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What is up everybody? Welcome back to Capital University the top five business podcast in the world. If you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to like comment and subscribe. And if you're listening on a podcast, we greatly appreciate you write the podcast five stars subscribe and leave a review We very special guest today pump you introduce them. Absolutely. What's
going on guys today? We have Chris Martin Chris was the founder and original CEO of Shazam.
Probably know that app and also he is now the founder and CEO of a company called guard over there using computer vision to help people from drowning. This was an awesome episode. Hope you enjoy it. All right, Chris. Maybe let's just start with you kind of telling your story as to how you got to this point life.
Oh, wow. Okay, that's a pretty broad question started off my career. Just knowing that I wanted to do something in business and and the combination of business computer science with to prove to parents who are professors physics. So raised by scientists, basically and then you know, I just took all the
Additional routes really in business of getting normal jobs in you know consulting firms and so on and what really kind of the breaking point for me was during my MBA when I suddenly realized wow, you can actually kind of make your own destiny. You can actually, you know, come up with your own idea and create your own vision and start your own company and that all happened while I was at Berkeley doing my MBA and I would say, you know, it was at that point that I kind of had a lot of of the other ingredients in the sense. I had the kind of natural motivations and creativity and love starting my own little projects and so on.
That's when I decided I'm going to really embarked on this and actually like try to create it, you know real I could company with a product that people use and is self-sustaining business and so on and I decided to go that route and begin the kind of brainstorming process so that that's kind of that's how I got to where I am today, I guess. So what made you want to start Shazam? I like many people, you know had that kind of recurring issue of you know, hearing those like cool songs and in daily life, you know, it could happen anywhere, right? It could happen at your friend's house or at a cool retro.
A bar or a you know walking down the shopping mall and hear those songs and I would you know, I would really ask people what they were and just kind of I can't maintain this little list of songs that I can write and and I did eventually turn him into a little kind of compilation playlist back then it was pre playlist. So it was actually known as the miscellaneous tape back then and honestly, it was not a novel invention to think of like wouldn't it be great to identify that song. I mean there were other people that were thinking the same thing and even other companies trying to do it, but they were all doing it the easy way which were the easy way is just to monitor
Your stations and only identify what's playing on the radio. And so the Breakthrough was not what's that song the Breakthrough was what if you could identify that song from The Sound in the air coming to the microphone of your phone? And that was that was the kind of pattern recognition problem that we decided to embark on solving and that's what we did. So she's am also it doesn't just do music, correct. It does movies. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny cuz we tried to invent a music recognition technology. I'm working with my co-founder who from Stanford with four degrees from Stanford.
Added mathematics and electrical engineering but then when we invented it, we realized what we had actually invented was not music recognition, but recorded sound recognition and so that recorded sound could be music and that's the primary use case for Shazam, but it could be any form of recorded sound. So you could ingest into our database all TV advertisements all movies. All TV shows literally even lectures and universities anything that you could record you could ingest and therefore you could identify just recently had another explosion because a tick tock to because everyone's like, what's that?
Sound what's that song? Oh, is that right? Yeah, everyone everyone's using it again. That's that's such an interesting concept Chris. It's talk a
little bit about as you guys kind of built the company how you thought about kind of spending your time focused on building versus talking to customers versus internal, you know, hiring and capita allocation and things like that and really the context here is Bryce has started a number of businesses and he almost has done it backwards. Right? So most companies build a product and they go find the audience Bryce has the
fit of him and his friends have found the audience and now they're starting to build companies of a product to sell to that audience. So they've got everything from merchandise to energy drink Etc. How do you think about Bryce kind of acting as that startup founder or executive spending his time most efficiently on product customers internal things
Etc? Yeah. I mean, I guess I've always been someone who's very passionate about ultimately one thing and that's delighting the end customer and so many
Great companies have come from that kind of focus. I have great admiration for those companies and those entrepreneurs those Business Leaders. And so I think there are examples of great companies actually that started like Bryce with an audience. So when Skype was founded the people who founded it had previously founded Kazakh and they had the audience because all users and then but most importantly what they did is they thought what's a very very compelling thing that we could offer these people and you know free phone calls over the internet from your computer is was extremely compelling at that time and they see
He did it with that audience. So I know I think that I think you know Bryce is in a great position to have this huge audience. And I think the most important thing is to be very picky very finicky about what he brings to them and bringing things that really are just excellent. Excellent products, excellent experiences things that you know that he's vetted and even worked with other people to vet so that he knows that it will build a reputation of being great things that really Delight people and that could be in many areas. It could be in nutrition. It could be in sports you
Name it got and then Chris when you're thinking about kind of understanding what the technology Trends are obviously for Shazam. You had I think almost a two-decade run right and kind of constantly evolving the technology the product and the business. How do you think about kind of staying relevant with a product or a company in terms of price today him and his audience or young obviously over the next couple of years. They're going to kind of transition to later stages in life. So they'll get married. They'll get kids they'll get you know into the 30s.
And one of the things that they're focused on is staying relevant, right both from the audience making sure that they're keeping technology and products all of it. But also the them themselves, how do you
think about that in terms of staying relevant? Definitely, you know, it was extremely important for Shazam to stay relevant here when Shazam started. We were a service pre apps, you know, so you Lily dial the phone number on your phone. That's how you choose am and then you got a text message back with the name of the song because there were no apps and staying relevant. It seems so obvious to tell you this today, but believe me at the time it
Not so clear and obvious but staying relevant was a lot of hard work and we had evolved with mobile phones, you know becoming Java apps and Brew outside eventually the apps that we all know is the iPhone app and then, you know providing all the experience Rich experiences and so on so it's extremely important to stay relevant. And as you said, you know what's relevant to people of different ages definitely changes as they get older clearly. I was just thinking about us today, like one of the things I'm interested in right now, very passionate about is nutrition and you know watching YouTube videos earlier today about how bad
sugar is for you and so on and I think we'll gosh when I was 21, I mean, I wouldn't think twice about consuming huge amounts of sugar and then you just sort of it doesn't even bother you but then I was thinking wouldn't it be amazing if I could start seating that concept of my little 12 year old son to sort of see that concept so that he can have learned the importance of that type of thing. Hopefully a decade or two earlier than I did. I think that's you know, staying relevant is sort of seeing ahead and seeing what's important to people
absolutely and today. I believe you're building a company that uses computer.
Described as for life-saving type applications. What can you share about that today? And why the focus on computer vision with this new company? What I
wanted to do is I wanted to do something that had some similarities to Shazam in the sense that it would be basically developing a disruptive difficult to execute technology us, you know, picking something cutting-edge like computer vision, which is based on artificial intelligence. But more importantly for this time around I wanted to do something that wasn't necessarily a huge lucrative Market, but
I mean that would be more mission-driven so I could have some impact on the world and that that's the saving lives. So this little tiny Market that I've chosen little business opportunity is to see if I can prevent drowning and swimming pools so you can think of it as basically I like to say a smoke alarm needs a self-driving car and the sense that you know, it's always on device that uses computer vision artificial intelligence to determine not just as if someone Falls in a pool, but if they actually are drowning
absolutely and then if you could go back at 21, what are the things that you know now that
Wish you knew whether it's as an entrepreneur and investor or just a human obviously Bryce kind of gets the benefit of learning from you. What are those things that you wish that you knew?
Yeah, I guess I'm probably the biggest one is when I think Bryce already knows which is the thing. I mentioned that I discovered during my MBA which is wow, you know that sense of empowerment of like you really can do whatever you want to do when you're younger and less experienced. You ain't typically kind of figure out what's the traditional path. You know, how do I you know, what do I do? What which college do I go?
Go to what job do I take and so on and you tend to think of these traditional routes but as life went by as my career went by. I started to realize that almost all the best things came from what I just invented my own path and inventing my own path. I would apply to many things. I mean right down to like finding an apartment in San Francisco when it was really hard. I used my own method that was very different than everyone else's, you know to starting your own company to start even projects to you know, how you choose which friends you're going to hang out with, you know, I think you can take very non-traditional ways of doing those things and then vent.
Own path that whatever makes sense to you and I think that's the something that I learned through life really led to Great outcomes. And I guess that would be the thing that I would have loved to really understood it 21, right? If I thank you. Thank you man, Chris.
Where can we send people to find you on the internet and find out more about we've
done? Oh, gosh. I'm not really very findable on the internet. I don't use Twitter. I don't use on Facebook. I don't know the tick-tock.
I'm pretty well hidden. You know, I have a website where I do professional speaking, which is Chris J Barton.com. So that's my main speaking website. That's it. That's probably all my public exposure. Okay.
Bryce is Gonna Get You On Tick-Tock now?
Yeah, I gotta get you on Tick Tock or your son. Your son is probably on Tick-Tock. My son's on takes out. Yeah, so it was my son would want his he wants me to get 12 million views. I think his if I get on there so that'll probably happened. Yeah, I never know you never know. Maybe we could do something together. We can like, you know, do some push-ups have to
Of competition you just you did say you were into Fitness and Nutrition. Let's do it. I'm down. All right, Sandhya
awesome Chris. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. I think everyone's gonna really enjoy it.
All right. Thanks for having me. Thanks, man. Thank you guys so much for listening / watching all the way to the end. If you're listening on Apple podcasts. Don't forget to write the podcast five-star subscribe and leave a review and if you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to like comment subscribe and we'll see you guys next time with another episode of Capital University base.
