What3Words: Why an injury can be the best thing to happen to you, with Co-Founder & CEO Chris Sheldrick

Secret Leaders
Secret Leaders
Episode • Jun 28, 2022 • 46m

We normally can’t see it at the time but bad things often play a critical role in good things happening. As Steve Jobs famously said, it’ll make sense looking backwards. This is exactly what happened to Chris Sheldrick who had plans to be a professional bassoonist but a freak injury changed the course of life.

Chris is now the Co-Founder and CEO of What3Words, an alarmingly simple solution to a complex problem you didn’t know we had - addresses.

Lots of places don’t have addresses - like a barge on a canal, or a spot on a mountainside. This makes it difficult to deliver or do things at those addresses so Chris’s solution was to turn the world into 57 trillion 3-metre squares and give each of those squares a three word name, e.g. house, dog, car.

But it’s one thing haven’t a genius idea. It’s another thing executing on it. Find out how Chris has done it.

We talk about:

  • Why a young kid would play the bassoon 
  • How sleepwalking can go wrong
  • Why being polarising is good 
  • How to raise funds
  • Using What3Words to help in disasters
  • The business model

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