Finding My Virginity: The New Autobiography Read online

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  Copyright © 2017 by Richard Branson

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  “Speed of Sound.” Words and Music by Guy Berryman, Jon Buckland, Will Champion and Chris Martin. Copyright © 2005 by Universal Music Publishing MGB Ltd. All Rights in the United States Administered by Universal Music—MGB Songs. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC and Music Sales Limited.

  “1999.” Words and Music by Prince. Copyright © 1982 NPG Publishing. All Rights Controlled and Administered by Universal Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC and Music Sales Limited.

  Excerpt here © Hunter S. Thompson, 1997, The Proud Highway, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc/Penguin Random House.

  “Candle in the Wind,” 1997. Words and Music by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Copyright © 1973, 1997 Universal, Dick James Music Limited. Copyright renewed. All Rights in the United States and Canada Controlled and Administered by Universal—Songs of Polygram International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC and Music Sales Limited.

  ISBN 9780735219427 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780735219434 (ebook)

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

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  Dedicated to my parents, Ted and Eve, who made me who I am. To my sisters Lindy and Vanessa, who have always been there for me. To my wife, Joan, who makes every day an adventure. To my children, Holly and Sam, who dream of an even brighter future. And to my grandchildren, Etta, Artie, Eva-Deia and Bluey, who make me want to turn our dreams into reality.

  —

  A special thank you to Greg Rose for helping me pull this project together. Greg has spent years getting to know my life, my mind (and my tennis serve!) and searched through countless unburnt notebooks and memories for us to bring this book to life.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 1999

  Chapter 2 What You See Is What You Get

  Chapter 3 Building a Business from the Back of a Beer Mat

  Chapter 4 Let’s Get Physical

  Chapter 5 How to Start a Train Company

  Chapter 6 Answering Madiba’s Call

  Chapter 7 “What do you call a Virgin employee with a tie? The defendant”

  Chapter 8 The World Turned Upside Down

  Chapter 9 The Elders

  Chapter 10 “They’re building a spaceship!”

  Chapter 11 An Englishman in America

  Chapter 12 The Rebel Billionaire

  Chapter 13 Crossing the Channel

  Chapter 14 Steve

  Chapter 15 Four-Play

  Chapter 16 Holly and Sam

  Chapter 17 The Elders Assemble

  Chapter 18 Climate Change

  Chapter 19 Back on Track

  Chapter 20 Becoming a Banker

  Chapter 21 Planes and Mergers

  Chapter 22 Plain Sailing

  Chapter 23 “Somebody mentioned the word ‘hurricane’”

  Chapter 24 A Lost Night in Melbourne

  Chapter 25 Shoes

  Chapter 26 Revealing Character

  Chapter 27 Dad

  Chapter 28 Like a Rolling Stone

  Chapter 29 Necker

  Chapter 30 Weddings

  Chapter 31 Start-ups

  Chapter 32 Calculated Risks

  Chapter 33 The Accident

  Chapter 34 Moving On

  Chapter 35 Floating

  Chapter 36 Audacious Ideas

  Chapter 37 Satellites

  Chapter 38 Good Morning, Vietnam, Good-bye, Madiba

  Chapter 39 Brexit

  Chapter 40 Traingate

  Chapter 41 “We’re free!”

  Chapter 42 Grand-Dude

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Section 1

  Section 2

  Section 3

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix: Seventy-five Close Shaves

  Picture Credits

  Index

  Prologue

  You can only lose your virginity once. But in every aspect of my life—building businesses, raising my family, embarking upon adventures—I try to do things for the first time every day.

  When I first published Losing My Virginity, in 1998, I wasn’t at all prepared for the reaction. I expected the business community, some newspaper reviewers and a few autobiography readers to pick it up, but before I knew it the book had taken off. Losing My Virginity is still the most common object handed to me (except a mobile for a selfie), usually by a person with a pen and a smile. I have written short updates to my autobiography over the years, but so much has happened in the past two decades that I realized I needed to write a sequel.

  I was pondering the right time to do this when I came across my old notes for Student magazine’s launch in the archive. I rubbed the dust away to double-check the date—the notes really were from 1967. What better way to mark fifty years since I started out in business than by sharing everything that has happened and all I have learned over the decades? This book highlights incidents from my early days, but it concentrates on the past twenty years, the time I have been Finding My Virginity all over again.

  Finding My Virginity kicks on from where Losing My Virginity left off, at the dawn of the new millennium. By 1999 people thought we had done everything and there was nowhere else left for us to expand, no new challenges for me to embark upon. But being involved in running a company like Virgin is never a question of sitting back, it’s about constant reinvention as the world changes, and as do I. This is the story of the last two decades, told through one of the most dynamic brands in the world. My home has moved from a houseboat to a paradise island, while my company has grown from a UK business to a global brand. My dream of flying private citizens to space has gone from a childhood fantasy to the brink of reality, and my focus has shifted from battling bigger rivals to changing business for good. In this time I’ve experienced joy, heartbreak, hurricanes, business (and other) highs, grief, records, doubt and my toughest ever crisis. It’s been a rollercoaster ride and I have no intention of getting off any time soon.

  Fifteen years after Losing My Virginity’s publication, Zach Galifinakis asked me: “Is your book a play on the name of your company, or the first time you had sex?” “Both,” I answered. This time around, I considered giving my book an even more risqué title. That it was factually accurate only made it more tempting. My alternative name for the book you are reading? Losing My Virginity: The Second Entry. I also considered Virginity Lost, a nod to the title of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, but it felt too negative. I view life as one big adventure; I’m always learning, and finding new things to try and challenges to overc
ome. I’m still Finding My Virginity every day. But now that I am a grand-dude to four wonderful grandchildren—Etta, Artie, Eva-Deia and Bluey—I look at my life in a new way.

  Whether you are running a company or simply living your life, hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and put a smile on your face along the way. A reviewer described Losing My Virginity as the first autobiography in which the author had written an exposé of himself. I hope Finding My Virginity will be similar. If your life is one long success story it won’t make for a good read. What’s more, you’re most likely a liar. We all have ups and downs, trials and tribulations, failures and triumphs: we just hope to come out stronger on the other side.

  The late Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur I most admire, said: “My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.” That thought has been on my mind as I write this book, thinking back to all the good times and tough times behind me, and looking forward with wonder at what lies ahead. I’ve always lived every day as if it’s my last, fiercely loving my family and friends and trying to make a positive difference. We only get one life, and this is mine.

  I hope you enjoy finding out how I did it for the first time—all over again.

  CHAPTER 1

  1999

  Necker Island, New Year’s Eve, 1998. I was in my bedroom, trying to make an urgent to-do list. As I stared at the blank piece of paper in front of me, across a sandy path, a song Prince released in 1982 was booming around the Great House on repeat. It was a song that let everyone know 1998 was nearly over and the ball was about to drop on the last year of the millennium: 1999.

  The New Year’s festivities were in full swing. My daughter, Holly, was leading the celebrations with our family and friends. I could hear the clink of glasses as my wife, Joan, toasted with friends while our fourteen-year-old son, Sam, ran around getting under her feet. They were the familiar sounds of family life and ones that I was grateful to hear after my adventures of the previous weeks.

  Five days earlier, on Boxing Day, I had arrived on the island fresh from my last ballooning adventure. I was lucky to be alive. On 18 December, Steve Fossett and I had set off from Marrakech in the hope of completing a record-breaking round-the-world trip. What had followed was a mixture of high-stakes adventure and diplomacy—pulling in favors as our balloon had veered over Libyan airspace, then having our approval to fly over China rescinded before being reinstated as we made our way over Nepal. Finally, having got close to crossing the Pacific, the winds blew us back, forcing us to land in the ocean near Hawaii. I’d made it there for Christmas, then flew on to Necker Island the following day.

  Back in the security of home, with the end of the year approaching and the end of the millennium looming, I found myself both reflecting back and looking forward. As so often during my life as an entrepreneur, I really had no idea what was coming next. I had created and sold the biggest independent record label on the planet, and fought doggedly to build Virgin Atlantic into the best airline in the world. The Virgin Group had grown from a couple of companies to more than a hundred and I had gone from a struggling hippy to a proud father and businessman. My mind was starting to wander to other projects, fresh ambitions and bigger dreams. Within the space of twelve months we would launch nine different companies and begin turning Virgin into the all-encompassing global brand it is today. It was time for a new start, and to look to the stars.

  —

  How do you go about becoming a millionaire? I’m often asked this question and ever since I founded Virgin Atlantic in 1984 my answer has been the same: “Start as a billionaire and launch a new airline.”

  The first fifteen years of Virgin Atlantic had been a topsy-turvy tale of excitement, innovation and survival. We had taken the might of British Airways head on and, unlike the airlines that came before us, lived to tell the tale. In fact, we won one of the largest libel cases in British history after BA’s Dirty Tricks campaign tried to put us out of business. It was a campaign that most people within the industry knew by another name altogether: Operation Barbara. Why was it called that? Because Barbara Cartland had written a lot of novels about virgins getting screwed.

  As we emerged from this most challenging of periods, I had clear skies for the first time in a while, exploring new horizons for the Virgin brand. Many experts will tell you it tends to take a year to get a business off the ground, from the initial idea through planning, market research, development and launch. Personally, I’ve always disregarded this rule. As far as I’m concerned, anyone following it should pull their finger out.

  When I was a wide-eyed teenager, our mail-order record company was set up in a couple of days, and even more complex businesses like Virgin Atlantic went from idea to liftoff in a matter of weeks. Generally, we like to work fast: try ideas, see if they stick, and, if they don’t, quickly move on to the next one.

  I work best when my mind is able to jump from one topic to the next in quick succession. It keeps things lively, and it’s amazing how often good ideas for one company come out of another completely unrelated business. As I took a step back from the day-to-day running of Virgin Atlantic, I was able to concentrate on what was next for Virgin. As it turns out, there was more than even I had ever imagined.

  The turn of the century was to prove unprecedentedly productive, even by our standards. After my first wave as a records impresario and second as an airline founder, the third wave of my career as a global entrepreneur was about to begin in earnest. Some of the companies, namely Virgin Blue (now Australia), virginmoney.com, Virgin Wines and Virgin Mobile Australia have gone on to become big success stories. We had already launched the likes of Virgin Clothing, Virgin Brides, Virgin Cola, Virgin Vodka and Virgin Vie cosmetics by this point, all of which would disappear in the next few years. But failures didn’t put me off at all. They had all been fun to get stuck into, and we’d learned a lot of important lessons.

  Some businesses quickly turned into far less successful operations. Virgin Cars, our automobile company, was effective for a few years but overnight became unworkable. Our business model of purchasing cars, mostly from the Netherlands and Belgium, and importing them to sell into the UK was destroyed by a combination of restrictive practices by the big carmakers and changing currency values. V.Shop, small record stores we launched after rebranding Our Price, never got off the ground, while there were similar stories for Virgin Student, Virgin Energy and Virgin Travelstore. The dot.com bubble was still going strong, but we hadn’t quite got the hang of it. Because our core businesses remained solid, the brand wasn’t derailed by these smaller failures. I was also able to spend even more time with my young family and enjoy life a little more. I didn’t feel I had so much to prove, and was getting more comfortable in my own skin. If the odd business didn’t work out, I was confident there would be another on the way.

  We were beginning to see which core areas we could expand the brand into, but it was still taking time for me to understand how flexible the Virgin brand was, the areas where it could bend successfully, and the areas where it would break. The sweet spot was always where we could differentiate from the competition, in service and in product, and where there was a real appetite for change. We were still a long way from creating the more structured strategy we have today, but it was one hell of a ride finding out what worked.

  With the financial clout we had gained from selling Virgin Records and the profile lift our battles against BA had inadvertently given us, Virgin Atlantic continued to grow in popularity and profit. I was determined for us to capitalize. Our fleet grew to twenty-eight jets, and by the end of 1999 we had agreed a deal to sell 49 percent of the company to Singapore Airlines for £600 million in cash. This would give more opportunity to invest in new businesses and reinvest in Virgin Atlantic’s customer experience, while maintaining a controlling stake in our airline. We had already become the first airline in the world to introduce
seatback video across our fleet. Now we became the worldwide launch customer for the new Airbus A340-600 and introduced new successful routes everywhere from Las Vegas to St. Lucia, Delhi to Barbados and Shanghai to Cape Town.

  I began to enjoy flying Virgin Atlantic even more when we created the first ever double beds in the air in business class, and could even continue my meetings mid-flight when we launched Earth Calling in-seat call service via passengers’ mobile phones. Now there really was no escape for my team from phone calls at all hours! Thankfully for them, we also introduced the first ever in-flight bars. It’s amazing who you can get talking to and what you can get discussing over a few drinks at 30,000 feet. I’ve heard hundreds of business pitches at our sky-high bars over the years and several have gone on to become successful companies. As for matchmaking, there are few things I love more than setting up a couple while they sip a drink above the clouds. And at least one hit single has been written at the bar, while birds go flying at the speed of sound outside the window . . .

  One morning in September 1999 I was woken up at four in the morning to learn that BA was having a little trouble with a big wheel. BA was paying big money to be the sponsor of the new London Eye, but its launch was fraught with technical problems. When they were finally ready to launch it, ahead of celebrating the millennium, they were unable to erect the wheel. We just so happened to own an airship company nearby in the Home Counties, so I got on the phone to the team.

  “We need to scramble a blimp,” I told them. “How quickly can you get one to the Thames?”

  With the world’s press assembled and the wheel lying limply on the South Bank lawn, our blimp hovered directly above, proudly displaying the legend “BA CAN’T GET IT UP.” We got the headlines that night at BA’s expense—literally! The photo also coincided with the same day BA’s share price plunged to a new record low.

  The following year, I pulled BA’s tail again when we revamped our free in-flight massages for Upper Class customers. Right outside Heathrow Airport, we installed a giant poster stating “BA Don’t Give A Shiatsu.” In just five words we showcased our effervescence, cheekiness and great service. That, to me, is what Virgin is all about. It’s crucial in this job not to take yourself too seriously and people appreciate it when they see a bit of humor and personality shining through. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the average customer is usually far smarter—and more appreciative of a joke—than big businesses give them credit for.