Q: Are there some (risks) that didn’t pan out well for you that you could talk about?
There’s plenty that haven’t panned out. Fortunately, because we don’t buy companies — we build companies from scratch — if something is not working out, it generally doesn’t cost us too much.
We like to take on the biggest, and I suspect the one that we were hoping (for is) to knock Coca-Cola into the No. 2 position. I believe Coca-Cola is still the No. 1 cola company in the world. We have lots of fun trying. We’ve landed in New York with a tank from England, and went to Times Square and blasted through the Coca-Cola sign … Their guns are bigger than our guns. They drove us off the shores.
Q: Do you get personally invested, emotionally, in risks that don’t pan out?
Of course, because you are dealing with people, and pulling the plug on the company is pulling the plug on people. I definitely don’t follow the rule that I should follow, which is cut the losses quickly. I can let things go on too long.
Even if you try something and fail, I think it’s good for the brand. Virgin is sort of the underdog brand, so if we try something and we fall flat on our face, somehow I think it doesn’t do too much harm. So we’re willing to take bigger risks, or slightly bigger risks, than some.
Q: Can you talk about Virgin Galactic?
I saw the moon landing as a young teenager (and) thought that one day I’d be able to go to the moon. I soon realized that because (it was) a government-run space travel (program), that they weren’t interested in you or me going to space. So, in 1990, I registered the name Virgin Galactic — I always like the sound of the name — and headed around the world to see if I can find any engineers or technicians that could build a spaceship that could offer people a return ticket.
Q: What do you have to say about your dreams?
I’m just very fortunate that I’m in a position where I can try to fulfill my dreams. The sky is usually not the limit. It’s just getting out there, finding the genius that Tom was. He came up with this idea, that the biggest danger with space travel is the re-entry. If you can turn the spaceship into a giant shuttlecock, you can then literally come in as a shuttlecock and the pilot would be sound asleep. You haven’t got all the risks that NASA had in the past. And then turn it back into a spaceship and come back down again.
It’s just great to be able to find people like that, who have the genius ideas, and invest in them and enjoy the excitement.
Q: What are lessons that come to mind from your career?
The names of the books sum up my philosophy in life: ‘Screw it, Let’s Do it.’ I’m the sort of person that says, ‘Let’s just give it a try.’
If I’m flying on a domestic American airline, which I have done over the last 30 years, and I find that the service is dire, which it has been for the last 30 years, then don’t just talk about it, go out and start an airline that gives people a choice.
I think that applies to a lot of businesses. If you are frustrated with the way people are doing things, go and try to do it better than they are doing it. Get fantastic people around you and make sure that they completely believe in what you are doing. Give them a lot of freedom to make mistakes, as well as to make good things, and let them get on with it. Don’t try to second-guess what they are doing. That will free you up to move on to the next thing.
Q: You also have a deep commitment in giving back to the community in which you live and work. What is Virgin Unite, its focus and mission?
I think that if you are an entrepreneur and you are capable of building businesses to make money, and to make a difference in different sectors, you should also be capable of using your entrepreneurial skills to look at some the problems of this world and set up not-for-profit organizations to tackle some of these problems.
Through Virgin Unite, which we set up to unite all that … we’ve (set) our entrepreneurial team to look at things like conflict resolution issues or disease — Africa doesn’t have a center for disease control — so maybe that’s what lacking there is to set one up. …
Of all those things, I suspect that the one we’re most proud of is an organization called ‘The Elders,’ which is headed up (by) Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Tutu and President Carter, here in America. And they’ve got the 12 perhaps most respected men and women in the world, high moral authority, and they go into conflict regions and try to resolve conflicts, and (they) have had some considerable success over the last two years.
