Sir Richard Branson
Sir Richard Branson chats with technology of tomorrow ⁰⁸ host Martin Warner...

Martin Warner: Welcome Richard. Thank you so much for doing this video interview with us.

Richard Branson: Always a pleasure.

Martin Warner: For some context, how important is technology across your businesses?

Richard Branson: Technology is pretty important. We'd obviously like to see our planes stay in the sky. We like to see our trains stay on the rails and soon we are going to want to see our space ships safely returning from space so technology plays a pretty important part at the Virgin camp.

Martin Warner: So let's look at your adventurous exploits. Ballooning across the Atlantic, recent bungee jumping. I just wonder there is obviously an inherent risk in doing these adventures. How closely do you follow technology or whether you just put your faith in others?

Richard Branson: Well on the sort of adventures I have done over the years we have been pushing boundaries and trying to do thing which people said were impossible. So before we crossed the Atlantic in a hot air balloon the furthest a hot air balloon had ever been was 350 miles. No hot air balloon had ever flown in the jet stream and people said it was impossible for a balloon to fly in the jet stream. They said that the winds of 150 - 200miles an hour would rip it to pieces so we thought long and hard and got the best engineers on board to try to cover most eventualities, but having said that we were effectively being test pilots in having to effectively put our lives on the line to sort of see whether we were correct in thinking it could be done. Fortunately with a few hairy escapades we survived to tell the tale and I think push the boundaries forward and so whether it's ballooning, whether it's trying to build a plane to fly non stop around the world as the Virgin Atlantic Global fly did with Steve Foster on board or whether it's to build new space crafts which can safely take people to and from space. You have got to accept that there are elements of risk in the initial stages but hopefully by the time ones ironed those out there will be a whole new era of ways of travel will have started.

Martin Warner: It still takes a lot of courage to go out there and prove it and once you do that the customers will follow on.

Richard Branson: Well I don't think you can ask the customers to go if the owner is not willing to give it a go. With space travel I will be the first to go out there and my family want to as well so basically we are going to say when we are ready to go we believe the programme is ready to take customers and we will, I suppose have shown that the Branson family feel comfortable with that. Which I suppose based on my history with balloons might not say much but you know.

Martin Warner: Let's look at technology innovation. I wonder how closely you follow these advancements obviously it is very difficult to build business propositions around Tech Centric Investments but you have. I'm thinking sub-orbital space.

Richard Branson: The way we set up new business is to decide there is a market for it. In 1991, we registered the name Virgin Galactic Airways, and then to go out and find the best engineers out there to invest in it to see whether they can deliver what we need and it was discovering Burt Rutan and Spaceship One that made all that possible and his genius. Likewise with clean fuel technology we are taking the very same approach to that as we take to spaceship technology. We are out there investing in the best engineers in the world to try to come up with a fuel that will power our planes, trains and automobiles that is not damaging the environment.

Martin Warner: How difficult is it to try and get these people into your business? You know, this talent is very scarce; I wondered what approaches you might take?

Richard Branson: I think the way to get the best people is just to set about doing it and I don't believe there were many other people out there, many other companies, out there looking for engineers who could build them a space rocket. In fact I don't think there were any and so when I turned up in the Mojave desert and go to these different hangers with these different, wonderful, weird contraptions I was welcomed with open arms, the difficulty was, as a non engineer myself, trying to work out which was likely to fly and which was not and fortunately from my ballooning days I got to know Burt Rutan and he built the best and safest pressurized capsules that could fly at 30 - 40 thousand feet without going pop and so I knew of his incredible track record and some of the wonderful crafts he'd built in the past so when he said he thought he could do it, we felt that if any one could do it, it would be him.

Martin Warner: Clearly, you transformed the flight experience of Virgin Atlantic through digital airline entertainment, I wonder what's up next, is there a grander flight experience plan?

Richard Branson: Through Virgin Galactic, the engineers who are developing that, I think that there is a very exciting future and once we've developed the re-usable spaceships and we've got them safely taking passengers to and from space the next challenge will be to take them in next to no time, between London and Sydney, and London and Los Angeles and to pop them out of the earth's atmosphere and pop them back down again. Most of the time of the journey will be at the airport and hardly any of it will be in the air.

Martin Warner: Do you think it's possible in your lifetime?

Richard Branson: I'm taking my vitamins, I hope to live a long life and I very much hope it's possible.

Martin Warner: Wouldn't that be great, to take off, 20 minutes and land on the other side of the world that would be huge.

Richard Branson: It will be huge and it's definitely possible and I think equally important right now, with what's happening with global warming, I think it can be done with almost no damage to the environment what so ever, so enormously exciting.

Martin Warner: Let's stay on the consumer for the moment. When you look at creating your Customer experiences, do you put yourself at the centre in order to judge its value and I wonder what's important to the experience you want to create for your customers?

Richard Branson: I completely look at it from experiencing it myself; I mean most of the businesses we have started have been as a result myself personally having a bad experience. So I, 21 years ago ran a record company that had offices all over the world and I had to fly on other peoples airlines to get to those offices and I had a bit of chicken if I was lucky dumped on my lamp, no entertainment system, grumpy stewards and stewardess who obviously weren't proud of the job they were doing and the materials they were given and so decided to give it a go and rang up Boeing and said, “This is Richard Branson I am the guy that bought you the Sex Pistols and I have a great brand called Virgin any chance letting me have a second hand 747.”
There was a long pause at the other end and they said, “What did you say the name of the brand was?” I said, “Virgin.” And they said, “Well we might give you a go as long as you promise to go further than your name suggests.”
So its very much personal experience and I think a good company is, if you go into a restaurant and the owner runs the restaurant, every single detail is right because the owner is there generally there all the time and he makes sure every detail is right. If you are somebody who runs an airline equally you've got to treat it as if you are an owner of a small restaurant. You have got to make sure that every single detail is right. Even to the extent in that something that we did at Virgin is we found that these beautiful little pepper pots and salt pots were being stolen because they were so nice. We put underneath them 'pinched from Virgin Atlantic' so when people took them home at their dinner parties and after using them for a while, they suddenly looked underneath them and least we got some advertising and gave people a smile. Detail is important.

Martin Warner: Let's talk about philanthropy for a moment then. Obviously you have done considerable charity work globally and continue to do so. I would be interested to hear you're prospective on how technology can play a greater role in humanities greatest challenges. Whether that would be Global and environmental, whether that would be sure for diseases. I am interested in your perspective.

Richard Branson: Technology can definitely play a part in combating global warming and global warming is going to make the problem in Africa, India and other parts of the world far worse than they are today. So technology can come up with much better windmills, they can come up with incredible solar panels that can really utilise the sun. They can come up with fantastic wave power and they will come up with ideas that we haven't even conceived of today. They will hopefully be able to turn Ethanol into Butonol so its 20% more powerful and so on. So I think that technology can play a big role in that. Technology I think also can play a role in co-ordinating the, if you take Africa there is something like a thousand different voluntary organisations working in Africa and yet there is no co-ordination and we have been setting up something that is called the War Room in Africa which will try to help co-ordinate all these various organisations, look for best practises and technology is going to play a major role in that War Room.

Martin Warner: Lets talk about the Internet for a moment. Obviously you are involved in the Internet in a range of your businesses but I wondering how much attention you pay to these new social communities springing up, the birth of social networking and some of these really interesting developments that are creating new revenue channels for business and indeed business models. I wonder how important the web is to you and your businesses?

Richard Branson: I think the web has become critical to most businesses now and if you are not on the web your business is unlikely to survive. I have got a friend's wedding coming up and this couple are going to kite surf of the beach after they get married. I am looking for a remote control Shark to frightening the living daylights out of them and I finally found a suitable “Jaws” on a website.

Martin Warner: A big one??

Richard Branson: A big one.

Martin Warner: It didn't have Universal written on the side of it did it!!

Richard Branson: So there are important things like that it can be very useful for.

Martin Warner: If we extend out over the next 5 - 10 years I wonder what your major interest areas are and where you might invest next.

Richard Branson: I think our main areas for Virgin, I mean there are quite a lot of different areas but I mean the big area is in clean fuels and trying to come up with a major break through there. Its in taking people into space, it's going to be in building the best airline in America, which is not very difficult to do, and with Virgin America and expanding that very quickly because people seem to love it. Maybe moving airlines like that into places like Russia who don't have decent airlines. Doing a lot more investment in Africa and not just charitable investments but investing in companies in Africa. The Nigerian government asked us to set up an airline in Africa. Virgin Nigeria for West Africa, which we have done and are expanding on that. And then where we see places in the world that we see consumers getting ripped off then Virgin will go and try and turn industries on its head. I've just come back from Canada and consumers there are not happy with their financial service companies there so we might give it a go. We have got various criteria for deciding to go into things but you know the one of them is that we must have a lot of fun doing it. Financial Services might not sound like fun but we think we can make it fun if we do it in the right sort of way.

Martin Warner: This is a good segue into the final question. Obviously you are involved in so much but what is exciting you right now? What's that one thing?

Richard Branson: I am excited by playing my bit and trying to make the world a better place. Myself and Peter Gabriel have been involved in setting up an organisation called the Elders and Nelson Mandela has chosen the first twelve elders and they are twelve incredible people who have got enormous moral authority, tremendous respect around the world. Who are going to attempt to get in there and make sure that future conflicts that might be brewing don't happen and also get involved with trying their best to stop conflicts that have already started to happen and I am very hopeful that people at that kind of authority have got a real good chance of banging heads together and making sure that conflicts can be resolved from clever diplomacy rather than from war.

Martin Warner: Richard thank you so much for doing this video interview. I look forward to seeing you next year.