Virgin's Richard Branson was interviewed onstage Saturday at the close of the TED conference by TED organizer/curator Chris Anderson (not to be confused with Wired mag's Chris Anderson). A few highlights:
Until he was 50, Branson didn't know the difference between net and gross earnings until one of his board members drew him a diagram.
"I was dyslexic. I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. And I certainly would have failed IQ tests. It was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. And if I’m not interested in something I just don’t grasp it. But as somebody who is dyslexic you also have some quite bizarre situations. I mean for instance, . . . I’ve been running a large group of private companies in Europe but haven’t been able to know the difference between net and gross. So board meetings have been . . . fascinating. . . .
So when I turned 50 somebody took me outside the boardroom and said, Richard, let me draw on a diagram. Here’s a net in the sea, and the fish have been pulled in from the sea into this net and that’s the profit that you’ve got left over in this little net. . . . And I finally worked it all out."
He says Virgin makes $25 billion gross annually, btw. Or is that net?
On quality assurance and customer satisfaction related to his condom company:
"Often when you launch a company and you get customer complaints you can deal with them. But about three months after (launching) the condom company I had a letter, a complaint. I sat down and wrote a long letter to this lady apologizing profusely but obviously there wasn’t a lot I could do. And then about . . . nine months after . . . I got this delightful letter with a picture of the baby asking if I’d be godfather, which I became."
On why the Virgin brand doesn't work for every company he launches:
Chris Anderson: There are a few launches that you’ve done where the brand maybe hasn’t worked quite as well. Virgin Brides? What happened there?
Richard Branson: We couldn’t find any customers.
Buh duh buhm.
On his mother's parenting:
Anderson: Some bizarre things happened earlier in your life. There’s a story about your mother allegedly dumping you in a field at age four and saying, ok walk home.
Branson: She felt that we needed to stand on our own two feet from an early age. So she did things which now she’d be arrested for, such as pushing us out of the car and telling us to find our way to granny’s -- about five miles before we actually got there.
On his new Virgin Galactic venture to launch tourists into space:
"Philippe Starck designed the logo and is building the space station in New Mexico which will be a giant eye so that when you’re in space you ought to be able to see this massive eye looking up at you, and when you land you’ll go back into this giant eye.
On a near-miss with one of his balloon expeditions:
Branson: "Nobody had actually crossed the Atlantic in a hot air balloon before so we had to build a hot air balloon that was capable of flying in the jet stream. And we weren’t quite sure when the balloon actually got into the jet stream whether it would actually survive the 200-220 miles-an-hour winds that you can find up there. And so . . . as we were pushing into the jet stream . . . the top of the balloon ended up going a couple hundred miles an hour. The capsule that we were in at the bottom was going maybe two miles an hour. And it just took off and it was like holding onto a thousand horses and we were crossing every finger praying that the balloon would hold together, which fortunately it did.
The ends of all those balloon trips something seemed to go wrong every time. And on that particular occasion, the more experienced balloonist who was with me jumped and left me holding on for dear life.
Anderson: Did he tell you to jump or did he just say “I’m out of here!”
Branson: No he told me to jump. But once his weight had gone, the balloon had shot up to 12,000 feet. I put on oxygen mask and stood on top of the balloon . . . and plucked up my courage to jump into the North Sea.
Anderson: Did you jump or did it came down?
Branson: Well I knew I had about half an hour’s fuel yet and I also knew that the chances were that if I jumped I’d only have a couple minutes of life left. So I climbed back into the capsule and just desperately tried to make sure that I was making the right decision and wrote some notes to my family and then climbed back up again and . . . climbed back into the capsule again. And then finally I just thought there’s a better way. I’ve got this enormous balloon above me, it’s an enormous parachute ever. Why not use it? So . . . fly the balloon down through the clouds and at about fifty feet . . . I hit the sea, threw myself over and the balloon hit the sea, went shooting back up to 10,000 feet without me. It was just a wonderful feeling hitting that water. . . .
Anderson: Your companies have had incredible pr value after these heroics. . . . Cynics might say this is a smart business guy doing what it takes to execute his particular style of marketing. How much was the pr value a part of this?
Branson: Well of course the pr experts said that as an airline owner the last thing you should be doing is heading off in balloons and boats and crashing into the sea. I think our airline took a full-page ad out at the time (in the Times) saying, you know, come on Richard there are better ways of crossing the Atlantic.
