Founders - #316 Bugatti

Starting point is 00:00:00 If there was a prototype operation for what Enzo Ferrari envisioned, it had to be what the legendary Ettore Bugatti built in Molsheim. This part artist, part engineer, part entrepreneur, part sculptor had created an automotive fiefdom in a tiny village in Alsace the entertainment of customers, a stable of thoroughbred horses, and the factory itself, which was a series of low buildings set among landscaped gardens with a trout stream meandering through the factory machinery. Bugatti was from Milan, born into a family of artists. The boss, as he was known, was generally to be found conducting business dressed in riding breeches, boots, and a yellow coat. His automobiles were and remain a stunning combination of industrial aesthetics and the jeweler's art, as if Fabergé had somehow been able to motorize an egg. They

Starting point is 00:00:56 were simple, flawlessly fabricated, and reliable. Bugatti was just one of a bevy of colorful eccentrics, dissolute nobles, playboys, dreaming commoners, and hard-eyed egomaniacs who populated the world of European motorsports in the 1930s. He certainly stood above the rest in terms of lifestyle. A feudal barony had been created around the spidery machines that he manufactured in limited quantities and sold only to those he personally deemed worthy. By contrast, Enzo Ferrari, at the time, was still a drab, simple journeyman laboring in a small garage in an Italian backwater. But the example that Bugatti was setting for Ferrari did not escape him. Bugatti was a prototype for success. He was manufacturing cars for the very wealthy and fielding his own team of professional race car drivers.

Starting point is 00:01:50 Mobs of people were flocking to Molsheim to have their Bugattis anointed by the master himself. Surely, if Bugatti could succeed at this, a similar concept could be developed by Enzo Ferrari. That was an excerpt not from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, but a book that I read originally back on episode 220. It's called Enzo Ferrari, The Man and the Machine, and it was written by Brock Yates. But that was the excerpt that originally got me interested in reading a biography of Bugatti. Up until last week, I had failed to find one. There is a founder's listener by the name of Cameron Priest, who's probably sent me dozens, I don't even know, maybe 50 excellent, hard to find biography recommendations over the years. And he was

Starting point is 00:02:30 the one that made me aware of the book that I'm actually holding in my hand, which is called The Bugatti Story. And it was written by Bugatti's daughter, Laeib Bugatti. And this is the perfect book for Founders Podcast. It was originally published. Very hard to find. It's originally published in 1967. The copy that I'm holding in my hand was actually somebody's Easter gift in 1972. You can still see the note. And I can tell you right up front, this is a book that I'm going to wind up reading again. I'm going to make more episodes on the future. I absolutely loved. I spent the last eight days going over the book. I could have spent another week reading and just rereading certain parts of this book. It is perfect. I feel like I've stumbled upon some kind of like hidden treasure. Okay, so I want to start with the foreword where his daughter is talking about like why she decided to write the book. This book was written in

Starting point is 00:03:16 response to the long felt desire of the Bugatti family to have a full and objective account of the life and work of a Tory Bugatti. And one of the things I like most about the book is the fact that towards the end of his life, Bugatti was very sick. A few months before he died, he started to try to write his autobiography. It was never published, but his daughter had a copy. And so there's large chunks of his autobiography in this book. So it's like Bugatti speaking directly to you and I almost 80 years after he died. So I want to start in the preface of this book. It was actually written by an engineer who worked with Bugatti speaking directly to you and I almost 80 years after he died. So I want to start in the preface of this book. It was actually written by an engineer who worked with Bugatti. So an idea

Starting point is 00:03:51 that you and I have talked about over and over again, there's always a blueprint. All of the founders that were studying, they were inspired by founders or scientists or inventors or explorers that came before them. Obviously, from the excerpt of Enzo Ferrari's biography, we see that in large part, the blueprint for Ferrari was Bugatti. And so these observations about Bugatti, the man made by the engineer that worked with him, you can clearly see why somebody like Enzo Ferrari would want to pattern much of his career after Bugatti. And so he says car manufacturers at this time looked upon their products as parts of themselves. Bugatti was one of the last car manufacturers to keep the flag of the artistically built car flying high when the mass-produced car invaded the scene.

Starting point is 00:04:32 Bugatti maintained that quality production depended upon a small number of skilled workers and a small output. His character was too strong to change to new methods. So what they're talking about here is, this is the reason this came to mind is because Enzo Ferrari, he has this famous exchange with Henry Ford II. So that is Henry Ford's grandson who was running Ford Motor Company in like the 1950s when this is happening. And Ford Motor Company had attempted to buy Ferrari and Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari get into this argument. And Ferrari says that you make ugly little cars in an ugly factory. Ferrari, like Bugatti before him, were still hand building his cars. In fact, in that book, that the Ford versus Ferrari movie that came out a few years ago, it's actually based on this book called Go Like Hell, which I also did a podcast on. There's this great line that talked about how

Starting point is 00:05:19 the contrast between the cars that the Ford factory was producing and then these like hand-built cars that Ferrari was making at the time. And so it says nothing like a Ferrari had ever graced American roads. They were cars built by Italian artisans, every detail down to the steering wheel, handcrafted using some of the same methods used to make Roman suits of armor and the royal carriages of the ancient kingdom. And so this idea of cutting against the bias, to use the term that Balenciaga used last week, you have the trends within your industry that everybody else is adopting and copying. Bugatti was like Balenciaga. Bugatti was like Ferrari. He would constantly cut against the bias.

Starting point is 00:06:00 So it says he was too strong to change to new methods as other car manufacturers resigned themselves to doing. So they're talking about changing from this like an artisan handmade factory to mass production. Bugatti had no interest in that at all. And he taught all of his employees to adopt this mindset as well. By his training, Bugatti raised his workmen to the love of artisans and craftsmen. These two words evoke his own personality. He was an artist and a craftsman. He always insisted that his engineers and technicians should never ignore the promptings of their intuition. I was a young engineer at the time, and I fell under the spell of his charm and his singleness of purpose. To the end of his days,

Starting point is 00:06:44 he remained a figure of another age, an age in which the conveyor belt had not yet eliminated craftsmanship and when individual imagination could have free reign. And then we get to the first excerpt from his unpublished autobiography, where he says, in order to explain the strange development of my career, I must first describe my environment during my childhood and what my life was like as a youth. And so the influence of his father, Carlo, is very fascinating to me. It's going to go on for several pages, but I want to give you what I think are the most important parts. So he comes from a family full of artists. They were pretty

Starting point is 00:07:20 well off. His grandfather was a famous architect and a sculptor. His dad was an acclaimed jewelry and furniture designer, and he also painted and sculpted as well. Art was extremely important in their family. We can see this because they named Bugatti's younger brother Rembrandt, and he's going to be a famous artist in his own right. But there was just one line that jumped out at me when I was reading through this about his early childhood, and that his dad would tell him that art could not be learned, that if you were going to be an artist, it would be an innate skill. It'd be something that came completely natural to you. And if you didn't have it, you were wasting your time. The interesting thing to me behind that statement is the fact that that then sent Bugatti on this search for what am I naturally inclined and talented at doing? And Bugatti, like Henry Ford, just stumbled

Starting point is 00:08:05 upon the fact that they had a gifted mind for mechanics and engineering without any kind of training at all. And discovering this also came from advice that he got from his father. So his father told both of his sons that you should work with your hands and you can do whatever you want. You just cannot be mediocre. And so when he's really young, he's like 15 or 16 years old at the time, he winds up trying out this thing called a motor tricycle. So it's just what be mediocre. And so when he's really young, he's like 15 or 16 years old at the time, he winds up trying out this thing called a motor tricycle. So it's just what it sounds. It's a tricycle with a motor on it. And this is the first time he realizes he has some kind of innate talent here. In a short while, by just looking at the machine, I had grasped all the intricacies of its mechanism. My father attached great importance to his two sons being able to work

Starting point is 00:08:41 with their hands. And so Bugatti wrote that even in establishments of higher education, manual work would be of great value to those who are choosing a career. It is a relaxation, and at the same time, it exercises your muscles and your brain. And so a young, like high school age Bugatti, we're talking like late 1890s is where we are in the story, right? He discovers, okay, wait, he's at the right place, the right time. He's the right person with the right set of skills. He says it was a time when people were awakening to the possibilities of self-propelled road vehicles. And I was immediately fascinated by these new machines.

Starting point is 00:09:15 None of the people who were working on these road vehicles at the time was, in fact, motivated by thoughts of commercial gain. Listen to the language that he uses to describe the work that he was doing at this time. It was an aspiration to greater freedom, to an emancipation from the ties which bound man to the earth. And it's at this point where he realized, oh, this is going to be my art form. Says he threw himself into this entirely new kind of art

Starting point is 00:09:41 where so much was still to be invented. For Bugatti, the main attraction was having something to create, to model, to perfect, and the joy of seeing the machine come into being as a work of sculpture did in the hands of his father or his brother. This revelation changed the whole course of his life. And there's a factory producing high quality motor tricycles right in Milan. This is where Milan is where Bugatti and his family are living at this point. And so at 17 years old, he becomes an apprentice in this factory that's producing these motor tricycles.

Starting point is 00:10:13 And so he starts with this initial passion, this passion of mechanics, this passion of engineering. And then it's going to join with another lifelong passion that he has. And that is for racing. Initially, it is for motor tricycle racing. Then it's obviously going to be for car racing. So by the time, before he's even 18, he makes his own model of a motor tricycle. Then he takes it from Milan all the way to this race in France.

Starting point is 00:10:36 And so before I get to why racing was so important to him, even when he was 17, it's important to him until he dies, I got to tell you more about his personality. This guy's got like Kanye West levels of self-confidence. And so before he enters this race, he's on record saying, even before the start, I was sure that I'd win. And to put in the context why that's so astounding is this next sentence. This tri-car was the first that he had ever made.

Starting point is 00:11:00 I want to get to this part why racing was so important. It was fascinating because the way that Bugatti thought about racing, and I talked about this, you know, I did like a 13-part series years ago on all of these like early American automobile company founders. It was still true in the late 1800s, just like it was true in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe. Racing is the best distribution channel if you're a car manufacturer. You win a race, you have a line of customers out the door that want to buy that car.

Starting point is 00:11:27 But aside from the benefit of the business, Bugatti liked it because it was able, racing was the only true objective way to prove to himself how good his designs were. And so this is a little bit about how he looked at it here. His passion for racing was at once aroused. And this was a passion that he was never to lose. It was not so much for the race itself. It was because it was a natural complement of his passion for mechanics. Racing constituted the testing bench without which all mechanical inventions remain abstractions. It alone could decide all problems and was the indispensable true test.

Starting point is 00:12:07 And so the fact that this passion and obsession grabbed him from the very beginning, refused to let him go. He didn't want it to let him go either. It's one of the things I most admire about Bugatti and why I said earlier, this is a book that I plan on reading and rereading many times in the future and hopefully making many more episodes about. And it's because of how he describes this. He's, you know, 17, 18 years old at the time. Essentially, he just wants to spend as much time as possible learning everything he can about his obsession. Meanwhile, I was studying the different types of engines, examining their qualities and discussing their defects. I determined to build a car of my own. I had realized by then that I was completely taken by mechanics in which I could

Starting point is 00:12:45 clearly see so many imperfections. My ideas gave me no rest. And so this is like the first hint, but the book talks about it later on. You know, he kept very regular hours. There was really no separation between him, his life and his work. I mean, we even talk about the way he set up his house and his family or is literally on the grounds of his factory. That is like the physical manifestation for what is happening in his mind. He would see the perfect car in his imagination, but he lacked the material to build it. No one was prepared to invest in his capabilities as a car builder. And so he has to get these ideas out of his head.

Starting point is 00:13:20 This is now something that he talks about. He'll work this way for the rest of his career, and he would recommend other people doing it as well. He put everything down on paper. He began to put all of his ideas down on paper in drawings and in designs, all the ideas that his head was full of. He spent whole days designing his car in every detail. He talked about it with such enthusiasm that it seemed to be speeding along at 40 miles an hour. Even then, I sometimes feared that it might turn his mind. So this idea where he sees the perfect car that he wants to build in his mind, right? It comes from his imagination first. He has to get it out. So his version of a prototype is like drawing it out on paper. And then he uses this paper to go and try to raise financing. So this is very similar. I talked about this before. There's

Starting point is 00:14:03 this legendary meeting that takes place between Steve Jobs when he was like in his 20s and Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, when he was like in his 70s. This is from the book Instant, the story of Polaroid that I've done multiple times. And it talks about the conversation

Starting point is 00:14:17 that a young Steve Jobs and an older Edwin Land are having. It says the two inventors described to each other a singular experience. Each had imagined a new, a perfect new product, whole, already manufactured and sitting before him, and then spent years prodding executives, engineers, and factories to create it with as few compromises as possible. That is exactly what happened with Bugatti. So eventually he finds two very wealthy brothers.

Starting point is 00:14:43 In fact, they invite them out. They invite Bugatti to their huge estate. And this is the first time another passion. Bugatti is like passion personified. Another passion of his, as you could probably guess, the fact that he conducted business dressed as he was riding horses was horse riding. And it's actually at this estate from these two brothers that are going to wind up funding this initial prototype that Bugatti is about to build when I think he's like 18. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's 18 here. He learns to love horses and horse riding on a visit from their estate. But these two brothers meet him and they're like, oh, this guy's a genius. They recognize that wants a hidden brilliance in him. And we're prepared to go into

Starting point is 00:15:23 partnership with him to enable him to build his car. And then we get the first indication of something that he does for the rest of his life. He's a micromanager. He's involved in every single step of the process. He supervises everything. In many cases, he can do every single. There's a there's a line at the very end of the book in the appendix. Let me get to it real quick because I might not bring it up later.

Starting point is 00:15:46 And it reminded me of James Cameron and Christopher Nolan, who I've just spent a bunch of time studying and in the minds of. And this is about Bugatti. He says he can do any job in the factory as well as are better than the most skilled mechanic. I'm not kidding. This is crazy.

Starting point is 00:16:01 This book is, what is it, 60 years old? No, longer than that. 70 something years old, however old This book is, what is it, 60 years old? No, longer than that. 70-something years old, however old the book is. That line, there's a line just like that in the James Cameron biography. There's a line just like that in the Christopher Nolan biography. It is spooky how you and I keep studying the same personality in different bodies, alive at different times, working in different industries. It's so crazy to me.

Starting point is 00:16:24 So let me get to this point. He would let no one but himself put the car through its paces. It was his from start to finish. He had been responsible for or had supervised the whole construction. He is 19 from the drawing board to the final assembly. So then he goes, this goes back to this like Kanye West level of confidence that is very beneficial. He goes back to this like kanye west level of of confidence that is very beneficial he goes and enters this into the very first international motor show which was being organized in milan this is the year 1901 and so it's a car show based on like obviously how the cars look but actually how it performs too so then he does he takes it like around this track and of course he drives it himself and yet again we see more evidence that he was right,

Starting point is 00:17:11 that he had stumbled upon this innate talent because he wins it. He won first place at the first ever International Motor Show. And so this idea that you have this gifted person, he's a perfectionist by nature. He wants to control everything. He's completely obsessed. He's keeping irregular hours. He's giving everything to this like new craft. By the time he's 19, so he wins the International Motor Show, right? Then there's this car manufacturing firm in Germany. It's called D. Dietrich. They wind up offering Bugatti a contract to manufacture his car for them, and he's going to get paid a royalty fee. So this is the first time he moves from Italy to Germany. And so because his daughter had access to his unfinished autobiography, we see how he writes about how he felt about his very first contract. I mean, he had a bunch of success up until this point, but this is like the turning

Starting point is 00:17:55 point in his life. And so he says, I received 25 or 30,000 francs when I handed over my designs. I was happy to have money to spend on which I had earned myself. I drew satisfaction from being able to support myself without anyone's help. And I found satisfaction in receiving a sum of money for a completed job of work, which had given me pleasure to think about and to do, which had been fun to do. He has work that feels like play. And we see again, the sustained level of confidence. He's 19. He's like, listen, I want to do something new. I want to do something that no one else has done before. And this is the first time he mentions patents, but I think he winds up dying with like 900 patents or some crazy number. So he says, my patents result from my own work. And I'm happy

Starting point is 00:18:42 when I can improve on something already existing and arrive at a point which others have not yet reached. At one point, I had been granted more patents in Germany than anyone else. And then he talks about the importance, because remember, he comes from a family of artists. He had studied intently Leonardo da Vinci, and he realizes that the way da Vinci approached his work, there's ideas in the way da Vinci approached his work that Bugatti can use in his own. And the fact that he knew this at 19 is incredible. The importance of being influenced by, you know, the great work and the great people that did that work that came before him. And so one thing you learn is like, oh, if you can, you can develop your like powers of

Starting point is 00:19:20 observation, that is like a meta skill that can be used for anything. So he says, powers of observation are indispensable in order to produce anything. Leonardo da Vinci had wonderful powers of observation. He could reproduce with exactitude something which today would take a magnifying glass to do. He could catch movement as the camera does now. And at the same time, he gave the illusion of life to his sketches, something that photography is unable to do. It is by this observation that one can penetrate into the nature of things. If a man like Leonardo became a military engineer, he would have been an expert at it. His advice on any subject would be invaluable, and his ideas on the matter would be highly original. An artist of this class misses nothing. The smallest detail, invisible to

Starting point is 00:20:06 ordinary people, is enough to enable him to fix his subject. This habit of observation leads to the heart of the matter in all branches of human activity. Faster progress, this is wild, faster progress would be made in all fields if conceit did not cause us to forget or disdain the work done by others before us. There is a tendency to believe that nothing worthy of note has been done in the past, and this has an unfortunate bearing on our judgment, thus the present trend toward mediocrity. The improvements I have made to mechanical constructions have resulted from such habits of observation. And so he talks about that starts in your mind first. I often think that one should not put

Starting point is 00:20:50 pencil to paper before having visualized what one wants to do from all angles. Over the years, and after much experience in drawing quite novel and complicated things in pocketbooks, I have come to work by a series of mental images, and the drawing board enables me to give effect And so before he sets up Bugatti as like his own independent company, he is going to design cars for other car manufacturers and then he gets paid per car manufactured on like a royalty basis. And so he does this two or three times, but the way he sets this up, it really tells you like how important independence, like maintaining his independence was. Before I get there though, this is what finding your life's work sounds like. I was hypnotized,

Starting point is 00:21:47 drawn more and more to the mechanics of motors. These exciting problems had me completely under their sway. And so began for me the hard uphill task, the thankless labor of constructing and destroying and beginning again without a break or rest. And for days, months, years even, until success finally rewarded all my efforts. And so he has a little team.

Starting point is 00:22:12 There's like three people in the workshop putting together the car, three people in the design shop putting it together. They don't have enough money to manufacture it themselves, so he does another deal with this company called Dutz. This is Dutz Gas Engine. It's also in Germany. So they're going to manufacture the car, but they also make Bugatti the manager of the production department. In his contract, though, he makes sure that he's always retaining his independence. And so this is what he says. It was the first time that I had agreed

Starting point is 00:22:39 to take an appointment with a firm, meaning an actual day job, whilst being compensated by the royalties I received on the production of my car under their license. I had retained, this is the important part, I had retained the right to work independently on any other project in which I might be interested. He did not want to be relegated to the servitude of employee. He says so much himself, he had felt fettered by his appointment in the service of others. And so that clause was the most important clause in the entire contract, because what he's doing is in his spare time, he is going to build the very first Bugatti. So Bugatti decided to build it himself in his spare time. He worked patiently for many months, gradually assembling it in the

Starting point is 00:23:21 cellar of the house where he was living. When it was complete, he gave it a name which would later become renowned, per sang. It means thoroughbred animal in French. And so this is the beginning of the business. This is the beginning of him building his own world within the world. This is the birth of Moleshame, where the Bugatti factory is still to this day. So he goes to a banker with his plans. They give him the funding to start his business. And this is his daughter describing this point in their life. At Christmas, we all moved into the new house where we were to live for the next 30 years. So Bugatti's around 30 years old at the time. And a description of the early days of his company really tells you a lot about what was

Starting point is 00:24:00 important to him. Says his cars were hand built, each an expression of the creator's personality. He retained his independent outlook, his freedom to invent, and his urge for perfection down to the smallest details. He took little notice of trends among rival car manufacturers. That reminded me of last week with Balenciaga was like this with other fashion designers. And Bugatti paid no more attention to the presumed tastes of the public. That sounds like Steve Jobs. Essentially what they're saying there is he relied on his own taste.

Starting point is 00:24:31 He built the product that he wanted to use. And you're going to see another similarity with Balenciaga. I think last week it said like Dior, Christian Dior made dresses for the rich and Balenciaga made dresses for the wealthy. Right from the very beginning, Bugatti with his actions is essentially saying, hey, I make expensive shit. I only want to make high quality products, and I'm aiming for the top. And he did this from day one. Bugatti made no attempt to compete with the low price popular models already on the market. The price of the Bugatti was higher than any other car of equal horsepower. The reason is

Starting point is 00:25:06 that this new production stands in a class by itself. And so they started out making like five, 10 cars a year. This is not a large production. Within two years, his business is already fantastically successful. And this is going to remind us of one of my favorite ideas that David Ogilvie noticed about people that get to the top of their profession. And he summarized it with the good ones know more. The public began to take notice of this new constructor of cars, that's obviously Bugatti, whose business was only two years old, and that he knew more about the subject than the big firms

Starting point is 00:25:36 whose fame had spread around the world. And so before I move on, I just want to pause here. Like, remember a few pages back where he's like, I felt hypnotized. I was drawn to this. I'm under the sway. You fast forward two years later and he knows more about it than anybody else. It reminded me of if you think about the main, like, guiding, like, North Star to Paul Graham's essay on, I think, episode 314, How to Do Great Work. Essentially, he's just telling us over and over again, what are you intensely interested in? What are you irrationally curious about?

Starting point is 00:26:08 If you're interested, you're not astray. Just follow that. And the reason I think he gives that advice is because we see this. When you do that, you wind up like Bugatti. You know more about the things that you're intensely interested and curious about than anyone else in the world. And so this idea that he starts out, he's like, listen, I make the best products in the world. They're going to be expensive, but you're not going to find anything better than them. This is where these cult-like followings start.

Starting point is 00:26:34 To use the terminology of Steve Jobs, Bugatti believed that he made insanely great products. And what happens? You develop a cult-like following, and then those believers of Bugatti go out and recruit more believers of Bugatti. And so this guy named Dr. Espinette winds up buying a Bugatti. He's so obsessed with it, he tells everybody about it. He just happens to be really good friends with this world-famous pioneer aviator, this guy named Roland Garros, who's going to wind up becoming a really close friend of Bugatti's. And so Garros goes to check out. I was like, this guy, my friend, Dr. Espinet,

Starting point is 00:27:06 won't shut up about this guy. Let me go to Molsheim and see what's going on. So he says he went to visit Bugatti. His first impression was one of surprise. When he entered the gate, instead of the usual coming and goings of a car factory, he saw Bugatti dressed for writing, walking a fine pony around the courtyard. And this actually enhances his work. This is really, really important. Bugatti loved writing and kept a number of thoroughbreds. Many of his ideas and solutions of mechanical problems came to him while writing. It was a means of relaxation. He would interrupt his writing and go to the workshops when the idea popped in his mind, right? In writing breaches, if he had suddenly found the reason for a car part not working properly,

Starting point is 00:27:47 this is one of my favorite ideas from David Ogilvie's book, Confessions of an Advertising Man. It's this idea that you have to keep open the telephone line to your unconscious. And you see this all the time. Like, why do you have ideas? Like suddenly, like a problem

Starting point is 00:28:02 that you're like unconscious or even subconscious mind is like mulling over, you know, maybe pops up when you're in the shower or you're on a walk or whatever the case is. In Bugatti's case, it's riding his horses. You see this throughout history. These people talk about the fact that these ideas spawn to mind when you're

Starting point is 00:28:18 doing something else. Ogilvy says, I have developed techniques for keeping open the telephone line to my unconscious in case that disorderly repository has anything to tell me. I hear a great deal of music. I take long hot baths. I garden. I go into retreat among the Amish.

Starting point is 00:28:34 That is not a joke. He actually did that. I watch birds. I go for long walks in the country and I take frequent vacations so that my brain can lie fallow. No golf, no cocktail parties, no tennis, no bridge, no concentration, only a bicycle. While thus employed in doing nothing, I receive a constant stream of telegrams from my unconscious, and these become the raw material for my advertisements. That same idea is happening exactly where we are in this Bucati book. What I found fascinating is when Roland Garros, this famous pioneer aviator, is on the

Starting point is 00:29:11 visit, on this visit to the factory, he finds out who, he's interested in a car. What happens? He finds out who just bought this car. The Duke of Bavaria had just bought the car. And this Duke just happens to be the brother-in-law to the King of Belgium. And so it says Garros ordered one right then and there. And so me and my friends use this word setup all the time. And so the way, what a setup is, is like, how does where you live and where you work and the world you're building for your company and everybody in it, like, how does it interact with each other? Bugatti has one of the best setups at Molsheim, Molsheim than anybody I've ever come across. It gets even better. In addition to having this like English mansion on the property for his family, his workshop, the stream of trouts, the gardens, the horses, he also has a landing strip and a meadow.

Starting point is 00:29:57 A lot of the early Bugatti customers, there was a big overlap between people that wanted super fast cars and were also capable of flying, you know, when they're flying planes, like we're talking about like right flyers. This is like 1910, 1915 kind of planes. And so they come in to Molsheim and they just land right in the meadow next to the factory. And so between the increased production, the fact that he has,

Starting point is 00:30:18 he's funding his own racing team. Obviously that's where a lot of people are finding this out about his cars and making orders. Like between the racing and the increasing the production, this is a seven days a week long hours thing. This is how he's building his company. My small factory acquired great importance, Bugatti said.

Starting point is 00:30:35 Production was increasing. The nights were often short, but orders were flowing in. And then we get to the first of many turns in Bugatti's life that are outside of his control, but destroy his business. There's a paragraph that comes later in the book after he dies. He dies relatively young, and I would make the argument that he actually died of a broken heart. I want to read this paragraph that gives you an overview for what's about to happen in his life. It says he was a creator and a humanist before he was an industrialist, and then he showed himself to be an astute and wily businessman, conducting the affairs of his factory with success, despite keen competition, financial difficulties and the destruction of two wars.

Starting point is 00:31:14 This is World War One that is going to take all of the progress that Bugatti has been making. So he's around 33 years old at this point. He is around 200 employees. OK, he's been working at this since he was about 17 and is going to be destroyed. Then came the war, World War I, and Bugatti's plans for the future had to be shelved. And it's amazing that he was able to realize

Starting point is 00:31:34 that he's in trouble and that he has to get out right away. A lot of people would hesitate. It's like, I'm going to lose everything. And so his factory, now it's in France, but at this point it was considered German territory. So like France and Germany is constantly fighting over, I think you pronounce it like Alsace-Lorraine, I think is what it's called now. But at this point in 1914, he's in German territory. He's like, oh, I got to get the hell out of here. So it says his decision

Starting point is 00:31:56 was immediate. Others might've hesitated, weighed things in the balance, considered the importance of what was at stake, but not he. As soon as mobilization was declared, he decided to close And so the book goes into great detail about how perilous the journey is. He winds up getting his family out of Germany, gets them back into Italy. Now, this is a crazy thing. He sneaks back into occupied German territory because he has to hide his engines. Remember this part because this is going to become really important a few years from now. The factory was later taken over by local authorities. But before then, soon after seeing his family safely to Italy, Bugatti returned for a few days.

Starting point is 00:32:37 He buried the engines of three racing cars in the grounds of his estate. These engines, which were his latest constructions, were never detected. And he was able to recover them at the end of his estate. These engines, which were his latest constructions, were never detected, and he was able to recover them at the end of the war. And so imagine you're in his shoes. You have, I think, three kids at the time, a wife, a successful business. Essentially, his business is going to be paused

Starting point is 00:32:58 for five or six years. He's eventually going to go back and reclaim it. He's going to lose it again in World War II, which we'll get to. But what was he doing? What was he doing during World War I? He's not building cars anymore. And so we see for the first time that his mechanical genius is universal. And he does this for his whole life. He'll make cars. He'll make boats. He'll make airplane engines. He'll make rail cars. This guy's a legit genius. So he starts designing during World War I. He's making

Starting point is 00:33:23 airplane engines for the allies and specifically for the Americans. I just want to pull out one part because it made me laugh. This American company, I think this is 1916, maybe around there. He's making he's making airplane engines for him. It says Bugatti received a nice fat check less than a week after his first contract with the Americans. And not being used to such promptness on the part of official departments, he went to the bank with the check and had to ask if it was valid. And so this is the first time that the book mentions, but I need to bring this to your attention because it's, I'm obsessed with Bugatti, the fact, the way he built

Starting point is 00:34:01 his life, the way he built his business, everything he did, I find him fascinating. But this is something that also is extremely important. This idea that friends greatly enhance the magnificent, mysterious odyssey that we call life. And Bugatti was a good friend. He prioritized it. I thought this was very fascinating. An account of Bugatti's life would not be complete without mention of his friendships. Work was not everything to him. He opened up when in the company of a few friends. He was fortunate enough to enjoy several great friendships during the course of his life.

Starting point is 00:34:32 And one of these was Roland Garros, who I'd mentioned, the famous French aviator, the one that would land in the meadow at Bugatti's setup, right? Listen to how deep their friendship was. This is incredible. It's even more incredible in the fact that there is war raging on around them, right? Listen to how deep their friendship was. This is incredible. It's even more incredible in the fact that there is war raging on around them, right? These are Europeans in 1915. Garros offered Bugatti all the money in his bank account, about 200,000 francs. It was his whole fortune. You're helping the war effort, Garros said, just as I am. But I know of your difficulties. You have a wife and three children. I'm a bachelor and I might get killed at the front any day.

Starting point is 00:35:11 Garros has sent Bugatti a picture of them together. He says, to Itore Bugatti, the incomparable artist who alone knows how to give life to steal. In admiration and friendship, sign Roland Garros. This is how crazy this is he says i'm a bachelor and i might get killed at the front line any day he does get killed he is a pilot in world war one and he dies i think a year or two after this and so the deeper we get into this book i think you can see why i had such a a passionate and positive response to bugatti because there's just so many lessons he can teach us. It's like, one, can you find what you have a natural aptitude for

Starting point is 00:35:51 and a deep curiosity for? This is going to sound a lot like, I feel it's like, Bugatti's like the personification of Paul Graham's essay, How to Do Great Work. It's like, what do you have a natural aptitude for and a deep curiosity for? Can you work in that environment? Can you make a commitment to be the best in the world at what you're doing?

Starting point is 00:36:08 Can you care deeply about making truly great work? And then can you also make room for other humans in your life? It's not just all work all the time. You saw in the way he built his entire life. His kids were in the factory. His son, Gene, who's going to die in a car accident when he's, I think, 30 or 32. It's right before Bugatti's going to die shortly thereafter. But like his kids were involved in the business. His wife was involved in the business from day one. He creates an in on the

Starting point is 00:36:35 property so friends can say, customers can say. He was relentless about building deep friendships inside and outside of his industry and helping them as much as possible. And then another thing, listen to what I'm about to read to you. Your entire business was destroyed. You have to start from scratch. And Bugatti's like, all right, then might as well get to it. At the end of World War I, this is the state of his business. When Bugatti saw his factory again at the end of 1918, only the walls were of use. What remained of the machinery and the tools was scarcely good for scrap. A completely fresh start had to be made, but Bugatti did not hesitate. And so before the war, he had his own company. It was self-contained. Now he's like, okay,

Starting point is 00:37:10 well, I have to build up everything from scratch. I need a lot of money. I don't have a lot of money. What do I do? So this is how he financed the rebuilding to finance his business. He sold the license to produce his engines, as well as a few of his patents to various foreign car manufacturers. So they list a bunch of these companies. He does this in Italy, he does this in England, and he does this in Germany as well. And then he goes and recruits some of his former employees. And so then we see this again, cut against the bias inside your industry. Mass production had grown rapidly over the last four to five years, right?

Starting point is 00:37:41 And so some of his quote-unquote competitors were now mass producing and making a hundred cars a day. This was Bugatti's response. Bugatti, true to his standards, took no interest in that aspect of things. As in the past, he was more concerned to create than to produce. And this is crazy how good he was. Remember, he's picking up almost six years later. Imagine having your business pause like that. He recovered the three engines that he had buried. They were just as he had conceived them in 1914. The general arrangement of these engines is worth recalling, for these cars were to dominate racing in the early 1920s. Six years later, almost to the day, one of those cars was entered for the light car Grand Prix at Le Mans and won. And part of the reason he was able to win is because it goes back to this idea of cutting

Starting point is 00:38:32 against the bias. At the time, a theory was generally accepted that the heavier the weight of the car, the better that the car would hold the road at high speed. Bugatti, however, believed the opposite, and he proved that he was right. This lighter car would win the road at high speed. Bugatti, however, believed the opposite and he proved that he was right. This lighter car would win the race with a lead of nearly 20 minutes. This car was called the Bugatti Type 10. Now, I skipped over it earlier, but there's a bunch of examples in the book where he's just got a bunch of controversial innovations and they're controversial because they're essentially the exact opposite of what everybody else in the industry thought and believed at the time. So he was the very first person to place the driver and the engine low and towards the back of the car. And like many things

Starting point is 00:39:14 at the very beginning, one of his engineers that worked for him that was right in the preface of the book would talk about, hey, he preached to us, like, follow your intuition. Like you should trust your intuition. The reason that he made this innovation, he instinctively thought that this was going to be better for aerodynamics. There was no way to test this. It's just something he instinctively believed. Every other car designer at that time believed that the driver being seated higher was better. And we all know the result because now all the cars do it like Bugatti had figured out, you know, a hundred years ago. Now you could say cutting against the

Starting point is 00:39:45 bias is kind of a form of maybe confidence or even stubbornness. There's a negative side to it. Like, what if you're wrong? And in the case, like, he's winning a ton of races. And the races are what's fueling, like, his sales growth, right? This is in the early 1920s. Now, what was fascinating is he starts to lose a bunch of races because he was stubborn. He refuses to add all of his competitors. In the initially, we're adding blowers. So these are superchargers. And Bugatti thought that was like vulgar, like almost unnatural. So he resisted in doing it.

Starting point is 00:40:15 Takes him like a few years to realize, hey, I have to do this. And then once he does it, like he completely dominates. I think they win like, I don't know, like 2000 races or something like that. But this was fascinating. And it was Bugatti's description of their sales strategy. All the finest trophies were won easily by engaging in every important race without pause. And so Bugatti, like Ferrari after him, realizes, hey, if I just win, if I just focus on winning on the racetrack, then the sales will take care of itself. You see this in how they advertise his models, his cars. He knew that racing was the one true means of showing the quality of his cars

Starting point is 00:40:47 and enabling him to improve on it. He was also well aware of the publicity he got from racing. And right from the beginning, his annual catalog proudly listed his successes. So the beginning of the catalog is just like, here's all the races I won. Boom, a list of them. All his racing, and this is why it's important. All of his racing cars were catalog models available to anyone, and many amateur drivers were only too ready to purchase them.

Starting point is 00:41:11 And so something that reappears in the career of Bugatti is the fact that he was constantly willing to scrap what he was working on to build something new. He would not rest on his laurels. And so what I would think about is what he's about to tell you and I here is when you go do something great, just go off and do something else that's great. Don't stop to like celebrate the win or like admire what you did. Just keep going. Like you just have to keep pushing progress forward.

Starting point is 00:41:33 And so he wrote, it is tempting to stop when you've made some progress, but if you want to follow it up, you can't stop. That is why I shall go on as long as I'm able to. I know you can't always win, but when I'm beaten, I shall know why, and I'll beat my rival later on. When a car manufacturer builds a racing car, he always employs the best possible. The best workmen, the best engineers, all the best that his firm can provide. Nothing is too good. Nothing is too dear. You've got to win whatever the cost. You work day and night if necessary. Okay, so I want to spend more time going over Bugatti's setup or what it was like at Molsheim. And I think this is important because it's going to be a reflection of him, of the man, of his personality.

Starting point is 00:42:16 Visitors came expecting to find a factory, and none was able to hide their astonishment. There was a factory, obviously, and even one of the most perfect of its kind, for Bugatti sometimes found that the machines and tools that he needed were not available, and so he designed and made them himself. Of course he did. However, Molsheim was more than that. It was a house and a family. It was a little world where the attitude to things and the relations between people were out of the ordinary. A customer came to take delivery of a car and got the impression that he had suddenly discovered, in this small corner of Alsace, this little fiefdom of an Italian of the Renaissance who had strayed into the industrial age. And so this is what a typical experience would be like for a customer.

Starting point is 00:43:04 On arriving, all I could see at first were some stables close to a country house. The stables were being used as a workshop, and above them in a loft was an office reached only by a short ladder. There sat the accountant. I was explaining the purpose of my visit to him when Bugatti came up. He was wearing a colonel helmet and a well-fitting cream silk jacket. He took me to see the workshop. Everything there, except for the cylinders, which were made for him somewhere else, everything was produced in his workshop. And this is one of the most important lines in this entire section, which this section goes on for quite a while. The personality of its founder continued

Starting point is 00:43:44 to show in even the smallest details and unexpected ways. They start calling this the Molsheim touch. What a surprise, you come across a hamlet of long low buildings with brass bound doors of polished oak and with cement paths between them. All so clean and tidy, not a loose stone or a spot of dust anywhere. A car factory? Surely not, and yet it is. You get the feeling of being suddenly confronted with something unusual and beyond classification. The explanation of the shining cleanliness of all the doors in the various workshops was quite simple. An employee, one employee did nothing else but keep the paths and the workshops floors clean and the door plates from which all oily marks left by mechanics were wiped away immediately when they were made.

Starting point is 00:44:38 That is also something that pops up over and over again in the book, that he insisted on everything being organized and clean 24-7 to the point where somebody's job was to make sure the rocks were off the pathway. And if there was a smidge of oil on a door as a mechanic left, that had to be wiped away immediately. And so before moving on, I want to go back to this one line. The personality of its founder continued to show in even the smallest details and unexpected ways. The best way to think about this is a line that I read in one of the 10 or 15 books, whatever I've read on Steve Jobs. It says, Steve made and remade Apple in his own image. Apple is Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives. You could say the same thing about Bugatti in another example of his very unusual personality.

Starting point is 00:45:20 Bugatti once received a bill for electricity accompanied by a letter written in terms which he considered to be discourteous. He said as much to the manager, adding, Come and see me in a year's time. I shall have something interesting to show you. A year later, he had built his own electricity-generating plant. There was nothing at Molsheim which did not bear the mark of one man, his tastes, his wishes, and even his moods. This is one of my favorite parts of the book because it just goes on and on, page after page, and I finally just wrote this note to myself. All of this is excellent. I love everything about Bugatti. He was always well-dressed and wore his clothes with a quiet elegance, whether at the factory or in town. He had a style and manner all of his own.

Starting point is 00:46:08 He was an optimist. He had a remarkable gift of observation which spiced his conversation. He was genial and generous in every respect, and his egoism only showed if his habits were threatened. He was excitable at times, young and lively in spirit, tackling problems with enthusiasm. He liked beauty in all things. Cost and financial return were secondary matters. He made plenty of money, nevertheless,

Starting point is 00:46:36 and almost without noticing it. Bugatti used to say that work was never an effort to him, that he built up his business while enjoying himself. He was not envious of others. Like some English squire, his personal interests were in his estate and his horses and a boat or two. High society held little interest for him, and when obliged to attend social functions, he did so without real pleasure. The truth was that his work was his life, and in matters of work he had a horror of utopias and of mad schemes. His insistence on the job being done properly, down to the smallest detail, and for any ordinary task, such as shoeing a horse,

Starting point is 00:47:17 was evident of his concern for exactitude, and this made a great impression on all those who lived and worked within his orbit. His brain was always at work. He had no fixed hours. He sometimes spent many hours in the drawing office at night, for he found that the silence helped him to work out problems which had cropped up during the day. His starting point was always to create the most extraordinary things. And so then I want to get into more of how Bugatti worked and why this reminded me of an excerpt from James Dyson's first autobiography. So it said, Bugatti had no technical education and possessed no diplomas.

Starting point is 00:47:57 He had learned as he went along from experience and a natural mechanical ability. And so then he tells a story about working as an apprentice when he was 18 and realizing, hey, the best way to learn something is to try to take it apart and try to figure it out. So he comes across this engine and he says, I dismantled it all. And I said to myself, what a mess this is. I must put this right. And that's how I began to understand internal combustion engines. And so this race car driver is one of the first customers he ever had purchased one of the first cars that Bugatti ever produced. And he says, I was struck by the simplicity and directness of the mechanical solutions. In technical schools, apprentices were taught that the outlet valves of an engine had to be wider than the inlet valves because the volume of gas was greater. Bugatti was the first

Starting point is 00:48:38 to do just the opposite, making his inlet valves the larger, which is what everyone does now. And so in his autobiography called Against the Odds, James Dyson tells a story where he's a young man apprenticing with an older engineer, this guy named Jeremiah Fry, who was one of the biggest influences on James's career. And this is what he learned. Here was a man who was not interested in experts. He meets me. He thinks to himself, here's a bright kid. Let's employ him. And he does. He risks little

Starting point is 00:49:05 with the possibility of gaining much. It is exactly what I do now at Dyson. This attitude of employment extended to Fry's thinking in everything, including engineering. 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. When I came to him and I say, hey, I have an idea, he would offer no more advice than to say, you know where the workshop is, go and do it. But I would say, but we need to weld this thing. Well then, get a welder and weld it. When I asked if we shouldn't talk to someone about, 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 the boat,

Starting point is 00:49:44 and look at what happens. Now, this was not a modus operandi that I had encountered 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 work one way, he would just try it another way until it did. The root principle was to do things your way. It didn't matter how other people did it. As long as it works and it is exciting, people will follow you. And so those last few years at Molsheim were really the peak of his life.

Starting point is 00:50:31 And over the next 10 years, he has to endure unbelievable tragedy until he dies. The first thing to fall is the economy. The Great Depression causes Bugatti to have to look for other ways to make money. So he has to actually travel away from the place that he wants to be most because he's going to be designing rail cars for the French government. In 1931, faced with a precarious financial situation, Bugatti had to turn to rail locomotion. The development and production of these rail cars resulted in Bugatti being absent from Molchim for long periods, for he was obliged to maintain close contact with the engineers and administrators of the French railways. His son Jean thus became gradually responsible for the Molchime factory. So his son Jean was supposed to be his successor.

Starting point is 00:51:11 The management of the Molchime factory passed from father to son. So the depression causes a terrible financial situation. He then is forced to spend time away from where he wants to be. His son has to run the factory. Then there's a bunch of labor unrest spreading throughout France. All these other factories were being shut down completely by strikes. This is where Bugatti's actually like superhuman level of confidence actually plays against him because he thought it would never happen. He's like, oh, my employees love me. One big factory after another was affected and brought to a standstill. Bugatti thought his factory was saved from trouble. I've got nothing to worry about, he kept saying. My work people know me. They're part of my family. But the impossible happened. The men stopped working and there were protest marches.

Starting point is 00:51:53 The factory was occupied. It was a terrible shock and Bugatti was embittered by what he took to be so much ingratitude and an attack on him personally. That is in 1936. This is 1939, the death, the tragic death of his son and successor. This young life was so rich in promise and yet so abruptly ended. Gene met with a fatal accident on August 11, 1939, while testing the car, which had just won the Le Mans 24 hours. He went out after dinner with the family, saying, I'll be back in 15 minutes, in answer to our warnings to be careful. Remember, this is his sister writing this book. He went out after dinner with the family, saying,

Starting point is 00:52:35 I'll be back in 15 minutes, in answer to our warnings to be careful. He was test driving a Bugatti at high speeds on a country lane. A cyclist pops out, begins to cross the road. Gene breaks hard, swerves, and hits a tree, killing himself immediately. Bugatti is devastated, breaks down, sobs uncontrollably, as you can imagine when he hears about the death of his son. Less than a month later, the Second World War begins, and Bugatti loses his business again. The German invasion and subsequent capitulation of France brought an end to his business, for the factory was taken over by the Germans.

Starting point is 00:53:12 His life's work was gone. After the war, in order to have the business and premises restored to him, a court action became necessary. I want to pause and review before we get there. 1931, Great Depression happens. He has to go work for the railways, right? 1936, there's a strike at his factory. 1939, his son dies in a car crash.

Starting point is 00:53:30 A month later, start of World War II, Germans invade. He loses his factory and his home. 1944, his wife dies of a painful illness. 1945, he has to fight the French government to try to get Molsheim back he loses the first court case which causes him a great emotional shock and caused a nervous breakdown during the appeal he has a nervous breakdown he's depressed he gets influenza then he has a stroke that leaves him half paralyzed slips into a coma for four months and dies on August 21, 1947 at the age of 66. Ten days before he dies and while he's in a coma,

Starting point is 00:54:13 he wins the appeal and the French government give him back his factory and his home. He was thus deprived of the joy of seeing his factory returned to the Bugatti family. The official cause of death may be a stroke, but I think he died of a broken heart. I want to end by reading from the epilogue, goes back to the importance of friendship throughout the life of Bugatti. There is a letter called My Friend Bugatti written by a famous French aviation pioneer, Gabriel Voisin.

Starting point is 00:54:45 It is written about 20 years after Bugatti died. And I think it's a great place to end this conversation about a great man. There could be no better ending to this book than the moving testimony of friendship that the famous aircraft constructor Gabriel Voisin has written. We were both more or less the same age, but God was by his cradle on September 15, 1881, and bestowed all her gifts onto him. I do not remember our first meeting.

Starting point is 00:55:11 I seem to have known this amazing engineer all of my life. Bugatti was already one of us in the pioneering days of aviation. In 1908, our laboratory was in Paris, and there he used to visit us once a week. I always kept our mechanical problems for that friendly occasion. There seemed to be no snags or obstacles for this extraordinary man. One had only to state the problem for it to be solved. Many writers have written about the productions of the Molsheim factory, but none of these writers have given us

Starting point is 00:55:45 a faithful picture of the real Bugatti. Some have recalled his charm, others have disclosed his whims. None of them has seemed able to bring to life this great man. The immense talent of this born engineer was concealed beneath a cloak of fun and gaiety, and he gave the impression of never taking himself seriously. I am now 86 years old, and in these last years of my life, I can look back and measure the worth of the men I have known in the course of a career full of surprises. Most of my contemporaries were incapable of making an effort beyond what was required of them. I have therefore very vivid recollections of those few who were capable of actions and initiative. In his book, The Revolt of the Masses, José Ortega y Gasset wrote these inspired words. This is one of my

Starting point is 00:56:40 favorite paragraphs in the entire book. A human life, by its very nature, has to be devoted to something or other, to a glorious or humble enterprise, an illustrious or obscure destiny. This is a strange but inexorable condition of things. Ortega y Gasset must have known Bugatti at the time of writing those lines. The production of cars at Molsheim was really just a game to my friend, and his successes came easy to him. He was one of the last car manufacturers able to imagine whole, to assemble in his mind the most varied and complicated mechanical constructions, effortlessly, yet with exactness. In a word, Ettore Bugatti was one of the last mechanics truly worthy of the name. A larger volume would be needed in order to give a full and clear account

Starting point is 00:57:33 of his influence. After the war, this truly French technician was the victim of regrettable incidents and his health was thereby affected. He passed away in 1947. In 1913, I lost my brother Charles And that is where I'll leave it. For the full story, I highly, highly, highly recommend buying the book if you can. I think there's only a few copies available. I'm so glad this book came into my life. It was the perfect vehicle to learn about the genius that was Bugatti. I will leave a link down below. If you buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.

Starting point is 00:58:22 That is 316 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.

Founders - #316 Bugatti

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