4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2023
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Iain Griffin and Dirk Stewart formed their company after a mutual need for more leg room inspired a brainwave.
They created the Seatfrog app for train travel, which is disrupting the industry.
Dougal Shaw meets them (on a train), and finds out why their business changed from air travel to trains, and moved from Sydney to London.
Presenter/producer: Dougal Shaw
(Image: Iain Griffin and Dirk Stewart. Credit: BBC)
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Hannah and I'm very excited to be hosting What in the World a new daily podcast from the BBC World Service, where we try to help you make sense of the world around you, of the big things that are happening, the small things that are happening and everything in between. |
| 0:16.4 | Search for What in the World, wherever you get your BBC podcasts, and hit subscribe. |
| 0:26.0 | Hello, I'm Dougal Shaw, and this week on Business Daily, it's a CEO-Secretes Takeover. |
| 0:31.9 | Every day I'll be speaking to a different CEO or entrepreneur. |
| 0:35.7 | I'll be finding out what got them to the top, what drives them to stay there, and what |
| 0:39.9 | advice can they share. |
| 0:41.8 | Today, it's two for the price of one, as I catch up with a pair of co-founders, an Englishman |
| 0:46.9 | and an Australian. |
| 0:48.5 | Any good entrepreneur has resilience in spades, so you've just got to figure out the plan to get through it. |
| 0:55.4 | We didn't stick our head in the sand. |
| 0:57.0 | We kind of, you know, it was coming. |
| 0:59.2 | We made a very early decision about what we need to do with the business to survive. |
| 1:03.4 | I'm conducting this interview at high speed, around 160 kilometres per hour, in fact. |
| 1:09.0 | I've caught a train with two entrepreneurs who have set up a business |
| 1:12.2 | which aims to make train travel easier, especially for people like them. Like so many businesses, |
| 1:18.1 | they began by solving their own problem. For this journey, I sat opposite Ian Griffin and Dirk |
| 1:23.8 | Stewart, who together founded the travel ticket app, Seat Frog. |
| 1:33.8 | So we're sitting on a train now and we're travelling from London Paddington to Bristol. |
| 1:37.6 | And I guess it was on a train that you first had the idea for your business. |
| 1:39.4 | Yeah, that's right. |
| 1:43.0 | Dirk and I combined height of about 12 foot eight. |
| 1:46.6 | So upgrades have always been a bit of a competition between us um sitting in standard class really isn't an option when you're as tall as us so we had a bit of a |
... |
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