You have a weird combination: you built some of the greatest modern technology, but you have this obsession with and love of the past, which I think is very interesting.
Yeah. A healthy obsession with the past. I did Latin, Greek, and ancient history at school. And apparently of no use at all, but it is interesting how Greek civilization took place, and how Roman civilization started, and how it failed, and how people governed. Were oligarchies good? Were dictatorships good? Or are democracies? And all that, it's interesting. And history repeats itself, and it's repeating itself rather too quickly at the moment. So, history is interesting.
We were talking before we started recording. I have this obsession with reading everything that you have written. I've read your first autobiography five times, your second one at least two times. But people might not know that you actually wrote 'A History of Great Inventions.' I think you were writing this in like 2001. Why did you do this? You were building your company at the exact same time.
Yes. Because I'm really interested in inventions, how they happened, who did them, what personalities were behind them. And they're inspiring stories. Luckily, an editor of a big newspaper in Britain asked me to do it. So, I agreed to do it. We published it as a series of color supplements to a weekend newspaper and then put it into a book.
How old were you when you started this, when you had this obsession with history?
Oh, from school. Absolutely from school. But particularly Greek and Roman history. I mean, British history is really interesting, and I know all the kings and queens, I know their dates. I'm not a very clever person, actually. I'm not good at remembering things, but I have remembered all that history. And it jolly well does repeat itself, so you can learn really interesting things from history.
And this is what I've noticed: people that are the best in the world at what they do, they all have this love of learning from history. Charlie Munger has one of my favorite quotes about this. He says that learning from history is a form of leverage, and you can actually use ideas of people long dead, and you'll find out that they were very similar to you. They went through the same struggles, fears, insecurities, and triumphs. And you can just pick up a book of somebody's life story. I told you before we started recording, I was going through very... I had this obsession and love with my work, just like you do, and in my case, it was creating podcasts. I found your book in April 2018. I read it, and I'd already been struggling to start my podcast for two years with almost no success. It took me five and a half years of struggle. And the reason this is so important is because I'm like, 'Well, James struggled.' This book, 90% of it is you struggling for 14 years, building 5,127 prototypes and refusing to give up. You're also funny as hell in the book, where you're like, 'Anytime, if you think I have a little bit of ego, just realize that I'm only celebrating that I have the stubbornness of a mule.' I got to the very last page, and when I was recording my thoughts for the benefit of other people by making the podcast, this is what you inspired me to do: 'I hope Dyson's story inspires you to say, when you get knocked down, all right then, let's give it another go.'
Yeah, bouncing back is really important. If you're exploring new territory, if you're experimenting and trying to do something different, which is what you and I want to do, you're going to fail many times, and you've got to bounce back from it. And actually, if you learn that failure is so much more interesting than success. Because failure, you question it: 'Well, why did it go wrong?' And the reason it goes wrong is often very, very interesting. Where if something works, you say, 'Great, that works,' and you don't even stop to wonder why it worked. So, you've got to enjoy failure. That sounds like a difficult thing to do, but you have to enjoy failure if you want to improve things, if you want to not change the world, but change things and improve things. Goes hand in hand. And it always saddens me that school doesn't really teach that. At school or university, the thing is to be brilliant, and to get the answer right the first time. And there are brilliant people who can do that, but for the rest of us, we're not brilliant. And to get there, we have to strive, and we have to go through failure. In my case, and I counted it, it's 5,127 times. One of the things I always want to say is that that sounds like a struggle. Okay, it was a struggle, but actually, it was a hugely enjoyable struggle. The debt was mounting, and I had three children, and a wife, and a home, and a mortgage to pay, like everybody else. But I had a real point in life, I had a real aim, and I had to get there. And the failures were interesting because I learned from every single one of them, almost every single one of them.
Say more about that: you had an aim in life, was it a mission? How did you think of it then, while you were going through it?
Well, when I discovered that I loved engineering, because I did classics in school. I couldn't be further away from engineering, and then I went to study design and then discovered engineering. So, engineering was new to me. And I had this sort of stupid thought when I was at college that I wanted to design products, I wanted to engineer them, I wanted to develop their technology, and I wanted to manufacture them, and I wanted to sell them. So, it's a sort of megalomania thought.
Why? Why is it megalomania thought?
Because I was just a penniless student in London, you know? How could I have this thought of being a global manufacturer? And I don't know how or why I had that thought, but there were interesting things happening at that time, because Concorde was happening. Issigonis brought out his Mini car, which is still going today. And it was about 15 years after the Second World War, so there was deprivation during the war and immediately afterwards. But suddenly, particularly in the mid-'60s, and I think particularly in London where I was, there was a feeling that, 'Ah, we're free of the past. We can do something new and different.' And Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Buckminster Fuller, all these people were having really expansive and revolutionary thoughts about design, engineering, buildings, and so on. So, I was very lucky to be part of that era. And I think I caught the bug, and I had this very cheeky idea that that's what I wanted to be.
So, this is when you meet Jeremy Fry. I actually was not expecting to start our conversation the way we just did, but I'm glad. It leads perfectly to how I really wanted to start, which is: if you can explain who Jeremy Fry was and the impact that he had on your life.
Well, I was at the Royal College of Art doing design, and I was taught by a very famous structural engineer who worked with Foster and Rogers, and I became interested in engineering. And I designed a Buckminster Fuller-type structure for an impresario in London. It was a theater. And I went to this engineering company, this millionaire who had founded an engineering company, and asked him if he'd give money to the theater. And he said, 'No, but I'll give you a job. I can see you're an interesting genius, and I'll give you a job.' So, he started giving me jobs, and one of them was to design this high-speed landing craft, which was his invention, but I engineered it and designed it. And he then said, and I was a long-haired student with flared trousers, flowered shirts, all that sort of thing. He said, 'Come and start the company, making it and selling it.' So, I sort of looked at him and said, 'I don't know how to sell things.' And he said, 'Look, you're the engineer. You've chosen every square inch of that product. You know it all. You're the best person to sell it.' So, that was an interesting revelation for me, because I'd always thought there were professions. And sales was one profession, engineering was another, manufacturing was another, and being a manager was another. And suddenly it was this entrepreneur himself saying to me, 'Well, look, you're an engineer and designer, and you know all about the product. Go and make it, and go and sell it.' So, it broke down all the barriers for me. We became great friends, and we had lots of discussions about engineering and shared this passion for engineering and for making things.
And you found somebody that also had an obsession with the past, past engineers, past designers, past inventors that you could actually have deep conversations with about how they built their products, why they made these certain decisions. And then you used those to inform the work that you guys were doing, correct?
Yes, I mean, he was a friend of Issigonis. So, I'd never met Issigonis, but I heard about him from him. They used to do hill racing together, design cars, very, very light cars that raced up hills very quickly with very little power. So, it's sort of very skinny engineering, minimalist engineering. And so, he had quite a lot of stories from that era. He was 20 years older than me. So, he had seen a bit of life during the war and had done this racing car thing, and established an engineering company. So, he just removed the barriers that it was okay to be an obsessive engineer. And you just do whatever it is you want to do, and then you go out and sell it. And hopefully, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, people will follow you. So, to get that advice from someone at that crucial stage in my life was, well, I'd say mind-blowing. It enabled me to carry on and do things that everybody said I couldn't do.
And then what do you think, because you worked on the Sea Truck for five years before you left?
Yeah, about seven, because I did two years of it when I was at college. I moonlighted and designed it, and made one while I was at college, and then I left college and ran the business making and selling it.
What were some of the most important lessons from the seven years when you were doing the Sea Truck?
Oh, I think I learned everything from that. I learned how to manufacture, how to approach manufacturers and get them to make components, how to set up a factory, building the product, how to sell it overseas, how to find agents and distributors, all that sort of thing, and learn failures and successes with that. I learned that it's all about people, not appearances or how big their company was. It's finding the right sort of person with the right sort of enthusiasm.
Probably if you're running a public company and you're choosing a distributor, let's say for Canada, it would be probably irresponsible to find an individual who is just starting out rather than choosing an established distributor. But, of course, the person who's just starting out, he hasn't got a name yet, but he's probably incredibly enthusiastic and will put everything behind it and work all hours to make it work. So, it's the person, not the business, really, that you're backing.
My friend Josh Kushner has this great quote: when you have to decide when you're partnering with somebody, do you decide the most experienced, the most educated, or who wants it the most? You always choose the person that wants it the most.
Experience is an interesting thing, and Jeremy Fry taught me this. He hated experienced people. He also hated people with beards and something else. But anyway, this was a different era. But come back to the experience thing, which is the important thing. And I've discovered this: if you're experienced, you know why not to do something, or how not to do something. Whereas if you're naive and you're a young engineer, you've just qualified, or you're still training, you don't have that negativity towards certain things. And often it's something that hasn't worked previously that could work and is interesting to follow. So, you're very open. And I love naivete, people asking silly questions, stupid questions, because it creates a different way of doing things, and we've got to find different ways of doing things all the time.
My friend Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, we had a conversation about this where he actually thinks naivete is like one of the greatest assets a young entrepreneur or an inventor can have, because he's like, 'If I knew how difficult it would be to make Spotify succeed at the beginning, I would not have done that.'
Yeah. Yeah. Naivety equals stupidity? I don't think that. I think that naivety is interesting because you're thinking really hard, 'How the hell do I do this? I don't know how to solve this problem.' The experienced person might think they know how to solve it, but the naive person doesn't. So, they're thinking much harder and more intelligently.
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So, Jeremy was in the business of hiring people like a young James Dyson. Just like this smart, enthusiastic person that clearly wants to do this, as opposed to anybody that came from another company or even a competitor.
You're doing this now. You still do this 40 years later, 50 years later.
Yes. And we've taken it one stage further, because we've started our own university. So, we're taking 17 and 18-year-olds and starting even younger, and they work in the business and they ask naive questions.
You cover the university in the book. Again, one of the things I've personally learned from you is differentiation for the sake of it. And so, anything that I'm going to do, I look around... One of my heroes is Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. And he had this great line: 'My personal motto is, don't do anything somebody else can do.' Can you explain exactly how you structured and how you designed Dyson University?
University is very expensive. Especially in the United States. And it's getting as bad in England. And you're saddled with that debt for a long time. I mean, sometimes 20 years. And in any case, a lot of the debt is not repaid. And we need to find a different way to teach people. And it's ridiculous because they're only taught for half the year, the rest of it is holidays. So, you've got these big institutions, expensive institutions, with people only there part-time. It's madness. And also, as I learnt when I was at college working with an engineering company... I loved that experience, working with people who are having to do things, not academics, people having to do things and having to do them in a hurry. And I really enjoyed that. And I thought, 'Well, why can't I give that opportunity to other people?' So, we started our own university. And it's a difficult thing to do because the government has to approve it. And for seven years, we had to work with another university, and none of them would work with us because they saw us as big competitors because we pay our students.
Yeah. You start with, why are we saddling these young people with an albatross of debt around their necks that's going to limit what they can actually pursue? They're going to be taking jobs that they're forced to take that they don't want to take maybe for money, as opposed to following your just, I don't even call it a passion, I think it's more like an obsession that you have. So, am I correct? There's no tuition?
Yes, there's tuition. We teach them two days a week. And they work with us three days a week. We pay them $45,000 a year. They have cars, they go on skiing holidays. So, they're just normal people. They're not students. They're in a student group. We have about 170 of them altogether. But they're interspersed throughout the company, and they love that. They love working with people who are earning money and having to make things work, having to do engineering, having to do marketing or selling whatever it is, manufacturing. They like the reality of that, and it inspires them to learn the academic side. Because a lot of them said the academic side of engineering is difficult. It's hard. But I'm inspired to do it because I got to practice it every day.
As opposed to separating the two?
As opposed to going to university and just having academia for four years. With us, they're being inventors, they're developing technology, and they're learning exactly why they need to know the academic side, the theory.
Explain why it's better to have, in your opinion, a person with no experience than somebody that came from an existing company.
The older you get, the more you try to apply your experience. And if you've come from an existing company you may have picked up bad habits. I'm not saying we don't have bad habits at Dyson, but I'm saying you've picked up the habits of that company, which may not be the right sort of attitude that we want, this attitude of constant change, constantly trying new things, trying to be different for different's sake, because it sets us on a different path. And some people find that difficult. Some people want to have a much more conventional way to do things.
And so, if you're hiring, you have 18-year-olds working in Dyson, they're also going to school.
One or two 17-year-olds as well.
Okay, 17, 18-year-olds. What is that like?
To be honest, nobody really notices any difference.
Okay, that's going to be shocking for at least people who assume that you have to graduate high school in America, they have to go to college, and maybe in many cases, they go to graduate school, and then they're almost 30 by the time they start working. And you're like, 'No. Hire the 18-year-old.' You've got to say more about this.
Yeah. Well, because they're enthusiastic. They've come to us because they want to do real work and they do real work. And just because they're not as experienced as graduates or someone in year four as opposed to year one doesn't mean to say they don't have just the same to offer or even something better to offer because they're even more naive. So, it works really, really well, and it's interesting.
I want to go back to the seven years with the Sea Truck. You write about Jeremy Fry in both books, and in many cases, 50 years in this book, 50 years after you spent time with him and worked with him. You said there's a lot of ideas that you learned working with him that you still apply to this day at Dyson, which I think is very fascinating and speaks to the power of ideas.
I don't have a prejudice against beards, by the way. I think I probably retained the pipe one, but not the beard one.
I don't smoke a pipe. And I don't have the hippie beard, so this is fine. I mean, it'd break my heart to know Jeremy Fry, because he's become almost my hero too.
He would've changed over the years.
For sure. But one thing that's fascinating is, I'm curious about your opinion on risk tolerance. Obviously, you have excessively high risk tolerance in both stories. But you're like, 'I'm working for your mentor, who you think is a genius. He treats you really, really well. He gave you complete autonomy and control. He's like, just go run this business.' There's a great line in the book where he introduced you to a completely different modus operandi, where you're like, 'We need somebody to know about aerodynamics.' He's like, 'Well, the Range Rover's down there. The lake's right there. Tie a piece of wood behind a boat and record what happens and then change it.' But you had a wife and at least one child when you left to do the Ballbarrow?
Okay, so two kids. You have a mortgage. You have a great high-paying job. Right? You're working hand-in-hand with somebody you greatly admire that has taught you a ton in seven years, and yet you're like, 'I need to go out and be an entrepreneur and do my own thing.' Okay, so I want to talk about that. But then the second thing that I didn't understand no matter how many times I read this is, why didn't you let him fund that?
That was a really stupid decision. Because, and in fact, and ultimately, when I started the vacuum cleaner business, we did fund it together. So, that... That was a really stupid decision, because he was someone who understood about starting businesses, how difficult it was. And in fact, I went to borrow money off my brother-in-law and another party who didn't understand the difficulties of starting businesses and the growth pains and so on.
Before we get there, just the decision to leave a great...
It's almost like you seek...
Oh, tell me if I'm wrong with this. I know you seek difference for the sake of it. In that time period, you may not be like this now, in that time period, it felt like you were seeking risk for the sake of risk.
Yeah. No, I've thought a bit about that, and I think it's partly because my father died when I was eight or nine, and I think that had a sort of profound effect on me that I didn't realize at the time, because I felt very different to other people. I was at boarding school, and the headmaster was very kind, and he allowed me to stay on for 10 years without paying any fees, so that was an extraordinary act of kindness. But everybody else had parents, two parents. There weren't single-parent families in those days. And even if the two had split up, they appeared to come together to come and see their child at school. But I had just my mother coming to see me, my impoverished mother coming to see me. So, I felt different. And also, I think if you've lost a parent at that age, life can't get much worse. So, you're prepared to take risks, because you've started from a horrible starting point. Risk has become a sort of thing I need to live with. I need to live on the knife edge all the time.
You still feel that way today?
I still feel that today, yes. And it doesn't make me unhappy. Don't get me wrong, but I like living for the moment in danger because you're onto something new, you're doing something different, and it's risky. The result is not sure at all. In fact, it's very unsure and very dangerous. And I don't mind that. It doesn't keep me awake at night.
So, it starts when your father dies at... He died really young, he was 40 years old?
When you were nine. It's one of the most... I don't even want to start talking about it. I'll start tearing up because that part just destroys me. And I guess I'll talk about this now. I want to go back to the risk and making that jump. I think one of the most profound impacts that your second book has is that you're writing this 60 years after your father dies. And you're talking about your grandson, Mick. And you realize, now as a 69-year-old man with a lifelong set of experiences, just how vulnerable you were, because your grandson, Mick, is still taking his stuffed animal to bed. And now you're left alone. A nine-year-old boy needs his father.
Yeah. No. He had a profound influence on me. He had to do everything. I mean, he loved producing plays, he loved directing them. I've got notes in his little Shakespeare books, crossing out lines and making notes about things. And he did puppet shows, he played the recorder, he taught rugger, he taught hockey. He just wanted to do everything. And I'm a bit like that, and I was certainly like that at school, especially if it didn't involve academia. And he was like that.
I just thought of a connection maybe I didn't make previously. He wanted to change professions towards the end of his life.
He fought in the war in Burma. We call it The Forgotten War. And it really was, and it was a nasty, nasty war, a long way away. And he came back from that in 1946, and in 1949, he contracted cancer. So, he'd been away from his wife for the first six years of their life together. Then he had three years being a classics master at school, and then he got cancer. And so, he was in and out of hospital for the next seven years.
Did he have an opportunity to work for the BBC or something like that?
That's what he wanted to do. But never had the opportunity to do it.
And now I'm thinking, I just asked you the question, it was like, 'How the hell do you leave this fantastic position to go off on your own?' You realized, well, I had the opportunity to, whereas, like your dad, unfortunately for a situation outside of his control, never got that opportunity.
No, he had his life stolen from him at the age of 40, and then, yeah, I'm almost 80, so twice as long as he did.
Your mom passed away early too.
Yes. She got cancer as well in her 50s.
My mom passed away from cancer early too.
