—
When I founded the airline, Lord King from British Airways said that I was “too old to rock, too young to fly.” Fifteen years on, where was I now? It was a question I was asking myself, not just from a business sense, but as a father, too. My children, one not yet born, the other tiny when Virgin Atlantic started, were growing up and already making those first steps toward leaving home.
We had never planned to send the children to boarding school; I had suffered such dreadful experiences there myself. But as Holly approached sixteen we discussed the option seriously. Holly was keen to try out full-term boarding, and we compromised on her going to school in Oxford, which was close to where we lived then, but far enough away for Holly to gain some independence.
Choosing a school for your children should be a process of careful thought and contemplation: in our case, we managed to find the right choice by getting lost instead. Joan and I had an appointment at a school in Oxford we were considering for Sam and Holly. But having driven to the school, it turned out we had the wrong one altogether.
Popping inside and realizing it was not an open day, we bumped straight into the headmaster, David Christie. Rather than show us where to go, he insisted on whisking us around on a whirlwind tour of his school instead. The tour and his passion for the school were very impressive indeed. It had, until recently, been an all-boys’ school up to sixth grade but was now taking girls. There was a progressive air about the place, an unstuffy feel compared to the crammers I had experienced. By the time we left, both children were bound for St. Edwards. It was a real sliding doors moment in more ways than one: as it turns out, a young boy named Freddie Andrewes, whom Holly would get to know rather well in the coming years, was already studying at St. Edwards.
When Holly was later named the school’s first Head of School, I was overflowing with pride. But I was equally pleased that she was making friends, enjoying herself and growing into a fine young woman. She was already acquiring a taste for tackling injustices, and when she came home bemoaning the fact that girls were not allowed to wear trousers I helped her draft a letter to her headmaster demanding equality for all students. It reminded me of when I was at Stowe School, though in my case I would have campaigned for all students not to wear ties.
There were some amusing antiquated perks to being Head of School, one of which was the right to be able to graze your own goat in the school grounds.
“Holly, this is too good an opportunity to miss,” I told her over the kitchen table. “Whenever you come across absurd rules, take advantage of them.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I think you should buy a goat.”
“Don’t be silly, Dad,” she replied, wisely resisting.
As Holly prepared to graduate in 2000, we spent an evening hunched over her desk together working on her big speech to the whole school. I went to see her make the speech and was amazed how she had already become a better public speaker than her dad. She was shy, but concentrated on her words and spoke unwaveringly in her beautiful, clear voice. Not for the first or last time, I wept with pride.
Although sending Holly and Sam to St. Edwards was well worth it, it did take some getting used to the children not being at home. I was accustomed to being away from the kids a little, due to traveling with work so much. For Joan, it was a real wrench—to begin with she would cry every day: she missed her babies so much. She took to driving to Oxford quite a lot, and would “just happen” to pop by the school near midday, and take Holly and Sam out for lunch. Back home, after one of these lunches, there was often no food in the house. I remember standing in the kitchen one evening, rifling through bare cupboards, and saying to Joan: “Look, I know the kids are gone, but we still need to eat!”
“Well, you know where M&S is, too, Richard,” she replied.
It was a fair point. I got used to driving to Marks & Spencer. But she soon took pity on me!
—
Sitting there on Necker Island on New Year’s Eve, staring at my blank piece of paper, I’d decided it was time for a new start, to look to the stars. The following year, I followed up on that decision, literally so, with the setting up of a new company.
My fascination with space first started thirty years earlier. It was 20 July 1969 and I had turned nineteen two days before, still nursing the type of hangover that any teenager celebrating their nineteenth birthday could expect. My father turned on the tiny black-and-white television in our home in Shamley Green and I, along with countless millions, watched the extraordinary sight of images from space being beamed back to earth. More than 238,000 miles above, Apollo 11 had landed on the moon. I was gripped as Neil Armstrong uttered the immortal words: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Whether he fluffed his line or not, it was inspirational.
I was instantly convinced I would be going to space one day. I assumed that if NASA could land on the moon, in the near future they would be able to take anybody who wanted to go to space. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind. But when the Apollo missions ended, and the years started to pass without new breakthroughs, space travel felt further away again. Nevertheless, I was sure it was just a matter of time, and my enthusiasm remained undimmed.
In 1999, I was to take the first small steps toward fulfilling my own dream. For all the remarkable travels around the world I took that year, the most exciting journey started with a short stroll from my then home, across the icy greenery of Hyde Park, to a dreary bureaucratic building. I walked into Companies House and officially registered a new company: Virgin Galactic Airways. (Being a born optimist, I also registered Virgin Intergalactic Airways!) I did not know how to start a spaceline—nobody had ever done it before—but I loved the name and the idea thrilled me. It seemed an exciting way to enter a new millennium, looking up to the stars and thinking about how to get up there—and back again.
—
All that, though, was in the future. Back on New Year’s Eve it was time to dance with my wife. I put down my pencil, left my to-do list of possibilities on the table and joined our guests downstairs as Prince sang on: “I was dreamin’ when I wrote this, so sue me if I go too fast. But life is just a party and parties weren’t meant to last . . .”
CHAPTER 2
What You See Is What You Get
I was one of the first people in the country to use a mobile phone in the 1980s. It weighed more than Holly did at the time and was almost as big. To call it a brick would be disrespectful to bricks. However, by the time their size got more manageable, mobiles spread rapidly and transformed the way we did business. I no longer had to be at certain places at specific times so often, and was free to spend more time with my kids in the great outdoors, or just disappear for a while. I hated being stuck at a desk, and could see how mobiles would be transformative for workforces, providing freedom as well as convenience.
The spark for Virgin Mobile came back in 1999. I was sitting in the kitchen of my Holland Park house, working my way through some correspondence, when Will Whitehorn, my head of communications, came in, waving a piece of paper.
“Guess what, Richard. We’ve won a prize.”
“Oh great. Which one?” I asked.
“Actually . . . I’ve won a prize.” Will put the document—a phone bill—down on the table in front of me. “You have made me call you and every journalist in the country so often that BT has awarded me a trophy for the highest phone bill in Britain.”
Will’s bill got me thinking. No, not that I should bother him less often. But why were we giving BT all the money from so many calls? Why not start our own phone company?
In 1998, global mobile phone sales more than doubled to 162.9 million—we needed to get into the market. But I, along with everybody else, was paying through the nose for the pleasure of using my phone. Lengthy contracts that had huge service charges became the norm. Mobiles had become so useful so qui
ckly that most people just accepted they would be ripped off.
I saw this as a prime opportunity to shake up the market. The Virgin Group was relatively stable and we had cash from Virgin Atlantic’s new partnership to invest—mobile was the obvious space to do it in. My one concern was the idea of footing all the costs of a huge infrastructure investment. This, though, was where the really unusual part came in: we wouldn’t have to build a whole new network, we would piggyback off one of the existing ones. In 1997, we started a twenty-year partnership with Fast Track, a network ranking the UK’s top performing private companies in the Sunday Times. I couldn’t help but notice many of the successful start-ups, such as Carphone Warehouse, were in the telecoms sector. I asked Stephen Murphy and investment guru Gordon McCallum why we weren’t already investing. They were ahead of the game, quickly showing me a Goldman Sachs report about the possibility of MVNOs—mobile virtual network operators. It was filled with jargon that made my head hurt, but, once most of the dozens of acronyms had sunk in, the direction we should take seemed clear: if we could persuade one network to agree, we would rent time and bandwidth on their system, and bring our marketing and customer service expertise to the table.
Once I got the word out that Virgin was interested, we were approached by many networks for partnerships, as well as entrepreneurs with ideas for the mobile space, from handset designers to pager developers. I came across two young men from BT Cellnet with considerable experience in the telecoms industry, Tom Alexander and Joe Steel. After negotiations to form a deal with Cellnet got nowhere, I suggested to Tom that we start a truly different mobile company together.
I invited Tom up to my then home in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, for lunch. In old-fashioned entrepreneur style, we hashed out a plan over the kitchen table. We would launch a pay-as-you-go service, where users would only pay for what they actually used. We would aim at the youth market, appealing to teenagers getting their first phones, as well as slightly older people who had grown up with Virgin and were fed up with being stung by their old providers. And we would use our Virgin Megastores to sell the phones. By this point we had 381 stores worldwide and new flagships in London (Piccadilly Circus), Miami, Glasgow, Strasbourg and Okayama, filled to the brim with the sort of savvy people we could aim our product at. Tom, along with Joe, agreed to leave Cellnet and joined James Kydd from Virgin Drinks as Virgin Mobile’s first three employees.
There was just one small problem. These smart young men were, well, too smart. Being dressed neatly in suit and tie was not really the Virgin way.
“Do you really want to come to work dressed like that every morning?” I asked, yanking Tom’s tie. “How do you breathe?”
On their first day working for Virgin Mobile, we had a somewhat unusual initiation ceremony: we took their suits and ties, and, making a small fire, set them alight. As we watched the material go up in flames to cheers all round, I knew we had made the right decision. Now we just had to light a similar fire underneath the mobile phone industry itself.
—
As news of Virgin Mobile leaked out, critics once again suggested we were spreading the Virgin brand too thinly and entering too many sectors in which we lacked expertise. I wasn’t worried about that: I saw change as a challenge, and wanted to meet it head on. But what we needed most was a network. One by one the networks rejected us, concerned that they would lose more than they would gain by letting us into the market. Then, finally, the last one we spoke to, One 2 One, agreed to supply their network and we would provide the brand and marketing. On 1 August 1999 we became 50/50 partners with them. But then, out of the blue, One 2 One was sold off by its owners Cable & Wireless to German firm Deutsche Telekom, who rebranded it T-Mobile. For a worrying twenty-four hours it looked like they were going to drop us, so I jumped on a plane to Germany to meet Deutsche Telekom’s CEO Ron Sommer. Ron was straightforward and very smart. To my great relief, after an hour of listening to me, he said he understood the vision, and agreed to go ahead with our deal.
T-Mobile matched our investment of £42.5 million and we set about creating one of Britain’s biggest start-ups of all time. After we secured bank debt of £100 million, City analysts started putting heady numbers on the value of the company. One even estimated the business was worth £1.36 billion—before we even had our first customer!
“Did they really say billion, not million?” I had to double-check with Will.
I was scratching my head, wondering why we hadn’t entered the mobile business earlier.
When it was time to launch the company, I knew I needed an event that grabbed people’s attention. At one airline launch I flipped Kate Moss upside down on the wing as the press looked on at Heathrow. “Richard, I’ve got no panties on!” she shrieked. I had forgotten it had been raining earlier; I felt my feet slipping and my grip getting looser. For a moment, I thought I was about to drop the most famous supermodel in the world off the side of our jet. I managed to cling on, and I think Kate has just about forgiven me.
For Virgin Mobile I wanted to show this was a network with nothing to hide, which wouldn’t screw customers over with hidden charges. What better way than joining seven gorgeous ladies in a huge transparent mobile phone in London’s Trafalgar Square? Oh, and we just happened to be completely naked, except for some little orange cushions barely covering our modesty.
“What you see is what you get,” I told the crowds, who got the message and enjoyed a laugh. The Metropolitan Police didn’t quite see the joke, though, and we had to make a dash for it, taking our cushions with us.
—
Sometimes the publicity stunts we pull can take even me by surprise. That was the case with the launch of Virgin Mobile in Australia. By November 2000, Virgin Mobile UK had more than 500,000 customers and scooped Mobile Choice’s Network of the Year award (not bad, since we didn’t actually have a network!). As the Aussie public had embraced our airline so quickly, it made sense to strike while the iron was hot and launch a second mobile company down under. As in Britain, we found an established company, Optus, and agreed on a partnership using their network infrastructure and Virgin’s branding and customer experience. And, as with the launch of Virgin Mobile in the UK, we wanted an event to get people talking.
The first inkling I got that something unusual was going on was when I was picked up from my hotel, the Holiday Inn in Potts Point, Sydney. I got into a car with chief marketing officer Jean Oelwang, Peter Beikmanis and Catherine Salway for a briefing. I presumed we would be driving to the harbor, but instead we started heading out of the city and into the countryside.
“I thought we were going to do the launch next to Sydney Harbor,” I said.
“Erm, yes, we are,” said Jean, a little too nervously.
As the others in the car exchanged sideways looks, I could tell something was up. The next thing I knew we had arrived in an empty field. It seemed an unusual and unpopulated venue for a business launch. Then I heard the whupp-whupp-whupp of helicopter blades. That made more sense. I stood back in the full force of the wind as the helicopter landed next to the car.
“I think I get the picture.” I was about to climb into the helicopter when Jean pulled me to one side.
“Richard, we probably should have told you this earlier . . .”
Jean stood back as one of the helicopter crew put a harness on me. “You’re not actually going in the helicopter. You’re going to fly a hundred feet under it.”
That was a new one! I could feel my heart beginning to thump, but nothing ventured and all that. The helicopter crew told me to lie flat on the ground. As I lay down in the soft warmth of the grass, I could feel a bungee rope being attached to my waist.
“Keep still,” I was told. “Keep your head down.”
As I lay there I could hear the blades whirr into action. I was just wondering what Joan would make of my current predicament when, with a jerk, I was lifted off the ground. As I went
up I spun around and around uncontrollably fast. I tried to get myself into a skydiving position—arms and legs spread-eagled. My face had a fixed expression somewhere between bemusement and, I suspect, terror. Probably closer to terror, thinking about it.
Finally, I got the hang of it, and now we were really moving. I was flying forward through the air, 100 feet below the helicopter at a rapid rate. Over the years, I have often had dreams where I am flapping my arms and flying. Sometimes I soar around Necker, smelling the ocean air. Other times I fly up into space, looking down at the pale blue dot of Earth. Usually, however, I am looking down along Oxford Street, where our first Virgin Records store was, knowing that if I stopped I would crash. I swoop down, knock somebody’s hat off and zoom back upward. Occasionally I wake up falling.
This was as close as I’d get to my dreams in reality. I’ve never had a more exhilarating experience in my life. I worked out that if I dropped my arm on either side I could even control my direction—to a certain extent. As we approached the city I began to enjoy myself, waving to confused-looking people far below, and feeling more like Peter Pan than ever before. This is what being a bird must feel like, I thought to myself.
The next thing I knew, the imposing structure of Sydney Harbor Bridge was approaching fast in front of me. I tried dropping my arms as I’d just taught myself, but it wasn’t going to be enough. I tried shouting to the helicopter pilot to climb higher, but that was just as futile: there was no way he could hear me.
Finding My Virginity: The New Autobiography Page 2