Simon Griffiths

Engineer and economist turned social entrepreneur, and founder of Who Gives A Crap

Simon Griffiths spoke at Ready24 – stay tuned for our Ready25 Line Up, dropping in the coming months.

Simon Griffiths is an engineer and economist turned one of Australia’s most prominent social entrepreneurs.

In 2007, after turning down his dream job offer as a corporate high-flyer, he moved from Australia to South Africa to immerse himself in his true passion: development aid.

There he discovered that the biggest problem faced by NGOs and social entrepreneurs is a lack of funding.

Driven by a passion to use business to give back, in 2010, Simon had the idea to start a toilet paper company that builds toilets in the developing world, and 2012, launched Who Gives A Crap with a crowdfunding campaign, agreeing to sit on a toilet on a live web-feed until he had pre-sold the first $50,000 of toilet rolls.

The multi-award winning launch attracted global media attention and generated over $1 million of PR value.

Since launching, Who Gives A Crap has doubled or tripled in size almost every year, primarily relying on word-of-mouth to fuel its growth, and has donated more than $10 million, proving that not only can you do good, while doing business, but that doing good is good for business.

Simon is also well known as the co-founder of Shebeen, a non-profit bar in Melbourne’s CBD that opened in February 2013 and ran for 3.5 years. Shebeen sold exotic beer and wine from the developing world, with 100% of the profit from each sale going to a development project in that drink’s country of origin.

At Ready24 Simon took the audience on the journey from idea to start up, to successful large-scale company, sharing how he and his team took the business from strength to strength, without compromising on their purpose.