Dell Computers: Michael Dell (2018)

Hey, and happy new year, everyone. Okay, now just for a moment. Think of yourself at the age of, say, twenty one or twenty-two. Maybe you're just out of college or you're in the first few months of a new job. You've got a roommate or two, you're trying to save a bit of money, whatever. Okay, now think about Michael Dell. At the age of twenty one, he was already running a company that was making like sixty million dollars a year, which Every time I say this just still seems

crazy to me. I mean 21 years old, 60 million dollars, and that was just the beginning for Dell Computers. This story of how Michael built his company? It's the kind of thing that makes you feel like almost anything is possible. This episode first ran in January of twenty eighteen. You know, here I am supposed to be going to college and I've got this thriving business in my dorm room. I was buying computers and souping them up w with more you know capability and then

Reselling them. So I advertised I bid on state contract. How did you know to do all that?

You know, I don't really remember how I figured that out, but I somehow figured it out. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. Guy Raz and on the show today. How a college freshman turned a dorm room side hustle? into Dell.

One of the biggest computer makers in the world. Long before anyone heard of the tech wonderkins like Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel or Katrina Lake, Back before it was fashionable to drop out of college to pursue your startup, even before people used the term startup. Back in the ancient days of the 1980s, The dorm room miracle story you'd have heard of?

was Michael Dells. Now, today the company is enormous. It's beyond enormous, worth billions of dollars. Dell has sold more than 650 million computers since Michael Dell founded it in 1984. And what's amazing about this Isn't the money, it's not even the idea. What's amazing about all this is well, Michael Dell. Because he's not a backslapping sales guy. He doesn't come across as particularly charismatic. He's actually on the quiet side, maybe even a little shy.

Michael grew up in Houston in the 1970s, and this was just as digital technology was taking off in that city with companies like Texas Instruments and then later Compaq. His dad was a doctor, his mom was a financial consultant, and the expectation was that Michael would become a doctor. Like his dad. But even from a young age.

Michael Dell felt pulled in a different direction. He was into numbers. I mean I remember When I was a small child, my dad had this adding machine.

The Victor adding machine. This is before the electronic calculator. And I was just fascinated that You could Add up numbers. With this machine.

and really big numbers, right? And so and so and it would just and it would make this like mesmerizing sound every time it did it. And uh I d I just kind of love that. And then I remember when I was about uh seven or eight years old I bought a calculator. semiconductor bas calculators. And I was fascinated that this small machine could do complicated math problems.

So yeah, I got I got very interested in in this stuff. It also turned out that About equidistant between my junior high school and our and our house

There was a radio shack store. And so When I was riding my bike home I could stop by the radio shack store and see The you know, early forms of the of the personal computer and hang out there until they kick me out of the store.

kind of entrepreneurial as a kid. Yeah, I I kind of liked uh business. Uh and um I had all kinds of businesses you know, selling baseball cards, uh, had a stamp auction I got a job.

at a Call. coin and jewelry store and I was to negotiate with people that were selling things and buy those things at the lowest possible price because the owner gave me a Percentage.

And I read that you also worked for the local paper for for some time. Yeah, so I got this job working for the Houston Post newspaper. Uh uh it doesn't exist anymore now, they think they combined with the Houston Chronicle and My job along with hundreds of other Mostly, you know, teenagers

Was to call random people on the phone. and try to sell them a subscription to the Houston Post newspaper. And uh I observed three things. The first thing I observed is that If you sounded like the people you were talking to, they were much more likely to buy the newspaper from you.

You put on a Tex like a heavy Texas accent. Yeah, I'm not gonna do it for you here, but I think you can you can use your imagination. Okay. So second thing I observed was that People that were getting married were much more likely to buy the newspaper. And then the third thing I observed is that people that were moving into a new house or residence

We're also far more likely to buy the newspaper. Well, how did you know who was getting married? And who was moving in. Well you talked to him. You you strike up a conversation. Do you just call people and say and and ask them about themselves? I guess this was like

At that time people were perfectly happy to tell strangers personal details, right? Yeah, and so I I observed this and what I figured out is that In Texas, when you as this is true in many states. When you want to get a marriage license You have to go to the county courthouse. Ah.

It turns out this is public information. Right. And among the information that you give to the county court is the address that you want the license sent to. So

Вірмад. Direct mail. Program. Where I sent letters to all of the people that had applied for marriage licenses

in a sixteen county area surrounding Harris County Which is where Houston, Texas is. And I hired a bunch of my High school

Pals. Yeah to go out to all these county courthouses and Type the names. into Small

Apple two computers And I sent you know, massive direct mail campaign. to all those people that were applying to get uh you know marriage licenses. And there were also at that time in Houston there was a building boom and there were these very large apartment and condominium complexes that were going up. And so I would go to these buildings under construction

And sort of figure out Who was in charge And say, Hey, I'm from the Houston Post newspaper. And You know, we've got this great offer where

your new residents can get the paper free for two weeks. And all they need to do is fill off this little form. You were a high school student when you were doing this. Yes. H how much money did you walk away with? I I think I was about seventeen years old and I I made a little over eighteen thousand dollars

That year. This is like freakishly precocious of a of a high school senior. Like that's it's just weird that you would even know to think of doing those things. I mean don't don't you think? I I didn't really think about it like that. I just just seemed like seemed like a good idea. So I I was pursuing it and it was working I did plenty of things that didn't work, you know, but but uh that worked so I I kept doing it.

$18,000. What did you do with that money? I mean that that must have been more money than you'd ever seen in your life. I I bought a BMW. Uh Because I wanted I wanted a BMW. What did the other students think of you? Did the w w did you have this reputation as like a the business whiz kid in in high school or or

Like what did they think about you? You know, I d I don't really know and I and I didn't really care. Uh so I I I was sort of keeping to myself and you know, I had a few friends, but I I wasn't The most social of Kids. But you must have been somewhat social because you were going out and selling stuff to people Strangers.

Sure. Social enough to make the sale, but yeah. So you were on the one hand doing this entrepreneurial stuff and then y I guess you were also Just really into computers? Yeah.

You know, the original computer that I you know got my hands on at home was the same one everybody else had, which was the Apple Two. The Apple Two, yeah. Yeah, and one of the beautiful things about the Apple II was that all of the circuits were discrete circuits that you could understand. So you could go in and start to, you know, play with those and modify them and reprogram the BIOS and upgrade the system and take it apart, put it back together. So and something happened here

Around uh nineteen IBM introduced the IBM PC. And that was sort of a very important moment because if you dial back the clock to the late seventies and early eighties You know, this company IBM had a leadership

of the part of the economy referred to as information technology, unlike any other company at any other time. in history. They were by far the dominant company. So when IBM introduced the IBM P C, this to me seemed to be a very important moment. So I

When you took apart this IBM PC. that was selling for about three thousand dollars As far as I could tell, it was about six hundred dollars worth of parts. Wait, you bought one and you took it apart just to Check the insides out? Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

W what else would you do? So yeah you gotta you gotta take it apart. But like most people buy computers to like, you know, at that time I guess to do basic, you know, accounting and word processing. You bought it to take it apart. Well I Wanted to understand it. And you know, to understand it, you have to take it apart. Huh.

And I remember in Nineteen eighty one, I was sixteen years old. I'd just gotten my driver's license. And they had this thing called the National Computer Conference. In the astrodome in Houston.

And I You know, as soon as I got out of school. I would rush over there. And they had all of the computer companies of note in the world in the astrodome and they were showing off their computer equipment. I mean that's an amazing coincidence'cause you went to that convention which happened to

Take place in Houston that year. Yeah. Yeah, I mean there there's uh there there's definitely some luck involved here. Right. And that convention

Not only were you there. But Rod Canyon went there too, who went on to start Compaq. I mean Compaq and Dell That convention. Well and and I remember in my chemistry class

In high school The guy sitting next to me was telling me that his dad had just left Texas instruments To go start this new computer company.

And you know, he he was one of the early guys that At Compaq. Yeah, m amazing. So you so you uh obviously you graduate high school, um and then you go to to university to to U T Austin, right? Yes. I was a premed major and You know, some of this was the programming from my parents

Because you know, my father was a doctor, my older brother was a doctor, and I always thought I be a doctor and and uh When I started going to school

You know, my parents weren't around all the time, right?'Cause I'm I'm in Austin there in Houston and you're pretty far away. So you got a lot of free time on your hands. So I start exploring this whole computer thing further. And one of the things that I noticed about the computer business was that it was very inefficient. Hm i it took a really long time for the technology to get

from the people that made it to the people that were buying it. And it was actually rather expensive and and slow to occur. А то мі да вас сортин. So you are a you're a student at U T

You're supposed to be doing pre med training. And you start to think, hey, the PC market, like there's an opportunity here? Is that what you start to think? So I was in this mode of Buying computers and Souping them up with more you know capability.

And then Reselling them. And it was just sort of a fun thing to do, and a way to make some money. I loved the computers. It was actually working out great. what would you do? You would go and find like

second hand computers and take them apart and rebuild them and then sell them to people? No, no, I was buying new computers and I would Upgrade them with More memory. And actually the main business became putting hard drives. in those machines. So back then the original

IBM personal computers had no hard disk drives. Mm. So what I would do is I would buy a couple of these disc drives and buy a controller card and write some software and make some cables and make a hard disk drive system that you would put inside an IBM computer and then instead of Two a hundred and sixty K or three hundred and twenty K floppy disk drives, it would have

a ten megabyte hard drive, right? Which at the time was something amazing. Yeah. Sounds ridiculous today, but ten megabytes then was That was like Unbelievable. How long would it take you to upgrade one computer, for example? Oh, it didn't take that long, you know.

What you were doing. Maybe Thirty minutes, forty five minutes, something like that. So you can so you could do a bunch of computers every day. Oh sure.

Yeah, no problem. In between classes. But you really weren't studying. You weren't there's no way you were doing your schoolwork. I was I was definitely slacking off on the schoolwork during that time. Yes. But who would you I mean, how did you find customers? There was no Craigslist, there was no th I mean, you were s eighteen or nineteen years old, I guess. I mean how did you even know who to sell these to? I advertised in the in in the local newspaper

Um I bid on state contracts and it it's kinda funny, the uh the state office that was responsible for buying computer equipment and everything else. was about three or four blocks from my dorm room. So I could just like walk over there and they they would give you all the Dockets for all the Things that the state wanted to buy. How did you even know how to do that?

You know, I don't really remember how I figured that out, but I somehow figured it out. Um And uh, you know, but my my biggest customers were universities in the area doctors, lawyers, you know, architects, things like that. Students weren't really buying computers at the time. And most of the students

That I knew They weren't really interested in computers at the time. That sounds Like crazy right now, but this is back in Nineteen eighty three, nineteen eighty four. There weren't very many people that had personal computers at the time.

Hm. Okay, I I'm hoping that I don't sound like a a broken record. But I'm just I'm just thinking, Michael, like here you are. You are an eighteen year old kid. I mean you you probably looked like a a baby and you were going around hockeying computer. So Like, why would these architects or businessmen or lawyers have taken you seriously? Well, I guess they figured I knew what I was talking about. Uh I Nobody ever

said well I'm not gonna Buy from you because You don't look the part or something. So I think the early adopters of computers Yeah.

sufficiently technical and geeky that I was able to relate to them in in a way that that resonated. And so I didn't have any problem. A and h how much money were you making at the time? I was doing about Fifty to eighty thousand dollars a month.

Wow. In business when I was in my dorm room. That I mean that's just an insane amount of money. I mean Did you tell your parents that you were

That you were making this much money? Uh no. No, I didn't. Um now the the you know they they eventually Going back to late eighty three, you know, they became very upset with me and

said you have to stop this and and focus on your studies. You gotta get your priorities straight, you know, what are you doing with your life and All that stuff. And You know, I agree to do that. You know, it was like going cold turkey or something. It just

It lasted about ten days and I actually realized that this was more than A hobby or a nice way to make some extra cash on the side while I was going to school, but actually something I was very passionate about. So during those ten days, I I sort of mapped out you know the the beginnings of

how I was going to Yeah. Finish up my freshman year. But then launch this as a real official business.

And you know, I eventually made a deal with my parents that If it worked out it would continue, and if it didn't, I'd go back to school. I mean it it I can just imagine how exciting it was

You're eighteen and you're selling you're you're starting a company basically without even realizing it, I guess. Wha what was it that was more exciting? Was it all this money that was coming in or was it just that You were just selling a bunch of computers. Well, it was probably a a a little bit of everything. I mean

the opportunity for you know what became Dell Computer Corporation. Was More and more apparent.

And You know, while you couldn't see out three or four years, you know, you could see far enough out that You know, you keep going. So you were, I guess for the first couple of years or the

At least for the first Two years you were just buying off the shelf computers and making them better? That's right. You know, w well we started Upgrading other people's computers and then we started making these

hard disk drive upgrade kit. That became the main business of the company selling hard disk drive subsystems. And and memory kits to upgrade the computers. When you say Michael, when you say we, who who who were the we? I mean, you started this by yourself in your dorm room. And then Who did you bring on to help you?

Well, I always say we'cause that makes it sound like there's more of us. Um but we but when I started we was just me. But I I hired about one person a week Every week. You know, for the first Year or so and then it became more and more. Uh and

Remember one time we had this customer Who wanted to come visit us, it was Martin Marietta. Which is Now part of

Some much bigger company. And a guy wanted to buy like a hundred and fifty of these kits. Which was You know, for us uh pretty enormous order. And

He wanted to come to Austin and see our Factory. Right. Operations. Yeah you know. And so this was a little bit scary because It sort of looked like a massive dorm room, you know, there's it was it wasn't the most put together place. Like you you had by this point rented out an office space.

Yeah. Yeah, we we we're growing quickly and so we you know, we tried to clean this space up and put on some semi respectable business attire. Yeah. So the guy's going through and we're showing him here's how we format the hard drives and here's how we you know, ensure the quality controls and

We're sure we can meet your demand for this order for a hundred and fifty units. And He says, Well what are those? And I said well those are the computers that we have to format the hard drives.

And by this time we had actually been Assembling our own computers just to format the hard drives.'Cause it became too expensive to buy'em from other people. And He said, Well why don't you sell those? Hm.

And I was like Oh. That's a great idea. I should've thought of that. We were so busy making these hard disk drive kits that we hadn't really

Thought. Uh Make our own computers. When we come back in just a moment. How that idea launched Michael down a path

that would make Dell one of the biggest computer companies in the world. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This. From NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz.

So normally at this point in the show We start to talk about the slow and steady growth of a business and the early struggles. And all the hard work that went into getting it off the ground. But in the mid-1980s, pretty soon after Michael hired his first engineers to start making the first Dell computers from scratch,

They were selling so many computers so fast. That they started to compete with the biggest name in computing. IBM. IBM at the time had a six megahertz two eighty six computer.

That they sold For three thousand nine hundred and ninety five dollars. Yeah. So You know, we introduced a twelve megahertz two eighty six space computer.

And we sold it for nineteen hundred and ninety five dollars. So Ar computer was twice as fast and was half the price. How d how are you able to do that?

Well, we still made a decent margin. Selling them. And uh I think one is we had some clever engineers. And We had this

Great supply chain that we created. And so When We would sell let's say two hundred computers in a day.

Uh you know, we would give that signal back to our suppliers who would Every day or every Few hours deliver parts To our factory.

And Then we would you know, ship those comput out to the customers. So We had a unbelievably efficient supply chain that we created out of necessity because we had no capital.

That also meant that we had the freshest parts at the best cost and as the cost of the materials were coming down We benefited from that and we could get the latest technology to the customer Faster than anybody else.

You you were direct to consumer s company. You you didn't retail shops were not selling Dell computers, right? You had to call Dell or Fax Dell and order a computer. At the time that's right. Except uh Most of our business wasn't to consumer. It was to business. It was to businesses. Right. But that's what you just said is a actually a common misperception. A lot of people thought, Oh, only consumers buy from Dell. Yeah.

That's actually not what was happening. We were selling to All sorts of companies and governments and small And medium sized businesses. And that was most of our business. Even from the beginning.

like the late eighties, w what did you have in mind for the future? Like what was What were your ambitions for the company? Well, we had some pretty big aspirations. The first one was we said

We want expand. Globally. Uh-huh. It was pretty clear to us that You know, if you were only successful in the United States, that wouldn't be good enough.

Uh the second was That we had to go after selling to big companies. Because if you didn't sell to the really big companies and The biggest governments in the world

Well you weren't gonna B. a relevant company. Yeah. And then the third one was we said we had to differentiate. On the basis of service.

And we created this thing called on site service. And today would be a very common thing, but back then, you know, if your computer broke You had to put it in the trunk of your car, take it back to the computer store. And then they would take it and then they'd ship it off somewhere, and you'd wait weeks and weeks and you'd supposedly get it back. And so we came up with this program where Yeah.

You know, calls on the phone. This is before the internet. And If you had a problem, we'd help you resolve it on the phone. And if we weren't able to resolve it on the phone, we'd send A Technician

With parts. to your location to fix your computer on site. And we did that all across the United States. You know, we thought The minute we announce this, our sales will double.

Yeah, because it was like so much better than what we were doing before. And they didn't double instantly. But after about three months they doubled. So Wow. You know we we think about

Like Really young. Entrepreneurs And we think m many people think Mark Zuckerberg or the guys who made Instagram. You were twenty one years old. I mean you're y a at that time

Dell was already doing like multiple like what, ten, twenty, thirty million dollars in sales a year? S I think it was sixty six million that the that year. And I I was I was twenty one. Sixty six million dollars. I mean ch just for a moment, you know, d have an out of body experience for a moment. And and don't think about you, but think about this twenty one year old Name Michael Dell, who's

running a sixty six million dollar company. I mean it is Unbelievable, right? I mean it's it's almost implausible to imagine that That happening. Yeah, certainly some, but I I was more focused on the future and thinking about How do we become three times larger or ten times larger?

What new products are we gonna launch into? Do we have the right talent? How do we expand and You know.

Get more salespeople and What was your lifestyle like at that time? I mean, did it change? Were you still living like a twenty one year old, or d all of a sudden did you start did you buy a giant mansion and How did it change the way you lived? You know, I I wouldn't say massive changes.

I did Buy a nice house. I wasn't you know, wanting for things, but I didn't really have a lot of time to consume things. And uh Wasn't really focused on that. I mean it j it sounds like you were so busy that you were just your your whole

Everything that you were doing was this was this job and I mean I'm assuming you didn't even have a personal life at at that time, probably. You were just working all the time. Yeah, that's a that's a valid assumption. I did uh Couple years later you know, take a little time off and you know, manage to uh Find

A fantastic partner. And get married. have kids and all that and that's been a amazing part of my life and I was actually motivated to do this in part. Buy

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Really? Yeah, and the reason I was motivated to do it because of them was because they were not married. Huh. And they were about ten years older than I was. And Having the

experience that I had as a child with my family That's what I wanted. I wanted that family. I wanted that experience. And I didn't want to be A single guy in his thirties or beyond

That didn't have that. What what would stress you out at that time?'Cause it seems like you're so Even keeled? that you don't actually sound like you get stressed out, but I have to imagine there were things that would stress you out. Oh, we had plenty of stresses. I mean, I remember one time

We got this letter from something called the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC And apparently uh you know, computers fall under something called the Federal communications commission class B device.

Which means they have to be approved. By the F C C So I did not know this. You know, they basically said you have to stop making these things. Wow, when was this? This was back like in eighty six, eighty seven. So

If we had followed their instructions You know, we wouldn't be on this podcast today. Yeah. So Fortunately I had some pretty smart you know, guys who sort of said, Well, what you need to do is Call this lawyer in Washington and he's gonna help you fix this.

So I called up this guy and he'd been one of the prior commissioners of the F C and he said, Okay, here's what you need to do. You need to go down to this test range. You need test your computers immediately. And you need to submit an application right away. And

Make sure they comply, by the way. And so we did all that and then he went to the F C C and said, Hey, you know, these guys are Honest, forthright people they just didn't know. And and now they filed their application, they wanna do the right thing and here's what we're doing and Mm-hmm

Yeah, I mean in the first three, four, five years There were Actually several Things like that. There was a thought at the time that oh wow, IBM's gonna

Take back this whole idea of the personal computer and it won't be an open ecosystem anymore. And Yeah, we could All you know, poof, be out of business. Well that didn't really

materialized. So you guys decide to go public, I guess, in nineteen eighty eight. Uh you do an IPO. And raised tons of money and and Why did you why did you decide to do that, by the way?'Cause at that point you I guess owned The entire company.

Well, we needed the capital. We were growing at like eighty percent per year And you know, the company was only four years old and we were expanding into all sorts of new countries, we were expanding into new product lines. You know, and we also

Wanted to be more of a peer with our customers. And being a public company somewhat enabled us to do that because Customers could look and see that we were You know, a real legitimate company. Yeah. You know, that that was helpful at the time. Well h here's what I I think is hard to to r for for lots of people to wrap their head around, which is you were

expanding by an order of magnitude every year. You there was huge amount of revenue coming in, but yet that wasn't enough Cash and capital for you guys to expand. Sure, all the revenue's not profit. We weren't a we weren't a software company and so We did need some capital to finance the the growth of the business. And Hire more people, open new offices, open new factories.

build you know IT systems You know, we we absolutely needed some capital. And by getting that money, were you able to say, Okay, now we're gonna beat IBM. We're gonna be bigger than IBM. Well, um We definitely wanted to to to be the biggest.

And I would say it changed a little bit in that time frame Two You know, competing with Compaq. And one of the things I think I learned along the way was that if you obsess On the competitors

You could be making a really bad mistake. Huh. And I think, you know, that was definitely true w in the case of those two, in the sense that we had a better business model and if we were trying to you know, just look at them, we would miss opportunities by

Not listening to our customers and How did we get it? From uh A company that Yeah, started in a dorm room to having

half a billion dollars in sales Well, we did it because we listened. Yeah. And we learn. So I I I I guess By the year two thousand. End of two thousand.

So two thousand one Dell computers P Cs. becomes a number one Brand, by by sales, by market share. More than Compaq, more than IBM.

Yes. W what did you do you remember? Finding that out? Yeah, you know, we sort of have this uh celebrate for a nanosecond, uh, you know um sometimes a little longer, but you know, we were focused on How do we keep growing? How do we expand into

servers and storage and services and software and How do we solve the next unsolved problems and Two thousand one. We would have been thinking a lot about China. You know, in India and the emerging markets and uh so there there wasn't a lot of

dwelling on any particular success. So I mean The company you know, the story of Dell is is just pretty remarkable because it seems like

From the moment you started selling PCs out of your dorm room until two thousand one. It's just success after success after success. Like there was no moment of failure. There was no There was no real struggle. Is that true? Is that is that right? No, that's not right at all. There were plenty of struggles and certainly if you go back and look at the history there, you'll find All kinds of

missteps along the way and Did ends and uh mistakes, you know. What was the dumbest mistake you d you made? Because it doesn't I mean uh uh Michael, I'm being honest with you, it doesn't sound like you made any mistakes. It sounds like you were preternaturally gifted as a high school kid to n understand business and then you understood computers and then you just started this successful company. So what what was a

But was a mistake you made. Okay, so nineteen eighty nine We created something called Dell Unix. Which was uh which was a software. Yeah, yeah, y you know, this this was sort of prior to the whole Linux

Wave. And Unix was A Well used operating system in mid-range computer systems. You know? Turns out we were

really early at that and and that was a that was a really bad idea and it was a uh kind of a horrible misadventure. Did it cost the company money? Did it affect the stock price? Sure, yeah, all that. Yeah, around the same time we also had a wildly ambitious

engineering program. That Our team had cooked up. And It was too big of a technical leap.

And the the project failed. It was a project called Olympic. We had problems with our inventory control early on. You know. We had

all kinds of mistakes. Fortunately none of them were fatal and One of the things I learned a long, long time ago You know, when you find a problem, fix it as fast as you find it. And look when you're pioneering in a new area with a new business model

There's no playbook. There's no Uh, you know, you you have to just Learn by doing. And you have to intuit And experiment your way.

Through the problem. I'm curious about Two thousand four,'cause you you you step down as a CEO of Dell I mean, you y the the company is just it's a f obviously a Fortune five hundred company. huge revenues. Um, did you just think, okay, I've made it, I'm thirty nine.

Time to move on and start f a different phase in my life. Not really, you know, I didn't really think about it as stepping down. I had this partner in the company, Kevin Rollins, who was the president of the company. He and I were running the company together and I decided okay.

U B CEO For a while I'll be chairman, I'll still be very involved. And After about two years You know, the industry started changing pretty rapidly and the board

You know came to me and said. You know, hey, we think You should go back to being CEO. By all accounts that I've read, the There was a decline. I mean bi uh two thousand four Dell starts to lose market share.

And then a couple years later, HP becomes the number one PC seller and And then you come back in two thousand seven. So what was going on in those three years? Well I think the market was changing I think there were new things starting to emerge. The cloud

you know, uh what people call the cloud today, you know, was starting to show up I think we weren't being aggressive enough. In the changing the business given the shifts that were happening. Yeah. You know, it's a change or die business, it's a quicker dead business, and the board asked me to

come back into the CEO role and and I was happy to do it. But but I've read that that like around that time the the quality and the service of Dell was was in decline. Like the company was getting a lot of heat, and I'm I'm sure you saw that criticism. So how did you How did you deal with that?

Look, I think I think you can In any anecdote. You know, extrapolate. But there were definitely some areas where we could have been investing more In innovation.

And We you know changed the focus of the company starting around two thousand seven. Two understand you know what we needed to do to be you know an important and relevant company in the future. And so look I I I I

felt then and feel now a deep sense of responsibility and commitment to the company and I'll I'll care about the company after I'm dead. W what does that mean I'll care for the company after I'm dead? It means that you know, this is a a a lifelong pursuit for me in terms of, you know, helping the company reach its full potential. And you know, certainly my dream is that the company persists well beyond

My lifetime. Which uh you know, I'm still pretty young guy, so th I think that's a Many years away. I wonder, Michael, how much of

your success has to do with You know, your hard work and your brains and, you know, intuition and how much of it is luck. Good question. I don't really know. Uh you know I I'm sure there's some

You know, element of uh of luck there. I I I've I've probably been lucky uh a lot. Um Yeah, I feel like I was really lucky to be born in the United States. That's probably the biggest stroke of luck right there. Because I think in the United States.

When you're twenty years old and you show up And you wanna sell something to somebody You know, they they don't look at you too funny. So I I think that was my biggest stroke of luck was just being born here in this country and having the opportunity and the freedoms that that's afforded me.

That's Michael Dell, and if you still think of a Dell computer as the nerdy John Hodgman character in those PC versus Mac commercials, Dell computers have actually been used by the good guys in the Jason Bourne movies, in Spider-Man, Captain America, even Mission Impossible. In fact, a few years ago, in 2016, Dell was the number one brand featured in movies. More than Sony, more than Mercedes Benz, or Adidas, and yes, more than Apple Macs. Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today we're updating a story that first ran about a year and a half ago.

About two sisters in Lynn, Massachusetts, who had perfected a family recipe. I make the stuffings. That's Casey White. And I make the dough. And that's her sister Vanessa. And the dough and the stuffing They are for pierogis, those Polish dumplings filled with cheese and potatoes, sometimes sausage. Their grandfather used to sell them at the family deli in Western Massachusetts. In middle school I would go there on Saturdays and help Pinch pierogis and and we always had them in our freezer, kind of like our craft macaroni and cheese. And when Vanessa and Casey went off to college, their mom would bring them coolers full of pierogis from the deli. And by the time they graduated, they were still eating them and their friends were too. And sure, they could get pierogis at Trader Joe's or wherever, but who wanted those? There wasn't really anyone making pierogis like family used to make. And we finally said it was one of those ideas where you're like, someone's definitely gonna do this. And then we we realized after a while that no one was really we don't maybe we should do it. Maybe they should make pierogis and sell them. Okay, so at this point it was 2015.

And Vanessa and Casey's grandfather was no longer alive. but he had written all of his recipes out by hand. So they went to the deli, And they got them. We brought them back to my house and caked my table in flour. And so began the pierogi making for ten hours every Sunday. Vanessa would do the dough. It should be not too thick, not too chewy. And Casey would do the fillings. We started with three flavors, potato and cheese. The pineapple and cheese.

And sweet potato caramelized onion. Wait, I do not believe they grow pineapples in Poland. It is very strange. Yes, definitely not something you would find back in the old country, but it actually was one of their grandfather's recipes. Anyway, every weekend Casey and Vanessa would make the pierogis, freeze them, and then sell them at the farmers market in Melrose, Massachusetts. And realized that there was a market. And one reason they were selling so fast. I think dumplings are the ultimate comfort food. Whether it's ravioli or it's empanadas or it's Asian dumplings. It's a very nostalgic food. So anyway, all that year Vanessa and Casey would make and sell pierogis on the weekend and then go to their office jobs during the week. But there was a point where we had to go to the next step'cause we were just making only s you know, we could only make so much in that

that long ten hour day. We couldn't grow it unless we kinda took the leap of faith. So we quit our jobs. And after taking that leap? The sisters moved their pierogie operation from Vanessa's house to a commercial kitchen in Gluster, Massachusetts. They hired a few people to help them make more pierogies, but Vanessa, she is still doing the dough. Stretching it out, running it through the dough sheeter, and then cutting those circles, thousands of circles a day, for the rest of our staff to fill and pinch. Vanessa and Casey call their company Jaju Pierogis. Jaju is the Polish word for grandfather. And since we last talked to them, they've shifted their business from retail to wholesale. which means they're focusing on large distributors like stadiums and grocery stores. In fact, they're about to launch in their first grocery stores next month, with fingers crossed on a possible contract with a stadium coming up. And by the way, that pineapple and cheese stuffing.

They no longer make it. Um, apparently people don't like Pineapple but their cheese. Like we went to Poland a few years back and Neither of us saw pineapple on any menu. If you want to learn more about Jaju Pierogis, head to our podcast page, how IbuiltThis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org.

And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at how I built this or at guy's. Our show is produced this week by Rand Abdelfata with music composed by Ramteen Arab Lui. Thanks also to Candace Lim, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Sequoia Carillo. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to how I built this.

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