Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everybody, I'm Nikola Tangen, and today I'm here with one of the most incredible tech entrepreneurs of all time, who started off in his freshman dorm room and built his company into one of the largest technology companies in the world. Now, one-third of you will have a PC with his name on: Michael Dell. Welcome. Thank you so much, great to be with you.

Thank you so much, great to be with you.

Normally, Michael, I would start with the present, but I think when it comes to you, we have to go all the way back to the beginning. You were very young and you bought an IBM computer. Most people would start to do computer things, but you took it apart instead. How did that happen? What did you see inside that computer?

Well, back then, you could actually learn a lot because you didn't have these large chips that we have today that are an amalgamation of lots of small chips. And so, you could literally get a book that would explain what each chip did, and you could understand the circuits. As I said, I was upgrading computers to make them do more: more memory, more storage, make them go faster. What I found in this IBM personal computer was that none of the parts were made by IBM. Then I discovered that the price they were charging for the computer was roughly six times the cost of the parts. It didn't really seem fair to me that it was that expensive.

IBM was the most valuable company in the world at that stage, and you were 16 years old. They were the most valuable company in the world, and they were about 80% of the value of the sector called technology at the time. So, they were more dominant in their sector than any company, maybe, in any time in history. I mean, are there any companies today that are 80% of one sector of the S&P 500? No, not even close. So, yeah, they were an incredibly successful company.

Then I went off to college, to the University of Texas. I was a biology major; I was supposed to be a doctor because my parents wanted me to study Pre-med, sort of the family business, you know, to be a doctor. Strong encouragement from the parents. So, I'm not in my parents' house anymore; I'm in the dorm room. I've got a lot of time. The University of Texas is a big school; some of the classes are enormous. If you show up or you don't show up, they don't really notice all the time. So, I'm kind of doing this computer thing, and it's getting bigger and bigger. My parents found out about it, they got very upset, and they kind of made me stop. I stopped for 10 days, and that's when I decided that this was actually something more.

So, in early May of 1984, the company was incorporated: Dell Computer Corporation became a corporation. It was about a week or two before my final exams of my freshman year. The first year, we had $6 million in revenue, and the second year was about $33 million. We grew about 80% per year for the first eight years compounded.

Why do you think there are more entrepreneurs in America than elsewhere?

I think there's something in the culture that is accepting, even embracing, risk in a good way. It says, 'Well, okay, if you try something and it doesn't quite work, and you fail, it's okay, try something else.' And maybe that's not as accepted everywhere. I think there's a combination of factors: it's this risk acceptance, it's capital that will invest behind that, and there's a history of other entrepreneurs that you can look to—that I look to and others look to—and say, 'Well, yeah, they did it, so maybe I could do it.'

Did you think it was a risk at the time? Did you ever have fear?

No, no. If you have nothing to lose, right? So, it didn't seem like a big risk. I mean, the risk for me was if it didn't work, I'd go back to college.

So, a third of your income is from commercial PCs, like the one I have on my desk. What are the important innovations taking place here? Now, they look a bit like they don't change that much, right? I mean, they look a bit like the one I had last year and the year before.

Well, actually, what the PC does is very, very different than it used to do, and so we keep asking it to do more and more things. Right now, the big thing that's going on in the PC is AI. We used to have the CPU (Central Processing Unit: 中央处理器), then we had the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit: 图形处理器), and now we have something called the NPU (Neural Processing Unit: 神经网络处理器). It is a part of the processor that speeds up the AI activities that occur on the PC to an incredible degree. Pretty much all the software you're using is being rewritten so that anytime there's a prompt or some user interaction, that experience is enhanced and made better using AI. Most of that AI, maybe 85-90% of it, will run locally on your PC, and that's probably the biggest thing that's going on, in addition to longer battery life. We have more than 24-hour battery life, super bright displays, super thin, super light, very secure—all the things you'd want in a new machine to replace one that's several years old. So, we will continue to buy new ones, basically, if you want to be in the future.

You were listed on a stock exchange for 25 years, and then in 2013, you took Dell private to get off the stock exchange. Correct? Why did you do that?

Around 2010, we started evolving the company into new areas. We were making acquisitions and building cloud, data center, networking, and storage capabilities. The more we did that, the less the market liked it. At the same time, something else was going on: the smartphone and the tablet were on the rise. A lot of people looked at the smartphone and the tablet and said, 'Well, that's the new thing; we don't need the PC anymore because we have these other things.' And Dell, even though it has all these other businesses, is kind of a PC company, so 'the PC's dead, therefore Dell's dead,' right? So, the stock kept going down.

At one point, the stock was really low, and I thought, 'This is kind of crazy.' This company is generating lots of free cash flow (自由现金流: 公司在支付运营费用和资本支出后所剩的现金), billions of dollars of free cash flow every year. It had generated $150 billion of cash flow in its lifetime. 'Let's just do a huge buyback; let's buy back all the shares.' So, that's what we did.

But when it was private, you also acquired EMC (易安信: 一家领先的数据存储和信息管理公司), a very big deal.

We spent like $67 billion, right? The biggest technology acquisition the world had seen. So, when we took Dell private, it was the largest take private (私有化: 将上市公司股权全部收购，使其退市) ever in technology. And then a private company bought a $67 billion public company and took it private too, which was kind of fun. That significantly accelerated our transformation. We then kind of became like a public company because we had a tracking stock (追踪股票: 旨在追踪母公司特定业务部门业绩的股票) associated with EMC's ownership in VMware (威睿: 一家提供云计算和虚拟化软件及服务的公司). Ultimately, we became a fully public company again at the end of 2018. It's the most profitable private equity deal ever, I think that's what I'm told. It worked out well; could have been a lot worse, but it worked out well.

What is the core culture at Dell? How would you describe it?

It's winning. It's delivering value for our customers. It is understanding their requirements and solving them. It is a results orientation. It is 'play nice but win.'

You mentioned 'fun' a few times, and clearly, you are more fun than most CEOs. That's very clear. What place does humor play in your company?

I think humor is very important. If you can't laugh, joke around, play tricks on people, you know you're doing it wrong. You have to be able to laugh at yourself and laugh. Humor is incredibly important.