Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with Chris Barton.
Chris is the co founder of Shazam, a mobile music recognition service, which started out as an idea that Chris had in 1999.
Today, Shazam has over 100 million active users each month.
In 2004, Chris joined Google and currently he's working at Dropbox where he's responsible for business development for mobile operators.
He also continues to serve on the Shazam Entertainment board.
Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Barton (00:59.430)
Thank you.
Good to be here.
Omer (01:02.070)
Now, I gave the audience a brief overview of the product or business, but tell us a little bit more about yourself personally.
Who is Chris when he's not working?
Chris Barton (01:11.510)
Yeah, see, when I'm not working, gosh, I guess I'm a guy who loves the outdoors, loves adventure, loves surfing.
I grew up in San Diego, so surfing was a big part of my life and loves travel.
So, yeah, I'm a pretty social person.
I love to have a good time.
I always like to say I work hard and I'm driven by laziness in the sense that I love to have.
I'd love to have some more free time.
Omer (01:41.170)
Awesome.
Now, we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite quotes?
Chris Barton (01:51.340)
Yeah, there's this one quote that I came across that really resonated with me because it reminded me so much of the story of Shazam.
And that's because everything we were doing.
Shazam.
But particularly the idea of being able to identify music in this noisy environment and then turn it into a product that people would use all the time.
This is the quote that I really love from someone named Walter Baggott.
And.
And the quote says, the greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Omer (02:23.760)
And I think as we get into the story, I think that for people who aren't familiar with the Shazam Story, I think that quote will make a.
A lot more sense as.
As we sort of look at the business as it is today.
Can you talk a little bit about who the target customers are and what are the pain points that Shazam Is trying to solve today?
Chris Barton (02:44.120)
Sure.
Well, I'd like to think the target customers is everyone on Earth, or at least certainly everyone that enjoys music, which is, I believe, is the vast majority of people.
And all Those people are more and more moving to smartphones, as we know.
And so basically I think Shazam ideally sort of solves a problem for all those people, which is really finding a way to connect with music that they pass by in their sort of in their daily lives and then be able to bring it into their life and then interact with it.
Omer (03:17.430)
So let's go back to 1999.
How did you come up with the idea for Shazam?
Chris Barton (03:25.110)
Yeah, so I think the concept of wanting to know the name of a song when you hear it was really an obvious one.
It certainly was not non obvious.
And that's one that probably in the past many people would have thought about.
And in fact there were even companies that were sort of attempting various solutions to solve that problem.
But all the companies that were approaching it were approaching it in a way that sort of was technically feasible, which was to focus in on radio play.
Because radio play sort of was a known quantity.
And so you could.
There are ways of finding out which songs were playing on radio stations in real time.
And the number of companies used various methods to kind of track, monitor, report radio play in real time and therefore enable users, people to, to know what song was playing.
But I think the real breakthrough with Shazam is I was sort of brainstorming ideas for businesses and I was really interested in this particular problem of knowing what's playing.
And I also started off by thinking about the radio focused solution, because that seems like the easiest one to conquer.
And then I kind of thought, well, if you did, if you did solve it for radio play, what would be something that someone could do that would sort of leapfrog you?
And then I thought to myself, wow, what if you could just solve it and you didn't need to know what was playing on the radio because you could just solve it using the actual sound that you hear?
Wouldn't that be amazing?
Because you wouldn't need to know the name of the radio station.
And not only that, but you wouldn't be limited to what you're hearing on radio stations.
You would be able to use it anywhere.
Because radio is not the only place we hear music.
It's a significant source, but we also hear music in cafes, bars, clubs, shops, restaurants, theaters, laundromats, you name it.
So that was the kind of breakthrough was thinking what would be a leapfrog over kind of just a radio only solution.
And it led me to think, wow, it'd be something that was based on just the actual sound coming to your ears.
What if we could focus on identifying that right over a mobile phone.
Omer (05:28.000)
This wasn't an area that you had any expertise in at the time.
Right.
Chris Barton (05:31.840)
It was completely new to me.
Yep.
I had no expertise whatsoever.
So I kind of started from scratch with my co founders to identify, you know, how we would go about doing this.
Omer (05:41.260)
So how did you know that this was the right idea?
Because I understand, you know, you were a guy who was always coming up with lots of ideas, so how did
Chris Barton (05:48.140)
you know this was the one?
So, yeah, I definitely was really into brainstorming ideas.
I always enjoyed that.
But I think that really it came from the fact that this is one that I felt passionate about and it really resonated with me.
Some of the other ideas I would often think about, try to think of ideas that we're solving real problems, but we're also also viable businesses.
But I found that for many of the other ideas, when I really thought about it, I just couldn't get that excited about them.
For example, there was one I was thinking about that was selling contact lenses and contact solutions on the web, which seemed like a real opportunity back in that at the time, some companies actually turned that into quite a big viable business.
But I just couldn't get excited about it day to day.
Whereas Shazam.
Was something that I just really felt passionate as, something that was going to really have a big impact on delighting users around the world.
Omer (06:41.150)
What advice would you give to somebody who maybe is in that stage right now where, you know, they have a ton of different ideas, different levels of excitement about them, or maybe they're passionate about something that at this point doesn't seem like a really big business opportunity.
What's a good way for them to sort of think about picking that idea?
Chris Barton (07:11.160)
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that as an entrepreneur, you benefit greatly by trying to pick ideas that could become big businesses.
And that's something that certainly investors often look at when they're looking at whether to fund an entrepreneur.
One of the key criteria is something that has the chance to become a very big business.
And sometimes something that can seem very small initially does have the opportunity to become a very big business, but it's really understanding how to sort of assess that kind of how to project forward and say, how big is the market for this?
How many people want this type of service, how much money is being spent on similar types of things today, and really sizing the opportunity.
I think that kind of exercise is one that's well worthwhile as an entrepreneur kind of thinks through the different ideas that they might pursue.
Omer (08:09.890)
Okay, so you had this idea, you've got your two co founders on board and they're excited about this opportunity as well.
But you were still missing one person, somebody who actually had the expertise to be able to, you know, build this, this technology.
So can, can you tell us a little bit about how you went about trying to find that person?
Chris Barton (08:38.280)
Yeah.
So, yeah, we, we wanted to build this technology.
And as we started to explore experts in the area that was relevant, which was essentially audio signal processing, was the area that we identified would be kind of the expertise needed to create a technology that could identify music.
But as we explored that, we soon learned that this technology was not something you just simply built.
It was actually something that needed to be invented.
And the reason for that is because everyone who was an expert in this area told us that basically what we were trying to do was impossible.
There was no known technology that would be able to identify music with noise.
You could do it without noise, or you could do it with a small set of songs, but to do it with noise over a mobile phone, there was no known solution.
And so we knew we had to invent the technology.
So it was really a matter of finding not just someone who had the skill sets to build this, but someone who really was kind of theoretical and could sort of be kind of almost a mini Einstein for coming up with a completely new revolutionary method of pattern recognitions with a specific concept in mind of audio recognition in a noisy environment at scale.
And so we hunted for that person.
The way we did it is we went to some of the top institutions that had PhD programs focused on signal processing, audio signal processing.
And two of the leading institutions in the US were Stanford and mit.
And we started networking our way through those departments, both current PhD students and prior graduates from the PhD programs, as well as the professors themselves.
And it was kind of a.
A very intensive networking and hunting session trying to find that right person until we could find the perfect co founder to join us in creating this technology.
Omer (10:38.160)
Now, I think this is an interesting point.
You went out looking for these people who were experts in audio signal processing.
You spoke to these PhDs, and pretty much at that point, everybody was telling you, it's impossible, it can't be done.
What kept you going?
Why did you believe that you could still do this?
Chris Barton (11:04.719)
Yeah, I think that what was really funny is that even when we found the person that did say he would join us to do it, as well as the professor that helped us find that person, even he said that he still felt like it was impossible.
So I Think that I was just convinced it was possible.
And no matter what people told me, even though they had this deep expertise and I did not, I just felt like.
I felt like that it felt fundamentally possible to me because I just felt like there's ultimately some meaningful data in the bits of music that you can capture, even in a noisy environment over a mobile phone.
And there's got to be some way to turn that into a robust match.
So I think I just felt like in my heart that this was.
It felt fundamentally possible and it just really came from really an instinct.
I mean, I have parents who are scientists, both PhDs in physics.
And so I think I grew up in an environment of science and maybe that influenced me in some way, but I certainly had no expertise in the field.
But as I said, it was just really just a raw instinct that this had to be feasible.
And so I kind of refused to give up.
Omer (12:21.430)
Okay, so you've.
You persuaded to this person to come.
So it was Avery Wang, right, who joined you guys as the.
As the fourth person on the team.
Chris Barton (12:30.550)
Yep.
Omer (12:31.350)
How did you fund this business?
Chris Barton (12:35.660)
Yeah, so we originally raised angel money.
Angel money funds from angel investors.
The first round was, I think, close to a million dollars.
About a million dollars.
And that's how we first funded the company.
So we just approached kind of individuals that we thought would have an interest in investing in this type of startup and raise those funds to kind of fund that first year and a half of the incubation stage of the company.
Omer (13:05.110)
What did you have to show those investors at that time?
Did you have a working product?
Chris Barton (13:11.350)
No, all we had was a demo, really.
This demo originally was just on a laptop computer, actually.
So what it showed is, it showed we could play a sound that had been submitted, collected over a mobile phone, of a bit of music, which we collected, as you might expect, over mobile phones.
And you could hear.
You could barely hear the music in these clips, so you could see how challenging the problem was going to be.
And then we used our algorithm that we had invented.
So we actually invented the algorithm prior to raising angel money.
So I don't think anyone would have invested just based on the idea alone.
So our first kind of nine months as a company had zero funding, and we focused on finding that co founder and then inventing the technology.
And then once we had invented this technology and patented it, we then had this demo that we could show people that showed how it would basically take this sort of noisy sample class over a mobile phone and then correctly match it against a database of music which of course on a laptop demo was a pretty small database of music, probably 10,000 songs or something much smaller than what Shazam has today.
Omer (14:25.110)
Okay, so you've persuaded investors to get on board.
You guys have got a million dollars.
How did you spend that money?
What were the sort of the major areas of investment for you guys back then?
Chris Barton (14:37.030)
Yeah, so we raised seven and a half million dollars in our Series A round.
And we really needed a lot of capital to get this business to launch.
So back then, when we were starting Shazam, which was that round was closed in 2001, we had to build almost everything from scratch.
So there were no digital music databases that you could just go and used as a starting point to create fingerprints that we needed for identifying music.
So we had to kind of help create those fingerprint databases from scratch, starting from CDs.
So that was a massive undertaking we had to build.
There was no kind of Amazon cloud servers that you could outsource to.
So we had to build all of our own infrastructure from scratch.
And we essentially built a mini Google center, sort of a Beowulf cluster of PCs on which in the RAM we stored the fingerprints of all this music and built essentially a little mini search engine, as I said, a mini Google, except it was for fingerprints of music rather than websites.
And we had to build that from scratch, including both the architecture of the PCs as well as the search algorithms, as well as.
And then we had to design the end to end user experience and including integration with mobile operators.
Back then there were no smartphones, so the service was very different than it is today.
We had to integrate with an interactive voice response system, ivr, and with SMS systems with carriers.
So users would dial a four digit phone number, place a voice call where we would capture the sound of the music, and then we'd terminate the call with our interactive voice response system and send an SMS to the phone with the name of the song.
Omer (16:27.200)
So looking back at those early days, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you made?
Chris Barton (16:34.000)
Yeah, that's a good question.
I think ultimately probably as a very green entrepreneur, I probably didn't have enough understanding of how important it was to get to revenues as early as possible.
And of course, you know, we absolutely planned to build revenues and we did so by launching a service.
But we later, we later as a company, we recognized there was an opportunity to bring in revenues in a slightly easier form than consumer.
You know, that doesn't require consumer adoption.
And that was to kind of go after some sort of B2B applications with our business, licensing our technology for other uses.
And that was a great thing to pursue and it was successful for the business and it helped bring in money to really cover the cost of operating the business.
But I think the mistake that when I think back, probably one of the things that I could have done differently would be to pursue that at an earlier stage of the company.
Because I think the earlier that you can start bringing in revenues to help fund your company, the better off you're going to be, because you really need those revenues.
Essentially, you want revenues to be your source of funding rather than funding itself as soon as you can, much as Google did by licensing its technology to Yahoo, that it could start to use revenues as a source of funding rather than venture capitalists.
Omer (18:03.820)
Do you remember how quickly you went through the $7.5 million of funding that you had?
Chris Barton (18:08.620)
I don't remember exactly, but I would say sort of probably wasn't that much more than 12 months because we had a pretty significant business to build.
Omer (18:17.980)
All right, so you've got the investors, you've started to build out the technology, the team and the product.
What did you do for marketing?
How did you get the word out about the product?
Chris Barton (18:31.520)
Yeah, we hired a marketing director to run our VP of marketing, as you could call it, to run our marketing for Shazam, we hired someone very experienced in the music industry.
We were a UK based company in London and this guy had run marketing for the largest group of radio stations in the uk.
And it was a sort of a nimble, fast moving, fast thinking, sort of entrepreneurial smart guy that was a great fit with our company.
And so, yeah, his job was to kind of think through all the different ways that we can take a very limited marketing budget and use it to kind of ignite the fire of the service and hopefully kind of start to acquire users and ideally get those users to spread the word.
He tried all kinds of different things ranging from, you name it, banner ads on websites, radio ads, small late night TV ads, SMS messages, email messages, just all different types of things, even people going into bars to tell consumers about it.
But the reality is that I think it was an uphill battle because back then again, there were no smartphones.
So you're really having to change consumer behavior in a way that it's hard to contemplate today in the world of smartphones.
People understand the idea of mobile apps now and just downloading them and using them back then, but Shazam was not a mobile app and there were no mobile apps.
So you were basically trying to train people to take on this completely new behavior of dialing a phone number and then being charged, because we had to have a business model being charged 50 pence per use to identify a song.
And so I think the combination of that, creating that, trying to drive users to acquire that new behavior, and the fact that we had to have some business models, since you couldn't even sell digital music back then, and therefore we had to charge those things, made it a real uphill battle to get significant number of users, which now today, Shazam enjoys, thanks to the sort of advent of the smartphone.
Omer (20:35.860)
At what point did you feel like the business was starting to get some meaningful traction?
Chris Barton (20:42.900)
Well, the first stage of meaningful traction was kind of a couple years into Shazam, or a couple years, I should say, after launch with the first wave of mobile applications.
So before what is now known as sort of Android and iPhone and iOS and all these smartphones, there was a kind of earlier stage of phones that were more advanced than SMS in terms of their interactivity, but they had job applications and they were hard to distribute to phones, but you could sort of find ways to preload them on phones.
And so we actually had a pretty successful model preloading these java apps on AT&T phones in the United States.
And we actually drove a pretty significant revenue stream from people basically paying monthly subscription to huge Shazam on their AT and T Java phones.
That was the first wave of kind of.
There was sort of a glimmer of hope of a real business, and especially if we could spread that around many more carriers around the world.
But of course, the real hockey stick occurred when the iPhone app store launched in 2008.
And that's when Shazam just instantly rose to the top of the charts and always sort of resting in the top, sort of 50 to 100 apps and remaining there.
And it was like that's when the users that Shazam had was growing at an astronomic rate.
Omer (22:06.500)
If the App Store hadn't launched at that time, do you think your growth would have been a lot slower?
Chris Barton (22:18.350)
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
This is an example of how it can be sort of these externalities that your whole business relies on.
And in fact, many of great businesses have relied on externalities.
In the case of YouTube, it was the advent of Flash video.
And without Flash video, it was hard to have a sort of frictionless experience of watching videos on the web.
So, you know, there's many businesses that had some kind of technological advent, sort of technological innovation that kind of opened up the door for the incredible opportunities for those Companies to realize.
And yeah, Shazam was absolutely reliant on the app stores essentially to get to its growth.
And if they hadn't happened today, Shazam would still be, you know, it would be nowhere near 100 million monthly active users.
It would be probably, you know, still kind of below 1 million monthly active users.
Omer (23:12.340)
Now, in 2004, you decided to step down as CEO and you hired a replacement.
What was the reason for that?
Chris Barton (23:23.180)
Yeah, so I actually stepped down from the CEO role before 2004.
So 2004 is when I moved over to Google.
But I hired in a CEO to replace me earlier than that.
I hired in a CEO to replace me after I had been CEO of the company for about two years, about a year prior to venture funding and a year post venture funding.
And one of the things that we agreed with our venture capitalists when we raised our venture funding, we actually even wrote it into the term sheet, was that we were going to hire an experienced and gray haired CEO to run the company.
And that's the way things were done back then.
It's a different world today.
If anything, venture capitalists really encourage founders to remain as CEOs.
But back then I joked that the venture capital handbook said exactly the opposite.
It said, you can't trust this 20something entrepreneur to run a business just because he has a good idea.
And that mentality I think was even more rigorous, rigorously believed.
In Europe, where we were, I was fine with that.
I really just wanted to build a successful business.
Of course, I wanted a great CEO.
But we went out and we actually interviewed a lot of candidates and we found a fantastic CEO named Jerry Roust who had been running, who had previously run CompuServe Europe.
And he stepped in to run Shazam.
And I kind of remained on board as a really business development focused role.
Omer (25:05.670)
And then what?
So that was when in 2002 or three?
Chris Barton (25:13.440)
I would say, yeah, it's probably around 2000.
Gosh, yeah, I'm trying to remember all the dates now.
Yeah, kind of around 2002.
Around that time.
Omer (25:24.480)
And then why did you decide to leave and then move on to Google?
Chris Barton (25:30.000)
Yeah, so actually of the four co founders, all of them left at different times, but all kind of within 12 months of that time, I would say.
And the company was really struggling at that time.
So as I said, Shazam didn't really hit its hockey stick until 2008 and we started the company in 2000.
I left in sort of late 2003 even to join Google in early 2004.
And yeah, I Think we just sort of felt like the company was running lean.
It didn't have the meteoric growth that we had hoped for.
We had hired in seasoned management to.
To really kind of lead the lead the company.
We had fully vested our shares.
I'd been there for four years altogether at Shazam And Google was kind of like a hot opportunity.
And I thought, well, why not jump on board at Google and kind of.
I still have to get to keep my shares and Shazam and keep my.
More importantly for me because it's such a great passion for me, stay involved in the company at the board level, which I continue to do today.
Omer (26:34.300)
And so do you still have equity in the company?
Chris Barton (26:38.460)
Yes.
Omer (26:39.340)
And so.
Okay, so.
And so now your involvement is limited to being a board member, correct?
Chris Barton (26:45.780)
Yeah, got it.
Omer (26:46.780)
Okay.
All right.
So, Chris, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as possible.
Are you ready?
Chris Barton (26:57.100)
Yep.
Omer (26:57.980)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Chris Barton (27:03.920)
I'd say it's some venture capitalists, as I was raising money, would ask me how I can come back to them having eliminated certain risks that they were concerned about.
And I started to really realize that it's eliminating risks.
The more that you can eliminate risks one by one prior to raising your money, the more effective you're going to be at attracting capital so that you can actually build a successful business.
Omer (27:27.840)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Chris Barton (27:31.600)
Well, it was a really old book that I hope is still in print, but I read and I found really inspiring called Burn Rate, A story about a guy who built a startup that was eventually sold to aol and all the kind of crazy times that he went through in that process.
And I found that it was a real roller coaster ride of excitement.
Omer (27:51.520)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Chris Barton (27:57.530)
I think that one characteristic that you're not going to be able to survive without is just incredible persistence.
Because there is nothing that's easy in entrepreneurship.
And so, yeah, that's sort of a fundamental requirement.
Just ridiculous amounts of persistence.
Omer (28:13.530)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Chris Barton (28:18.170)
I love this wasn't around when I was doing Shazam, but today I couldn't live without it.
It's a piece of software for the Mac computer called Things T H I N G S and it's a productivity kind of software based on the getting things done concept, but very usable and easy and I just, I live by it day to day.
Omer (28:38.650)
Do they have an icloud sync feature for that now?
I remember looking at that a couple of years ago and that was one of the things that was putting me off at the time.
Chris Barton (28:45.850)
They don't use icloud as their sync, but they have their own sync.
And so it does sync well.
Unfortunately, it doesn't sync across platforms, so it's only on Mac and iPhone, iOS, not on Android or PC.
But if you're willing to live with that, you do have sync, which is great.
Omer (29:04.810)
If you had to start a new business tomorrow, what type of product or market or opportunity would you go after?
Chris Barton (29:16.010)
I believe that there's a huge opportunity coming up in the next decade in healthcare and healthcare related technologies.
So I think the opportunity is absolutely massive.
And then I think that it's an industry that's so archaic and outdated that it's ripe for innovation to really come in and disrupt things.
And finally it has a sort of mission driven quality to it that I find very attractive.
So I'd say health technology.
Omer (29:42.409)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Chris Barton (29:48.090)
Well, so because I'm an English father and spent quite a few years in England, I really love something that they eat in England called Marmite that some people, some listeners might have heard of.
I like this thing called Marmite.
And in England you eat Marmite on a piece of toast, typically.
But then again, I've also grown up in California where as you know, a very common food in California is the Mexican burrito.
And so I actually combined those two concepts and created Marmite burrito.
And the Marmite burrito is sort of Mexican British and it's basically Marmite and a little bit of butter on a tortilla and rolled up, it's delicious.
Omer (30:26.170)
Only in England would people eat stuff like that.
Chris Barton (30:29.210)
Yeah, exactly.
Omer (30:30.650)
All right.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Chris Barton (30:36.810)
I would say travel.
And as I mentioned earlier in the interview, particularly if there's an element of sort of surfing or adventure in it.
I love sort of adventurous travel.
It's probably one of the highlights of life experience.
Omer (30:52.240)
Great.
Now, you know you joined Google back in 2004 and then, I mean, that was in the early days of Google, relatively early days.
And then you joined Dropbox a few years ago.
Have you ever thought about going back and starting another, another business yourself?
Chris Barton (31:19.330)
I thought about it definitely and I've.
I still think that I might do it at some point.
And one, one kind of channel for me now is I am involved in a couple startups on the side.
It's hard.
It's a stretch, of course, because I'm at Dropbox full time.
I'm on the board of Shazam and I'm helping one or two startups.
Two startups, actually.
But, yeah, I can see.
I can see starting another company one day, but it's not.
Not immediately cool.
Omer (31:48.090)
Chris, I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
Now, if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Chris Barton (32:02.730)
Probably my Twitter account, which is bartonsurfer.
B A R T O N S U R F E R Barton Surfer at Twitter.
Great.
Omer (32:12.700)
And if they want to check out Shazam, folks can go to shazam.com or just go to the App Store if you haven't tried it out.
Chris, thanks again and I wish you continued success in the future.
Chris Barton (32:23.100)
Thank you so much, Amir.
Omer (32:24.700)
Take care.
