James Dyson

“Sometimes one needs to go through these rites of passage. To understand the importance of ownership of intellectual property, the importance of owning, having a majority share in your own company, or even all the shares in your own company, and not charging en…”

“So when I'd finished the welding, I rushed home And made a miniature one out of cardboard and scotch tape, and connected it with a piece of hose to my hoover, and, er, pushed it around the house, feeling rather happy, and it appeared to work.”

“Whereas I went to a clearing bank, Lloyds Bank, and by some miracle, they agreed to lend me 600,000 pounds.”

“Well, yes, it saved me from bankruptcy, put it that way.”

“The problem with the venture capitalists and the private equity people is that they all thought that because I was an engineer and designer, I knew nothing about making and selling things, and I couldn't possibly make a commercial success of it. So they all tu…”

“But the thing is never to take advice.”

“And I built 5127 prototypes before I got it right.”

“I was in the black from the first month on. I was able to pay my employees and I was making a profit as my distribution started to rise.”

“And he hated experts. For a good reason, actually, and I rather hate experts as well.”

“So I went and copied one of those that I saw on a local sawmill. I climbed over the wall at night and took some sort of measurements and examined it. And we came back and over two weekends we made one that was about 30 foot high.”

“I've never made the mistake of giving away equity in the company.”

“Well, I think considering it was two and a half thousand dollars, it did quite well.”

“You don't replace the bags because they're full. You replace the bags because they're blocked.”

“And now I spend, you know, 95% of my time doing that. But I was the CEO for the first 10 years.”

“Firstly, at that time, the state of the art was that cyclones were only good at separating dust, down to about 20 microns, whereas I had to get it down to half a micron, cigarette smoke type particles.”

“These big companies like Hoover and Electrolux weren't bothering to improve the technology. Yeah. They were quite happy selling bags. And no one was taking them on because they're so big. So I thought, well, therein lies the opportunity.”

“And that was all fine, and we got 50% of the market, but never made any money.”

“And I mean, within a couple of years, we were selling a hundred or more a year. It's a very successful business.”