James Dyson, Dyson

Summary

Podcast Summary: "James Dyson, Dyson" with David Senra

Podcast: David Senra | Host: Scicomm Media | Date: December 7, 2025

---

Overview

This episode features a wide-ranging, insightful conversation between host David Senra and legendary inventor James Dyson. The discussion explores Dyson's deep obsession with both history and technological innovation, the painful and rewarding process of invention, key mentors, lessons learned from failure, the founding philosophies of Dyson as a company, and Dyson's strong views on education, risk, and what it takes to build world-changing products.

The episode is rich with practical wisdom, personal stories, and candid reflections from Dyson on his decades-long journey, including first-hand accounts of struggle, risk-taking, and the dogged persistence required to create breakthrough inventions.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Obsession with History and Its Lessons

• Dyson describes his lifelong interest in Greek, Roman, and British history—and how lessons from history inform progress and governance today.
• Dyson links the cyclical nature of history to entrepreneurship: "history repeats itself and it's repeating itself rather too quickly at the moment. So history is interesting." ([00:12])

Notable Quote

"Learning from history is a form of leverage. And you can actually, you know, use ideas of people long dead and you'll find out that they were very similar to you, that they had the same... struggles, the same fears..."
— David Senra ([02:01])

2. The Role of Failure and Resilience in Invention

• Dyson emphasizes the importance of failure in creative processes. He notes his own "healthy obsession" with learning from what's gone wrong.
• He details the 14 years and 5,127 prototypes it took to develop the Dyson vacuum, stressing the “enjoyable struggle” and the learning extracted from each attempt.

Notable Moment

"You've got to enjoy failure, as that sounds a difficult thing to do. But you have to enjoy failure if you want to improve things... and it always saddens me that school doesn't really teach that..."
— James Dyson ([03:52])

3. Mission, Mentorship, and Early Lessons

• Dyson credits mentor Jeremy Fry, who broke down barriers between “professions,” inspiring Dyson to integrate engineering, design, manufacture, and sales.
• Both Dyson and Fry valued naivety and enthusiasm over experience in hiring — a philosophy Dyson maintains at his own company.

Memorable Quote

"If you're experienced, you know why not to do something... And often it's something that hasn't worked previously, that could work and is interesting to follow... I love naivety."
— James Dyson ([12:17])

4. The Structure and Rationale of Dyson University

• Dyson describes the origin and unique structure of the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology.
• Students work three days and study two, and are paid instead of taking on debt.
• The goal is to merge academic knowledge with hands-on practice, believing physical creation is undervalued in traditional education.

Notable Quote

"They love working with people who are earning money and having to make things work... and it inspires them to learn the academic side..."
— James Dyson ([18:00])

5. Early Businesses: Sea Truck & Ballbarrow

• Dyson shares the vast business lessons gleaned while working on these ventures—specifically the value of autonomy and the perils of bringing on investors who lack entrepreneurial understanding.
• He repeatedly notes the importance of having “skin in the game” and regretted not taking Fry on as a financial partner at first.

6. Psychological Roots of Risk Tolerance

• Dyson candidly discusses how personal adversity, particularly the loss of his father as a child, shaped his high risk tolerance and sense of urgency.
• This history led Dyson to embrace risk and difference as essential facets of his identity.

Moving Moment

"If you've lost a parent at that age... life can't get much worse. So you're prepared to take risks because you've started from a horrible starting point..."
— James Dyson ([23:53])

7. Inventing the Cyclone: Observation, Insight & Edisonian Process

• The "happy accident": Dyson noticed parallels between clogging vacuum bags and an industrial cyclone he built for the Ballbarrow factory, inspiring the bagless vacuum.
• Dyson stresses that breakthrough inventions typically arise from close observation, relentless prototyping, and learning by doing, not by inspiration alone.

Notable Segment

• Cyclone invention story ([38:03]–[42:09])

8. Licensing, Manufacturing, and the Pain of Lawsuits

• Dyson details his failed attempts to license his ideas—and the eventual necessity and satisfaction of doing it all himself, even borrowing heavily and enduring a grueling five-year lawsuit.
• This led to full ownership and control, key to Dyson’s subsequent global success.

9. The Importance of Focus, Single-Mindedness, and Control

• Dyson attributes his success to an "unbelievable focus"—refusing distractions, eschewing "Me Too" products, and pursuing only ideas that are different and better.
• He builds teams and structures that reinforce this approach and refuses to license core Dyson technology to others, seeing control as essential to product quality.

Notable Quotes

"Because that doesn't excite me... Life is for living. It's developing your technology and coming out with different radical products. That's what interests me, not making money per se."
— James Dyson ([74:00])

"Focus...it's one word. It's like they're unbelievably focused."
— David Senra ([78:23])

10. Intuition, Experience, and the Decision What to Build

• Dyson unpacks the nature of intuition—not as guesswork, but as a synthesis of thousands of micro-experiences and inputs.
• The decision on what to pursue is both informed and fragile; early ideas are easily destroyed by negativity.

Notable Quote

"Intuition isn't just... airy fairy. It's not a feeling... your brain has been fed with hundreds of different things and from that you make a decision."
— James Dyson ([80:32])

11. Lifelong Dissatisfaction and the Drive for Improvement

• Dyson never feels pride or satisfaction, only a need to improve: “Satisfaction is a pretty dangerous thing...there's a kind of smugness to it.”
• This relentless dissatisfaction drives continual product iteration and innovation at Dyson.

12. The Limits of Learning and the Value of Manufacturing

• Dyson and Senra both note that actual hands-on making confers learning and progress; outsourcing such work means losing vital understanding and improvement ability (echoing Charlie Munger’s views).

---

Memorable Quotes (with Timestamps & Speaker)

• "You have to enjoy failure if you want to improve things... and it always saddens me that school doesn't really teach that..."
  — James Dyson ([03:52])

• "If you're experienced, you know why not to do something... but the naive person doesn't. So they're thinking much harder and more intelligently."
  — James Dyson ([12:17])

• "If you've lost a parent at that age... life can't get much worse. So you're prepared to take risks because you've started from a horrible starting point."
  — James Dyson ([23:53])

• "Because that doesn't excite me... Life is for living. It's developing your technology and coming out with different radical products."
  — James Dyson ([74:00])

• "Intuition isn't just... airy fairy. It's not a feeling... your brain has been fed with hundreds of different things and from that you make a decision."
  — James Dyson ([80:32])

• "I'm never satisfied. I mean, there's always something wrong. I've got to go on improving it...satisfaction is a pretty dangerous thing anyway."
  — James Dyson ([93:55])

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:12] Dyson's love of history and its practical value
• [02:01] The importance of learning from history (Munger quote)
• [03:52] Valuing failure, educational system criticism
• [06:07] Discovering “megalomania” scale of ambition
• [07:26] Meeting mentor Jeremy Fry
• [12:17] Naivety vs experience in inventors/entrepreneurs
• [16:11] Structure/vision for Dyson University
• [23:53] Risk tolerance and personal tragedy
• [38:03] Discovery of cyclone technology
• [51:13] The centrality (and fragility) of ideas
• [74:00] Focusing on what excites, not money
• [80:32] The true nature of intuition in decision-making
• [93:55] "Never satisfied": the endless drive to improve

---

Conclusion

James Dyson's story—richly retold in this conversation—is a testament to the power of dogged persistence, the rewards of learning from history and failure, and the necessity of focus and belief in one's own vision. Listeners come away understanding why Dyson continues to innovate radically, value naivety, and challenge both received wisdom and conventional business logic.

Whether you're a founder, builder, or anyone pursuing something new, this episode delivers practical wisdom, inspiration, and a deeper sense of what it means to invent and persist against overwhelming odds.

---

For deeper insights, consider reading Dyson’s autobiographies and works on invention, as cited by both Senra and Dyson throughout the episode.

Transcript

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yeah, A healthy obsession with the past. I think it's. I mean, I did Latin, Greek and ancient history at school. Yeah. And apparently of no use at all. But it is. It is interesting how Greek civilization took place and how Roman civilization started and how it failed and how people governed. Oligarchy is good, where dictatorship's good, or democracies. It's interesting. And history repeats itself and it's repeating itself rather too quickly at the moment. So history is interesting.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

And this is what I've noticed. People that are the best in the world at what they do, or near the best in the world at what they do, they all have this love of learning from history. Charlie Munger has one of my greatest favorite quotes about this. He says that learning from history is a form of leverage. And you can actually, you know, use ideas of people long dead and you'll find out that they were very similar to you, that they had the same. They went through the same struggles, the same. They had the same fears, they had the same insecurities, they had the same triumphs. And you can just pick up a book of somebody's Life story like the ones that I have in front of me. I told you before we started recording, I was going through, you know, very. I had this obsession in love with my work, just like you do. And in my case was. Was not invention, it was creating podcasting. Podcast. And this book, I found it, you know, I think it was April 2018, the very first time I read it. And I'd already been struggling to start my podcast for two years with very. Almost no success at all. Basically none. No success. And it took me five and a half years of struggle. And the reason this is so important to find it year two into that five and a half years before I had any, you know, even remote level of success is because I'm like, well, James, struggle. This book is 90% of it. You struggling for 14 years, building 5,127 prototypes and refusing to give up. You're also funny as hell in the book where you're like, anytime, if you think I'm, you know, have a little bit of ego, just realize that I'm only, I'm only celebrating that I have the stubbornness of a mule. This is the note. So obviously I mark up the books like crazy. And I was showing you this before we started recording. And this is really. I get to the very last page and when I was recording my thoughts for the benefit of other people by making the podcast, this is what you inspired me to do. It's like, I hope Dyson's story inspires you to say, when you get knocked down, all right, then, let's give it another go.

[James Dyson]

Yeah, bouncing back is really important. And if you are exploring new territory, experimenting, you're trying to do something different, which is what you and I want to do, you're going to fail many times and you've got to bounce back from it. And actually, if you learn that failure is so much more interesting than success, because failure, you question it. Well, why did it go wrong? And actually the reason it goes wrong is often very, very interesting. When something works, you say, great, that works. And you don't even stop to wonder why it works. So you've got to enjoy failure, as that sounds a difficult thing to do. But you have to enjoy failure if you want to improve things, if you want to not change the world, but change things and improve things goes hand in hand. And it always saddens me that school doesn't really teach that at school or university. The thing is to be brilliant and to get the answer right first time. And there are brilliant people who can do that. But for the rest of us, we're not brilliant. And to get there, we have to strive and we have to go through failure. And we realized that you don't get it right first time, you don't get it right a second time, in my case. And I counted it. It's 5,127 times. One of the things I always want to say is that that sounds like a struggle. Okay, it was a struggle, but actually it was a hugely enjoyable struggle. The debt was mounting and I had three children and a wife and a home, and then a mortgage paid like everybody else. But I had a real point in life. I had a real aim and I had to get there. And the failures were interesting because I learned from every single one of them, almost every single one of them.

[David Senra]

Say more about that. You had an aim in life. So the mission, how did you think of it then, while you're going through it?

[James Dyson]

When I discovered that I loved engineering because I did classics at school, I couldn't be further away from engineering. And then I went to study design and then discovered engineering. So engineering was new to me. It was like something new. And I had this sort of stupid thought when I was at college that I wanted to design products, I wanted to engineer them, I wanted to develop their technology and I wanted to manufacture them and I wanted to sell them. So it's a sort of megalomania thought. Why?

[David Senra]

Why is it megalomania thought?

[James Dyson]

Because I was just a penniless student in London. You know, how could I have this thought of being, you know, global manufacturer and. And I don't know how or why I had that thought. But there were interesting things happening at that time because Concord was happening. Issigonis brought out his Mini car, which is still going today, by the way, hugely successful today.

And it was about 15 years after the Second World War. So there was deprivation during the war and immediately afterwards. But suddenly, particularly in the mid-60s, and I think particularly in London where I was, there was a feeling that, ah, we're free of the past, we can do something new and different. And Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Buckminster Fuller, all these people were having really expansive and revolutionary thoughts about design, engineering, buildings and so on. So I was very lucky to be part of that era. And I think I caught the bug and had this very cheeky idea that that's what I wanted to be.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Well, I was at the Royal College of Art doing design and I was taught by a very famous structural engineer who worked with Foster and Rogers. And I became interested in engineering and I designed a Buckminster Fuller type structure for an impresario in London, as a theater for an impresario in London. And I went to this engineering company, a millionaire who had founded an engineering company, and asked him if he'd give money to the theater. And he said, no, I'll give you a job. I can see you're an interesting journalist, I'll give you a job. So he started giving me jobs and one of them was to design this high speed landing craft which was his invention, that I engineered it and designed it. And he then said, and I was a long haired student with long hair, flared trousers, tight shirts, flowered shirts, all that sort of thing. He said, come and start the company, making it and selling it. So I sort of looked at him a bit and said, I don't know how to sell things. And he said, look, you're the engineer, you've chosen every square inch of that product or everything, you know it all, you're the best person to sell it. So that was an interesting sort of revelation for me because I'd always thought there were professions and there was sales was one profession, engineering was another and manufacturing was another and being a manager was another. And suddenly it was this entrepreneur himself saying to me, well look, you're an engineer and designer, you know all about the product, go and make it and go and sell it. So it broke down all the barriers for me. We became great friends and we had lots of discussions about engineering and shared this passion for engineering and for making things.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes. I mean, he was a friend of Issigonis, so I never met Issigonis, but I heard about him from him. They used to do hill racing together, design cars, very, very light cars that raced up hills very quickly with very little power. So it's sort of very skinny engineering, minimalist engineering. And so he had quite a lot of stories from that era. He was 20 years older than me, so he had seen a bit of life during the war.

And had Done this racing car thing and established an engineering company. So he just removed the barriers and that it was okay to be an obsessive engineer, and you just do whatever it is you want to do, and then you go out and sell it, and hopefully, like the pied pepper of Hamelin, people will follow you. So, you know, to get that advice from someone at that crucial stage in my life was, I say, mind blowing. It was. It enabled me to carry on and do things that everybody said I couldn't do.

[David Senra]

And then what do you think? Because you worked on the C truck for five years before you left?

[James Dyson]

Yeah, about seven, because I did two years of it when I was at college. I moonlighted and designed it and made one while I was at college. And then I left college and ran the business, making and selling it.

[David Senra]

What were some of the most important lessons from the seven years when you were doing the C truck?

[James Dyson]

Oh, I think I learned everything from that. I learned how to manufacture, how to approach manufacturers and get them to make components, how to set up a factory, building the product, how to sell it overseas, how to find agents and distributors, all that sort of thing. And learn failures and successes with that. To learn that it's all about people, not appearances or how big their company was. It's finding the right sort of person with the right sort of enthusiasm.

[David Senra]

Say more about that.

[James Dyson]

Probably. If you're running a public company and you're choosing a distributor, let's say, for Canada.

It would be probably irresponsible to find an individual who is just starting up, rather than choosing an established distributor. But of course, the person who's just starting out, okay, he hasn't got a name yet, but he's probably incredibly enthusiastic and will put everything behind it and work all hours to make it work. So it's the person, not the business, really, that you're backing.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Experience is an interesting thing, and Jeremy Fry taught me this. He hated experienced people. He also hated people with beards and something else. But anyway. But this was a different era. This was a different era. Oh, smoking pipes. That's right. Cause people used to smoke pipes back in the 60s, and beards were different in the 60s. But anyway, come back to the experience thing, which is the important thing.

And I've discovered this. If you're experienced, you know why not to do something or how not to do something. Whereas if you're naive and you're a young engineer, you've just qualified or you're still training, you don't have that negativity towards certain things. And often it's something that hasn't worked previously, that could work and is interesting to follow. So you're very open. And I love naivety. People asking silly questions, stupid questions, because it creates a different way of doing things and we've got to find different ways of doing things all the time.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[Podcast Narrator]

James Dyson is obsessed with crafting a high quality product and he's made some of the best products in the world by running tens of thousands of experiments throughout his life. Every single experiment was aimed at making a better product for his customer. That is exactly what the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp, does. Dyson reminds me of my friend Kareem, who's the co founder and CTO of Ramp. I spend a lot of time talking to Kareem and every single conversation centers around his obsession with crafting a high quality product and using the latest technology to constantly create better experiences. Experiences for his customers. This is exactly what James Dyson does. Kareem and James Dyson both believe that nothing is ever good enough and everything can be improved. Ramp has one of the most talented technical teams in finance and they use rapid, relentless iteration to make their product better every day. Just like Dyson, so far this year, Ramp has shipped over 300 new features. Ramp is completely committed to using AI to make a better experience for their customers and to automate as much of your business's finances as possible. In fact, Karim just wrote this. It is our duty to be first movers and push limits so we can make the greatest possible product experience for our customers. That sounds a lot like James Dyson to me, and it is why many of the fastest growing and most Innovative companies in the world are running their business on ramp. Make sure you go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money. Let AI chase your receipts and close your books so you can use your time and energy building great things for your customers. 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 to get started today by going to ramp.com so Jeremy was.

[David Senra]

In the business of hiring people like a young James Dyson, this smart, enthusiastic person that clearly wants to do this as opposed to anybody that was came from like another company or like even a competitor.

[James Dyson]

Exactly that.

[David Senra]

You're doing this now. You still do this 40 years later. 50 years later, yes.

[James Dyson]

And we've taken it one stage further because we've started our own university. So we're taking 17 and 18 year olds and starting even younger. And they work in the business and they ask naive questions.

[David Senra]

You cover the university in the book. Again, one of the things I personally learned from you, it's like differentiation for the sake of it. And so anything that I'm going to do, I look around. One of my heroes is Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. And he had this great line. He's like, my personal motto is don't do anything somebody else can do. Can you explain exactly.

How you structured and how, you know, how you designed the Dyson University?

[James Dyson]

Universities very expensive at the end, especially.

[David Senra]

In the United States.

[James Dyson]

And it's getting as bad in England. Yeah, and it's terrible. And you're saddled with that debt for a long time. I mean, sometimes 20 years. And in any case, a lot of the debt is not repaid and we need to find a different way to teach people. And it's ridiculous because they're only taught for half the year. The rest of it is holidays. So you've got these big institutions, expensive institutions with people only there part time. It's madness. And also, as I learned when I was at college working with an engineering company.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes, I was sort of moonlighting. The college knew what I was doing and approved of it, but it wasn't what normal students, students did, so. But I loved that experience working with people who are having to do things, not academics, people having to do things and having to do them in a hurry. And I really Enjoyed that. And I thought, well, why can't I give that opportunity to other people?

So we started our own university, and it's a difficult thing to do because the government has to approve it. And for seven years we had to work with another university and none of them would work with us because they didn't like the. They saw us as big competitors because we pay our students.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes, there's tuition. We teach them two days a week and they work with us three days.

[David Senra]

But you pay them for the three.

[James Dyson]

Days we pay them. They pay them $45,000 a year. They have cars and they go on skiing holidays. Those normal people, they're not students. They're in a student group. We have about 170 of them altogether, but they're interspersed throughout the company. And they love that. They love working with people who are earning money and having to make things work, having to do engineering, having to do marketing, selling, whatever it is, manufacturing. They like the reality of that, and it inspires them to learn the academic side, because a lot of them said, you know, the academic side of engineering is difficult, it's hard. But I'm inspired to do it because I got to practice it every day.

[David Senra]

As opposed to separating the two, as.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

And so if you're hiring, you have 18 year olds working in Dyson, they're.

[James Dyson]

Also going to 1, 2, 17 year olds as well.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

To be honest, nobody really noticed any difference.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

I want to go back to the seven years with the sea truck.

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Oh, thank you.

[James Dyson]

I think I probably retained the pipe farm, but not the beer.

[David Senra]

I don't smoke pipe.

[James Dyson]

That's fine.

[David Senra]

And I don't have like the, you know, the hippie beard, so this is fine. It'd break my heart to know Jeremy Fry wouldn't because he's become almost my ear.

[James Dyson]

He would have changed over the years for sure.

[David Senra]

But one thing that's fascinating is, okay, this also speaks to.

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

[James Dyson]

Two.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

That was a really stupid decision.

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

[David Senra]

Which we'll get to.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Before we get there, just the decision to leave.

[James Dyson]

Great.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yeah, no, I've thought a bit about that and I think it's partly because my father died when I was 8, 9. And I think that had a sort of profound effect on me that I didn't realize at the time because I felt very different to other people because I was at boarding school and the headmaster was very kind and he allowed me to stay on for 10 years without paying any fees. So that was an extraordinary act of kindness. But everybody else had parents, two parents. There weren't single parent families in those days. And even if the two had split up, they appeared to come together to come and see their child at school. But I had just my mother coming to see me, my impoverished mother coming to see me. So I felt different. And also I think if you've lost a parent at that age.

Life can't get much worse. So you're prepared to take risks because you've started from a horrible starting point. Risk has become a sort of thing I need to live with. I need to live on the knife edge all the time.

[David Senra]

You still feel that way today?

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

So it starts when your father dies. He died really young. 40. He was 40 years old.

[James Dyson]

40, yeah.

[David Senra]

When you were nine. It's one of the most. I don't even want to start talking about starting tearing up because like that just. That part just destroys me. And you. I guess I'll talk about this now. I want to go back to the risk and making that jump. One of the. I think one of the most profound impacts that your second book has is you're writing this 60 years after your father dies and you're talking about your grandson Mick. And you realize now, as a 69 year old man with a lifelong set of experiences, just how vulnerable you were because he's still taking his. Your grandson Mick is still taking his stuffed animal to bed. And now you're left alone with a nine year old boy needs his father.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Yeah.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Okay.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

That's what he wanted to do.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Never had the opportunity.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Your mom passed away early too.

[James Dyson]

Yes. She got cancer as well. In her 50s.

[David Senra]

55.

[James Dyson]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

My mom passed away from cancer early too.

[James Dyson]

Yeah. Horrible disease.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

No, it never occurred to me.

[David Senra]

Interesting.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

I'll try and keep going.

[David Senra]

No, no, no.

We're gonna do. I want to come to Dyson HQ and I want to record more things. I want to like, see the headquarters and everything else. So, yeah, you have a reason to live in addition to your beautiful family and everything else. One of the byproducts of reading a bunch of biographies of dead people is you get to the end. And it's not that you got to the end of the book. You got to the end of somebody's life story and it's not morbid, but you have this constant reminder that our time here is limited and don't waste a single day. I think about that I am intolerant to wasting even 24 hours. I think it's actually like a powerful motivator and just a great byproduct of the profession I've chose. I want to go back to. You're going to. Taking risk for the sake, for the sake of risk. You want to be your own man. I think is the line that you have in the book when you leave. So I understand that we're going to get to the ballbarrow, but can you.

[James Dyson]

Say so that that was the point. You did ask me that question and why I didn't ask Jeremy Fry to help fund that thing. It's because I wanted to do something on my own. And you felt I'd worked for somebody. I wanted to do something entirely on my own.

[David Senra]

But you'd still be the entrepreneur.

[James Dyson]

But it's a terrible decision. But that's. That's how I felt at the time.

[David Senra]

Why not take money from him?

[James Dyson]

Because I felt I'd worked with him, he'd been my mentor and I wanted to just go off and do it on my own. It was to prove something to myself. I suppose it was a stupid decision because I was still having other people help fund me. So it was a really stupid decision. And you do make stupid decisions in life. And I learned from my mistake. And so when I started the vacuum care I went back to someone who understood entrepreneurship who had been an entrepreneur rather than people who hadn't been entrepreneurs.

[David Senra]

We were talking about this earlier. You and I were talking about this earlier. Where there is now a new class of capital available to entrepreneurs that is not institutional venture capital that obviously still exists. But you have a lot of people that have had incredible success like yourself. But I've become friends with Michael Dell and this is something that he's interested in. In providing alternative funding solutions to entrepreneurs from. An entrepreneur knows exactly what they're going through. That is not a professional investor. That is not. Doesn't even has not trying to make more returns. They have more money than they'll ever spend. They literally love entrepreneurs and want to help entrepreneurs. I think it's really important.

[James Dyson]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

I want to go through the list of mistakes because you always say this and I love it. I have the.

[James Dyson]

The.

[David Senra]

The first version of your second biography which is Invention of Life. I think it's changed now. I think you were going to name it like failure is more interesting than success or more fun than success.

[James Dyson]

Lousy marketeer I am. The publisher quite rightly said it won't sell.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

About that right at the beginning? Having people fund it. Help fund it. Because I had to put up a guarantee. My brother in law put up a guarantee.

[David Senra]

The guarantees against your house.

[James Dyson]

The guarantee was against my house.

[David Senra]

Okay.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

What did they not understand?

[James Dyson]

They just didn't understand the business, what it's like. For example, the ball bear is copied in America by an ex employee and another company and they wanted to go after him and teach him a lesson and I said, no, no, no, let him do it. If he wants to do it, let him do it and we'll come into America and we'll sell ours against his, he'll pave the way and we'll come and sell our original version. But they wanted vengeance so we spent a lot of money trying to sue them to no good effect really. So that's one example. The real thing I learned is that it's much better to put your own money in. I didn't have any money, I borrowed it, but it was money that had been given to me by a bank, so it was my money, even though I was on the line for it and my wife had to sign the house away on all our possessions and all that sort of thing. So I was making my decisions for me. I wasn't having to worry about investors or what they might think, which when I was doing the ball bearing business, I was always doing that. I was having to ring them up and say, do you think we should do this? Is it okay if I do this?

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

No, not that at all. That's not what I meant. Okay, I'm glad you raised that. That's not what I meant. For example, I have non executive directors. I run the business as though it was a public business, but it's a private business and I think it's very important to have good people advising here. Now what I meant was when I'm entirely on my own and I make a decision, I make a decision without reference certainly in the early days to anybody else. Is it the right decision for the business? Will it make a better product, will it sell more, all that sort of thing, that's very, very single minded. Didn't have to worry about investors at all. I had to worry about the bank balance, but I didn't have to worry about investors, which made me very single minded. And if there's a failure, it's my failure. It's all down to me. Whereas if you've got other people, then other people are making joint decisions. So I really enjoyed not having anyone to turn to. Whereas with the ball bear business, there are other directors, there are other investors. So I had to worry about what they thought. Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I did. But if you're on your own, you may the decision from entirely the right reason.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

So there's no Home Depot or low.

[James Dyson]

None of that, which makes life a lot easier. You might not think that, but it does make life a lot easier if you're manufacturing something. So we had to sell through wholesalers who sold to all the individual retailers and garden centers where you go and buy garden stuff. They were all individually owned. So you had to have teams of salespeople going around all these things trying to sell products to them. Oh yes, we can take one this week and one order. It was a completely mad system. Now I'd started the business selling direct to people through little adverts in the newspaper, tiny little adverts and people would send checks. In those days, people used to send checks. It was pre credit cards.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes, exactly. So exactly that. And that was the point. The illustration of that is when I went around trying to sell to garden centers and hardware stores, they were not interested. They actually laughed. They said that thing with the big red ball, no one will never buy that. But they did buy it from these little ads. So I wanted to go on expanding the idea of selling direct and not having a middle person and not having to have salespeople. But they said, oh no, look, you're being successful. I think now is the time to do it properly and get a factory and sell the normal way through retailers.

[David Senra]

Did you push back against that decision a bit?

[James Dyson]

Yes. Now I said, look, we're doing quite well now and I won't having to borrow money. We're not dependent on anybody. We're just replacing these ads and seeing what happens. And okay, the business might be very small, but it's okay. Actually, it's wiping its face. But then we got into debt and the debt got bigger and the debt went to 22% interest rate. I mean a company's lucky if it can make 5% profit or 10% net profit. But we're fighting a 22% penalty all the time.

[Podcast Narrator]

The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20% of their data because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts and conversations. Unless you have HubSpot. HubSpot is where all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. Because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit HubSpot.com today. That is HubSpot.com.

[David Senra]

So there's another thing that happened where you made the mistake of assigning this was your invention, this is your. The ball bear was your creation. You made some other products, but we can skip over that for now. And then you filed a patent. It was patentable, and you transferred the patent not to yourself, but to the company. And then when they kicked you out of the company, they then took your company and your patent.

[James Dyson]

Yes, yes, it took everything. But actually, there's a silver lining to all of that which I'd offered them. The vacuum cleaner. Yes. And they didn't believe in it.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

The important thing is to observe things all the time for an engineer and work out how they work. And also, incidentally, you're always working out how to make them work better. Would it be better if I did this? Isn't there a better way of doing that?

And that always happens with all the inventions. They don't just come out of the sky. They occur because you observe something. So curiosity and observation and trying to understand things is the way to come up with new ways of doing things. And so it was with the vacuum cleaner, as you said. We had this huge plant that sprayed the frames with powder. A lot of the powder missed the frames because it's playing sort of open things. There's masses of it missing it. And we were sucking it away onto a cloth filter, a huge cloth filter which clogged all the time.

[David Senra]

Like a vacuum bag.

[James Dyson]

Like a vacuum bag, you see. So you make the connection. You see, you make the connection. And what clever people did was have this huge cyclone. So I got a quote for one. And we know way we could afford it. So over a couple of weekends we built one. And it was 30 foot high. And we had to make hole in the roof of the factory to stuff chimney, a sort of outlet at the top. And a cyclone separates dust from air. So between you and I, there's a lot of dust. And a cyclone will separate that by centrifugal force. So if you drive at a corner of a road very fast in your Porsche, if you drive too fast, you spin off into the ditch. And so that is with a dust particle. Dust particle, though the ones between us are floating, they're very fine. If you make them go around a corner at very high speed, they get flung out to the edge into the ditch. So a cyclone is a circular container and you apply enormous centrifugal force to the dust particles within it and they all get flung to the outside wall. And the only way out is from the center, a chimney in the center. So that's the basic principle of a cyclone. So, yes, I'd used vacuum as I did everybody else, and they always seemed to make this screaming noise and not pick things up. And one weekend I was cleaning the house and the bag was full. Well, no, it said the bag was clogged, which is a slightly different thing. Anyway, I looked around for a new bag, couldn't find one in the house. So I opened it up, emptied it out, and then gaffer taped it back up again and shoved it back in. Still no suction. So I thought, that's odd. I thought, you know, didn't suck because the bag was full. I suddenly realized the bag was empty and something else was at play here. And I opened it up. I took the gaffer tape off and opened it up, and there was a fine lining of fine dust around the inside of the bag. And I suddenly realized that the suction is created by airflow which has to go through the pores of the bag. But this fine dust is clogging the pores. It's not the fact the bag's full. It's the fact that the bag is clogged. They call it a bag full indicator. That's a lie. It's a bag clogged indicator. So I felt pretty angry about this. I did go out and went and drove to a shop and bought a new bag and put it in and I had good suction for a short while and then it dropped off again and it said bag full. It wasn't bag full, the bag's clogged. So I got pretty angry about this and I came to a realization. It's not very clever realization that all the air is trying to go through these little holes in the bag and it's so easy for them to be clogged. And then of course I remembered the big cyclone, huge 30 foot cyclone we built at the factory to stop the cloth getting clogged in the dust. Instead we were spinning it out successively by centrifugal force. It never clogged. So I thought, why don't we have one of those 30 foot cyclones inside a vacuum cleaner a foot high? So it wasn't very clever really. So I built one out of carbon.

[David Senra]

It's very clever.

[James Dyson]

Well, not really. No, it's very clever. It's not very clever. So I built one very quickly in the kitchen at home out of cardboard and catheter. Again, I took the bag off my upright vacuum cleaner, replaced it with a bit of hose and this cardboard mini version of the 30 foot one we built at work out of steel and pushed it around. And I was pushing around the first vacuum cleaner that never loses suction. So I thought I had a good idea. So I filed a patent and I offered it to the Ball Bearer company.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

It's horrible, right? A seasonal product is awful.

[David Senra]

So why don't we. Especially in England.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

So you take this vacuum cleaner. All right, guys, I have the solution to our problems. It's a genius invention.

[Podcast Narrator]

It's very clever.

[David Senra]

Even though you keep saying it's not clever. I had this clever invention. And their response is.

[James Dyson]

Their response is, if there was a better vacuum cleaner, who would. Electrolux and all the existing people would have done it.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Way from Jeremy Fry is ridiculous.

[James Dyson]

It's not true.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes. Yeah. Well, no, he wasn't that rude. But I mean, yes. He said, don't trust an expert.

[David Senra]

Again, a very old idea. Andrew Carnegie said the same thing. Henry Ford said the same thing. This is happening 100 years before you were trying to make a name.

[James Dyson]

You know where a piece is. It. It was during COVID Yeah, we're following the science.

[David Senra]

Yeah.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

So you get this, this is something interesting. Because this is one thing I don't think I understand. At least your. Your thought process. Now you're, you're, you're kicked out. You lose your patent. You lose how long it was five years that you're working on the boat. So you did seven years on the sea truck, then another five years, and now you're like, okay, why was there another product you knew you wanted to invent? You knew you wanted, I think, invent more than manufacturing. I think now you love manufacturing once you became one. But you were an inventor for.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

But at the beginning of the vacuum cleaner, you wanted to just invest in license.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Which is surprising to me because you clearly like to control. You don't want to rely on a bad decision. Okay.

[James Dyson]

Anyways, it was a bad decision. No, it was a bad idea.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yeah. And somebody else thinks the opposite. And it was a nightmare. And I was becoming a lawyer because I was doing license agreements all the time and then worrying what happens, and then they. They cancel it and all that sort of thing.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Because I'd been having directors and investors who knew nothing about business, I thought I'd go back to someone who I really enjoyed working with and who clearly understood about starting businesses, hasn't been enthusiastic about it. Like Michael Dell.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Oh, yes. Yeah. You're still a friend. Yeah.

[David Senra]

Okay.

[James Dyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes. Gets it immediately. Actually, I Had two ideas, but the he was. He and I were both more attracted to the vacuum cleaner.

[David Senra]

What was the other day?

[James Dyson]

The other one was. I mean they now have it, but when you sand something, the dust used to go everywhere. So I had a device that collected it in a bag, funnily enough, or little cyclone while you were sanding something or drilling something. I mean, it exists now, but when I started 50 years ago, whenever it was that it didn't exist. But we decided that wasn't big time, it was a sort of peripheral thing. So we want to do something important.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

And then this is where we now delusion. Yeah. You have to deal with other humans.

[James Dyson]

That are very difficult, not just humans.

[David Senra]

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

[Podcast Narrator]

What is your finance?

[James Dyson]

I'm not in debt. I'm in debt. I got into debt when I was a student.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

No.

We'Re getting crazier. No, of course not. You don't know you can solve it, but you've just got to try. And that's true today. When we're trying to solve. We don't know we can solve. We don't know that we can make a motor go at 130,000 rpm when existing motors only go 15,000.

[David Senra]

I want to talk about motors.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Okay, So I want to talk about motories. Don't you forget that about that.

That's like one of those. You inadvertently said one of the most inspiring things like, no, I didn't. No, I have no money. No, I'm in debt. Just a simple flaky idea that it's intolerable that the product that I'm buying does not work. I'm just going to make a working version. And if I make a working version.

[James Dyson]

Other people will buy at that point. You're right to focus in on that moment because ideas are so fragile and they're easily knocked away by anybody.

[David Senra]

That's why experts are dangerous. It's why experts are dangerous.

[James Dyson]

Experts are dangerous.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Exactly, exactly.

[David Senra]

Your philosophy and his philosophy, there's a lot of like, overlap. And experts.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Well, you made a good Point. I heard another. And you said in the book. And I heard another interview. It's just like you're asking people to invent the future. That's their job. That's your job. What are you doing? Yeah, let's focus back in on this very important point. That or time in your life that you just, you mentioned. So you set up in the coach house, you're in debt, you have no more money. So how are you funding things? I know your wife is like selling art, but like, do you go immediately to the bank, take out another mortgage? Like, what do you actually do exactly that.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes, yes. I'm working at home. The only expense is my time and a few cheap materials. I couldn't buy a lathe or equipment. I was doing it all with little black and Deckers and things like that by hand. I was making cyclones by rolling in rollers. I went and bought some antique metal rollers down at a junk store for £25 and I could roll cyclones. You know, they're a funny shape, like a sort of upside down cone, and solder them together. So I was doing everything by hand.

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes.

[David Senra]

It took how long?

[James Dyson]

Five. Five years. And I'm still doing it.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes, because we were going to try and license it. So we had to have a good strong pattern, which we had ended up having a good strong patent because we made an interesting discovery by accident. Because if you're doing enough experiments.

You'Re trying to be logical, what you're doing, but sometimes.

Something Occurs. That's not logical and it works. So you've just got to keep trying. Luck will happen to you.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

No, not much. Your fingers are useless. I can't do anything with them now. They're in arthritis.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

No, they're workman's hands. In fact, they're this wretched fingerprint thing at airports. It doesn't work for me. They're worn thin, there's no line. And it's fun, actually. Working with your hands and your brain is something that schools despise for some reason.

[David Senra]

This is going to sound really weird to you, maybe it won't, but because my entire work is all digital, right? I read a book, I sit down, I record into a microphone. That's digital. It's connected to a computer. It goes out into the world. I don't, you know, I just see numbers go up on a screen. It's just, I'm by myself the whole time.

[Podcast Narrator]

I.

[David Senra]

One thing that I do which is kind of working with my hands is I've insisted on. I edit all the transcripts of every single episode by hand. And that is literally me going in there and changing a sentence or a word or adding punctuation. If I ever do anything else or in addition, even just for fun, it has to be something physical. Like, I don't want to just. I feel I'm missing out on something and I'm trying to approximate that by like physically touching, you know, pieces of paper. This is why the books look like they do. And I don't read digital copies. Like, I like, I sit down with a pen, a ruler, you know, post it notes, scissors. Like, I feel like it's like Arts and crafts over here. But there's just some weird satisfaction I get out of working with my hands. My hands don't look like yours, though, from like, you know, five decades of this.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

The entire world that we inhabit is physical.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Built this and like the building that we're in.

[James Dyson]

Yeah, no, but we want to be intellectuals. I'm not getting involved in the dirty work. That. And it's a great shame because I think that's why we've lost as countries the ability to make things. Manufacturing is vanishing from Manufacturing made America great, it made Britain great.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Great.

[David Senra]

History again. Talk about history repeating.

[James Dyson]

Hey, yeah.

[David Senra]

Why do you think I love what you said? We're going to go back to this. But you have this great thing that growing up in Britain at the time you did, they still remember Churchill and World War II and everything else, you know, like. Well, one thing that we learned and we were taught was like, we're not the weak ones. Like, we can actually persevere through unbelievably difficult times where it looks like the end is near and not give up and actually come on the other side as the victor. Think that was very important. So you, You. You borrowed the money. You're doing one prototype a day? Two.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Well, there's hope. A thing called hope, expectation.

I don't mean expecting something to work. I mean the excitement of going in the next day and seeing if the next experiment is better or why is it better or where's it taking me? So it's a journey of discovery, which is interesting. I mean, it doesn't sound. From the outside, it sounds very boring and worrying and all that sort of thing. And true, it was worrying the debt Was getting bigger all the time, but I was getting a little closer, a little closer and a little closer. Hadn't yet made it work and I hadn't got a product, but I was actually enjoying the process, even getting covered in dust, because our engineers do their own tests and build their own prototypes. Because there's something funny about the process of actually making the prototype yourself that you learn. And when it fails, it may have been something you noticed as you were gluing it together or machining apart. That sort of visceral experience.

Makes you get forward, whereas if someone else builds a prototype and someone else does the test and you look at the test results.

You haven't got that same involvement, that same utter understanding of it.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Well, I was imagining that if I can make it work, that I could then go and show it to the existing manufacturers of these flawed vacuum cleaners with horrible bags in them, smelly, noisy, dusty, expensive bags, that someone would snap it up.

That was what was in my mind. And it wouldn't necessarily make me rich, but it might get me out of debt.

[David Senra]

Money and finance is not a driver to.

[James Dyson]

No, no, I have to Survive and live, of course. And money can sometimes be a good determinant of whether what you've done is successful or not. Not always. Sometimes it's just not. So I don't necessarily develop products to make enormous commercial success.

It's nice to do that. But sometimes you do it because you want to do.

Might be a small success.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Probably a good example of that.

[David Senra]

I used it this morning. It's excellent.

[James Dyson]

Because we were making vacuum cleaners and.

Cooling products and heating products and so on, and we done this tiny motor and we thought, we can make an even smaller one. If we'd done that motor, we can make an even smaller one and that would make a great hair dryer instead of those bulky great motors they have in at the moment. So that was the start of it.

[David Senra]

But everyone, these are discovered by Traliner.

[James Dyson]

Yes. Well, very early on in the vacuum cleaner business, we were buying these big heavy vacuum cleaner motors. Haven't got one here, but I mean, they're big, you know, and they go at 30,000 RPM. And the theory is the faster you make a motor go, the smaller it can be, the fewer materials it can have and the more electrically efficient it is. So quite early on we realized that we needed to develop a new type of electric motor, because electric motors, this sort of thing, haven't really changed for 150 years. It's the same Faraday idea.

So rather cheekily, as people who don't make electric motors, we thought, let's make a new type of motor. So I recruited some people from British universities who are academics who knew about electric motors. And we started as a non electric motor manufacturer developing our own motor. It took a long time. Took 10 years.

[David Senra]

10 years before you had success in that too.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Let's jump. We're going to jump back and forth.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

Are you starting with. Because you seem to be my Understanding and correct me if I'm wrong, one of the best companies in the world are making motors. Electric motors.

[James Dyson]

Yes. Yeah.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

It can be.

[David Senra]

Okay.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Because sitting in your.

[James Dyson]

We make electric motors, we make filtration and cooling devices. Let's talk about the car. Developing batteries.

[David Senra]

Let's talk about the car.

[James Dyson]

So we thought, oh, we should do an electric car.

[David Senra]

When was this?

[James Dyson]

2014. Okay. And I looked at what the industries were predicting and they said 2% electric cars by 2030. And I thought, they've got that wrong. That can't be right. So we started developing electric car. We're developing batteries, by the way, new technology. We still are. So the batteries.

[David Senra]

Manufacture your own batteries?

[James Dyson]

Not yet. Not yet.

[David Senra]

But you want to?

[James Dyson]

We want to, yeah.

[David Senra]

What a surprise. You want control over that. I didn't understand that.

[James Dyson]

New technology ones, not ordinary ones. So we said we're developing batteries. Electric motors are one of our things. Air treatment is another one of our things. That's pretty much an electric car.

So we started developing one and then we got to 2017 and Dieselgate happened. So the first three or four years, Tesla was everything. Tesla was doing everything very successfully, but no one was taking any notice of that. They all thought Tesla was a flash of the pan or something. They were ignoring it because it was such a different thing for them to do. They make internal combustion engines, not electric motors and batteries. So Dieselgate changed all that. They realized partly from PR point of view, but also this horrific reaction to Dieselgate that they had to get into electric cars. So most of the big manufacturers immediately jumped into electric cars and made them. And they make a terrific loss on.

[David Senra]

Explain.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Oh, not the individual model, not the individual model.

[James Dyson]

So if they had a model which didn't emit anything, they could go on making big gas guzzling vehicles on which they make a lot of money. So they're prepared to lose money on the electric car to make the money on the big gas guzzling SUV or whatever it is. So. But as a. Tesla and us were just electric vehicle manufacturers. Tesla's brilliant. And $30 billion has gone into a huge investment. I'm little company on my own and I have faced a very uncertain future trying to settle an electric car in that sort of setup. And if you have fairly low volume and you're a new manufacturer, all your costs are 30% higher because you're not buying very many seats from the seat manufacturer or very many tyres from the tyre manufacturer and so on. So all your costs are much higher. And we knew that because you had.

[David Senra]

A series of structural disadvantages, huge disadvantages.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Well, you spent about 750,000. $750 million. I keep working in pounds. Half a million. Half a billion pounds.

[David Senra]

Okay, so 750 million.

[James Dyson]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Is there anyone that you can at least drive or. They're just.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

No, no, it's too painful.

[David Senra]

Like, would you get in a 7A car that cost you 750 million?

[James Dyson]

Everybody said, you know, you must have learned a lot from that experience. And the answer is I learned absolutely nothing.

What do you mean? No, I mean it was fun to do, but we.

[David Senra]

It was fun to do.

[James Dyson]

It was fun to do. And half the people were snapped up by other manufacturers and half the people working on it came to work on and do vacuum cleaners.

[David Senra]

Oh, I didn't even think of the emotional think about. If you worked on something for a decade, it didn't go anywhere. They must feel.

[James Dyson]

Yeah, quite a decade. Five or six years.

[David Senra]

Five or six years.

[James Dyson]

Yeah, no, it's an awful thing to do, but sadly we didn't really learn anything from it.

[David Senra]

Yeah.

[Podcast Narrator]

All of the founders and extreme winners that I have studied have this one trait in common. They have excessively high energy levels. After spending several hours with James Dyson, it was obvious that he is high energy too. If you're going to be the best.

[David Senra]

At what you do, you need to.

[Podcast Narrator]

Maximize your energy and output. And that's why I've partnered with Function. I signed up for Function long before they were a sponsor of this podcast and when you sign up, they ask you what your health goals are. And my response in all capital letters was maximum energy. Function provides access to comprehensive blood tests and other lab testing to help you improve your health so you can perform at your highest level. Function has made it easy for me to monitor and improve my internal health markers so that I feel at my absolute strongest as a member of Function. You get access to test over 100 plus biomarkers, from hormones to toxins to markers for heart health, inflammation and stress. Function gives you a straightforward analysis of all your results, along with advice from expert doctors on how to improve things like your testosterone, your stress hormones, how to reduce toxins in your body and much more. The platform is absolutely beautiful and provides an easy to understand picture of your overall health. Once you try Function, you immediately understand why it's the fastest growing health platform in the country. You can now join function for just $365 a year. That's a dollar a day. Learn more and join by visiting functionhealth.comsenra and use code SENRA25 for a 25 credit towards your membership, that is functionhealth.com forward/senra.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes, I mean, I think the way we approach the car is slightly dangerous because we were saying, look, we've got these skill sets and you were trying to match it and we say, oh, it would go very well in a car without really saying.

Is that going to be a successful product? Is it going to be a breakthrough product? Well, it might have been a breakthrough product if we had managed to do the battery and certainly Our motors we developed were very efficient motors. An electric car is all about efficiency, aerodynamic efficiency, drive motor efficiency, and so that you can have better, smaller batteries. Power consumption is a big thing, but six to a quarter of the power is taken up by air conditioning and heating, for example. So if you can make that more efficient, you can make your car go further. So it's all really about how far can you go on a battery?

[David Senra]

How do you come up with new product? I know you're very secretive. You don't talk about things you haven't released yet.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

How many of these do you make now? Motors?

[James Dyson]

Oh, we've made about 150 million of.

[David Senra]

Them a year though now.

[James Dyson]

Yeah, we make about 30 million a year.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

That's correct.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Yeah, but you're.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Because that doesn't excite me.

[David Senra]

Thank you. You forget what life is for living.

[James Dyson]

I know. That's for making money. It's developing your technology and coming out with different radical products. That's what interests me. Not making money per se.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Say more about that.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Well, that's the fun.

That's fun. I mean you decide the most important thing and that's an important decision. And you say, well, I haven't got time to do the other things. I won't do it. Will one of those kill me? I don't know. Probably not. So I'll concentrate on the thing I really want to do, which I think is the right thing to do.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

But you have multiple product lines.

[James Dyson]

Yeah, that's stretching my brain a bit. Yeah. But yes, yes. And I'm learning to manage that in myself and I've got lots of wonderful people around me helping me including my son.

[David Senra]

Now, I know you did the vacuum cleaner first and you did a vacuum cleaner as sold as the only product in Dyson for how long?

[James Dyson]

Eight years, probably.

[David Senra]

Okay, so yeah, focus. And then was the washing machine.

[James Dyson]

The second washing machine came on quite early, after about four or five years.

[David Senra]

But it didn't work.

[James Dyson]

It didn't work. It works very well. Don't say that to me.

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

I wasn't learning from history.

My marketing people said, if you make it cheaper, you'll sell a lot more.

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

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

[David Senra]

They're still in operation, though.

[James Dyson]

Oh, yeah, I use them. I mean, so you have your own Dyson washer shave. Yeah, it's great. It's great. And people have now copied a lot of the ideas, like the big door, you know, if you're trying to put a duvet in this tiny little hole or.

So. And it was very expensive to make, actually. And I should have learned my lesson from that because it had two drums, had two motors and a gearbox that had a lot of things that other washing machines don't have. But it did a very good job. It was a very good washing machine.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

So keep in mind about that.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

It's partly intuition, but I don't believe in intuition is.

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

That's the hard thing. I mean, ultimately it's intuition. But intuition isn't just.

It's not airy fairy. It's not a feeling, you know.

It'S.

Your brain has been fed with hundreds of different things and from that you make a decision. And you can't rationalize it and say, oh, that's that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that. Therefore this equals that. It's an intuition that I could be right, I could be wrong. But I think I'm going to back that I'm right about this. And then you've got to make it work. But it's very fragile. That early idea, I came back to that with a vacuum cleaner, the cyclone idea. It's a very fragile idea. You can blow it away, it's worth nothing.

[David Senra]

And they Tried them. Your partners in the ball bearer tried.

[James Dyson]

To blow it away. Everybody tried. My friends tried to blow it away. What on earth are you doing?

[David Senra]

They took hold of you right away?

[James Dyson]

Yes.

[David Senra]

And then did your confidence deepen as you get down the path or were you pretty adamant, like. No, I'm not going to give up until I solve this problem.

[James Dyson]

At the beginning I got the bug and I'm not. I'm going. I'm going to go on. I'm going to make it work. And, you know, it took me 5,001 much longer than I thought it would and all that sort of thing, and I got deeper and deeper into debt, but I was going to make it work. I got a rat by a tail. I'm not going to let it go. I've got to make it work. I've got to. And the more, the bigger the deck got, I suppose the pressure became greater and greater.

[David Senra]

The pressure did.

[James Dyson]

But did you have, like, a lot.

[David Senra]

You had to have lulls and confidence and, like, doubt throughout that period?

[James Dyson]

Of course I had doubts and made it work. Yeah, yeah. You can't pretend you don't have doubts.

[David Senra]

Were you talking to anybody about this?

[James Dyson]

Deirdre, my wife.

Nobody else? No.

[David Senra]

Not even Jeremy?

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

Let's go back to that. Okay, can you explain why you bought him out? And this was. This is after failing for, if I remember correctly, after failing to try to license it?

[James Dyson]

Yes.

[David Senra]

The first successful license was Japan, right?

[James Dyson]

No. Oh, yes.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes.

[David Senra]

And they sold it.

[Podcast Narrator]

Not even to.

[David Senra]

You weren't even sure they used it because it was like, pink, right?

[James Dyson]

No, they did use it.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

That's when you bought Jeremy out?

[James Dyson]

Yes. We had a big lawsuit.

[David Senra]

Is this the Amway?

[James Dyson]

Yes.

[David Senra]

Oh, God.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

So I was that contentious between. You did it Danger?

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

An offer.

[James Dyson]

I bought him out.

[David Senra]

How much money, though?

[James Dyson]

£45,000.

[David Senra]

This is another thing we haven't his.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Well, I think it's that, but because.

[David Senra]

I've heard stories, that's fine. We don't talk about it. And you.

You bought out your 49 partner for 45, 000 pounds. Okay, so what happens now? You're on your own?

[James Dyson]

Yeah, completely on my own.

[David Senra]

And you stayed. I know you have.

[James Dyson]

Exactly. The lawsuit. Had to fight that lawsuit with Amway.

[Podcast Narrator]

Yes.

[James Dyson]

For five years.

[David Senra]

Yes.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes. But a drip of license agreements just kept me going.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes. It was at the end of the lawsuit, actually. That's when I decided, I've had enough of this licensing game. I'm going to do it myself. But you have no money and I'm no money. And I'm sick of traveling because I was traveling to Japan, America all the time, and I was just sick of it. And I got meningitis from it, I think from an airplane. So I thought that I'm going to stop and I'm going to have a little sort of cottage industry making vacuum cleaners in Britain.

[David Senra]

That was the. Okay, but then you have to borrow. I think it was like £600,000.

[James Dyson]

Yes. Yeah, right.

[David Senra]

For tooling.

[James Dyson]

For the tooling.

[David Senra]

And you did that how?

[James Dyson]

Well, I went to various venture capitalists, the sort of people who ought to lend to startups. And the kind of response I got was, well, you know, it's not very interesting area. We're investing in restaurants, fast food restaurants at the moment. Or we're not lending to you because you're an engineer.

If you bring someone from the industry to run it, then we might consider backing it. Those are the sort of responses I was getting from venture capitalists, as we used to call them.

And so in the end, I went to my local bank, the clearing bank.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes. Okay. I'm getting quite used to this. By the way, Deidre has to keep signing the Awful gray forms for signing away the house. So yeah, I borrowed and they lent me a huge amount of money actually. I mean, it was 1992, there was a big housing crisis. The banks had lots of proper, you know, return properties.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Lloyds bank ran the system. Instead of going to a man sitting in a branch of the bank and borrowing from them, they had a sort of flying doctor who went around businesses. So he was a real business expert and he didn't work from an office, he just went around people's businesses. Very interesting man, actually. And.

The bank refused his request for the loan, so he went to the ombudsman within the bank and persuaded them to lend me the money. And it was a crazy thing for them to do, actually, because, you know this guy setting up a business to make vacuum cleaners to compete with all the big multinationals on earth's he doing living in a little coach house near Bath. When you think about it, it's completely mad.

[David Senra]

Yes.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes, yes. Doggedness, Never giving up, just carrying on and not worrying what other people are saying. My friends said, you're completely mad. What are you doing is spending all that every day in that shed with all that dust around?

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Yes, everybody thought I was mad.

[David Senra]

How did you receive that feedback or that criticism?

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

You believed. You're right. You had no doubt.

[James Dyson]

Yeah. Because they never really gave a good reason.

[David Senra]

Well, for the vacuum, the existing manufacturers. There's a great story in the book. Again, I'm going to quote Charlie, Margaret. He's one of my heroes. Never, ever think about anything when you should be thinking about the power of incentives. He's like, incentives rule human. They just drive so much of human behavior. And I'm thinking of Charlie when I'm reading your book, and it's like, yeah, you know, it turns out it's really hard to sell. I know you don't like this word, the bagless vacuum cleaner. You think it should be like, no, loss of suction. Suction vacuum cleaner. I'm just going to use the term for the story. It's really hard to sell a bagless vacuum cleaner to people who make $500 million a year selling vacuum bags.

[James Dyson]

Well, it was partly that. It was partly that and partly I realized they didn't want to change human history. Yeah. And that's what encouraged me. I mean, although each rejection, I should have got more and more depressed.

[David Senra]

You had the opposite reaction.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Great line, by the way. Yes. It's not. Well, no. They're rejecting it without having a good reason. Yeah. That's what was interesting. Yeah.

[David Senra]

You would have listened if they found a design flaw or if they told you exactly something there. But you're like, no, no, I am right where everybody else is wrong difference for the sake of it. That is how you build an insanely valid best products in your category. You seem to be able to build a best product in every category you create, but also how you create value, like in durable value, so that you're actually doing something differently and better than, you know, everybody else.

[James Dyson]

But that's what I'm trying to do different. And an advance takes.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Oh, yes, yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.

[David Senra]

You got to say more about that. That is a crazy thing to say.

[James Dyson]

Yes. I mean, sometimes, for example, with the vacuum cleaner, tipping the dirt out of a bin, someone would say. Some people would say it's worse than disposing of a bag because it creates a bit of dust.

[David Senra]

Yeah.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

It's got to be better.

[David Senra]

It has to be better.

[James Dyson]

Yeah. In my mind, yes. Yeah.

[David Senra]

But it has to. You're not going to make, like another Me Too product.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

So let's go back to. You buy the tooling. I'm not going to redo the entire book. We'll skip over the issue that you have to move the tooling and you're having issues. But then eventually you have this great line in the book. You end one in this chapter. These are some of my favorite three paragraphs in the entire book. And it's on total control. And you say, from the first sprouting of the idea, through research and development, testing and prototyping, model making and engineering drawings, tooling, production, sales and marketing, all the way into the homes of the nation. It is most likely to succeed if the original visionary and you put into parentheses our mule, because you're only celebrating your stubbornness, sees it right through. As I often have said, I aim.

[Podcast Narrator]

Not to be clever, but to be dogged.

[David Senra]

And my doggedness had gotten me so far to a point where I had my very own cyclonic vacuum cleaner. At last, on May 2, 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 2, 1992, was my 45th birthday.

[James Dyson]

Still heavily in debt.

[David Senra]

Do you. Do you remember that day?

[James Dyson]

Oh, yeah. No, I do. Yes, I do. Yeah, I remember. I Remember quite a lot of my birthdays. But yes, no, that, that was really important because.

To get to that point had taken me 11 years, I think, wasn't it? 11 years, something like that, and a lot of money and I was hugely in debt. But I had the first prototype that worked.

[David Senra]

Outside of your family. Is that period of your life the period you're most proud of?

[James Dyson]

No, no, I don't. No, it's all, it's all. It carries on, doesn't stop. So I don't ever sort of stop and think. Now's a moment to be proud. In fact, I don't really like pride. Why? It's sort of self serving. It's never good enough. So you can't be proud.

[David Senra]

Explain more.

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

It's just knowing that things could be better.

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

[David Senra]

Say more.

[James Dyson]

Well, because there's a kind of smugness to it. But I've. I'm perfect and I don't need to do any better than this. I can relax. And I, I just don't think like that. I'm always wanting to do something better. My wife hates it because when we're exploring the car or something, I always think there's something better around the corner and she wants to stop and enjoy where we are at the moment. So I mean, I do accommodate her on that. But I mean it's, that's, that's how I think and feel.

[David Senra]

But does that lead to. But you seem to be very like happy and like not content. That's not the word. But you seem to be like a happy person where this is not like a torturous inner monologue where you're. All you see is like you're never satisfied. And you see the things that could be fixed.

[James Dyson]

It is slightly torturous.

[David Senra]

So.

[James Dyson]

But. But. But. But it's what. It's what I do. It's. I feel the same way, but, like.

[David Senra]

It could also lead you to, you know, periods of, like, very, like, dark on, like, unhappiness. How do you. How do you not let it?

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

But give me an example of a moment of unhappiness.

[James Dyson]

Well, you know, lawsuit goes wrong or so or something. Or an experiment doesn't work, and I hoped it would, those sort of things. But. But I bounce back from them very quickly. They're just minor notes.

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

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

[David Senra]

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

[James Dyson]

Never stopped. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I'd say that's true. And I think.

My father's death has quite a lot to do with that, coming back to that. And.

I was in the sort of a group because we lived in a school. In a public school, in a private school is probably a better expression. And the other teacher's children was the same sort of age. So we were a group, and we had the run of the school grounds during the holidays. But I was the youngest, so the others were up to five years older than me. So I was always dealing with people who were bigger and stronger than me or cleverer than me. And so I think it made me always strive. So I think a combination of being the youngest, because I was the youngest of three children anyway, and younger than this group that I went around with, made me try to punch above my weight a bit and made me very determined, because in order to succeed at anything, I had to be really, really good. In order to beat them at tennis or whatever it was, or in a race, I had to be.

Punching above my weight. So I think that. And losing my father, so losing. Realizing I was on my own.

[David Senra]

And.

[James Dyson]

I was away at boarding school on my own. So that whole combination.

Made me the sort of character I am, made me never satisfied, Always wanting to find something better.

And bouncing back from failures.

[David Senra]

That's the perfect spot to end this conversation. James, they say never meet your heroes. They're 100% wrong. I don't feel ashamed at all. You're one of my heroes. This conversation has been excellent. Out of all the people that I've studied and met, you're definitely the person I try to emulate the most, so I really appreciate you taking the time well.

[James Dyson]

Thank you, David. It's great to hear your story as well.

[David Senra]

Thank you very much.

[James Dyson]

Succeeded. Thank you very much.

[Podcast Narrator]

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