getting caught by security, to try to see how the damn thing works. And he realizes, he spends an entire weekend designing a cyclone for a vacuum cleaner, which is what he was referencing earlier, when he made one of like masking tape and cardboard. So he spends the entire, he's doing this on like Saturday night and Sunday. And he's like, this is amazing. Like this is gonna be a really good idea. Like it's gonna turn the fortunes of Kirk Dyson, or yeah Kirk Dyson, the company around, because now we'll have a new product we can sell. And this is, this is what happens next.

• 44:42David Senra?

  And the note I left myself is, don't make your products too wide, narrow it down. He's constantly harping on that fact. So after the amazing weekend, I could hardly wait to get back to the office. Horrible though it was. It was an unusual feeling for me, for I had been sometime growing tired of life at Kirk Dyson, for all the reasons I gave earlier, and was, though I didn't know it of course, approaching the termination of my relationship with the company. They just kicked him out without, like at the, they had a meeting one day and he was out. But on this particular morning, I was returning to work, having just made the first steps in developing what I felt, what I felt sure was to be one of the inventions of the decade, and which could solve all of Kirk Dyson's problems at a blow. As I drove in, I turned over in my mind, as you do, the conversation that would follow my revelation.

• 45:27David Senra?

  The board would be bound to object that the vacuum cleaner was not a gardening product, and that we had better stick to the market we knew. Boards of directors are predictable like that. We had come to realize some months before, that we needed to diversify. The selling operation, management structure, factory and enormous bank overdraft that we needed to finance the company, could no longer be supported by sales volume and profit margins of the ball barrel. But we were still thinking purely of the gardening market. By way of diversification, we had been developing a hydroponic drip watering system, that involved a network of thin plastic pipes running under the garden, delivering water directly to the roots of the plants, so that nothing was lost by evaporation.

• 46:10David Senra?

  And you watered only the plants you wanted to, without encouraging weeds or slugs and snails. Sadly, for it was a fine product, we had made a major marketing error. What we were attempting to offer was a panacea to all of your gardening troubles. But rather, as had happened with the sea truck, Consumers were simply not able to grasp so many improvements in one fell swoop. And the thing was too universal, to all purpose. Had we begun it, say, as a greenhouse watering system with a single time-saving benefit, thus appealing to a specific need, it would have bedded down nicely into the real market. So there's that, that thought again, stay narrow.

• 46:53David Senra?

  I felt that the gardening market was simply too small for the sorts of things I believed I was capable of producing. I thought we should be making a higher-value product, retailing for a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred dollars, that sold in enormous quantities throughout the year, not just in the summer, and to every kind of household, not just the ones with gardens. Something like, oh, I don't know, like a vacuum cleaner, for example. And so it was that when I sat down with the board, I was ready to defend myself against their objections that the vacuum cleaner was not a gardening tool. Even though, even, but even as I was doing this, I was more than somewhat miffed that they showed so little excitement about my invention. As directors of a manufacturing company, they should have been, been hopping about

• 47:38David Senra?

  in a delirious, in delirious glee at the discovery that one of their colleagues had invented something that could instantly dominate an enormous market, save the company, and make them extremely rich. Instead, they sat with their faces as long as Hoover bags, grumbling about staying in the garden market and focusing all our effort on roots, that's that system he was designing, until, in the height of my harangue, and the moment is as fresh in my mind as if it was happening even as I write, I was stopped by one of them with the words I was to hear over and over and over again for the next ten years. "But James," he said smugly, simpering, like a father patronizing an over-enthusiastic

• 48:20David Senra?

  child, "your idea can't be any good. If there were a better kind of vacuum cleaner, Hoover would have invented it." I think that qualifies for induction into our Critics Don't Know Shit segment. So now we've reached the main part, what I would say constitutes the majority of the book, and that's the beginning of, he finally gets into the vacuum cleaner business. So the board laughs. Doesn't like his invention. A few weeks later, they kick him out. So then he goes and he decides, you know what? I'm, I think this is a good idea. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this. So he goes back to Jeremy Fry. They form a partnership. They both throw in some money, even though James doesn't have a lot of money at this point.

• 49:01David Senra?

  He puts his house as collateral, which he does several times in the book, which is crazy. And they go about trying to sell a cyclone vacuum cleaner. So let's jump into that. He goes, "My fingers numb with chill. I huddle like Bob Cratchit over a single candle and prepare to hammer out another prototype cyclone. There is some way to go yet. You will have noticed, if not by the weight of the pages in your right hand, then by the fact that I have said somewhere before, or somewhere before, that before I went into production with the dual cyclone, I had built 5,127 prototypes. So far, you know only about one. The cardboard and tape thing that I tossed together on the kitchen floor.

• 49:45David Senra?

  Well, this little room in the coach house is where I built most of the other 5,126." So the coach house is on his property at home. It's a little house with no plumbing, no electricity, no anything at the start. Eventually winds up putting all that stuff in himself, but that's why he's working by candlelight. "And all the while I was making cyclones, acrylic cyclones, rolled brass cyclones, machined aluminum cyclones. For three years, I did this alone. I could not afford anyone to help me. And what would have been the point when I could do it all myself? When you start out, you just don't think it's going to take that long. Time passes by and it's always mañana." This is his son.

• 50:29David Senra?

  "Sam grew up and started walking, then talking, and all the while I made cyclones. Deidra," that's his wife, "did everything else. Sometimes I would lose control completely when a model went wrong after weeks of planning. And Jacob," that's his other son, "told me only recently how well he remembers the sound of sheets of acrylic shattering out in the coach house or down in the cellar and me exploding in a typhoon of verisefus profanity." Now he's going to go a little bit more into this Edison, the Edisonian principle of development. This is what development is all about. Empirical testing demands that you only ever make one change at a time.

• 51:13David Senra?

  It is the Edisonian principle, and it is bloody slow. It is a thing that takes me ages to explain to my graduate students at Dyson Appliances. But it is so important. They tend to leap into tests, making dozens of radical changes, then stepping back to test their new masterpiece. How do they know which change has improved it and which hasn't? There is no, this is really important too. There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence. And in the end, you make it look like a quantum leap. While it is easy, of course, for me to celebrate my doggedness now and say that is all you need to succeed.

• 51:56David Senra?

  The truth is that it demoralized me terribly. I would crawl into the house every night, covered in dust, after a long day in the coach house, exhausted and depressed because that day's cyclone had not worked. There were times when I thought it would never work. That I would keep on making cyclone after cyclone, never going forwards, never going backwards, until I died. So he eventually gets a working prototype going. And he says, you know what? I like designing and building things. So that's how I want to spend my time. Him and Jeremy agree that, hey, why don't we just, we build it and then we can just license it to other people. So what would happen is they would retain all the rights and then other people sell it, take care of all the customers and everything else, and they wind up getting, you know,

• 52:41David Senra?

  would get like hypothetically like 5% or 10% royalty for the life of it. And some people are really successful doing this. So that's why they thought they could do it. In one example in the book, I think they're licensing one of the vacuum cleaners, because it's also country-specific and they're completely like customizable, the license agreements. So I think at one point... One company is doing like 100 million in sales and they get 5% of that. So they were making 5 million a year, quote unquote, doing nothing, which he took umbrage to because he's like, "I'm not doing nothing. I spent years inventing this thing and giving you a product to sell." But just so you know where we're at in the book, he's going around and he's meeting with all these companies in all throughout Europe, trying to get them to license the

• 53:26David Senra?

  product. And this is the result of some of the meetings. "It really was extraordinary and quite unexpected. Every single one of them seemed to miss the point. That here was an innovation of real benefit to the consumer, a massive leap from a crappy old carpet sucker to a cleaner of total efficiency and undiminishable power. For each manufacturer in turn, it represented an opportunity to bring out a new product with a major technical advantage over their competitors. The most ironic in this respect was Goblin, that's the name of the company, who had trouble finding time to see me because they had their staff on a two-day week because sales were so low. As if it were better to save time by not seeing me rather than buying something better

• 54:09David Senra?

  than anything their competitor had, starting to sell again and going back to work full time. All anyone could ever think of to say was, 'Ours works perfectly well. Ours works perfectly well already. People are used to bags and we like selling bags.'" And if they weren't repeating these little trite objections, they were sighing or looking the other way or smiling conspiratorially to each other, even laughing. Enough of this could drive you mad when he tried to license the technology even to other existing manufacturers of vacuum cleaners. Like, "Well, yours doesn't have a bag, though." And he's like, "Yeah, that's the entire point." He's like, then their response is, "Well, we make a lot of money selling bags."

• 54:54David Senra?

  That's the problem. So it's really interesting because you see this play out and this is humans. We've seen this play out in different industries and different books and in different time periods, but it kind of stays constant. And I think that's where the opportunity is for us to build and design things where there's big holes by the already existing players.

• 55:18David Senra?

  He has no success anywhere. America, Germany, Britain, nowhere. Japan was his saving grace, where he finally is able to license one of these things to Japan. And so, uh, this part is called "Japan Gets It." Let's just read a little bit, uh, what's going on here. "In fact, they thought the machine was wonderful. Unlike anyone I had met so far, they understood..." And, uh, let me just back up. This is, uh, all the, all the, this stuff is, is taking place over several years. So it's not like it was quick that he, that he arrived at being able to sell a license to Japan. And we find out, wind up finding out it's not even that lucrative. "In fact, they thought the machine was wonderful. Unlike anyone I had met so far, they understood exactly what I was trying to do and knew exactly how to sell it.

• 56:02David Senra?

  And within three weeks, we had signed a deal by which I get front money of $35,000 plus design fees of $25,000 on completion of the drawings, and then a 10% royalty with an annual minimum of $60,000." So this front money, because I've never done a license to it, I didn't know anything about it. So, um, one of the most important things, especially because usually the, the inventor's trying to license these things to larger companies, is, uh, when you're negotiating, you have to negotiate a large upfront payment, because that's going to get you through the development. Because even if they buy your license, uh, and you sign a license agreement, it might take them years to, to start actually manufacturing and selling a thing, which means if you're only getting, um, the royalty, it could, you could, by the time you get the royalty,

• 56:45David Senra?

  you might have been out of business or in a, uh, or went bankrupt or whatever the case is. And then, uh, real quick, I want to point out this deal where they talked, the royalty was an annual minimum of $60,000. That's all he ever gets from these people, because, uh, there's no way to prove how much they're selling. And they, they, they wind up giving him like, uh, reports, and it's all like handwritten, it's just, it's really weird. Um, okay, and so they're calling his vacuum cleaner the G-Force. "From the beginning of 1985, the G-Force became all-consuming. It had to be. I had lost Amway, I had lost Rotork, and I was heavily in debt and had to survive." Interesting, uh, story that I'm not going to include on the podcast, because it's, uh, it's, it's, takes place over many chapters, it's really long, but the, the, the summary

• 57:28David Senra?

  of it is, Amway, uh, this really friendly guy, uh, seeks out James Dyson after seeing, um, the, the Dualcyclone, or what's, becomes the Dualcyclone, in a magazine, said, "Hey, um, I know you're having trouble with all these other, um..." These other companies selling your product, we love it, we want to do it. They kind of rope-a-dope them, they wind up signing an agreement and he tells them all his ideas and gives them the information and he doesn't hear from there for a while. Then they sue him for fraud, saying he lied to them, which he didn't. And that goes on, he's spending tons of money going deep into debt because Amway, you know, is a multi-billion dollar corporation at the time.

• 58:11David Senra?

  And he's just some dude living in the outskirts of England. And they did all this just so later on, they made their own cyclone vacuum cleaner. So they took his technology basically and stole it. Later on in the book, he winds up getting, like, he winds up getting retribution for this, but at the time, it almost killed him. So that's what he means, I lost Amway. And he goes, and he goes, "I knew that if I had a product that was being sold successfully in Japan and which clearly worked, it would lift the Amway stigma and convince people that the cyclone had worked and not that we had duped anybody."

• 58:50David Senra?

  So not only that, after the Amway sues him, again, they're suing him on false pretenses, but the people that he's continued to try to sell to afterwards, like, "Oh, this guy's a, you know, this guy's duped Amway." Basically, they believed what Amway was saying without any proof and it was really damaging to him. So it's really just shady. "I spent much of the next year living in Japan in stints of six weeks at a time, designing the G-Force and seeing it into production. It was mentally and emotionally draining. It was professionally quite amazing." They worked, so he talks about, now he's talking about Japanese, "They worked all day and all night.

• 59:32David Senra?

  I could give a model maker a drawing at 8:00 PM and 24 hours later, he would come back to me with a perfect working model, something that could take weeks in Britain."

• 59:41David Senra?

  And there was none of the British attitude that makes a team sit down before any work is done and say, "Right, how many problems have we got?" The only difficulty was that if there was ever a problem, then, for the sake of honor, we had to overcome it without attaching blame to anyone else. And so, by August 1985, I had completed the drawings and in March 1986, the G-Force went on the market at a cost of $1,200 per machine. And despite, or perhaps because of its enormous price, it soon became the must-have domestic style item for the fashionable man or woman about Tokyo. Did they ever use it? Who knows? The Japanese, as a nation, prefer cylinder vacuum cleaners and had never bought uprights in any great number.

• 1:00:27David Senra?

  They don't really have houses, so there was no identifiable need for this full-size cleaner and there isn't much store space for it in their tiny homes. Which is why the upright, meaning the upright vacuum, that had sold there had been ones with an attachable tabletop so that when not being used, it could be disguised as a coffee table. It may be, I suppose, that the fact that it looked so good was what made it attractive to a people who were not going to be able to shut it away. Nor, that's just a weird sentence, I'm sorry if that sounds weird to you, "nor do the Japanese go for wall-to-wall carpet in a big way, and though I had included on the G-Force a special attachment for cleaning tatami mats,

• 1:01:08David Senra?

  the suspicion in the design world was that this futuristic, pink machine, they wanted him to produce it pink, by the way, half spaceship, half vacuum cleaner, just stood in the corner in most Japanese homes and generated oohs and ahs. But it stood in a lot of corners. And though it took off only gradually, within three years, it was making sales of $12 million a year." So he's finally having success. What I want to point out there is, he finishes the drawings in 1985, it goes into production in 1986. He started this, the idea of getting in the company now, in 1979. So from 1979, it took till 1986 before he made his first sale.

• 1:01:52David Senra?

  And this isn't even the Dyson company. This is a company he has with Fry. Fry winds up getting old and decides he doesn't want to be in business anymore. And that's when Dyson actually starts Dyson, which I think happened in 1987. But my point being is that when he talks about that he is the, he's only, he's earlier, he's saying, "I'm not trying to brag about like how great I am. I'm just saying that my virtue is that of a mule." That's probably accurate. Six years and just constantly, like having a product you know is working and yet being unable to sell it. So this is a few years later. This is now, he's like, "You know what? Like, I'm just gonna go it alone." And it wasn't, I don't think it was an acrimonious breakup with Fry. Fry was just getting older.

• 1:02:35David Senra?

  I think he was 65 or 70 at the time, maybe 75. And just, you know, he just didn't want to be involved in building the company. Okay, so this is, now we go back to this theme where, which makes James, I think, so happy and that's complete control over his invention. And he talks about, "This is the Dyson Dual Cyclone. This is what he became, he becomes, what sets the company on its path to success it has today." "A vacuum cleaner designed entirely by me, incorporating innovations up to the very latest point at which my technology had arrived, to be produced and marketed and sold under my own exclusive direction, was, to be frank, what this whole thing had been about.

• 1:03:19David Senra?

  I had gathered around myself a small team by this time, who I was able to pay out the royalties from Japan and America, and we worked together in the coach house at the end of the garden, which had been so unpromising when I first moved in, deprived of power, water, light and heat, but was by now, a rather impressive workshop and office, which I had built and restored gradually over the years of development. We were a band on a mission to design a vacuum cleaner that would challenge the world, and it was bloody exciting. With this team, at last, I could put into unhindered practice, all the things I believed about the interdependency of design and function, about the way in which aesthetic perfection could be generated out of the engineering principles of the work, rather than being

• 1:04:02David Senra?

  used to hide them, and about enabling the consumer to understand the technological benefits of new products by using them to make the product fun." The thing about inventing is that it's a continual and continuous process, and it is fluid. Inventions generate further inventions. In fact, that is where most inventions come from. They very rarely come out of nothing. So while it was the dual cyclone that was the basis of my first vacuum cleaner, as I went on to develop it over the next 12 years, dozens of other innovations were generated along the way. Upstairs was the office. We designed every detail on computers and downstairs in the factory,

• 1:04:46David Senra?

  quote-unquote, we made our models. It was a fantastic environment to work in for it was just engineers and designers and no one to mess us around. There were no salesmen, no advertising people, no marketing managers to interfere and to try to guide us in their direction. We had nothing to do but deduce our own dream product. There was no market research and there was no focus groups. It was, to be frank, a designer's wet dream. It was unique. The world just isn't like that. You are not supposed to do things like that. Just go ahead and do it all on your own and then order a million pounds' worth of tooling. It felt almost naughty.

• 1:05:27David Senra?

  So I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit. He has two sections in the book that I think are very, that's just practical, that is worth, that alone worth buying the book. And it's, uh, he lays out his design philosophy over a few pages and then his business philosophy. And I'm gonna cover the design philosophy right now and then we're gonna see the cul- cul- culminate? Culmination? Whatever that word is of, well, you'll just see how insane. So first, you know, I'm jumping ahead. Let me focus on the design philosophy and then we'll get to the insane part. "I have, often over the years, been asked what my design philosophy is, or my philosophy of invention, and have occasionally tried to put it on paper for those who do ask. It is a difficult thing to reduce to simple points

• 1:06:12David Senra?

  because so much of it exists in my mind, a weird concoction of things I have seen and learnt. But it might look something like this. I'm not gonna cover all them, just gonna cover..." Uh, ones that stuck out to me. But, heavy highlighting ahead. Okay. No one, no, number one. No one ever had an idea staring at a drawing board. So do not do this. I have always rather liked Francis Bacon's analogy of the spider and the bee. A spider, he explained, works entirely upon himself and from within himself and produces only poison. Whereas a bee works on raw materials deriving his product from nature at large and produces honey.

• 1:06:55David Senra?

  At any rate, Bacon always got his ideas from walking in the countryside and observing nature rather than sitting in his study. So get out and look at things and when an idea comes, grab it, write it down and play with it until it works. Don't sit and expect ideas to come. Always bear in mind though, that Bacon died of pneumonia trying to invent frozen chicken. Number two. Everyday products sell. Although it's harder to improve a mature product, if you succeed, there is no need to create a market. As before, thinking in a vacuum is not going to help. Try out current products in your own home and make a list of things you don't like about them.

• 1:07:38David Senra?

  I found about twenty things wrong with my Hoover Junior as, at the first attempt. Three. New technology. It may sound obvious, but many of the things that people write to me saying that they had invented, interesting and useful though they are, are only modifications of existing technology and can thus be copied by anyone under law. The thing about truly new technology is that, is that it makes your invention patentable and then no one can copy it. You will find that in the case of almost anything you dream up, someone, somewhere, may have done something vaguely similar before. This being the case, your job in seeking a patent is to point out how original and unique what you're doing is compared to what they did.

• 1:08:22David Senra?

  This is often extremely difficult, particularly at the US Patent Office. I had a particularly difficult examiner who kept have, who kept having time off for mental problems of some. She would agree that what we were doing is unique, thus paving the way for the patent to be approved. And then we'd get a rejection letter from her six weeks later and had to start all over again. It cost us $150,000 in patent attorney fees just to get that one patent through her. This is an interesting point. He continues, I'm going to skip a little bit, but we're still talking about technology and patents, so we're still on number three. "The terrible tyranny of patents, however, is that the costs do not end when you get your approval. Thereafter, you will be charged enormous sums to renew your patents every year, up

• 1:09:07David Senra?

  to $2,000 per country per year in some cases. And this is money that you, as a small inventor, are unlikely to be able to spare because you will not have turned your invention into a profitable business yet. I believe that an invention is a piece of creative art, like a book or song, and those don't require annual renewal fees. If I cannot afford an annual renewal fee, which is simply some spod stamping a piece of paper, why should the Patent Office be able to steal it from me? The legal establishment argues that these fees are an incentive to stop people sitting on technological breakthroughs. But that is patent rubbish, quite literally. The whole thing is clearly stacked in favor of the big companies, to whom the fees mean

• 1:09:50David Senra?

  relatively little, and against the small innovator. This is, I believe, a human rights issue, and I am, at time of writing, taking the DTI to the European Court of Human Rights over it." That's pretty crazy. Okay, so number four, we're back at the Edisonian principle. "Engineering is a state of mind, or at least a method of working. You can become an expert on anything in six months, but steer clear of projects that require too much maths and stick to empirical things. You can achieve major breakthroughs by a bit of lateral thinking, and this approach will often lead to new inventions being born of each other. Just as, for example, the dual cyclone came out of the ball-barrel.

• 1:10:35David Senra?

  Keep testing and retesting, and believe only the evidence of your own eyes, not to formulate..."

• 1:10:43David Senra?

  of other people's opinions. You may have to fly in the face of public opinion and market research. This is important part. They can only tell you what has happened. No research can tell you what is going to happen. A constant revolution. I'm just going to read one sentence from this section. The only way to keep possession of your invention is to keep strengthening it. So I'm going to skip ahead to a couple, a couple other of his design philosophies. Actually, this is the, there's two more that I want to cover. The first one, stamina and conviction, which we've, we've kind of hammered on today. Painful but true. Breaking the mold will upset people. Challenging sitting tenants will be tough. It will take longer than you ever imagined. 10 years of development, question mark?

• 1:11:28David Senra?

  Do you fancy that? And then negotiations on a knife, on a knife edge, a shoestring and hanging by a thread? It will take balls. And the last design, excuse me, yeah, design philosophy are principle total control. You're not surprised by that. From the first sprouting of the idea, the research and development, testing and prototyping, model making and engineering drawings, tooling, production, sales and marketing, all the way into the homes of the nation. It is most likely to succeed if the original visionary or mule sees it right through. And then this is the insane part I referenced earlier. And this is how he ends this chapter.

• 1:12:10David Senra?

  As I have often said, I aim not to be clever, but to be dogged. And my doggedness had got to me so far, had got me rather, 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. Now here's the crazy part. Okay. I was third, so he talks about, um, remember the whole thing that started this was he was pissed off at the Hoover vacuum cleaner. Ready? So this is the most insane part and why I think this, you need to read this book. I was 31 years old when I tore the bag off my Hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole.

• 1:12:54David Senra?

  May 2nd, 1992, which was when he got his first vacuum cleaner, was my 45th birthday. So the idea happened when he was 31 years old and he didn't get it to the point where he had complete control over his own product till he was 45. That's insane.

• 1:13:17David Senra?

  So he talks about, they go from not existing in January 94 to being the number one manufacturer, seller of vacuum cleaners and three years later in 97.

• 1:13:29David Senra?

  But he was having, it took a while because he'd have like small retailers willing to sell his product, but the big ones wouldn't. And he said that their reluctance had been threefold. They were too small, they felt to compete with multinational regulars, our product was so different and unusual that they feared being made to look foolish. And in an industry where everything is about discounts and price slashing, ours being double the price of anything else made the idea of high sales seem ludicrous. So I'm going to skip over this part because there's a graph on the page which shows like, looks like a mountain, like it just goes straight up a mountain, which is his sales. But I love how he puts this part here in the final paragraph. He goes, "What we were doing, to put it another way, was selling Mercedes or Porsches in Ford

• 1:14:13David Senra?

  Escort quantities. And all Hoover could do was call it a passing phase and describe the Dual Cyclone as a niche product." So even after he was kicking their ass, they were very dismissive of them. They never stopped being dismissive of them and then they eventually tried to copy them. "In June, we got into another store called Argos and by September, we had hit the number one slot, selling more vacuum cleaners than anyone else despite costing twice as much." If this, if we were a niche product, what were Hoover? A crack in the floorboards? He was throughout the whole book, he's constantly, I kinda like that he has this cheeky personality where he's not arrogant, I mean, some people might read this book and consider him arrogant, I just think that he built a better product and he's proud of it, and

• 1:14:56David Senra?

  then when his competitors try to diss his product, he fights back, which I think is a really good idea. Just another random sentence that I highlighted, because he talks about it a lot, and I think it's important. He says, "You can't sell more than one message at a time, or you lose the belief of a consumer." So, this is in a chapter, that's actually really interesting, and I'm not too sure how to present it on the podcast, and it's all about advertising. And he talks about the difference between bad advertising and good advertising, and the importance of overseeing all aspects of your business yourself, and never, ever, ever giving a penny to advertising agencies. So, I would definitely read that part, because it was a little counterintuitive, but he has examples where he thinks the people at ad agencies are basically, they're fake creatives,

• 1:15:41David Senra?

  and he winds up working with an agency, but not with the creati-, like, he's like, "I don't want to talk to executives or salespeople, I want to talk to the actual person." And he's like, "You can't do anything, like, you have to have a dialogue, a conversation." And so, the way he set this up is he talked to one person every day for a week, on an ongoing discussion about what the vacuum cleaner meant to him, why it was so important. And this is how they come up with one of their ads, or the ads that were so famous, which was, like, getting, we said goodbye to the bag. And there's pictures of them in the book, but you could also Google it and see that Dyson had some very, just a very unique way of communicating and advertising when they were first getting going.

• 1:16:25David Senra?

  So, I'm gonna skip over all that part, because I do want to get to his business philosophy, but there is something, he talks about this book that he read, and- Got it. And just keep in mind, these are not the words of James Dyson, but they might as well have been.

• 1:16:39David Senra?

  Who is it that gets neglected? The inventor, that's who. The designer, the engineer, the chemist, the brewer, the boffin. The people obsessed by the product, who will willingly accept that the sizzle is important, but who get their kicks trying to make an even better steak. Car companies used to be run by people who love cars. They knew how to make cars themselves and were always trying to make them better. Retail companies used to be run by people who love shops. And 100 and something years ago, George Stafford Parker was nutty about fountain pens. As businesses got bigger and more complex, these obsessive, impractical, product-driven enthusiasts couldn't cope. They had to be helped by money men and lawyers and marketing persons with advertising agents.

• 1:17:24David Senra?

  From that moment, the status of the maker in this country had been in decline, this is in Britain, and the rise of marketing persons, through no fault of their own, has done nothing to help. It might even be, I think, that the erosion of our manufacturing sector and the rise of our service sector is in part connected with the decoupling of making things from marketing things. This is why he's saying you should market your own product. And then, so that's the end of the excerpt that he wanted to share with you. And then this is him summarizing. In other words, and I think this is really important. In other words, if you make something, sell it yourself. And so we did. And absolutely nothing went bang, except of course, everyone else's market share.

• 1:18:09David Senra?

  So, pretty crazy, just random, I'm not gonna read. But he had say, in 1993, they were doing sales of 3.5 million a year. By 96, that number was up to 85 million. Another famous quote of his. Companies are built, not made. I love that. And now I'm gonna get to the end. This is gonna be a little longer. But this is, keep in mind, like I say on every podcast, I'm skipping over massive parts of the book. It's not meant to summarize, it's meant to, even if you don't read the book, hopefully give you some ideas and some inspiration that you can then use. But hopefully to also entice you to buy the book. Okay, so this is his business philosophy. Okay, so. He has like a heading and then a describing it, right? So I'm just gonna read the heading of one.

• 1:18:53David Senra?

  Everyone who starts work at Dyson makes a vacuum cleaner on their first day. So he's writing these words. Dyson's already, you know, multiple hundred million dollar company. So his success has been solidified then, you know, since the time the book is written to now. It's a multi-billion dollar company. But everyone who starts work at Dyson makes a vacuum cleaner on their first day. Engineering and design are not viewed as separate. Designers are as involved in testing as engineers are in conceptual ideas. Everyone is empowered to be creative, knowledgeable. It's a little vague, so let me get into the more specifics. So this one's really interesting. No memos ever. And then he describes this. First of all, memos are just a way of passing the buck, avoiding the issue and abdicating responsibility.

• 1:19:37David Senra?

  Secondly, memos only generate memos. Then memos responding to the memo responding to the memo. And then I could go on, but it would be as boring as a memo. Thirdly, and most importantly, however much they multiply, nobody ever reads them. Dialogue is the founding principle for progress. Talk to people, they listen. Monologue leads only to monomania. Memos are also tacky, soulless, and get lost. I would rather people did less if it means doing what they do properly. And a memo, though quicker than a conversation, is more likely to lead to misunderstanding. Another skipping ahead, another one of his business philosophies. No one wears suits and ties.

• 1:20:18David Senra?

  Now, it may be that not wearing of suits has taken on an importance for me that is greater than it really is. It should not, after all, become a stricture, because that is just to make the practice as much a uniform as the miserable outfit is it is trying to avoid. The fundamental principle is this. I do not want my employees thinking like businessmen. I do not want them sitting around a table with me or with anyone else and coming out with the same old crap as you would expect from a businessman. As soon as they start thinking like businessmen, they will think that the company is all about making money, and it is not. I have no time for businessmen. This sounds just like Jim Clark, doesn't it? They are all the suited pen pushers who have always endeavored to stifle creativity.

• 1:21:02David Senra?

  And while what I chose to wear is entirely up to me and not open to question, I have chosen also to discourage my employees from wearing suits, because it seems to me the best way to instill in them my own heartfelt conviction in the theory of difference for the sake of difference. That's probably what, the third or fourth time you've heard that? The difference and the sake of difference. And he's gonna go back on to that. I'm gonna skip a couple pages, and this is another subheading. "Encourage employees to be different on principle." This is a really... So he's mentioned this a bunch of times, but this is where he, in a few paragraphs, he kinda lays out like a very, like, why that's important. "Encourage employees to be different on principle. This is part of my anti-brilliance campaign.

• 1:21:47David Senra?

  Very few people can be brilliant. Those who are rarely do anything worthwhile, and they are overvalued. You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by bringing brilliance. And if you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are five billion people out there thinking in train tracks and thinking what they have been taught to think." That's a great sentence. "There are five billion people out there thinking in train tracks and thinking what they have been taught to think. If you go in and be illogical, then half the time, people will laugh at you. And half the time, you will strike up something interesting because you have stopped everyone else from thinking logically,

• 1:22:31David Senra?

  which has failed to provide a solution. Be a bit wacko, and you shake people up a bit. And we all need shaking up." Methodol... Oh, man, another word I can't pronounce. "Methodologically, it even makes a bit of sense in that to bastardize a dictum by Mr. Sherlock Holmes. When you have eliminated the logical, whatever remains, however illogical, must be the answer. So why not start there? I probably only think this because I can never be bothered to think anything through logically, but will let it go." At any rate, to be different is something we try to instill in all of our staff because, for the reasons given above, we don't want people behaving like businessmen, but behaving

• 1:23:16David Senra?

  like normal human beings and treating the customer as a friend. I love that idea. This is the last one, real quick. Employ graduates straight from university. The basic reason for this is they are unsullied. They have not been strapped into a suit and taught to think by a company with nothing on its mind but short-term profit and early retirement. We are trying to do things differently from anyone else. So it's easier to teach fresh graduates this new way and enable them to challenge established beliefs than to retrain someone with "experience." Sometimes, some of our staff do lack knowledge, but there is now a cadre of experienced and talented managers, and this combination provides an extraordinary energetic and intelligent

• 1:23:59David Senra?

  shroud of managers, which is what gives Dyson its strength. I began employing graduates because I was so appreciative of the opportunities given to me when I was younger by Jeremy Fry. He, after all, had taken me on when I was still an undergraduate. And as soon as I had graduated, he gave me carte blanche on the sea truck project and entrusted me with running the business from the start. I enjoyed and benefited from the responsibility of learning things by doing rather than being taught by superiors. That was what made me feel I was a pioneer. So when I first set up Dyson to develop the vacuum cleaner, I started employing engineering

• 1:24:43David Senra?

  graduates from the Royal College of Art. And now we have about 20 RCA graduates in Mamesbury. That's where his company is located. It never occurred to me that they wouldn't be able to do everything brilliantly, and they did. That is where I'm going to leave it. If you want the full story, look in the show notes on your podcast player for a link. That is the best way, one of the best ways to support this podcast. Like I said at the beginning, I include Amazon affiliate links for every book that I've done a podcast on, so you can buy this one or any of the other ones. Just check out the list below. You can just go to founderspodcast.com and get the links there. You'll get a great book.

• 1:25:25David Senra?

  Amazon will send me a tiny percentage of the sale at no additional cost to you.

• 1:25:31David Senra?

  All right, I appreciate your support and your time. Thank you very much for listening this far. I'll be back very soon with another podcast about a book, or excuse me, another podcast about a company builder who they wrote a book about. Have a good one.