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

 

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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Sponsor links:

What3Words

The what3words app, available for iOS and Android, and the online map enables people to find, share and navigate to what3words addresses in 51 languages to date.

 
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How I failed: “I didn’t want to tell them I’ve reached the end of my rope”, with journalist Emma Gunavardhana

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How I failed: short-form video platform that got crushed by TikTok, with Jess Butcher MBE