Chris Barton

Biography

Chris Barton is the inventor of Shazam, the first ever mass-consumer artificial intelligence product. He founded the company on an idea that experts at the time said was impossible. His story is one of innovation and determination, entrepreneurial spirit and risk, with insights into how technology has changed the world and what the future might hold.

Like many entrepreneurs before and since, Chris saw a problem, believed many others shared it, and set about creating a solution, no matter what. The question was: could you use your phone to identify a piece of music, simply from listening to a short extract. 

Leading professors at MIT and Stanford insisted the pattern recognition algorithm Chris envisioned could not be created, but he persisted. He developed new and unprecedented technology, building a search engine supercomputer from scratch, creating the world's largest music database, and designing a user experience for pre-smartphone-era mobile phones. He succeeded in developing the platform, and created Shazam. Today, Shazam has been downloaded over 2 billion times, is used monthly by over 300 million people, and has fundamentally changing how the world discovers music. After eighteen years, with its first six years surviving near-bankruptcy before the App Store existed, Shazam was acquired by Apple for a reported $400 million, one of Apple's largest acquisitions. 

Chris holds twelve patents, including one found within the Google search algorithm. He has played key roles in tech history, as head of Android Partnerships at Google, where he created the platform's mobile operator partnership framework, and as one of the first 100 employees at Dropbox. He also leads Guard, an artificial intelligence system designed to detect those at risk of drowning in swimming pools, and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship at four universities.

Chris's path to success was not straightforward. He struggled academically and was later diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. Rather than viewing these as limitations, he has come to see them as superpowers that enabled him to overcome seemingly insurmountable technical obstacles and persist through years of challenges. He developed the five-step Start From Zero Thinking framework for overcoming obstacles to innovation that can be applied to any challenge.

Exploring how to make big things happen in any organisation, Chris considers the real and perceived barriers to innovation and how to overcome them through creative persistence and bold thinking. He addresses resilience and perseverance, sharing personal and professional stories from building Shazam against the odds and his current work on apparently impossible challenges. He explains that the greatest limitation to creating the future is often our own imagination, and shows how to remove friction, embrace unconventional thinking and bring ambitious ideas to life.