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Ettore Bugatti

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17

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2023-08-14

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2023-08-14

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1. “And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. I highly, highly, highly recommend buying the book if you can. I think there's only a few copies available. I'm so glad this book came into my life. It was the perfect vehicle to learn about the genius that was Bugatti. I will leave a link down below. If you buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 316 books down. 1,000 ago, and I'll talk to you again soon.”

   2023-08-14 · Founders · #316 Bugatti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “The Second World War begins, and Bugatti loses his business again. The German invasion and subsequent capituation of France brought an end to his business for the factory was taken over by the Germans. His life's work was gone after the war in order to have the business and premises restored to him, a court action became necessary. I want to pause and review before we get there. 1931 Great Depression Happens. He has to go work for the railways, right? 1936, there's a strike at his factory. 1939, his son dies in a car crash. A month later, start of World War II, Germans invade, he loses his factory and his home. Nineteen forty four, his wife dies of a painful illness. nineteen forty five he has to fight the French government to try to get Molshim back. He loses the first court case, which causes him a great emotional shock and caused a nervous breakdown. During the appeal, he has a nervous breakdown, he's depressed.”

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3. “So, the depression causes a terrible financial situation. He then is forced to spend time away from where he wants to be. His son has to run the factory. Then there's a bunch of labor unrest spreading throughout France. All these other factories were being shut down completely by strikes. This is where Bugatti's actually like superhuman level of confidence actually plays against him because he thought it would never happen. He's like, oh, my employees love me. One big factory after another was affected and brought to a standstill. Bugatti thought his factory was safe from trouble. I've got nothing to worry about, he kept saying. My work people know me. They're part of my family. But the impossible happened. The men stopped working and there were protest marches. The factory was occupied. It was a terrible shock, and Bugatti was embittered by what he took to be so much ingratitude and an attack on him personally. That is in nineteen thirty six, this is nineteen thirty nine, the death, the tragic death of his son and son.”

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4. “And so those last few years at Molsheim were really the peak of his life. And over the next 10 years, he has to endure unbelievable tragedy until he dies. The first thing the fall is the economy, the great depression causes Bugatti to have to look for other ways to make money, so he has to actually travel away from the place that he wants to be the most because he's going to be designing rail cars for the French government. In 1931, faced with a precarious financial situation, Bugatti had to turn to rail locomotion. The development and production of these rail cars resulted in Bugatti being absent from Molshim for long periods, for he was obliged to maintain close contact with the engineers and administrators of the French railways. His son Jean thus became gradually responsible for the Molsheem factory. So his son Jean was supposed to be his successor, the management of the Molshim factory passed from father to son.”

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5. “Cropped up during the day. His starting point was always to create the most extraordinary things. And so then I want to get into more of how Bugatti worked and why this reminded me of an excerpt from James Dyson's first autobiography. So he said, Bugatti had no technical education and possessed no diplomas. He had learned as he went along, from experience and a natural mechanical ability, and so then he tells his story about working as apprentice when he was eighteen and realizing, hey, the best way to learn something is to try to take it apart and try to figure it out. So he comes across this engine and he says, I dismantled it all. And I said to myself, what a mess this is. I must put this right. And that's how I began to understand internal combustion engines. And so this race car driver is one of the first customers he ever had, purchased one of the first cars that Bugatti ever produced. And he says, I was struck by the simplicity and directness of the mechanical solutions. In technical schools, apprentices were taught that the outlet valves of an engine had to be wider than the inlet valves because the volume of gas was greater. Bugatti was the first to do just the opposite, making his inlet valves the larger, which is whatever.”

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6. “While enjoying himself, he was not envious of others, like some English squire, his personal interests were in his estate and his horses and a boat or two. High society held little interest for him and when obliged to attend social functions he did so without real pleasure. The truth was that his work was his life and in matters of work he had a horror of utopias and of mad schemes. His insistence on the job being done properly down to the smallest detail and for any ordinary task such as shoeing a horse was evident of his concern for exactitude, and this made a great impression on all those who lived and worked within his orbit. His brain was always at work. He had no fixed hours. He sometimes spent many hours in the drawing office at night for he found that the silence helped him to work out problems.”

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7. “Is one of my favorite parts of the book because it just goes on and on page after page, and I finally just wrote this note to myself. All of this is excellent. I love everything about Bugatti. He was always well dressed and wore his clothes with a quiet elegance, whether at the factory or in town. He had a style and manner all of his own. He was an optimist. He had a remarkable gift of observation which spiced his conversation. He was genial and generous in every respect, and his egoism only showed if his habits were threatened. He was excitable at times, young and lively in spirit, tackling problems with enthusiasm. He liked beauty in all things. He made plenty of money, nevertheless, and almost without noticing it. Bugatti used to say that work was never an effort to him, that he built up his business”

   2023-08-14 · Founders · #316 Bugatti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Smidge of oil on a door as a mechanic left that had to be wiped away immediately. And so before moving on, I want to go back to this one line, the personality of its founder, continued to show in even the smallest details and unexpected ways. The best way to think about this is a line that I read in one of the 10 or 15 books, whatever I've read on Steve Jobs. It says, Steve made and remade Apple in his own image. Apple is Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives. You could say the same thing about Bugatti and another example of his very unusual personality. Bugatti once received a bill for electricity accompanied by a letter written in terms which he considered to be discourteous. He said as much to the manager, adding There was nothing at Molshim which did not bear the mark of one man, his tastes, his wishes, and even his moods.”

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9. “Workmen, the best engineers, all the best that his firm can provide. Nothing is too good, nothing is too dear. You've got to win whatever the cost. You work day and night if necessary. Okay, so I want to spend more time going over Bugatti's setup or what it was like at Mole Shime. And I think this is important because it's going to be a reflection of him, of the man, of his personality. Visitors came expecting to find a factory, and none was able to hide their astonishment. There was a factory, obviously, and even one of the most perfect of its kind, for Bugatti sometimes found that the machines and tools that he needed were not available, and so he designed and made them himself, of course he did. However, Molsheim was more than that. It was a house and a family. It was a little world where the attitude to things and the relations between people were out of the ordinary. A customer came to take delivery of a car and got the impression that he had suddenly discovered in this small corner of Alsace this little fiefdom of an Italian of the Renaissance who had strayed into the industrial age.”

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10. “The beginning of the catalog is just like here's all the races I won. Boom, I'll list of them, all his racing, and this is why it's important, all of his racing cars were catalog models available to anyone and many amateur drivers were only too ready to purchase them. And so something that reappears in the career of Bugatti is the fact that he was constantly willing to scrap what he's working on to build something new. He would not rest on his laurels. And so what I would think about is what he's about to tell you and I hear is like, when you go do something great, just go off and do something else that's great. Don't stop to celebrate the win or admire what you did. Just keep going. You just have to keep pushing progress forward. And so he wrote, it is tempting to stop when you've made some progress. But if you want to follow it up, you can't stop. That is why I shall go on as long as I'm able to. I know you can't always win, but when I'm beaten, I shall know why, and I'll beat my rival later on. When a car manufacturer builds a racing car, he always employs the best possible.”

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11. “And so Bugatti, like Ferrari after him, realizes, hey, if I just win, if I just focus on winning on the racetrack, then the sales will take care of itself. You see this and how they advertise his models, his cars. He knew that racing was the one true means of showing the quality of his cars and enabling him to improve on it. He was also well aware of the publicity he got from racing, and right from the beginning his annual catalog proudly listed his successes.”

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12. “Now you could say cutting against the bias is kind of a form of maybe confidence or even stubbornness. There's a negative side to it. Like what if you're wrong? And in the case, like he's winning a ton of races and the races are what's fueling like his sales growth, right? This is in the early 1920s. Now, what was fascinating is he starts to lose a bunch of races because he was stubborn. He refuses to add all of his competitors in the industry were adding blowers. So these are superchargers. And Bugatti thought that was like vulgar, like almost unnatural. So he resisted in doing it. Takes him like a few years to realize, hey, I have to do this. And then once he does it, he completely dominates. I think they win like, I don't know, like 2,000 races or something like that. But this was fascinating. And it was Bugatti's description of their sales strategy. All the finest trophies were won easily by engaging in every important race without pause.”

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13. “The reason that he made this innovation, he instinctively thought that this was going to be better for aerodynamics. There was no way to test this. It's just something he instinctively believed. Every other car designer at that time believed that the driver being seated higher was better. And we all know the result because now all the cars do it like Bugatti had figured out 100 years ago.”

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14. “And part of the reason he was able to win is because it goes back to this idea of cutting against the bias at the time, a theory was generally accepted that the heavier the weight of the car, the better that the car would hold the road at high speed. Bugatti, however, believed the opposite, and he proved that he was right. This lighter car would win the race with the lead of nearly twenty minutes. This car was called the Bugatti Type 10. Now, I skipped over it earlier, but there's a bunch of examples in the book where he's just got a bunch of controversial innovations, and they're controversial because essentially the exact opposite of what everybody else in the industry thought and believed at the time. So he was the very first person to place the driver and the engine low and towards the back of the car. And like many things at the very beginning, one of his engineers I worked for him that was writing the preface of the book would talk about, hey, he preached to us, like, follow your intuition. You should trust in your intuition.”

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15. “In England, and he does this in Germany as well. And then he goes and recruits some of his former employees, and so then we see this again cut against the bias inside your industry. There's a mass production had grown rapidly over the last four to five years, right? And so some of his quote unquote competitors were now mass producing and making 100 cars a day. This was Bugatti's response. Bugatti, true to his standards, took no interest in that aspect of things. As in the past, he was more concerned to create than to produce. And this is crazy how good he was. Six years later, almost to the day, one of those cars was entered for the light car grand prix at Laman and won.”

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16. “One. He creates an inn on the property so friends can say, customers can say. He was relentless about building deep friendships inside and outside of his industry and helping them as much as possible. And then another thing, listen to what I'm about to read to you. Your entire business was destroyed. You have to start from scratch. And Bugatti's like, all right, then, might as well get to it. At the end of World War I, this is the state of his business. When Bugatti saw his factor again at the end of 1918, only the walls were of use. What remained in the machinery and the tools was scarcely good for scrap, a completely fresh start had to be made, but Bugatti did not hesitate. And so before the war, he had his own company self-contained. Now he's like, okay, well, I have to build up everything from scratch. I need a lot of money. I don't have a lot of money. What do I do? So this is how he financed the rebuilding to finance his business. He sold the license to produce his engines as well as a few of his patents to various foreign car manufacturers. So all these, they list a bunch of these companies. He does this in Italy.”

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17. “And so the deeper we get into this book, I think you can see why I had such a passionate and positive response to Bugatti. Because there's just so many lessons he can teach us, right? It's like, one, can you find what you have a natural aptitude for and a deep curiosity for? This is going to sound a lot like, I feel it's like Bugatti's the personification of Paul Graham's essay, How to Do Great Work, right? It's like, what do you have a natural aptitude for and a deep curiosity for? Can you work in that environment? Can you make a commitment to be the best in the world at what you're doing? Can you care deeply about making truly great work? And then can you also make room for other humans in your life? It's not just all work all the time. Like you saw in the way he built his entire life, his kids were in the factory. His son, Gene, who's going to die in a car accident when he's, I think, 30 or 32. It's right before Bugatti's going to die shortly thereafter. His kids were involved in the business. His wife was involved in the business from day.”

    2023-08-14 · Founders · #316 Bugatti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source