Sir James Dyson recounts buying out his business partner Jeremy Fry during the Amway patent litigation.
Insight
Dyson: Experienced hires from existing companies bring habits that resist change
“The older you get, the more you try to apply your experience. And if you've come from an existing company, we 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 no…”
Opinion
Dyson claims he learned absolutely nothing from his £500M EV failure
“One of the, everybody said, you know, you must have learned a lot from that experience, and the answer is I learned absolutely nothing.”
Insight
Dyson: Using personal debt is better than taking equity investors
“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 I was, 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 t…”
Insight
Legacy carmakers subsidize EVs to offset emissions for high-margin gas SUVs
“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- ... So if they had a model which didn't emit anything, they cou…”
Insight
Dyson: Marketing should sell products, not decide features or pricing
“Marketing would get on selling things, not decide what product should be or how much it should be sold for.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”