In Love with “How I Built This” (Radio Show)

The level and type of education that I have is a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. There have been many documentary style TV and radio shows that I believe have contributed in important ways to shaping the scientific part of my brain. I leave the task of listing and introducing some of those outstanding scientific shows to another time and blog post.

Compared with my knowledge of science, my knowledge of finance and business is substantially smaller and more recent. Shaping the business part of my brain is an endeavor which began in earnest only recently, about 4 years ago, when Henning Dekant and I launched the quantum computing software startup Artiste-qb.net. Recently, I have fallen in love with a radio show about business, on NPR (American National Public Radio), called “How I Built This, with Guy Raz”. This radio show is definitely shaping my business mind already. I highly recommend it to all my friends and the 2 or 3 stray cats that read this blog. All shows are nicely archived as pod casts. Each show interviews the founders of a company that became highly successful. The founders are asked to recount the saga of growing their company from nothing to a multi-billion dollar juggernaut. For example, some shows have interviewed the founders of Airbnb, Stripe, Honest Tea, Dyson vacuum cleaners, etc. I have found most of these founders to have fascinating and charming personalities. Their business creation stories are often quite riveting, full of cliff hangers. Also, I find very helpful their first-hand, hard-earned opinions and advice on possible pitfalls to creating a business.

After listening to the following episode, one of my all time favorite episodes of “How I Built This”, I added a new hero to my personal pantheon, James Dyson, the inventor the Dyson vortex, bagless, vacuum cleaner

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/26/584331881/dyson-james-dyson

The amazing thing is that J. Dyson built his company from scratch almost single-handedly. Not only is he a superb engineer, having invented a very successful, popular and useful product, the vortex vacuum cleaner, but he also did all the CEOing, business side of the company too. Both inventing devices and CEOing are back breaking jobs, full of failed experiments and heart breaking, demoralizing investor rejections. According to the shows blurb: “It took him five years to perfect the design, building more than 5,000 prototypes in his backyard shed. He then tried to convince the big vacuum brands to license his invention, but most wouldn’t even take his calls.”

And he managed to grow his company from nothing to a multi-billion dollar juggernaut without using any VC funding!

J. Dyson is an inspiring example of a person that combines intelligence, versatility, perseverance and humility. Indeed, despite his considerable achievements, J. Dyson is quite humble, which is an important part of why I admire him so.