#406 Christian von Koenigsegg

**David Senra** (0:00)
The first person to tell me about Christian von Koenigsegg was actually Daniel Eck, who's the founder of Spotify. And Daniel was kind enough to be the first guest on my new show. And after we got done recording the conversation that we published a few months later, Daniel was telling me about a bunch of founders that he thought that I would like. And one of them was Christian von Koenigsegg. Koenigsegg builds some of the most expensive and highest performing cars in the world. And then a few months after that conversation, somebody on Eck suggested I should do an episode on Koenigsegg. And then they sent me a message with a bunch of source materials, including like a documentary and a bunch of interviews that Christian has done. And almost immediately, as soon as I started hearing Christian describe his products, how he thinks about building his business, I knew I had to make an episode on them. So then I went and searched and I added about another dozen interviews and videos and essentially just spend a week consuming almost everything I could find on him and how he built his company. And then I spent the last few days organizing all my notes until I listed about 100 ideas that I think are very interesting and that jumped out to me while I was studying Christian von Koenigsegg. So the first thing to know is that Koenigsegg Automotive, it's a company founded by a man who's desire to build the world's best sports cars reaches all the way back to his childhood. He's been running his company for over 30 years and this is something that he's been repeating for at least a decade and a half. He says, for as long as I can remember, I've been totally fascinated by cars. When I was five, I went to the movies with my father and saw a Norwegian stop motion movie. It was about a bicycle repairman who decides to build his own car to race against the established teams and he won. I was intrigued by this movie. I said, that looks like a lot of fun creating and building your own car with a lot of unique inventions and then to go and compete with it against the establishment. I remember that very clearly. I felt I wanted to do what the bicycle repairman was doing. Build his own car with a little team and do something fantastic. His entire childhood, he's obsessed with cars and he talks about the very unique way that he learned how to build a car. It started before he was 11 He says, I had stacks of car magazines in my room when I was a kid, full of post-it notes of what I liked and didn't like. He would go over every single car in the magazine and just constantly ask questions. The word why might be the one that he repeats the most. He would ask, why does the hinge look like that? Why are the brakes like that? Why is that mirror different? Why did that car choose to do it this way and this car chose to do the same thing a different way? He said he had stacks of car magazines meters high in his room. He says, I was a car nut. When I got older, I had no choice. That is one of the most important ideas that repeat over and over again. It is very clear this was a compulsion. This is another example of the truthfulness of that saying by Jeff Bezos, that we don't choose our passions, our passions choose us. When I got older, I had no choice. And so he is going to start his car company with no experience at an unbelievably young age of 22 years old. And he always quotes the day. He goes on the 12th of August, 1994 I said, I'm going to build the car. It is a challenge big enough for a lifetime. This is a tangent on really what I want to talk to you about, but it really just jumps off the page because, you know, I've read, I don't know, probably 30 pages of notes of Christian in his own words. And it is very clear if you just search online, he has a cult-like following. And part of the reason I think he's able to do that is because of his incredible communication skills. He doesn't just express ideas, he makes them memorable. It reminds me a lot of Charlie Munger, reminds me of Elon Musk, reminds me of Steve Jobs. It is a challenge big enough for a lifetime. And so there's all these profiles written about Christian throughout the years that just do a great job of describing him. This is the brainchild, they're talking about his car company. This is a brainchild of a 22 year old with no background in the automotive industry driven by a single motivation, a lifelong ambition to make the greatest supercar in the world. So think about this, no engineering experience, no manufacturing background, limited funding. And he talks about what he was thinking when he was 22 years old and he starts the car company. I wanted to build cars. I realized it was probably going to take a very long time before I succeeded, but I was young and I didn't have any obligations. I thought that if I didn't do it then, I never would. And he sets the bar incredibly high from day one. This reminds me of James Dyson. Dyson, if you study him, and I just spent a bunch of hours with him, which I'll tell you about later, he demands difference. He refuses to make me two products. He has a crazy line that he says it has to be different even if it's worse. And Koenigsegg is constantly saying that we will be different no matter what. He says, I thought this is it. He's describing himself at 22 He's still like this at 53 I guess this is something I want to tell you because you're going to see me repeat a bunch of these things. I just had drinks with this very well-known legendary investor. And I always ask these kind of people, out of all the founders that you've backed, who are the most spectacular? What are the outlier of the outliers? And I won't repeat who this is, but he's been working with this person for 20 years. And he says, if you go back and you look at notes from our first meeting, this founder was saying the same stuff that he's saying today. He just never stopped executing on it day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade. There is a lot of that with Koenigsegg. And this is the first mention of this. I thought I could make something different. He wanted to make individually handcrafted machines. And at the beginning, he had to do everything. I did everything, designing, drawing, creating a business plan, a development plan, finding people around me who could help out. I had to find a chassis engineer, a designer who could help me make models of my sketches. It took me two years from the day I decided to do it to have a full running car prototype.