#406 Christian von Koenigsegg

The first person to tell me about Christian von Koenigsegg was actually Daniel Ek, 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 x 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 him. So then I went and searched and I added about another dozen interviews and videos and essentially just consumed. I spent 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 into a list of about a 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 whose 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 thirty years, and this 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. And so his entire childhood, he's obsessed with cars, and he talks about the very unique way that he learned how to build a car, and 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. So he would go over every single car in the magazine and just constantly ask questions. The word why might be the …