The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
VCs rejected Dyson's pitch, preferring to invest in fast food instead
“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 a very interesting area. We're investing in restaurants, fast food restaurants at the moment, or we're not lend…”
Dyson: Dyson Institute has higher first-class honors rate than any UK university
“And by the way, we have a higher percentage of first-class honors than any other British university.”
Dyson bought out Jeremy Fry's 49% stake for £45,000
“He just said, I hate lawsuits, and my financial advisor thinks the vacuum cleaner's going nowhere, and he owned 49% of the business.
So what'd you buy an hour for?
I bought him out.
45,000 pounds.”
Dyson: VCs rejected him because they would not fund an engineer
“I went to venture capitalists and the people, I suppose, who ought to have lent the money, but they wouldn't, because they said, we're not lending it to an engineer.”
Dyson: Vacuum cleaners lose suction from pore clogging, not full bags
“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. …”
Dyson: All major vacuum incumbent competitors rejected licensing cyclonic technology
“When I was trying to license it to, 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 were all quite interested in it, but turned it down.”
Dyson: Products require 5 to 6 times more engineers than 30 years ago
“So you need many, you need five or six times the number of engineers now to do a product than you did 30 years ago.”
Dyson built 5,127 failed prototypes before perfecting his vacuum cleaner
“In my case, and I counted it, it's 5127 times.”
Standard motors run at 15,000 RPM while Dyson aims for 130,000 RPM
“We don't know that we can make a motor go at 130,000 RPM when existing motors only go 15,000 RPM.”
Dyson produces approximately 30 million digital motors annually
“Oh, we've made about a hundred and fifty million of them.
David Senra: A year though now?
James Dyson: Yeah, we make about thirty million a year.”
Dyson: Design Was Not Widely Discussed or Prominent in His Youth
“I'd, you know, since the, I'd never heard of the word design. Design wasn't talked about. There wasn't good design in shops. There weren't design museums.”
Dyson: It took 5,127 prototypes over four years to build working vacuum
“And, ah, during the process, I always like to say I had 5126 failures over a period of four years. And then finally, the final one, the 5127th, worked.”
Dyson: Incumbents universally rejected licensing his bagless vacuum technology
“So I went off to try and license it to all sorts of people, including all my competitors, would-be competitors. They all had a good look at it, but none were interested in licensing it.”
Dyson: In-store point-of-sale technology displays were a crucial sales breakthrough
“And one of the problems in the early days was getting retailers to allow us to say next to our vacuum cleaner, On the stand, what the difference was, what the technology was all about. Because in those days, they just wanted people to buy on price, you know, i…”