Michael Dell on AI, Innovation, and the Future of Business

Get ready for the captivating start to the Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2025! 🎉

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We are incredibly honored to present our Show Opening Keynote Speaker, Michael Dell, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies. He sits down with hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman for a captivating conversation that spans his legendary entrepreneurial journey, his unique perspective on AI-driven economic shifts, and the enduring culture of innovation at Dell Technologies.

Key takeaways from their discussion:

🔹The Entrepreneurial Blueprint: Explore Michael Dell's foundational entrepreneurial experiences and how these early lessons profoundly molded his distinctive approach to business and relentless innovation.

🔹Navigating AI's Economic Tides: Gain a leader's perspective on the current AI-driven economic shifts, drawing parallels from Dell's rich history of successfully navigating similar periods of profound technological change.

🔹Dell's Evolving Culture of Innovation: Discover how Dell Technologies has continuously cultivated and adapted its culture of innovation in response to rapid technological advancements and dynamic market demands.

🔹The Future of Work is  Productivity, Creativity & Agentic AI: Uncover anticipated impacts of AI on productivity and creativity across diverse industries, alongside Michael Dell's insights into the development and potential implications of Agentic AI.

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Learn more at Dell Technologies.

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Watch the full video at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

Or listen to the audio here:
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Patrick Moorhead: The sixth annual Six Five Summit  is on and we have special guest Michael Dell to kick this off. Daniel, we made it six years here.

Daniel Newman: Yeah You remember Six Five Summit One.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

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Daniel Newman: We were in full lockdown mode and I remember you reached out to Michael asking for a little favor. Can you help us kick off the event? If you remember at the time, I'm pretty sure Michael picked up his phone. I don't remember if it was an iPhone or an Android. And he recorded us a 90 second message.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

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Daniel Newman: And, you know, another genesis story, Pat, for you and me and our relationship with Michael Dell kicking off now we're back for six and I couldn't be more excited.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Michael, I just want to thank you again for doing this. I mean, you kicked us off six years ago and you know, when you start a business, you just quite don't know where it's going to go.

‍

Michael Dell: Ain’t that the truth.

‍

Daniel Newman: No, it is.

‍

Patrick Moorhead:  I mean, your revenue size going back 40 years, I mean, who knows if that's where you would expect it to be today, but you are, and you know, we operate at a slightly different scale than you do, but we're really, really glad to have you.

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Michael Dell: Great to be with you guys and congratulations on six years and all the progress.

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Patrick Moorhead: Thank you.

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Michael Dell: You do a great job covering the industry and, you know, thinking a little more deeply about things.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, we try to do that. We really do. You know, there were a lot of missing holes out there and what was going on with Broadcast Video, what was going on with, you know, influencers. And I feel like we found a model. We kind of stumbled across it. Pandemic hit. Dan and I were doing a podcast and we just decided, I think there's a need for this, but thanks again.

‍

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it's funny, I kind of want to get Michael queued up to say, you're killing it again, like you did last year. That was one of my favorite highlights ever. Michael, I have to say, over the last year, it's been a lot of fun to sort of watch you become a bit more open with your journey on X. You've started sharing some more stories. I still, every six months or so, you'll share that first income statement from when you started the company. And you talk about, this is what I sent to my parents to basically get them to let me drop out of college so I could start this company. And, you know, it always, I think for us entrepreneurial types, I mean, it's heartwarming, it's exciting. You have a pretty exciting origin story, though. Not everybody necessarily is on X all the time, despite what Pat and I think I'd love for you to just share a little bit, open up a little bit about that, because it's been fun to watch. And I think people out there realize that while they're seeing the Dell of today, humbler beginnings, exciting growth. Talk a little bit about that origin story for everyone.

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Michael Dell: Yeah, well, you know, when I was about six or seven years old, I kind of liked math for some reason, and it was the beginning of electronic calculators, right? And I got one of these, and I'm like, this is incredible. I could do math with this thing. And then, you know, I'm 11 or 12 years old, I'm in an advanced math class, you know, in junior high school. And it turns out they had a teletype terminal that they just dropped in the classroom. The teacher had no idea what to do with it. And, you know, me and a bunch of friends are playing around with this thing, and, like, we're writing programs and sending them off to some mainframe, and it comes back, I'm like, this. This is amazing. Right? So, like, reading Byte Magazine, learning about the microprocessor and, you know, PCs and, you know, disk drives and, you know, super excited. Like, it's pretty much all I did when I was in my teens. And then, yeah, I go off to. I go off to college, and, you know, my parents aren't looking over my shoulder, so I'm like, I'm doing whatever I want to do, right? So I'm upgrading computers, I'm selling them. I'm having a great time. My parents, you know, kind of caught wind of that and got very upset. Said, you can't. Can't do that. You got to study, got to get your priorities straight. Michael, you're going to be a doctor. You got to stop messing around with these computers.

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Daniel Newman: There's no future in that.

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Michael Dell: Yeah, it's like, you know, you got to go to college, you got to go to medical school. I mean, be a doctor like your brother, like your cousins, like your dad, you know, and so I, you know, a lot of guilt was laid on me, and I said, okay, I'll stop, you know, and so I could last 10 days. That was the most I could last. And during those 10 days, I really, you know, thought about it, and I kind of concluded that this wasn't like a hobby thing.

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Patrick Moorhead: Right.

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Michael Dell: Like, really what I wanted to do.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

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Michael Dell: And so maybe I would have never started this company. Had. My parents told me I had to stop. So then I sort of set in motion, you know, what became Dell Computer Corporation, which I incorporated one week before my final exams of my freshman year. Probably not the best timing, you know, but here we are.

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Patrick Moorhead: Right. No, that's amazing. And by the way, I loved your book. I recommend it to everybody and it just gives insights. And also some of the people that made an impact on you, your family and different family members, but also people like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison and folks like that. I'm really glad you pulled that in. You made it perfect. But you also made it professional, too. And a lot of people don't do that. I really like that.

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Michael Dell: Thank you.

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Patrick Moorhead: So you've seen a lot of twists and turns in the economies. I mean, probably when you started the economy, the economy wasn't great. And there was even a question on what the new growth was going to be. Right. You had Japan taking over.

‍

Michael Dell: Exactly. Yeah. We weren't even supposed to be an American computer company.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Exactly.

‍

Michael Dell: It was all going to be Japan and was Tron. You know, they were buying up everything. And we sort of had this malaise that we had inferior technology and the Japanese were far more advanced.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: That's right.

‍

Michael Dell: And there's no way we'd ever beat them.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

‍

Michael Dell: So, you know, like, starting a computer company was like, what, are you crazy? You know, how are you going to beat the Japanese?

‍

Patrick Moorhead: So we're here now, right? The economy. A lot of ways to measure the economy. We've got a debt ceiling that is evaporating. A lot of debt, but a lot of opportunity. We talked about this during our Dell Tech World interview. Where do you see this disruption going? What's the end state? And I don't know if it's five years or 10 years, but where is this going?

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Michael Dell: You know, I think I always think of it as an infinite game. It's a race with no finish line. So there is no time. 

When you're like, you're done.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: I’m here. Let's pack it up.

Daniel Newman: Well, there is a time, but not that kind of time.

‍

Michael Dell: Yeah. So we just keep going. I think when we think about the role technology plays in the world, it is the fulcrum that's driving progress in every field. So whether it is medicine or education or manufacturing or finance or retail. And now we see, you know, there was a lot of data that was created over time. Right. And the time frame in which the amount of data in the world doubles is shrinking all the time as more and more data is being created. But we all remember a time not that long ago where the dirty little secret is that nobody really did much with that data, right? But that time has changed now. Now we have these incredible models that are bringing that data to life and allowing companies to express their competitive advantage. And it's not like it changes in a light switch. There's a lot of work that goes into that, but that is just a massive accelerator of progress. I think we will look back on this time as a point where there was just a big speed up in the whole infinite game.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Sure.

‍

Michael Dell: And that's super exciting. Lots of work involved in making that happen. But the cycles are coming faster and faster. We had the Internet and the PC before that. Now this is just a huge speed up. And look, maybe it's as big as those, maybe it's bigger.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Right,

‍

Daniel Newman: It's pretty easy at least for me to argue that the next multiple decades of global economic leadership sit on sort of being the leaders in AI. We can debate the politics and how things are being done and how trade is being addressed and how export controls are being, you know, put into place. But Michael, I mean, and I'm sure over the years you've had some conversations with people in D.C. and in policy, but there is no longer like a separation between the economy, between geopolitics, between defense. AI seems to be the frontier in which we really are trying to establish the multi decade global leadership positioning. So I think overall there is, I mean you have to, I think that you would believe there's quite a bit at stake right now. And then of course figuring out how this works from a business and enterprise which we like to talk a lot about. But there's also, you know, like I said, who has access to the keys. It's almost like the debate we had about nuclear at one time. But AI is really going to change the entire dynamics of the world.

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Michael Dell: No question national security, prosperity of nations will hang in the balance with their ability to have access to, and their ability to utilize technology to propel their economies forward. The US is in a pretty good position there, but you know, it's a fast moving competitive dynamic and you know, we certainly spend time with the policymakers doing our best to explain, you know, our point of view and what we're seeing. But we don't control that. You know, we tend to focus more on the things we can control, how do we help our customers utilize these technologies and how do we build a resilient, you know, supply chain and infrastructure that works in spite of whatever goes on, you know, in the policy world.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, I know. That was a big question. Let's get back to Dell a little bit, though, on culture. You know, you've been a driver of a certain culture archetype that's been very successful over the years. We talked over even the last five minutes about how fast that is, you know, how fast that is changing. Is it changing your approach? Because, like I said, the time you have to make decisions, the time you have to decide about making an acquisition, the time how you handle integration, how you decide on employee scale versus implementing a lot of customer zero talk at Dell, which AI is an efficiency and a productivity driver, kind of. How are you thinking about that, keeping your ethos as it pertains to culture but really readying yourself for what you're seeing ahead?

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Michael Dell: Yeah. You know, depending on the nature of your business, there's a degree to which your job essentially is to make decisions with imperfect information. When you're in a business that is changing rapidly, that has all these variables, you're dealing with a fair bit of imperfect information. That's our job. Right. So that's fine. It's kind of what we've been doing for a long time. It is speeding up a bit. And the good news is that we've had this culture of embracing change. And most of the time, the changes have worked out pretty positively for the company and for our customers. And so our people tend to trust us and follow us and think that, you know, most of the time we're gonna get it right. But we make mistakes. And, you know, the good news is you make a mistake, like, okay, we'll just change that and we'll go fix it.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Michael, I want to thank you for having this chat with us prior to the Six Five Summit in its sixth year. I want to talk for another hour, but I think you have other things that you need to get tohere. So I really want to thank you so much for that.

Michael Dell: You guys are killing it.

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Patrick Moorhead: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

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Michael Dell: All right.

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Disclaimer: TheSix Five Summit is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: The sixth annual Six Five Summit  is on and we have special guest Michael Dell to kick this off. Daniel, we made it six years here.

Daniel Newman: Yeah You remember Six Five Summit One.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

‍

Daniel Newman: We were in full lockdown mode and I remember you reached out to Michael asking for a little favor. Can you help us kick off the event? If you remember at the time, I'm pretty sure Michael picked up his phone. I don't remember if it was an iPhone or an Android. And he recorded us a 90 second message.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

‍

Daniel Newman: And, you know, another genesis story, Pat, for you and me and our relationship with Michael Dell kicking off now we're back for six and I couldn't be more excited.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Michael, I just want to thank you again for doing this. I mean, you kicked us off six years ago and you know, when you start a business, you just quite don't know where it's going to go.

‍

Michael Dell: Ain’t that the truth.

‍

Daniel Newman: No, it is.

‍

Patrick Moorhead:  I mean, your revenue size going back 40 years, I mean, who knows if that's where you would expect it to be today, but you are, and you know, we operate at a slightly different scale than you do, but we're really, really glad to have you.

‍

Michael Dell: Great to be with you guys and congratulations on six years and all the progress.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Thank you.

‍

Michael Dell: You do a great job covering the industry and, you know, thinking a little more deeply about things.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, we try to do that. We really do. You know, there were a lot of missing holes out there and what was going on with Broadcast Video, what was going on with, you know, influencers. And I feel like we found a model. We kind of stumbled across it. Pandemic hit. Dan and I were doing a podcast and we just decided, I think there's a need for this, but thanks again.

‍

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it's funny, I kind of want to get Michael queued up to say, you're killing it again, like you did last year. That was one of my favorite highlights ever. Michael, I have to say, over the last year, it's been a lot of fun to sort of watch you become a bit more open with your journey on X. You've started sharing some more stories. I still, every six months or so, you'll share that first income statement from when you started the company. And you talk about, this is what I sent to my parents to basically get them to let me drop out of college so I could start this company. And, you know, it always, I think for us entrepreneurial types, I mean, it's heartwarming, it's exciting. You have a pretty exciting origin story, though. Not everybody necessarily is on X all the time, despite what Pat and I think I'd love for you to just share a little bit, open up a little bit about that, because it's been fun to watch. And I think people out there realize that while they're seeing the Dell of today, humbler beginnings, exciting growth. Talk a little bit about that origin story for everyone.

‍

Michael Dell: Yeah, well, you know, when I was about six or seven years old, I kind of liked math for some reason, and it was the beginning of electronic calculators, right? And I got one of these, and I'm like, this is incredible. I could do math with this thing. And then, you know, I'm 11 or 12 years old, I'm in an advanced math class, you know, in junior high school. And it turns out they had a teletype terminal that they just dropped in the classroom. The teacher had no idea what to do with it. And, you know, me and a bunch of friends are playing around with this thing, and, like, we're writing programs and sending them off to some mainframe, and it comes back, I'm like, this. This is amazing. Right? So, like, reading Byte Magazine, learning about the microprocessor and, you know, PCs and, you know, disk drives and, you know, super excited. Like, it's pretty much all I did when I was in my teens. And then, yeah, I go off to. I go off to college, and, you know, my parents aren't looking over my shoulder, so I'm like, I'm doing whatever I want to do, right? So I'm upgrading computers, I'm selling them. I'm having a great time. My parents, you know, kind of caught wind of that and got very upset. Said, you can't. Can't do that. You got to study, got to get your priorities straight. Michael, you're going to be a doctor. You got to stop messing around with these computers.

‍

Daniel Newman: There's no future in that.

‍

Michael Dell: Yeah, it's like, you know, you got to go to college, you got to go to medical school. I mean, be a doctor like your brother, like your cousins, like your dad, you know, and so I, you know, a lot of guilt was laid on me, and I said, okay, I'll stop, you know, and so I could last 10 days. That was the most I could last. And during those 10 days, I really, you know, thought about it, and I kind of concluded that this wasn't like a hobby thing.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Right.

‍

Michael Dell: Like, really what I wanted to do.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

‍

Michael Dell: And so maybe I would have never started this company. Had. My parents told me I had to stop. So then I sort of set in motion, you know, what became Dell Computer Corporation, which I incorporated one week before my final exams of my freshman year. Probably not the best timing, you know, but here we are.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Right. No, that's amazing. And by the way, I loved your book. I recommend it to everybody and it just gives insights. And also some of the people that made an impact on you, your family and different family members, but also people like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison and folks like that. I'm really glad you pulled that in. You made it perfect. But you also made it professional, too. And a lot of people don't do that. I really like that.

‍

Michael Dell: Thank you.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: So you've seen a lot of twists and turns in the economies. I mean, probably when you started the economy, the economy wasn't great. And there was even a question on what the new growth was going to be. Right. You had Japan taking over.

‍

Michael Dell: Exactly. Yeah. We weren't even supposed to be an American computer company.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Exactly.

‍

Michael Dell: It was all going to be Japan and was Tron. You know, they were buying up everything. And we sort of had this malaise that we had inferior technology and the Japanese were far more advanced.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: That's right.

‍

Michael Dell: And there's no way we'd ever beat them.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

‍

Michael Dell: So, you know, like, starting a computer company was like, what, are you crazy? You know, how are you going to beat the Japanese?

‍

Patrick Moorhead: So we're here now, right? The economy. A lot of ways to measure the economy. We've got a debt ceiling that is evaporating. A lot of debt, but a lot of opportunity. We talked about this during our Dell Tech World interview. Where do you see this disruption going? What's the end state? And I don't know if it's five years or 10 years, but where is this going?

‍

Michael Dell: You know, I think I always think of it as an infinite game. It's a race with no finish line. So there is no time. 

When you're like, you're done.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: I’m here. Let's pack it up.

Daniel Newman: Well, there is a time, but not that kind of time.

‍

Michael Dell: Yeah. So we just keep going. I think when we think about the role technology plays in the world, it is the fulcrum that's driving progress in every field. So whether it is medicine or education or manufacturing or finance or retail. And now we see, you know, there was a lot of data that was created over time. Right. And the time frame in which the amount of data in the world doubles is shrinking all the time as more and more data is being created. But we all remember a time not that long ago where the dirty little secret is that nobody really did much with that data, right? But that time has changed now. Now we have these incredible models that are bringing that data to life and allowing companies to express their competitive advantage. And it's not like it changes in a light switch. There's a lot of work that goes into that, but that is just a massive accelerator of progress. I think we will look back on this time as a point where there was just a big speed up in the whole infinite game.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Sure.

‍

Michael Dell: And that's super exciting. Lots of work involved in making that happen. But the cycles are coming faster and faster. We had the Internet and the PC before that. Now this is just a huge speed up. And look, maybe it's as big as those, maybe it's bigger.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Right,

‍

Daniel Newman: It's pretty easy at least for me to argue that the next multiple decades of global economic leadership sit on sort of being the leaders in AI. We can debate the politics and how things are being done and how trade is being addressed and how export controls are being, you know, put into place. But Michael, I mean, and I'm sure over the years you've had some conversations with people in D.C. and in policy, but there is no longer like a separation between the economy, between geopolitics, between defense. AI seems to be the frontier in which we really are trying to establish the multi decade global leadership positioning. So I think overall there is, I mean you have to, I think that you would believe there's quite a bit at stake right now. And then of course figuring out how this works from a business and enterprise which we like to talk a lot about. But there's also, you know, like I said, who has access to the keys. It's almost like the debate we had about nuclear at one time. But AI is really going to change the entire dynamics of the world.

‍

Michael Dell: No question national security, prosperity of nations will hang in the balance with their ability to have access to, and their ability to utilize technology to propel their economies forward. The US is in a pretty good position there, but you know, it's a fast moving competitive dynamic and you know, we certainly spend time with the policymakers doing our best to explain, you know, our point of view and what we're seeing. But we don't control that. You know, we tend to focus more on the things we can control, how do we help our customers utilize these technologies and how do we build a resilient, you know, supply chain and infrastructure that works in spite of whatever goes on, you know, in the policy world.

‍

Daniel Newman: Yeah, I know. That was a big question. Let's get back to Dell a little bit, though, on culture. You know, you've been a driver of a certain culture archetype that's been very successful over the years. We talked over even the last five minutes about how fast that is, you know, how fast that is changing. Is it changing your approach? Because, like I said, the time you have to make decisions, the time you have to decide about making an acquisition, the time how you handle integration, how you decide on employee scale versus implementing a lot of customer zero talk at Dell, which AI is an efficiency and a productivity driver, kind of. How are you thinking about that, keeping your ethos as it pertains to culture but really readying yourself for what you're seeing ahead?

‍

Michael Dell: Yeah. You know, depending on the nature of your business, there's a degree to which your job essentially is to make decisions with imperfect information. When you're in a business that is changing rapidly, that has all these variables, you're dealing with a fair bit of imperfect information. That's our job. Right. So that's fine. It's kind of what we've been doing for a long time. It is speeding up a bit. And the good news is that we've had this culture of embracing change. And most of the time, the changes have worked out pretty positively for the company and for our customers. And so our people tend to trust us and follow us and think that, you know, most of the time we're gonna get it right. But we make mistakes. And, you know, the good news is you make a mistake, like, okay, we'll just change that and we'll go fix it.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Michael, I want to thank you for having this chat with us prior to the Six Five Summit in its sixth year. I want to talk for another hour, but I think you have other things that you need to get tohere. So I really want to thank you so much for that.

Michael Dell: You guys are killing it.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

‍

Michael Dell: All right.

‍

Disclaimer: TheSix Five Summit is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

‍