The Magic Behind Shazam

When Chris came up with the idea to identify music out of thin air, everyone said it was impossible. He embarked on a journey to make it possible through not just one but many innovations. He’s continued to innovate and learn from these amazing innovators during 8 years at Google, 4 years at Dropbox, and as the Founder of his new company?Guard. You might also know him from being the Founder and first CEO of?Shazam?which was acquired by Apple in 2018 for $400 million. Chris, welcome.

I’m always fascinated when someone has such a huge accomplishment like that on their resume, CV or whatever you call it, to ask what’s your story of origin. How did you get so passionate? I’m guessing you might have started with technology first versus music but take us back to childhood, school or wherever you want.

As a child, I wasn’t diagnosed, but I did in retrospect have dyslexia and ADHD, which explains a lot of things. It made things a struggle. I was lucky enough to get into college at UC, Berkeley. I remember when I was choosing my classes and my major, I would go into one of the buildings and look at the syllabus of every class.

I would choose all the classes and the majors that had the least books on the list. It would take me so long to read books. I embarked on a career after college in Management Consulting and enjoy the analytical side of that. I had this desire to create something that was this lingering desire. As a child, I always loved projects and creating my haunted house for the neighborhood.

A haunted house that anyone could come to and go crawl through cardboard boxes with strobe lights flashing, bake sales and all the typical things that little young entrepreneurs like to create. It’s a lingering thought. I’d love to create something on what’s my outlet going to be and how am I going to do it. I didn’t hone in on the idea of starting a company until I was already doing my MBA at UC, Berkeley.

While I was doing this MBA, I had thought I would use it as a pivot point to go from a telecommunications expert to becoming an internet expert and partnerships expert. One day, I was sitting in a computer lab. This was in the first couple weeks of my two-year MBA. Next to me was another guy working. He was a year ahead of me and doing his second year of the MBA.

I said, “What are you working on?” He said, “I’m starting a company.” I said out of curiosity, “What did you do before your MBA?” He said, “I was an Air Force pilot.” That was the moment I thought, “He was an Air Force pilot. There’s no relevance in flying jets to starting a company. He’s just a go-getter. If it means being a go-getter can start a company, then I should start a company.”?

Right in those first couple of weeks of my MBA program, I decided to embark on starting a company. I felt like it would allow me to achieve this dream of creating something and combine it with my expertise and my business career. That was the beginning. The next step was coming up with the idea, forming the team and all that stuff. I can get into that as it makes sense for you and this chat.

A lot of people reading are going to be interested to know how you overcame all those naysayers. Let’s talk about Shazam. You like to create magic and you come up with this idea. First of all, the name is fantastic. It implies magic. It tapped into my younger inner child, Shazam. I can hold something up. I understand Bluetooth technology but somehow magically this comes through. What did you do to ignore the naysayers saying your idea was impossible?

The first initial set of naysayers came from the fact that once I came up with this idea of identifying songs over a mobile phone, it turned out that technology did not exist anywhere. It wasn’t as simple as hiring some smart engineer to build it. It was more comparable to inventing a breakthrough drug to cure cancer in the sense that you have to invent something and not just build something.

That makes it very different from starting a company like Google, Snapchat or Facebook, where you’re building something. There’s no unknown. You just have to build. In our case, we’re trying to invent something. We had all these PhDs in Electrical Engineering Signal Processing from MIT and Stanford telling us that not only was there no technology to do it but also they knew of no way to do it. They didn’t know how it could be done. It had to be invented.

The reason that they said it was so difficult is it was pattern recognition. With pattern recognition, when you introduce two problems at the same time becomes often impossible or extremely difficult. Those two problems are Noise and Scale. Noise in Shazam is you’re identifying music by using the sound, coming from the microphone on the phone.

In the background along with the music are noises of people talking, cars honking and all different things. There’s also Scale. The database you’re identifying against is not the top 50, top 100 songs or all the 100,000 songs played on the radio. It’s 100 million songs that Apple has in its database. The way I like to describe what makes noise and scale so difficult is to imagine the following.

Imagine you’re in a small party of about 30 people. You look across the room and I say, “Show me where your sister is.” You point to her. I put you in Wembley Stadium and I say, “Across the stadium, your sister’s sitting in the crowd. Tell me where she is.” You can’t do it. That’s your brain challenged by noise and scale at the same time, a huge scale of people and a lot of noise. It makes pattern recognition very difficult.

The naysayers were people saying, “You’re not going to be able to invent this.” There were other types of naysayers along the way who say, “This is not going to take off. No one’s going to want to use it. It’s a feature, not a product.” What I found is that whenever I came across a naysayer, it motivated me more rather than less. The more that I thought something was impossible, the more I thought I wanted to get and achieve it because people say it’s impossible.

All founders face a form of that, don’t they? You’ve put that distinction that there’s noise in the marketplace. If you’re doing something that a bunch of other people is doing, they’re like, “You’re too late to the market.” All investors want businesses to scale. Those words have different meanings separate from the creation of Shazam. You have this interesting passion for inventing things.

You have twelve patents and not just Shazam. You did something for Google and Dropbox. When I think of Google, I don’t think of them as a company that’s reaching out to the people who don’t work there saying, “Please, invent something for us.” I think of them as the opposite. You have to come up with something that Google hasn’t thought of inventing themselves for them to want to buy. There must be a good story there.

I worked at Google for eight years. During that time, I came out with two patents. While at Dropbox, I did another five patents. In my role at both Google and Dropbox, I was the first mobile partnerships employee.

Not just an employee at Google but the first one focused on the mobile cutting edge.

I joined Google with 2,000 people while it was a private company. There was no one working on mobile at all. I had founded Shazam so I had a mobile background. I was out flying on planes around the world to meet with the big mobile phone companies like AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Nokia, Blackberry and so on. When Android came about, I was among the first couple of people doing all the Android carrier partnerships and creating a framework.

Android was this very complicated ecosystem. It was not just about making money. It was about creating a successful even playing field for everyone that wanted to play a role in smartphones, including mobile device manufacturers like Samsung and Motorola and mobile carriers like AT&T and Verizon. Also, all the people that make apps and other bits of hardware.

We’re talking about how you like to invent things and create patents. When you create something for a company you’re working for, they get the patent, not the employee, correct?

I should be clear, with those companies, Google and Dropbox, it is their patents. I invented it and I’m listed as the lead author on them. It wasn’t in my job title. I would not say the typical partnerships person at Google or Dropbox has filed patents. No one said, “Chris, you need to file some more patents.” We’re relying on your inventions here.

You travel the world as a keynote speaker. Tell us how that journey started. A lot of companies want to have someone with this incredible background and teach them about innovation for one thing.

It’s my main focus along with a startup company that I’m starting as a keynote speaker. I’m focused on innovation but also telling firsthand stories from having created, conceptualized and ideated ideas. I created Shazam from the ground up and overcome all the obstacles and barriers that we encountered along the way. I draw on all these firsthand stories from Google and Dropbox and being part of those pioneering teams.

I love to tell those stories and inspire people. I’ve identified five key ways of thinking differently. They’re not the default ways that we think. They’re ways that by default we don’t think. That’s one of the things that hold us back from these game-changing innovations like what led to creating Shazam and how we do it. Anyone can do this. Anyone can create these great innovations. It’s not that we were geniuses. It’s more about the approach and the way of thinking.

As a storytelling keynote speaker, a lot of people say, “You’re a gifted storyteller. It’s natural for you. Maybe you studied it.” It’s like being an athlete or a Broadway performer. If I don’t have those skills, I can never be a good storyteller. Everyone can learn how to be a good storyteller. You’re saying everyone can learn how to be an innovator and you have the process of Start From Zero. Can you expand a little about what that means?

I call it Start From Zero. I’ve given this name and brand for this set of methodologies. The best way to think of it is you’re resetting the way your brain thinks. Your brain is wired to think in a certain way. Due to the pressures of society and the world that we work in, you think in a certain way. That way can disable your opportunity in terms of creating a game-changing innovation. In Start From Zero, there are these five methods. One of them I call Build From Basic Truths. It’s coming up with new ideas in a different way.

Not thinking from the familiar or analogy to what we already know, which is how our brain is wired to think because that’s much more efficient but instead, taking a taxing approach, questioning all your assumptions and breaking down to what you know are the basic truths. This is otherwise academically known as First Principles Thinking. It’s used by people like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Leonardo da Vinci and a lot of many great innovators.

Another one is what I call Creative Persistence. I believe that great innovation is not just about one idea. It’s a sequence of ideas and problems that you solve very creatively that allows you to get from your original vision to the endpoint of having a truly game-changing innovation that has a breakout success. When I look at the Shazam story, it was much more than, “Let’s identify a song out of thin air and invent this technology.” There were many problems we had to solve related to the creation of the music database, the search engine and the partnerships with mobile phone company integrations that we had to overcome.

We had to do things that had never been done before to get to the end goal of a delightful single push of a button to get an answer. There are several others around eliminating friction making experiences to be seamless and trying to eliminate everything that you have to think or do and trying to make something Shazamable that people talk about.

It’s all about creating magic. Shazam set a new bar. When Shazam is out there, people thought, “You can touch a button and get this delightful experience that solves a problem.” Many companies will think, “How could we create our Shazam of something? How can we make it easy to book your airplane flight or have your house remodeled?” You could pick any business. How can we make it super simple and delightful like Shazam?

Click through to read the rest of the interview.

If you want help on how to craft a better story,?my?The Sale is in the Tale?online course?is for you.

Are you tired of coming in 2nd place when you pitch?

Are you struggling to be persuasive without being pushy?

Are you looking for a way to become irresistible to your ideal clients??

Then?The Sale is in the Tale?is for you.

If you want a private 15-minute strategy call to discuss how my course can help you?be a revenue rockstar,?click here