Michael Dell discusses unexpected business opportunity (Part 3)

I hired about one person a week, every week, you know, for the first year or so. And then it became more and more. And I remember one time we had this customer who wanted to come visit us. It was Martin Marietta, which is now part of some much bigger company. And the guy wanted to buy like 150 of these kits, which was, you know, for us, a pretty enormous order. And he wanted to come to Austin and see our factory. Right. You know, operations. And so this was a little bit scary because it sort of looked like a massive dorm room. You know, it wasn't the most put together place. This was not an actual dorm room. Right. Like you had by this point, rented out an office space. Yeah, yeah. We were growing quickly and so we, you know, we tried to clean this space up and put on some semi respectable business attire. Yeah. So the guy's going through and we're showing him, here's how we format the hard drives and here's how we ensure the quality controls and we're sure we can meet your demand for this order for 150 units. And he says, well, what are those? And I said, well, those are the computers that we have to format the hard drives. And by this time we had actually been assembling our own computers just to format the hard drives because it became too expensive to buy them from other people. And he said, well, why don't you sell those? And I was like, oh, that's a great idea. I should have thought of that. We were so busy making these hard disk drive kits that we hadn't really thought to make our own computers. When we come back in just a moment, how that idea launched Michael down a path that would make Dell one of the biggest computer companies in the world. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built this. You've been asked to run the company's social channels, but company content plays by its own set of rules. It needs a logo in the first three seconds, but it can't feel like an ad. It needs subtitles. Except when it doesn't, it needs to run at two times speed and deliver a complex message.