Ever wondered how and why people start tech brands? In this interview Adam Norris spills the beans on starting Pure Electric scooters after being successful in Britain’s biggest pensions company, Hargreaves Lansdown. He opens up about talking just one week a year off, a travel schedule fit for a pilot and how F1 has influenced his product.
I take one week a year off work
I’m going to Portugal – there’s a place where there’s no human beings and we have a Villa there. With Lando, and all the things I do, I travel the world anyway – I enjoy seeing different cultures and different things. Recently in the last couple of years it’s been too in-and-out: recently I went to Australia for three days – I tried to be brave and think I could sleep on the plane, but it catches up with you after a bit… I went to China last year and because the flight was delayed, I ended up being out of the airport for three hours. We were launching our new flagship store and there a lot of VIP guests who knew I was the founder of Pure, who were like “wow, you’ve come here for three hours, that’s impressive.” I had to be at Silverstone the next day.
Lando, now ranked second in the world in F1, started racing at 8 years old
My background is engineering, so I like gadgets and I like toys and so I brought him a quad bike at 4-years-old. It had a kill switch on it, so you don’t worry too much – if he started flying around too much you just press the kill and it kills the battery and motor – a little bit of protection.
He won the Miami Grand Prix 2024 – his first ever win – that’s the milestone for any driver is to effectively win a round in the world championship. He’s currently ranked second in the world!
A lot of the really clever engineering at Pure Electric came from F1 people
I took on the person who ran the hairdryer projects at Dyson, prior to that he’s been head of research for the whole group, so he sat down we me and I asked what he would do. Then I talked to F1 people who said lower the centre of gravity to make it safer. My mission was to make the world’s best looking – I think Dyson is pretty good at that – but also best e-scooter – so more convenient and also safer.
A racing car is broad and low, so like that we wanted to lower riders’ center of gravity on a scooter and change feet position, so you stand as wide as you can, not with the one after each other. All the other scooters effectively came from children’s kick scooters – just with a motor on and no innovation. From a breaking perspective we also knew we wanted to put weight further back.
We have recently done a collaboration with McLaren
We did a special edition for Ayrton Senna – the world’s best ever driver. McLaren did a special edition car for his anniversary for the Monaco Grand Pix and we did a scooter – it sold out within 90 minutes. Then we did a more mainstream one which sold out in the first week or so, but we’ve just got more stock. People like and we’ve done a few more special editions based on his car.
We were included in Stella McCartney’s show at Paris Fashion Week
Stella McCartney wanted things which are cool but also environmentally friendly on her catwalk. It was a really nice thing to do – it gave publicity to twenty small brands, including Pure Electric, and all the photographers and media were sitting on the opposite side to our products, so it just gave us a lot of publicity and airtime.
I formed Pure Electric because I wanted to build a company that was good for the planet.
I’ve been successful in Britain’s biggest pensions company, Hargreaves Lansdown – I built half of it merging with two others and floated on the stock market, which is great. But, I didn’t just want to be known as Lando’s dad or the person who sold most pensions and I’ve learnt I’m really good at solving problems and building businesses.
I decided my way of helping the planet was trying to cut carbon, so I look around going “okay, what creates carbon?” Transport is huge and urban transport is one of the biggest contributors. I found that because of lithium iron getting more efficient because of Tesla and all the mobile phones in the world, a new form of transport emerging – e-scooters – could fundamentally change the way we get around cities and cut pollution.
My house has a glass roof and features a helter-skelter slide
One of the things I wanted in my house was a helter-skelter slide! I built my house on Kevlar blocks – which meant I could hyper insulate it. Normally you have some form of heat loss to the ground but It’s all triple glazed and has been designed to give solar gains so you don’t have to heat it throughout the year much.
The whole house is run off renewables – I love nature, and I love the environment, and I’ve invested into a wave power business in the past and I put quite a lot of money into other things to enhance and improve renewables, but my dream is offshore wind.
I went fully electric but have since changed to a hybrid vehicle.
I went electric, I had a Taycan Turbo S, the Porche’s top of the range all-electric car but the range made start to think I needed a second car because I often have to go a long way. I had an Aston Martin, sold it, got the Turbo S and then swapped it for the Range Rover Electric Hybrid.
I travel a lot
Whilst I don’t necessarily enjoy the travel, I enjoy seeing parts of the world – I love the culture. As a human being, I enjoy getting out of the office and doing things. My wife calls it ‘stealing with your eyes’ – just seeing things, watching things, understanding. I’m a really inquisitive person, so I just love understanding how cultures have changed. It’s fascinating how we are all similar across the world, but we all slightly different aren’t we? Obviously, there are bad people and some very different people, but give or take we are all similar, but different. When you go to China, the food is different – you are still eating food – but some of it is quite different to what we eat.
My oldest son owns a racing simulator business
When Lando was practising for F1, and you want to practise as much as you can, we really got into simulators and I sort of led the world on home simulators. This is about eight years ago now and Lando did a lot of simulator work. I found what you want is a simulator to be as cheap as possible but also to be a good mimic of the stuff. My eldest son actually took that, because they weren’t being done very well across the world, and built a simulator business, called Cool Performance. That’s really good fun. Probably a third of the people who buy them are racing car drivers, so a lot of the F1 drivers have them at home – a secret you don’t know… The other people who want 90% of the fun of racing in your own home. It’s ten times up what Xbox is – it’s the most realistic and best in the world, but not cheap at about £30,000.
Find out more at pureelectric.com
