How I helped Bill Buckley get his incredible founder story out of his head and onto the page

A few years ago I worked as a ghostwriter on Ion Man: The Life & Adventures of Bill Buckley, the founder story of one of New Zealand’s first technology entrepreneurs and exporters.

Bill grew up on a small farm in the back blocks of the Waikato, struggled with dyslexia, and left school as soon as he could. He went on to build a company whose technology now powers around 90 percent of the world’s silicon chips.

At 82, Bill still refuses to talk about retirement. He’s the kind of man who got a Segway for his 70th birthday to save time walking between factory buildings. He did 2,500 miles on it, crashed it, broke eight ribs, and was back at a board meeting two days later.

What story did the client want to tell?

Bill didn’t, at first, particularly want to tell his story.

Like a lot of founders, he’s a doer, not a talker. “He’s not a ‘gonna’ guy,” as his brother puts it. When we started, Bill was reluctant to look back — his default setting is full speed ahead, on to the next machine, the next problem, the next market.

There was also a practical hurdle. Bill had spent his career building machines without drawings. “I didn’t write much down,” he told me. “Because I didn’t write things down, people thought I was winging it. I wasn’t. It was all in my head.”

So the brief was clear, if daunting: get a remarkable engineering life out of one man’s head and onto the page — including the parts he’d never thought to record, and the parts he didn’t think mattered.

What was the process?

The work started with Bill — hours of interviews, pulling out the story of the farm, the apprenticeship, the toxic boss, the moment in 1978 when he decided it was “now or never” and went out on his own.
But I didn’t stop there.

I interviewed his family and friends. I sat down with the engineers, the physicists and the long-serving staff who were in the trenches with him during the early years.

They filled in the blanks and added the colour:
Bill remembered the inventions. His team remembered the late nights making them work.
Bill remembered the deals. His staff remembered the culture that won the client’s trust.
Bill remembered what happened. His people shone a light on the how and the why.

Letting different voices tell their side of the story didn’t just add detail. It added depth and it validated everyone’s contribution to the journey. The finished book is part autobiography, part oral history.

What was the result?

Ion Man was described by the NBR as “the most overlooked business book of the year.” One editor who read an early draft called it a “superb evocation of life in country New Zealand in the 1940s and 50s” — and that’s before Bill even gets to the inventing.

But the result that matters most isn’t the reviews. It’s that a life’s work — one that would otherwise have lived only in one man’s head — is now safely on the page, in Bill’s own unmistakable voice, for his family, his staff, and the next generation of New Zealand engineers.

Working with Bill also reinforced something for me. Founders are often the last people to recognise the value of their own story. They’re so busy building the next thing that they never stop to appreciate what they’ve already made.

How did the client feel after telling their story?

The process gave Bill something he hadn’t expected, a chance to pause and see his own work clearly.

He stopped looking at the business as just a series of problems to solve and power bills to pay, and started to appreciate how much he’d loved the work itself.

“Machining is my artwork,” he reflects in the final pages of the book. “The engineering shop is my studio and a new job is like a blank canvas.”

That’s the real value of capturing a company history. It isn’t just for the readers, or the staff. It’s for the founder and their family. A legacy isn’t only about what you built — it’s about how much you enjoyed building it, and being able to step back and appreciate what it took.

If you’re waiting until you retire to tell your story, you might be waiting too long.

Don’t leave it too late.