Shazam Founder: The ‘Impossible’ Business That We Sold To Apple: Chris Barton | Unicorn Podcast E3

Chris Barton is a well-respected entrepreneur and one of the masterminds behind the music recognition app, Shazam. Shazam was created in London over 20years ago and caught the interest of Apple who went on to purchase the technology for a speculated $400 million in 2017. The app is now among the most popular apps on both iPhone and Android with over 1 billion downloads to date.

Chris’ career also includes companies such as Google where he worked for 8 years and Dropbox, where he held the position of head of mobile operators' business development. He has collected a wealth of knowledge and experience through his journey to make him a leading entrepreneur within the digital field and more specifically, mobile applications. He is now embarking on creating a new startup focused on machine learning and computer vision.

In today’s special episode of The Unicorn Podcast, Chris tells his story of building software that was so ahead of it’s time, as well as giving you all the highs and lows of his career, so you have the knowledge you need to replicate his success for yourself.

"Things take longer than you expect. You hit different hurdles and unknown things happen. Early revenue in your business is like oxygen. Make revenue for your business a priority from day one. If I had realised how important that was, even if it meant delaying my main vision, it would have been a better route to take."

Topics:

How Chris became an entrepreneur

Chris’ unconventional start-up approach

Shazam - How it went from an idea to a reality

Shazam - Finding an engineer to ‘invent’ the technology

Shazam - The four co-founders and their partnership dynamic

Shazam - Allocating job roles

Shazam - Raising funding

Persistence + Timing

Hiring CEO’s + getting out of your own way

Chris’ new company ‘Guard’

Apple’s acquisition of Shazam

What is it like after selling a company?

Why Guard?

One piece of advice to your younger self

Chris Barton:

https://chrisjbarton.com/

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