Podcast
The Disrupters
Hosted by BBC Radio 4 · EN
Kamal Ahmed and Rohan Silva lift the lid on the realities of starting your own business, as leading entrepreneurs reveal their stories of risk, ambition and failure.
10episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
CEO of Netflix: Reed Hastings
Feb 1, 202100:27:20Tap to summarizeKamal Ahmed and Rohan Silva lift the lid on the realities of starting your own business. Kamal and Rohan speak to founder and CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings. Reed discloses the mistakes made in his first business and how he overcame them. They talk about what it took for Netflix to take on a company 100 times their size - and win. Plus why creative industries need to break away from work practices tailored to the industrial era and what that means for Netflix employees: no bonuses, no holiday limits and why being 'on the clock' doesn't apply.Presenters: Kamal Ahmed and Rohan Silva Producer: Georgia Catt
Transcribe →Temie Giwa-Tubosun, founder of LifeBank
Feb 19, 202000:27:32Tap to summarizeAt thirty weeks into her pregnancy, Temie Giwa-Tubsoun was in America when she was rushed to the hospital for an emergency C-section. Had she been in Nigeria, difficulties locating and distributing blood supplies meant she may have died from postpartum haemorrhage. Nigeria has the fourth-highest maternal mortality rate in the world and the loss of blood following a birth is the leading cause of this.In response to the lack of infrastructure and poor distribution networks, Temie founded LifeBank, a business enterprise working to improve access to blood transfusions in Nigeria, which has today saved over 6,936 lives. She talks to Kamal and Rohan about how she built her company, and why she thought a business rather than working through non-governmental-organisations or government, was the best way to bring about the change she wanted.Presenters: Kamal Ahmed and Rohan Silva Producer: Georgia Catt
Transcribe →Sir James Dyson
Feb 7, 202000:28:59Tap to summarizeSir James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes to create the cyclone vacuum cleaner. He talks to Kamal and Rohan about patience, persistence, and why the best businesses come out of a passion.
Transcribe →Surinder Arora, founder and chairman of Arora Group
Jul 19, 201900:24:01Tap to summarizeAt the age of 11, Surinder Arora was living at home in Punjab, India. He had fallen in with a bad crowd and moved to England to live with who his Aunt and Uncle, only to learn they were not who he thought. He tells Kamal and Rohan the remarkable story of how he built up an empire of hotel and property assets.
Transcribe →Comptoir Libanais: Tony Kitous
Dec 12, 201800:37:10Tap to summarizeTony Kitous arrived in London from Algeria with nothing. Today he has thirty-five restaurants and employs over 1000 staff. He talks to Kamal and Rohan about sacrifice and risk.
Transcribe →Mumsnet: Justine Roberts
Dec 4, 201800:34:41Tap to summarizeJustine Roberts, co-founder of Mumsnet, on the need for more women investors, maintaining a good culture at work and the benefits of scaling slowly.
Transcribe →Co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman
Nov 27, 201800:39:56Tap to summarizeIn 2016 LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion. The professional networking site's co-founder Reid Hoffman talks to Kamal and Rohan about how he became one of Silicon Valley's most successful entrepreneurs and the learning curves along the way; including the time he had angry customers ringing every landline in the office twenty-four hours a day; how to change direction without giving up on an idea, and why references are more important than interview.
Transcribe →Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman, founders of lastminute.com
Nov 20, 201800:40:49Tap to summarizeThe poster children of the UK’s internet boom talk to Kamal and Rohan about the rise of lastminute.com, but how in business as in life, we have to be careful what we wish for.
Transcribe →The Cambridge Satchel Company's Julie Deane
Nov 13, 201800:40:09Tap to summarize‘I let the confidence in myself be shaken’Julie Deane started The Cambridge Satchel Company at her kitchen table with £600. Ten years on the company sells 10,000 bags a month. But getting to this point hasn’t been easy. She talks to Kamal and Rohan about having to fire her manufacturer whilst orders piled up and how pressure from venture capitalists nearly brought her company under.
Transcribe →DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis
Nov 5, 201800:29:27Tap to summarizeRohan and Kamal talk to artificial intelligence expert, neuroscientist and entrepreneur Demis Hassabis. A former chess child prodigy, Demis is chief executive of DeepMind, the artificial intelligence business bought by Google for £400m only three years after it had started. But previously Demis had another company, which had failed. In this podcast he talks about lessons learnt from that experience; the dangers of being over idealistic, burn out and knowing when to cut your losses.
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