Founders - #400 The Stubborn Genius of James Dyson

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

This episode covers the extreme perseverance and the stubborn genius of James Dyson. Dyson has a business philosophy which is very different from anything you might have encountered before. A philosophy which demands difference from what exists and retention of total control. For almost four decades, James Dyson has been building one of the most valuable privately-held companies in the world. A company he owns without shareholders — and one that is centered around an obsession with the quality of the product above all. I spent well over 70 hours reading (and rereading) both Against the Odds and Invention: A Life of Learning Through Failure. These books tell the story of the vision of a single man, pursued with dogged determination, that was nothing less than obsession. Episode sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ramp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud ⁠⁠⁠by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money.⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠⁠ Automate compliance, security, and trust with Vanta. ⁠⁠⁠Vanta helps you win trust, close deals, and stay secure—faster and with less effort⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠Find out how increased security leads to more customers by going to Vanta⁠⁠⁠. Tell them David from Founders sent you and you'll get $1000 off. ⁠⁠https://www.vanta.com/founders⁠⁠ Collateral⁠ transforms your complex ideas into compelling narratives. Collateral crafts institutional grade marketing collateral for private equity, private credit, real estate, venture capital, family offices, hedge funds, oil & gas companies, and all kinds of corporations. Storytelling is one of the highest forms of leverage and you should invest heavily in it. You can do that by going to ⁠https://collateral.com

So it took me nine years to get to episode 400. That means over the last nine years, I've read and reread 400 biographies and autobiographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs. My number one recommendation has been for many years and still is to this day James Dyson's first autobiography called Against the Oats. I covered James Dyson's first autobiography on episode 25, episode 200, episode 200, and on episode 400,

what I've done is spent the last two weeks reading and rereading both his first autobiography and his second autobiography. Dyson wrote his second autobiography about 20 years after his first. So I want to read two sections from his first autobiography and then I'll tell you how this episode would be different from the other Dyson episodes.

First thing he says, I am led to the belief that for vision, one might equally well read stubbornness. At any stage in my story when I talk of vision, and arrogance seems to have gotten the better of me. Remember that I am celebrating only my stubbornness.

I am claiming nothing but the virtues of a mule. I think that is one of the most important sentences in his first autobiography and is why I'm naming this episode the stubborn genius of James Dyson. The second thing I want to read to, he says this is a business philosophy, which is very different from anything you might have encountered before. This is not even a business book. It is, if anything, a book against business, against the principles that have filled the world with ugly, useless objects and unhappy people. 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. And that is exactly what I want to talk to about today, which is Dyson's very unique business building philosophy. So what I've done is made a list of about 100 of the best sentences across the two books, 126 of the best sentences, to be exact, across the two books, that I think will help you understand and explain this really unique way in which James Dyson has built one of the world's most valuable companies.

And if I had to summarize it into a single sentence, it would be difference and retention of total control. This is one of the most important ideas that I've learned from James Dyson, one that has absolutely grabbed me and held on to me for, you know, for six or seven years. It says difference for the sake of it in everything, from the moment the idea strikes to the running of the business, difference and retention of total control. This principle of Dyson's will be repeated across decades. He says, I have sought out originality for its own sake. This is a philosophy which demands difference from what exists. And the benefit of this business building philosophy being laid out in two autobiographies is what you realize. It's like, oh, Dyson's innate personality is perfectly suited for the business building philosophy that he has created.

This is what he said. I have been a misfit throughout my life. Misfits are not born or made. They make themselves. I was a stubborn, opinionated child desperate to be different and to be right. He is innately disgusted and repelled from following the hurt. One of the most important things that ever happened to James Dyson is that he winds up meeting Jeremy Fry. Dyson starts working for Jeremy Fry from young age.

Jeremy Fry becomes his mentor. And this is one of the things that he learned from Jeremy Fry. This is one of my favorite parts of both books. Here is a man who is not interested in experts. He meets me. He thinks to himself, here's a bright young kid. Let's employ him. And he does.

He risks little with the possibility of gaining much. It is exactly what I now do at Dyson. This attitude to employment extended to Jeremy'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. So when I'm describing Jeremy Fry, what is so fascinating about this is Dyson's describing Jeremy Fry. He's really describing himself. So when he says, Jeremy Fry, when he got an idea, you know, did not sit down and process it through pages of calculations.

He didn't argue it through with anyone. Dyson won't either. He learned this from Jeremy Fry. It's very important. He just went out and built it. When I came to him and I'd 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 we'll need to weld this thing, I would protest. Well, then get a welder and weld it.

When I asked if we shouldn't talk to someone, say, about 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, and see 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 that. As far as he was concerned, with enthusiasm and intelligence, anything was possible. It was mind-blowing. What's happening to Dyson at this point of life,

different ideas have a way to just crack your mind open. This idea that he learned from Jeremy Fry grabs a hold of him and he uses it for his entire career. It was mind-blowing. No research, no personal. elementary sketches. If it didn't work one way, he would just try it another way until it did. And as we proceeded, I could see that we were getting on extremely quickly. The root principle, which again, I think is now foundational to Dyson's business building philosophy. The root

principle was to do things your way. It didn't matter how other people did it. It didn't matter if it could be done better. As long as it works and it is exciting, people will follow you. Dyson demands difference the more you read his words the more you listen to him speak I watch all of his product presentations he's out of every single person alive he's the founder I most want to meet

and spend time with in person and when you observe him it's just very obvious Dyson demands difference back to what he learned from his mentor Jeremy Fry more than anyone else encourage me to think for myself and to just do it Jeremy Fry taught me without saying a word

that each day is a form of education I still find myself putting into practice at Dyson some of the same things Jeremy said and did when I worked for him half a century ago. And so one of the things that Dyson and Jeremy Fry had in common is the fact that they both used history, learning from history as a form of leverage. They were obsessed and they would talk with each other

about the designer and engineer heroes from history. And it's from these conversations that Dyson said this. I was left with a burning ambition to emulate the designer and engineers that I admired. Dyson wrote, I have an interest verging on obsession with the past. And he explains why this is so important. He says it's about understanding and celebrating the progress that has been achieved, learning from it, and building on it. So you and I have talked about this reoccurring trait for history's greatest entrepreneurs over and over again. I always say these guys have this encyclopedic

knowledge of history in their head. Dyson took it a step further. He wrote a book called a history of great inventions. It is literally an encyclopedia of great inventions. I have the book. I read it. I highlighted it. I thought I did a bonus episode. I have to find out where that is. Maybe I'll just do an entire another episode on it. But it is very interesting to me. I was reading, rereading it through us. I was making the outline for this podcast too. And it's interesting. The more I thought about it's like, oh, look at the title that he chose. He didn't say the history of great inventions. He said a history of great inventions. And I think the important part of the way Dyson looks at things is like there's a lot of

different ways. This just happens to be mine. And my business building philosophy, which I think he just absolutely nails, is tailor made for me. And so I think one of the most important ideas to learn from Dyson is, yeah, he's going to get a lot of great design and engineering ideas from the past. But he also uses their stories, he says this explicitly, as fuel to persevere through the inevitable struggles of building a business.

So both books are filled of examples. of Dyson studying great inventors and industrialists and engineers and designers and constantly using their stories as fuel for his own. So one of the most ingenious and most prolific figures in engineering history, this guy lived all the way back in 1800s, his name is Isambarg Kingdom Brunel. So when Dyson is describing Brunel, again, he's really describing himself. He says, 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.

This is one of my favorite lines. He was fired by an inner strength and self-belief almost impossible to imagine in this feckless age. That could be a description of Dyson as well. While I could never lay claim to the genius of a man like that, I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was. I have tried in my own way to draw on Brunel's dream of applying emerging technology in ways yet unimagined.

He was never afraid to be different or shocking. he had to overcome the most incredible resistance to his ideas in case you don't know the life story of Dyson that is exactly what Dyson had to do 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 i have asked people only to push my inventions around not to get inside of them and try to float and at times in my life when i have encountered difficulty and self-doubt, I have looked to his example to fire me on. I have told myself, when people tried to make me modify my ideas, I want to pause here. Think about this. I could

choose any adjective to describe Dyson in this episode. Why did I hone in on stubbornness? For the general population, stubbornness is a pejorative. For entrepreneurs, I'd argue it's the opposite. Listen to what he's saying here. When people have tried to make me modify my ideas, I have told myself, When people have tried to make me modify my ideas that the great Western Railway, which Brunel built, 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 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 would all turn out the way that it has. And one of the most important things to understand about Dyson is his need for mentors and guidance. What played a large role in that need is the fact that he lost his father at an extremely young age. So James was nine years old when his father died. His dad was only 40 when he died.

Unfortunately, he dies from throat and lung cancer. And what I'm about to read to you, please remember, Dyson is writing these words 60 years after his father's death. He said goodbye, holding a small suitcase as he waved from the back door. That was the last time I saw him. His brave cheerfulness chokes me up every time I recall this scene. It is impossible to imagine my father's emotions as he waved goodbye knowing that he might be on his way to London to die.

Sixty years have not softened these memories, nor the sadness that he missed enjoying his three. children growing up, how he would have relished playing with his grandchildren, of whom there are seven. This was all the more poignant when I observed one of my own grandchildren, Mick, at the age I was when my father died. Mick is loving, bright as a button, and self-possessed. Yet still at that age, he took his ruffled, soft toy puppy to bed with him. He was far too vulnerable to lose his father. I felt the devastating loss of my dad,

his love, his humor, and the things he taught me, I feared for a future without him. That is the first time he's going to use that word fear. You will see that reappear over and over again. It's really important to remember. Now, what might be surprising to you is his response to the death,

the early death of his father. He said the loss of my father, My father made me very competitive. And this leads directly into, I think, another important part of Dyson's business building philosophy. When you see how he gets ideas from the world around him, everything he reads, he experiences. Remember he said that Jeremy Fry taught him that every day is a form of education. I feel that he has the ability to turn almost everything into an abstraction. He has this mental habit of just pulling back from like the concrete details of an experience

and thinking in terms of general principles, patterns or concepts. He has the ability to extract the underlying idea. And you see this with his youthful addiction to running. And this is directly tied to his father's early death. There was no one to teach me how to run. There was no dad to tell me how great I was. Running became an obsession with me. Herb Elliott was the world's greatest middle distance runner of his era.

So I read a few books about him and discovered that his coach had told him that the way to develop stamina and to strengthen the leg muscles was to run up and down sand dunes. So Dyson starts doing that. I got a terrific buzz from knowing that it was doing something that no one else was. Remember, everything ties back to difference. Difference for the sake of it.

Originality for its own sake. I knew that I was training myself to do something better than anyone else would be able to. 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 out there on those 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 around the track like a herd of sheep and not getting any quicker. Difference itself was making me come in first. And then you see he has the ability to pull up more lessons from running that he's going to use to build his business. In so many ways, it taught me the most significant lessons. I was learning about the physical and psychological strength that keeps you competitive. I was learning about obstinacy. That is just another word for stubbornness. I was learning how to overcome nerves.

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, which makes me keep working at success. Dyson continues to pull out ideas from running and will apply them later to building his own company, the idea that you need a high pain tolerance, that excellence is the capacity to take pain. Running also taught me to overcome the pain barrier. When everyone else feels exhausted, that is the opportunity to accelerate, whatever the pain and win the race. Stamina and determination with creativity are needed to overcome seemingly impossible difficulties. And so that combination of stamina and determination, it's the advice that he gives himself.

It's also the advice he gives to other young people and everybody that works at Dyson. There is another trait that you're going to need if you want to adopt Dyson's business building philosophy, and that is a strong work ethic. Jerry Seinfeld has this line where he says that the hard way is the right way. I think that applies to how Dyson built his company. And you see that Dyson had this extreme work ethic from a young age. He says that when he was a young boy, a typical day involved waking up at 6 a.m. he'd go for a six-mile run, then he'd go to school all day, and then he'd go back out at 10 p.m. and run for another six miles.

So then Dyson's got all these ideas that he learned from his experience that are spread across the book, so I pulled out a bunch and organized them. And so one of the interesting things that he says that opportunity hides in plain sight. He says, everyday products sell. Although it's harder to improve a mature product, if you succeed, there's no need to create a market. And he's got really straightforward advice on how to do this. 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. vacuum cleaner during my first attempt

using it. Another piece of advice that he has, do not sell a half finished product. Jeremy Fry hires Dyson right away to work on this project called the C truck. And they made the design mistake of not including a cabin when they first tried to sell the C truck. And as a result, it was really hard to sell. And so Dyson says this. 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. Once they actually committed to investing and building a cabin, the sales of the sea truck took off. He has another lesson from this experience that he carries with him for the rest of his life. People want high-tech

specificity. 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. I convinced not a single one of them. People do not want all purpose. They want high-tech specificity. Dyson worked with Jeremy Fry on the C-Truck for over five years. And as you'll see over and over again, Dyson has an excessively high tolerance for risk.

He leaves a high-paying, stable job with a mentor that he loved and admired to go out and be an entrepreneur on his own. And so his first business is this invention called the ballbarrow. It is a wheelbarrow that doesn't get stuck in mud. There's a bunch of videos of Dyson's early inventions on Dyson's website, which I highly recommend going and watching. And from this experience, he took a bunch of different lessons. And one of them was that do not lose the direct connection to your customer. He had other partners. He had other shareholders.

And unfortunately, he listened to their advice. It's like, hey, let's stop. Even though it's working selling directly to the customer, let's stop doing that. Let's start selling wholesale. And he says the direct contact with the customer was the basis of our success. When we abandoned direct selling, we lost that connection and the business. headed downhill. This also goes against his main tenant that you have to retain retention of total control. Another foundational principle of his is that there's no such thing as a

quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence. And in the end, you make it look like a quantum leap. Dyson is pro iterative design over a long period of time. Dyson is obsessed with crafting a high-quality product. And he made some of the best products in the world by running tens of thousands of experiments throughout his life. Every single experiment was aimed at making a better product for his customer. This is exactly what the presenting sponsor of founders does. Dyson reminds me of my friend Kareem, who's the co-founder and CTO of Ramp. I spent a lot of time talking to Kareem, and every single conversation centers around

his obsession with crafting a high-quality product and using the latest technology to constantly create better experiences for his customers. It is exactly what Dyson does. Kareem and Dyson both believe that nothing is ever good enough and that everything can be improved always. Ramp has one of the most talented technical teams in finance and they use rapid, relentless iteration to make their product better every day just like Dyson. So far this year, Ramp has shipped over 300 new features. Ramp is completely committed to using AI to make a better experience for their customers and automate as much of your business's finances as

possible. In fact, Kareem just wrote this. It is our duty to be first movers and push limits so that we can make the greatest possible product experience for our customers. That sounds a lot like Dyson to me. And that is why many of the fastest growing and most innovative companies in the world are running their business on ramp. That's just a stone cold fact. Make sure you go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money. Let AI chase your receipts and close your books

so you can use your time and energy building great things for your customers because at the end of the day, that is what this is all about. Building a product or service that makes someone else's life better. That is what I'm trying to do. That is what Dyson has dedicated his life to doing. And that is what Ramp has done too. Get started today by going to ramp.com. I will also leave a link down below.

Now, another idea of Dyson's, the importance of being a person that has high agency. So when someone tells you that you can't do something, what is your natural reaction? If your initial response is resistance, that's a sign that you should be working on exactly that. Your intuition is trying to tell you something. When experts, so-called experts, told James Dyson that, his revolutionary wheelbarrow, the ballbarrow, was impossible. He said, this only strengthened my resolve and made me more determined to prove them wrong. Another one of his most important ideas and one I've never forgotten since the first time I read it. You simply cannot mix your

messages when selling something new. Not only, I got to pause here, not only is, I love the stubborn genius of Dyson. I love the products he makes. I think they're the best products in their category in the world. But he's also an absolute genius when it comes to selling and marketing. This is so important. 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. So he gives an example. Dyson's vacuum cleaner could also be used as a dry cleaner for your clothes. He never mentioned that in his ads. You want a single message expressed clearly. You want a single message expressed clearly. This is important to repeat over and over again

because even the best among us make this mistake. I think Steve Jobs' marketing and his communication skills, some of the best that the world has ever seen. And even he would understand and he would preach over and again. We need to have a single idea expressed clearly. But he would even fall to make that mistake and fall into the trap of unnecessary complexity. So there is this Steve's advertising partner, this guy named Lee Clow.

He's the one that did the 1984 Apple ad. He also did the think different Apple ad when Steve came back. And there's a great story in one of the books that I read about Steve that perfectly illustrates Dyson's, point here. So Steve was pushing, which is unusual for him, he was pushing to cram multiple selling points into an ad. And Lee Cloud did this incredible demonstration to convey his point of why we're not going to do that. So he crumpled up one piece of paper into a little ball and tossed it to Steve. And Steve caught it. And Lee says, that's a good ad. Then Lee crumpled up

five paper balls and threw them all at once and Steve caught none. That is a bad ad. Lee's point just like Dyson's point, the more messages you throw at people, the less they remember. One clear idea per ad wins. And then another great idea that he learned from making the mistake. He's trying to save us. We're trying to let us benefit from his experience. Appeal to a specific need. Do not make your product too wide.

Narrow it down. So in addition to making the ballbarrow, he was also inventing all these other products that would help with all your gardening needs. And so says, what we were attempting to offer was a. solution to all of your gardening troubles. Consumers were simply not able to grasp so many improvements in one fell swoop. And the thing was too universal. It was to all purpose. Isn't it fascinating? He made the same exact mistake on the sea truck. A few years later, he's making the mistake again. This is why it's so important to repeat all this. Repetition is persuasive. You have to

remind yourself over and over again. You and I are guaranteed going to make mistakes in the future that we know better. We simply should not do. We should try to avoid them as such as we can. Consumers were simply not able to grasp so many improvements from one fell swoop, and the thing was too universal, to all purpose. Had we begun it as a greenhouse watering system with a single time-saving benefit, thus appealing to a specific need, it would have bedded down nicely into a real market. Another super important idea. You have to think about the incentives of the people that you are selling to. Again, Dyson has learned from his mistakes. He invents the world's first psychonic vacuum cleaner. That means it doesn't have a bag. Do you know what he does?

He then goes and tries to sell his invention to people that make 500 million a year selling vacuum bags. You cannot sell a backless vacuum cleaner to people that make 500 million a year selling vacuum bags. No one is ever eager to fix a cash machine that's not broken. You have to think about the incentives of the people you're selling to. Something Dyson is going to repeat over and over again, retention of total control. He writes, 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, then you will be better able to sell it, and then to go back and to

improve it. 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, and something that is obvious in both books, especially the second one, because it covers much longer, you know, more decade-long history, two-decade-long history of Dyson. The more Dyson was able to control, the better his product and his company became. And any time he didn't retain control, anytime he didn't follow his own star,

which is one of my favorite things he ever said, he wind up getting met with failure. When he gets kicked out of his first company, which I'll talk to you about in a little bit, and one of the reasons he said he got kicked out is one, he didn't understand how to take care of himself, didn't have control, but he also didn't follow his own star. So one of the things that he learned from his designer engineer heroes.

So these are people like the, he repeats a lot of these people over and over again, which is very fascinating, how many ideas he took from their career. So like the founder of Honda, the founders of Sony, the designer of the Mini, the Mini Cooper, the inventor of the Jet Engine. This is what he says. Don't copy the opposition. Don't worry about market research. Follow your own star.

This is what successful entrepreneurs do. The opposite of following your own star is following the herd. And James has a really interesting take on why imitation is actually dangerous to your business. He says, the best kind of business is one where you can sell a product at a high price with a good margin and in enormous volumes. For that, you have to develop a product that works better and looks better than existing ones. That type of investment is long-term and high-risk, or at least it looks like a high-risk policy. In the longer view, it is not half as likely to prove hazardous to one's financial health as simply following the herd. To me, that is an echo of Peter Thiel's idea that he shares in the book 0 to 1.

If you want to create and capture lasting value, do not build an undifferentiated commodity business. business. And one of the positive byproducts of creating a truly unique and differentiated product is that for innovative and intrinsically excellent products, markets are often larger than you can predict. Dyson certainly found that with his invention of the vacuum cleaner and all the other ones that came after that. But he learned that from studying the founders of Sony. I've told you over and over again, it's very strange how many of the founders that you and I admire. I'm talking about Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, James Dyson, they studied the founders of Sony. You should go back and listen to the two episodes I did on Akio Marito, who's the founder of Sony.

You have all these legit geniuses saying, hey, I learned a lot from this guy. And this is one thing that Dyson learned from them, the fact that, you know, for innovative, intrinsically excellent products, markets are often large and you can predict. Sony hoped to sell 5,000 walkmans a month. They sold 50,000 in the first two months. By the time production ended, they had sold more than 400 million walkmans. For that to happen, the product has to be differentiated and it has to have intrinsic excellence. He says over and over again, his story, the reason he thought he was successful, he says, it has all happened, I really believe, because of the intrinsic excellence of the machine. He's talking, he's talking about the dual cyclone vacuum cleaner.

Another idea that I first read, you know, five, six years ago that grabbed a hold of me. The entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer. So he tries selling his ballbarrow to stores, like home improvement stores, and all the buyers say, no, this thing is too different, this thing is too weird, we're not buying. He goes direct by running ads in newspapers, and he starts making sales immediately. The entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer. One of Dyson's heroes that he mentions a bunch is Thomas Edison. And an idea that Dyson and Edison both believed in is the fact that ideas are produced by action. Dyson writes, no one has ever had an idea staring at a drawing board.

So do not do this. Francis Bacon 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. Do not sit and expect ideas to come. And one of the reasons, in addition to, I'm hugely inspired by his perseverance, hugely inspired by the unique ideas that he has in the book and his unique business philosophy. But he's also funny as hell.

These books make you, especially his first one, makes you laugh. So he ends this section. He goes, always bear in mind, though, that bacon died of pneumonia trying to invent frozen chicken. so don't take it too far. And another thing that I love about Dyson that he shares with Steve Jobs and really there's a lot of ideas that I've, you know,

because I just did this episode on Elon Musk or how Elon works, there's a lot of ideas that Dyson and Elon, even though they're completely different businesses, they arrived at similar conclusions. And one of them is that founder-led sales is the most powerful tool. That the best spokesperson for the company is the founder.

And so Dyson says, selling goes with manufacturing as wheels do with a bicycle. Products do not walk off shelves and into people's homes. And when a product is entirely new, the art of selling is needed to explain it, what it is, how it works, why you might need and want it.

Only by trying to sell the thing you've made yourself, by dealing with customers' problems and product failings as they arise, can you really come to understand what you have done? To bond with your invention and to improve it, only the man who's brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on others and demand a heavy price with all of his heart.

Steve Jobs is the perfect illustration of this. Founder-led sales is a powerful sales tool, and so is my partner Vanta. Vanta is a powerful tool to get more sales because Vanta's value prop is very clear. Vanta helps your company prove you're secure so more customers will use your product or service. Many companies won't sign contracts unless you're certified,

and this is causing you to lose out on sales. That is why the average Vanta customer reports a 526% return on investment after becoming a Vanta customer. Vanta helps you automate compliance, security, and trust. You can think of Vanta like an intelligence security system that helps your company pass audits without tons of manual work. So not only do you make more money with Vanta, but you also save more time.

Manual compliance is slow and painful. Doing everything by hand takes months. The best companies will not tolerate wasting valuable company time, doing something with labor when technology can automate it. That is a very old and powerful idea. It goes all the way back to Andrew Carney and it's an idea that you and I see over and over and over again in these biographies. Vanta will help you win trust, close deals, and stay secure faster and with less effort.

Go to vanta.com for such founders, and you will get $1,000 off. That is vanta.com for such founders. I will also leave a link down below. Now, Dyson also has a bunch of ideas on hiring. You're going to see a lot of his ideas on hiring sound exactly what Jeremy Fry did. Hire young, enthusiastic people, not full of other companies' bad ideas. So Jeremy Fry believed in taking on. young people with no experience because this way he employed those with curious and unsullied.

This is a very interesting word they used here. Unsullied and open minds. The way the Dyson and Fry looked at this is that it might be impossible to unlearn bad habits picked up at subpar organizations. And so he says that Dyson, we don't particularly value experience. Experience tells you how things should be done when we are much more interested in how things shouldn't be done. If you want to pioneer and invent new technology, you need to step.

into the unknown. And in that realm, experience can be a hindrance. I employ brilliant young graduates with no experience at all. I want free thinkers who can take the company forward and have revolutionary ideas just like Jeremy Fry did. And one thing I admire about Dyson is he takes his ideas to the furthest point possible. Dyson started his own university. And of course, if he's going to start his own university, he's not going to be like, well, let's just copy whatever other university is doing. Dyson demands difference in everything. He says, if I wasn't getting anywhere with the education system in my quest to raise the number and quality of engineering graduates, why didn't I start a university of my own? So he's like, well, let's just, if we're starting from

scratch, let's just redesign this. What would we do? And so he says, there's no tuition fees. Our undergraduates work three days a week with Dyson on real research projects alongside young Dyson engineers. We pay them a proper salary, and then we teach them for the remaining two days. When the undergraduates complete their four-year course, they will be debt-free. I think that's really important because one of the things that's so important to understand about the first autobiography is the fact that Dyson persevered under 20 years of crushing debt. He literally, literally signed over every last possession he owned to finance his dream. There's no way that he would saddle young people with that crushing debt.

He talks about it over and over again. He actually says something very interesting when he compares what he had to do in college compared to his son, which we'll get to in a minute. And so one of his ideas is like, well, shouldn't the university just be like the actual work instead of taking tests? One of his heroes is a guy named Frank Whittle, who invented the jet engine. And this is what Dyson had to say about him. Frank Whittle is a good example of how you don't need to be good at exams in school to

change the world. Having left school at 15, he became a test pilot. His was a life of learning and tenaciousness, just like this. Dyson. He went on to invent the jet engine, changing the course of aviation and our lives with it. Education should be about problem solving rather than retaining knowledge simply to pass exams. And so one of the things that Dyson teaches everybody in his company, but also he learned from Jeremy Fry and others, is that it can always be done better. He's got beautiful ideas around this that we'll revisit multiple times today. Constantly ask yourself, how can

this get better? Jeremy Fry was always looking for a better way of doing things. Jeremy He fried loathed, arrogance, and experts by which he meant those who want you to believe that they know everything about a subject. This is such an important part. When the inventive mind knows instinctively that there are always further questions to be asked and new discoveries to be made. This is why the stubborn determination he has is so important. Aim not to be clever, but to be dogged, to be determined.

When I got to this section, I wrote spontaneously, one of the most important notes I think I've ever read because it just finally clicked for me. He's talking about aim not to be clever. He's got this anti-brilliance campaign. He'll talk about a lot. Aim not to be clever, but to be dogged, to be determined. And this is another life for myself. A clever person doesn't spend 14 years building 5,127 prototypes

of the world's first cyclonic vacuum cleaner. A determined person does. Determination over the long term is the foundation that progress and innovation are built upon. There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There's only dogged persistence. And in the end, you make it look like a quantum leap. Dyson brings up the fact that everybody tried to get him to sell the company over and over again

as soon as he had a little bit of success and if you actually watch how he spends his time. He likes designing things. He likes being in the factory. He likes being on the production lines. He says, I happen to find factories and production lines romantic places. They are truly exciting.

It's a great example of this maxim that you don't work all your life to do what you love, to not do it. Go back to his idea of the importance of retention of total control. This is also something he learned from Jeremy Frye when he analyzed how Frye organized his business. If you have a good idea for a new product, you engineer, you prototype it, you manufacture it, you market, and you sell it.

Retain total control. And to do this, you must have a skepticism of experts. If you want to do something new, if you want to do something your own way, you must have a skepticism of experts. Experts tend to be confident that they have all the answers. And because of this trait, they can kill new ideas. This is why I have long admired engineers like Alec Isaghanes, and Andre Sitchoen, I had to look at it, I thought I pronounce his last name, who questioned orthodoxy, experimented, took calculated risks, stood on the edge of error and got things right.

And when they got there, they continued to ask questions. He will bring up both Alec and Andre over and over again. Another person that he greatly admired, he wound up reading a biography when he was in college of Buckminster Fuller. And he loved what Buckminster Fuller said. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, you build a new model that makes the existing. existing model obsolete. And to do that, you need new thinking about old problems. Buckminster Fuller had been described as one of the century's greatest dreamers. Fuller dreamt because his

vision was of a world that did not yet exist. The value of dreaming was the first thing that I learned from him. Another one of Dyson's ideas is if it's not beautiful, you're not done. It is only by remaining as close as possible to the pure function of the object that beauty can be achieved. and then when you build something beautiful, this is how you sell it. You need to tell the story of how your product is made. This is genius. This is also a very enduring part of human nature. People buy stories.

I can give you examples going back 200 years in the history of entrepreneurship. People buy stories. You need to educate them on how your product is made, how it's designed, why it's designed. This is genius. So think about this. You're going to walk into a store. This is on the dual cyclone vacuum cleaner. You know, you're going to walk into a store to buy a vacuum cleaner.

there's going to be six in a row, five are going to look very similar. Then you get down to this weird, strange-looking one that doesn't have a bag. And so that catches your eye. And then hanging from the handle of this strange-looking vacuum cleaner is this story that tells the story of who made it and why it was made. So this idea, he calls the story leaflet. So it says it was a small booklet. We reckoned that if people were going to spend 200 pounds on this vacuum cleaner,

which was invented, engineered, and designed by one person, who was personally accountable for everyone that was sold, then they had a right to know who I was. The fact that I was a bloke making and caring about vacuum cleaners was a selling point that would be useful to make clear. So we produced this little booklet that told, in a couple of hundred words, the story of the dual cyclone, and we persuaded our retailers to hang one on every Dyson in their shop.

Customers would read the story, and then they'd buy the vacuum cleaner. Steve Jobs said that the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world. Don Valentine, founder of Sequoia, says the art of storytelling is critically important. Most of the entrepreneurs who come talk to us cannot tell a story. Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because that's how the money works. The money flows as a function of the stories. People buy stories. That is exactly what my new partner, Collateral, does.

Collateral transforms your complex ideas into compelling narratives. I need you to remember their website, which is easy to remember because it's collateral.com. Collateral crafts institutional grade marketing collateral, and they do this for private equity, private credit, real estate, venture capital, family offices, hedge funds, oil and gas companies, all kinds of businesses. I have friends that have used collateral for their marketing collateral and have raised billions of dollars of capital and have made hundreds of millions of dollars. I will leave a link down below, but make sure you go to collateral.com and improve the way

that your company is telling its own story. Storytelling is one of the highest forms of leverage and you should invest heavily in it and you can do that by going to collateral.com. Now, I want to go back to this idea that Dyson's philosophy, his company building philosophy, it only works if you like the work and you're like Dyson.

And so Dyson was talking about the fact that, you know, he didn't have a father, he was very scared that he was going to fail and he talks about realizing, oh, I'm very different from my peers. And one of the ways that he realized this, or one of the first examples of where he realized this, is in college.

And he says, I was motivated in an almost devilish way compared to the other students. And in the second autobiography, he talks about the difference, the fact that, you know, he was a James did not party in college. He was very focused, disciplined. He was very serious. He worked all the time. Then and now. And he talked about the fact that he built an entire different world for his son to grow up in.

And so by time his son gets to college, they're very successful. His son didn't have to live like he did. And Dyson says something very fascinating here. He says, no amount of ambition for my son's professional happiness could have made me wish on him the fear of failure that drove me then and still does. And so I think it's key to ask, why is Dyson? You know, this guy, he brings up the fear of failure over and over again. He brings up the fact that he's just obsessed with the retention of total control. So why is he so obsessed with control and driven by a fear of failure?

He is kicked out of his own company when he's 32 years old. So keep mind. This is what I mentioned earlier. He left a job that he loved with his mentor that he treasured to be his own man. He is a born entrepreneur. And he did this when he had two little kids and a big mortgage. That's what I said earlier. Risk is another important part of his philosophy.

So he had partners, this is the ballbarrow. They screwed him over and kicked him out of the company. And this is what he says about this on his relationships with the products that he lost. They were part of me. To lose my invention was like giving birth and then lose. losing the child. I was completely shattered by it. I had lost five years of work. I had failed to protect the one thing that was most valuable to me. If I had kept control, I could have done what I wanted. I learned very much the hard way. I should have held onto the patent and licensed it to

the company. So he talked about it over and over again. He was the inventor. Then when they form a company around this venture, he signed the patent over to the company. But that means if he lost the company, he lost the patent. And it's exactly what happened. I lost the license, the patent and the company. In this sense, the ballbarrow, my first consumer product was a failure, but one from which I had learned valuable lessons. There was a lesson about not assigning patents, another about not having shareholders. I learned the importance of having absolute control of my company. I knew how to make and sell, but not how to look after myself. From then on, I was determined not to let go of my inventions, patents and companies. Today, Dyson is a

global company and I own it completely. He has no shareholders. I own it and this really matters to me. It remains a private company. Why is that so important to him? I think you've already picked up on this now. Controls more important than money to him. When you own the whole company, all decisions are your own. That is way more important to Dyson than money is. And what's funny about this is Dyson is the first time where I realize this idea that I describe as anti-business billionaire.

You have these people that are so obsessed with the quality of the product that they're making and so they make a bunch of non-financial decisions and it's all about increasing the quality of the product. So I mean people like James Lyson, people like Steve Jobs, people like Yvonne Chonard of Patagonia. And what's fascinating about this is if you obsess over the quality of the product you're making

and you retain control of your company over the long term, They wind up with the money anyways. And what's fascinating about this part of the story, it's his lowest point in his life, but this is also the beginning of the greatest adventure and greatest company. This is the beginning of Dyson. I was penniless again with no job and no income. Now he has three kids.

I had three adorable children, a large mortgage to pay, and nothing to show for the past five years of toil. This was a very low moment and deeply worrying. My confidence took a big blow and it would take some years to regain it. And this is the importance of relationships and people to understand you. to Jeremy Frye actually gives Dyson $25,000 to start his first vacuum cleaner company. And Dyson talks about why this is so important. Fry knew that things don't always work out immediately

and that innovation takes time and persistence. And we're going to talk about superhuman levels of persistence. For three, remember, he has this idea for dual cyclone vacuum cleaner. He doesn't know how to make it yet. So for three years, for the next three years, I made cyclones alone. I could not afford to hire anyone to help. He sets up in this little coach house in his. backyard. This coach house has no water, no heating, no phone, no gas, or no electricity. This is going

to be the beginning of Dyson, one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world. So one of the first things he does, he says, I put in electricity and gave myself a single light bulb to work by. I had nothing but a workbench and a few simple tools, but I was determined that here I would make the damn thing myself. I made a new prototype every day for more than a thousand days. And to me, this is the most important part of the story. This is the part that's full of terror and agony and doubt. Listen to what he says about the next 14 years of struggle. Well, it's easy, of course, for me to celebrate my doggedness now and say that it's all you need to succeed. The truth is that it demoralized me terribly. I would crawl into the house

every night covered in dust after a long day, exhausted and depressed because the 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. And he's got a beautifully simple maximum about this. Perseverance is not cheap. Dyson's instincts are obviously to manufacture the product himself, but he was out of money and he's deep in debt. So him and Jeremy Frye decide we're going to try to license it first. We're going to invent it, and then we're going to let a larger company pick up the bill of manufacturing. We'll get a little bit of money up front, and then we'll get a royalty on every single one that is sold.

That idea did not work out at all. After two years of trying and then failing to license his invention, this is what he said, bankruptcy or death looking the most likely outcome of efforts. Three years into trying to license, and he had still not made a penny. This is what he says about that time in his life. My doggedness and self-belief in the absence of any real evidence that they were justified were beginning to look more and more like insanity. And one thing that he knows in his bones is if he didn't stay on top of this, the project would have died.

He says a project will die if the original designer doesn't stay on it. The self-belief is not there to press through the hard times. And so after going down this licensing path and seeing very, Very little progress. Dyson says, forget it. I'm just going to do it myself. And so he writes, almost all of our license agreements had failed

and precious time was wasted. Instead of relying on other companies to make our technology, why not reverse the decision that Jeremy and I had made several years previously? We could take on these competitors that were content selling bags and their loss of suction

and we'd be free to determine our own future, our own development, and our own designs, instead of feeling dread about taking on this immense task of becoming a manufacturer, we felt liberated. And so again, we see the stubborn genius of James Dyson. He tried that this is such an important part. He tried to raise money.

He does not have any money. He tried to raise money to go into production by selling equity in his company. And no one would invest. So he borrows $600,000 for the tooling that he needs by putting up his house as collateral, and this is what he said about this time in his life. I am not one to give up. This is very important. Entrepreneurs need encouragement. I was talking to Todd Graves, the founder of Raising Keynes, about this. Todd was on that show Shark Tank, and he told me that he had a problem, essentially, you know, you go on the show and you kind of pass judgment on

entrepreneurs, ideas, and he just had a problem, like putting them down. Because at the beginning of Raising Keynes is a lot like Dyson. Todd had to go to insane lengths to get the money to chase after his dream when other people wouldn't invest. And I just remember during this part of our conversation, I was like banging on the table. I was literally pounding on the table. I think it was yelling like, fuck shark tank or something like that. And it's, I have

nothing against the show or the people that work on it. But the arrogance that people have, that think they have some kind of magical predictive ability. Just think about this. Dyson will be one of the most valuable businesses on the planet and no investor

believed in it. Not a single one. Not a single investor believed in it. I get asked by founders all the time. Like, what do you think of my idea? And my answer is all the same. I don't know. And it doesn't matter what I think. It matters what you will do. And no one knows what you will do more than you. Dyson was never, never going to quit. He says, as I often said, I aim not to be clever, but to be dogged. And my doggedness had got me so far to a point where I had my very own cyclonic vacuum cleaner at last. On May 2nd, 1992, this date is important. On May 2nd, 1992, I found myself looking at the first fully operational, visually perfect, Dyson Dual Cyclone. I was 31 years old when I tore the

bag off my Hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole. May 2nd, 1992 was my 45th birthday. 5,127 prototypes, 14 years of struggle, one mule refusing to quit, one mule refusing to retreat. How the fuck could you not find that inspiring? If you think about everything that will happen over the next 30 years after he persevered for that, all the success, the joy, the accomplishment, that would have not happened if he quit. That, that right there is why this is my number one recommendation. This is not something that 1% of people would do. This is much, much rare. This is more like 0.000,000, 1% of people would do this.

And it turns out that someone who perseveres to that and has 40 years of experience is someone we should read about. It's someone we should listen to. It all goes down to what he said at the beginning, the vision of a single man pursued with dogged determination that was nothing less than obsession. Listen to how he talks about this. This is after he sets up his own factory.

Now they were making ourselves under our own total control, there's that word again, we were making far better products, more of them and much quicker. I cradled in my arms a dual cyclone built by my own staff at my own factory. It was amazing. 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. Fifteen years of invention, frustration, and determination were finally beginning to pay off. I was now a proper manufacturer. It was thrilling to see the sight and sound of a production line in full swing. I found it impressive. I found it staggering even, and I still do.

That is incredible. Imagine how it feels for him to be able to write those words. he's writing those words 30 years after it happened and he still feels that way and the way he describes this is in my opinion exactly what your company should be we knew that this was the most exciting adventure of our lives and dyson knows it would have never happened if he relinquished total control from the first sprouting of the idea to research and development testing and prototyping model making and engineering tooling production sales and marketing all the way into the homes of the nation it is most likely to succeed if the original mule sees it right through. If you make something, sell it yourself, and so he did, and absolutely nothing went bang, except, of course, everyone else's market share. And then he gets into a lot of these great ideas. I told you before, I just absolutely love his ideas on marketing and sales.

He says, my belief is that only the person with the closest relationship with the product could make a success of it. It is the people who make the thing that understands them. Selling anything is about seeing how the product fits into the life of the customer, not about mouthing off about how great it is. It's about discovering a need and satisfying it. And the way to best satisfy somebody's need is to have this permanent dissatisfaction with your product. He says later on, if you are like this, guess what?

You'll never be able to turn it off. You'll be like that at work. You'll be like that at home. You have to use that as an asset. It is not a liability. Have permanent dissatisfaction with your product. Just because a product appears to be selling well, An engineer must keep on improving.

They must keep feeling permanently dissatisfied. And then he's got a great line about never being afraid to keep taking risk. You have to risk failure. That's all experimentation is. But on the other side of successful experimentation is a better product. That's this whole point. I had discovered the confidence and the stupidity to start doing things differently. That's great language.

You need confidence and stupidity to do things differently because at the beginning, your work is going to suck. Your work will be bad. more advice on how to get the word out and how to best market and sell your product. I made editorial comment the basis of all my thinking about publicity. Why? One decent editorial will count for a thousand ads. And then when he does run ads, it's very clear and straightforward.

The ads are always talking about what need it fills for the customers and how it's different. Dyson advertising focused on how our products are engineered and how they work. And they lean into their difference. He's got, this is what I'm about to reach you, one of the most important. two sentences in both books. I don't know, six, seven hundred pages I read. They only come to you because you're eccentric. They can get conformity anywhere.

Another thing that he'll repeat, once you have retained total control, you need to focus only on your company. One of their, something that Dyson's world class at is designing and manufacturing these motors. And they're so good, everybody tries to buy them from him. And this is what he says. People often ask if we would supply other companies with our motors. Although it may be profitable to do so,

we supply no one else besides ourselves because I want Dyson engineers to be 100% focused on our next exciting motor development and not on retrofitting our motors to someone else's product. Back to difference for the sake of difference. Copping reduces choices for consumers. Rather than encouraging different products working in different ways and achieving different objectives, we want difference in originality. We don't all want to sing the same song and look at the same painting. My own heartfelt conviction is difference for the sake of difference. This is core to his philosophy. I think the way to really think about this is just ask yourself, like, how can I be different than my competitors?

It is a great question to sit and think about. Aim to improve products simply for improvements's sake. Once you start down the path, you never stop. It can always be better. This is, again, what he has in common with a lot of history's great entrepreneurs, no resting on laurels, no sleeping on wins. They make something wonderful and then they do it again. And if you take some of these ideas and you follow down this path

and you don't stop over a long period of time, a lot can change in a lifetime. This is one of the greatest experience. of reading these two books back to back. There is, so remember, go back to his first company he starts, right? They gets kicked out of. So he's working on this in his late 20s, early 30s, is the ballbarrow. And so they do a photo shoot for an ad that they're making for the ballbarrow.

They do a photo shoot at this place called Doddington Park. Dyson's wife is photographed pushing the ballbarrow around the grounds for the camera. And then Dyson says, we could have never guessed then that a quarter of a century later, Doddington Park would be our family home. Family home is a funny way to describe a 300-acre estate where the main house is 52,000 square feet. He starts out from a place of being in debt and nearly broke to 25 years later owning the place. Another idea that Dyson has in common with Elon cut out middlemen and those who add no value. Delete, delete, delete.

They also both believe in iterative design. I believe in progress by stages. in the iterative development that I have described as Edisonian. This is such a great way to describe why this is so important. It's that persistent trial and error that allows you to wake up one morning after many, many mornings with a world-beating product. Constant development will result in the end in a better product. And then he talks about why you don't want to separate design and engineering from manufacturing.

This is exactly what Elon's point was about not outsourcing manufacturing. This is what Dyson says. Inventions generate new inventions. ideas generate new ideas opportunities generate new opportunities the thing about inventing is that it is 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 i am a great believer in the auto generation of inventions out of each other a kind of asexual reproduction of the product gene it is usually when you actually come to design the product that some of the most

interesting things happen. 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 dozen years, dozens of other inventions were generated along the way. And at the very same time that he is recommending that you adopt this Edisonian principle of design, the fact that you need to make these small iterations over an insanely long period of time, that you should only change one thing at a time and see what difference that one change made he says ours has neither been a quick nor cheap approach but it is very valuable investment

in new technology requires many leaps of faith and a huge financial commitment over long periods in route there are multiple failures sleepless nights and a great deal of frustration and that last sentence is super important you're not getting around that you're going to this is why excellence is a capacity to take pain you have to persevere through multiple failures you're going to have nights you can't sleep and you're going to be a lot of pain and frustration that is part of the job. Now, he has a really interesting idea how to motivate people to persevere through this. So he keeps artifacts of great inventions around Dyson's headquarters as a reminder of persevering through difficulty. So like Frank Whittles jet engine, the mini, Harrier Jumpjet, and this is why he

does this. Each artifact has its own story of against the odds progress and lessons on why having faith in your ideas and believing in progress is so important. What these pieces of history demonstrate is that it's hard for other people to understand or get excited by a new idea. This requires self-reliance and faith on the part of the inventor. I can also see that it's hard for an

outsider to understand the challenge and the thrill of inventing new technology, designing and manufacturing the product and then selling it to the world. It's very fascinating how much of these books he's talking really talks about the importance

of keeping your head in a good place. It is very dangerous to doubt yourself. Plenty of outsiders, they have enough doubt for you. You don't need to add to that pile. And so Dyson writes, you have to give the project 100% of your creative energy. You have to believe that you're going to get there in the end. You need determination, patience and willpower.

The funny thing about this story is that I knew it would turn out like this from the very beginning, despite all the setbacks and lawsuits and cash crises, the ridicule, the bad feelings and all the doubt I always knew deep down. And one thing that was very beneficial through, you know, this decade and a half of just crazy struggle, he calls it you should possess naive intelligence. The way I would think about what he's saying is like you should possess raw, untrained cleverness. And so he says, I had various degrees of perseverance underpinned by a kind of naive intelligence, by which I mean following your own star along a path where you stop to question both your

self and expert opinion along the way. The updated subtitle to the second biography is a life of learning through failure. This is exactly what he's talking about. You're questioning your initial hypothesis. You're questioning what outsiders tell you is or is not possible.

And he says learning by trial and error can be exciting. The lessons learn deeply ingrained. Learning by failure is a remarkably good way of gaining knowledge. It is part of learning. And you go back to another persistent reoccurring part of his business building philosophy.

You have to be asking yourself, how can I be different from my competitors? What assets do I have that they cannot replicate? And so he says that that comes down even to what you name your company. The company name was crucial. I was going up against these big multinational companies and my great advantage in a jungle ruled by faceless conglomerates was that I own this product myself

and was personally responsible for everything I sold to my customers. And so I made it clear in the name of the company. I intended to design other products too. And they would all be closely identified with me personally. Again, what do I have that makes me different from my competitors? It's very interesting. He says, from the get-go, we were not just going to be a vacuum cleaner company. I knew I was going to design other products too.

That doesn't mean he wasn't focused. It was 17 years. He had 17 years of focus before launching a new product. For 17 years, I had kept my head down making vacuum cleaners. And so then Dyson has another idea that he learned from some of the great engineers. and designers that he admired, lightness is a guiding principle. We remain a company primarily of engineers, and because of this, we sought to use as little energy on materials as possible to solve every task. Lean engineering is good engineering.

This is something engineers I admired have done since the advent of powered machinery. For me, lightness, which he defines as lean engineering and material efficiency, for me, lightness is a guiding principle. I don't know why, but one of my favorite quotes, Popped in my head when I read that paragraph. And the quote is, a novice is easily spotted because they do too much. Too many ingredients, too many movements, too much explanation. A master uses the fewest motions required to fulfill their intention. Charlie Munger has this great line that he says intense interest in any subject is indispensable

if you're really going to excel in it. If you actually examine Dyson definitely fits into this category, but the people that he also admires. They were all obsessive, impractical product-driven enthusiasts. And it's just an unfair advantage if you can maneuver yourself into a position, if you can just work on what you're intensely interested in. And you see a lot of people that get to the top of their fields did exactly this. 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 a hundred years ago, George Safford Parker was nutty about fountain pens.

These were all obsessive, impractical product-driven enthusiast. This is exactly how I would describe Dyson. Remember, he's got another example. If you're completely obsessed with your product and you never want to stop improving it, he says, remember, there's nothing wrong with being persistently dissatisfied or even afraid. Magic, the unique way a product does what it does is never to be underestimated. And he's got more advice on who to hire. He already said, hey, I want, you know, blank slates.

I want people with unsullied minds that haven't been ruined and picked up bad habits from subpar organizations. And I also want determined, very, very determined people. You should hire for determination. Here's an example of that. Ross was exactly the sort of dogged, stubborn achiever that we needed. When I first met him, he had been in the process of building a house at the bottom of a very steep slope, down which the builders refused to carry the bricks, claiming it was too difficult and dangerous. So Ross carried every single brick for his house down the slope by himself, by hand,

working at it steadily every single morning before showing up for work. This was a man who could build things and companies are built, not made. Another idea he has in common with Elon, engineering and design are not separate. Do not separate them. Engineering and design are not separate. Designers are as involved in testing as engineers are in conceptual. ideas. At Dyson, we see no barriers between these disciplines. Maintain full control over everything always. Design, engineer, manufacture, and market your own invention. The ultimate challenge was to

design, make, and sell inventive and wholly new products. To do this, you need to be more than a designer or an engineer. You need control over the whole process. Just as my models, my role models have been, like the founder of Honda, Citroen, and Sony. literally just using their ideas over and over and over again. And one way to figure out who you should admire is like just find the person that makes products that you absolutely love. When Dyson was in college, he would run around, he would drive a super cub, the Honda motorcycle. And so he talked about this, the invention of the engineer So Chiro Honda, who I greatly admired for his addiction to the continuous improvement of products. This is going to sound just like Dyson.

So he's an inventor and engineer, just like Dyson. I admire greatly for his addiction to the continuous improvement of his products, which Dyson has. So he's talking about the supercub. He says a supercub with simplicity itself to own and ride. This was an early example of an inventive manufacturer taking an existing product, just like Dyson did, in this case the low-cost motorcycle, and transforming it into a much better and much more attractive proposition than anything available. So Chirohonda's genius was to think against the grain while focusing on continuous improvement,

just like James Dyson did after. Then he talks about another one of his heroes that he mentions over and over again. Alec Isaganus, who designed the mini. Alex's view was that market research is bunk and that one should never copy the opposition. He designed the best-selling British car of all time. If he believed in market research, it would have never existed. Now, this is so wild.

I told you, I watch all of Dyson's product presentations. I find him very, very fascinating. I think his ability to communicate, which is very simple and straightforward, easy and understand. Dyson just gave a demonstration of his new products. And he literally starts the presentation with why he had mine, Myers Alec Iseganis and what he learned from how Alec designed the mini and how he used some of those ideas for the new product he just made.

How cool is that? I really hope that you're using ideas that you learn from this podcast half a century later. That is so cool to me. Another thing that he says over and over again, he's got an anti-brilliance campaign. He says, encourage employees to be different on principle. The way David Ogilvy says this is that the beginning of greatness is to be different in the beginning of failure is to be the same. I think Dyson would agree with that. Dyson says, 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. I don't think I've ever heard this idea anywhere else. And if you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse because there's seven billion people out there thinking in train tracks and thinking what they've been taught to think. be a bit wacko and you shake people up and we all need shaking up and then i mentioned earlier why one of the benefits of reading his first autobiography and his second too but really his first autobiography he's just he's just flat out hilarious he just like makes you laugh all the time

and so he was trying to tell us hey you can't you can't lead your employees by isolating yourself from them so don't do that but he says in a very funny way i am not i am not the sort of swollen gutted belching business luncher that sets off in a limo for four hours of beef and claret every day at noon and comes back to do little more than gurgle and fart all afternoon. I

eat on site like everyone else. And then another great thing about him is not only is he funny, but he's very easy to understand. I remind people that the assembly lines on the assembly lines that they need not be in a hurry. Speed is not important and neither are numbers. The only

thing that is important is doing everything carefully, thoroughly and vigilantly, new assembly workers used to the methods of other manufacturers in the market have sometimes become accustomed to a mentality that works at full speed all day to achieve mere numbers at the expense of care and quality. Again, he's not saying numbers don't matter. It's not saying speed doesn't matter. He says you never, ever sacrifice care and quality for speed. In fact, when I met Todd Graves, I got a tour of the very first Raising Keynes that he opened like 30 years ago. And in the back where customers can't see, there's a giant sign on the wall that says exactly this. It says never sacrifice quality for speed.

I try to do this. I aim to make a new podcast every seven days. When you notice that I am late and I'm not hitting that seven day number, it's not, it's because the quality isn't there yet. It bothers the hell out of me, but I'm not, no one's going to remember if I put a podcast out five days from, you know, you're hopefully listening to this 10 years from now. No one's going to remember if I put it out five days late. they're going to remember if it wasn't great. So I love that, never sacrifice quality for speed. We are never satisfied with the product and are always trying to improve it.

We are fascinated to the point of obsession with the product. And then finally, we get to the point, I'm reading both books at the same time, re-reading both books at the same time. I wasn't sure if I was going to combine them, that wasn't a kind of unexpected idea. When I got to this part, when I got to this part in the second book, I knew it. This idea and the way he describes this is too important. It had to be both books. And it starts out with him having a great way to describe what being an entrepreneur actually is. Ours is a life of challenge and frustration, all of which is a fulfilling pastime.

Being an entrepreneur is not necessary about making a fast buck. It's about creating new products and new opportunities, generating rewarding employment and opportunities in the process. It is not easy. It may be necessary to change, to reinvent your business as circumstances change around you. Just as you think you have understood a situation and how things work, it changes without warning. There are traps around every corner. As soon as Dyson became successful, people asked me when I was going to sell the company. Once I had made my first million, it was surely time for me to get away from the sweat and grime and grim routine of the factory

and become a reclusive landowner building duck houses and cleaning the moat around my castle. Many wise friends advised me to sell when a few offers came in. A family business has most of its wealth tied up in the business, so continuing to keep it a family business is both a risk and a responsibility. But I like living on a nice edge, competing and building the business. I am passionate about developing new technology and working with a wonderful and creative team around me. Those kind people totally missed the point.

I didn't work on those 5,127 prototypes. or even set up Dyson to make money. I did it because I had a burning desire to do so. I find inventing, researching, testing, designing, and manufacturing both creative and satisfying. Going against established expert thinking was a huge risk. No one could confirm that what we were doing was a good idea. Everyone, in fact, confirmed the reverse. The data were all against it.

If, however, we had believed the data and had not trust. at our instincts, we would have ended up following the path of dull conformity. In following a different path, obstacles will be put in the way of pioneering manufacturers. Yet the process of creativity and of solving seemingly insolvable problems is rather wonderful. It is hard to be pioneering because you don't know whether or not you're going to succeed. You have to believe that you will succeed. It is scary. I am scared all the time.

Fear, though, can be a good thing as it pumps the adrenaline and motivates. A life of perpetual learning, pursuing science, engineering, and technology has been a magical and fulfilling adventure. Improving products through the application of technology and making them enjoyable and surprising to use is thrilling. For an engineer, the creative impulse, the desire to improve things, and the need to solve problems are a state of mind that cannot be switched off. It is there all the time, whether you're at work or at home. It is the intellectual challenge of seeing problems and developing a product or system that solves them. Scientists and engineers combined recognize today's problems and are capable of providing new solutions.

History has proved this time and time again.