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I was closed for 18 months, and Tony, you saved my life.
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If I didn t go to BM, I would have never reopened after COVID.
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SPEAKER_00
Two years ago, it was COVID.
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Now it s a looming recession, and business as usual won t cut it anymore.
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The businesses that survive the coming economic winter will be those that step up to serve in a new way, add more value, innovate, and anticipate.
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At Business Mastery, Tony Robbins and his team of niche business experts will train you in the seven critical areas of business that you need to master if you want to not only survive, but thrive this winter season.
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So don t just stay afloat.
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Dominate with 30 to 130% growth guaranteed.
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See if Business Mastery is a fit for your business at TonyRobbins.com forward slash business podcast.
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When I came up with the idea for Shazam, I thought, you know, it s gonna be, people are gonna hold their phone up in the air, and then they re gonna know the name of the song, and that just felt like magic, it really felt like magic.
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Yeah, and it s like, wow, how can that be?
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Hey everybody, it s Mary B, and it s my pleasure to welcome you to the Tony Robbins Podcast.
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We ve got a gem for you today as we drop you inside the room of Tony s Business Mastery Seminar.
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Here you ll witness Tony one-on-one in an interview, and what s so cool about this one is you ve probably never heard of this guy, but this guy that you ve never heard of, the one with dyslexia, who over a hundred venture capitalists turned away cold, he came up with a product that I bet you know and love.
0
SPEAKER_01
Let me ask you this.
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Have you ever held up your phone in a coffee shop or a noisy bar and then marveled open-mouthed that in a few seconds it was able to identify the song and artist for you?
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If so, then you have our friend Chris Barton to thank for it.
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Chris was working on the app we know today as Shazam back in the year 2000, when the flip phone was still the hot new rage and the snappiest thing a cell phone could do was download monophonic ringtones.
0
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And there was Chris with this grand idea and a relentless will to turn it into reality.
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Some of the most brilliant minds at MIT and Berkeley and Harvard all told Chris he was crazy and that it couldn t be done, but he went on to bring to fruition one of the most popular tech tools of all time.
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And the first person we re going to interview is a person you don t know the person, but I bet you ve used the product.
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It s called Shazam.
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How many have Shazam on your phone?
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The man who created this product, when he came up with this product, it was impossible.
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Everyone said it was impossible.
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He came up with a product three years before iTunes, seven years before we ever had an iPhone.
0
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I mean, literally before there was digital music, he thought of this idea of wouldn t it be cool if you could wave your phone in the air, hear a song, and in 15 seconds, no matter where the song was playing, be able to know what that song is, access that song, and be able to make that happen.
0
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And he did it.
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He did it in spite of every obstacle you can possibly imagine.
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And he ended up selling this business for $400 million to Apple.
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It s the fourth largest one.
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A billion people have downloaded this app.
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And today, if you have an iPhone, you can just say, Siri, what s this song?
0
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It s built into Siri as well.
0
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Ladies and gentlemen, please stand up, give a big hand, the co-founder of Shazam, Chris Martin.
0
SPEAKER_02
Oh, yes.
0
SPEAKER_02
Chris, it s such a pleasure to meet you and a privilege to be with you.
0
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You ve got a product that most of us around the world all are delighted by.
0
SPEAKER_02
I can probably remember the first time we ever used it.
0
SPEAKER_02
I certainly remember the first time I did.
0
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Driving a car, hearing a song while I m driving, clicking on Shazam and going, oh, my God, this song by Pink, Funhaus.
0
SPEAKER_02
This is really cool.
0
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And I use music in all my events.
0
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So I m always hearing music and I was always trying to gather, what is that?
0
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We call this, you know, the radio stations and say, what was that song?
0
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And now to have this at our fingertips.
0
SPEAKER_02
I want to know, before we get into the journey of Shazam, I d like to know a little bit about you.
0
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Tell us, you know, what it was like growing up and what do you think created this belief inside of you that says,
0
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I can do things people say are impossible.
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SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_03
Let s see.
0
SPEAKER_03
I guess, I think growing up, similar to my son, I have undiagnosed dyslexia and ADHD and I had my own challenges of just kind of getting through basic academics.
0
SPEAKER_03
And so you d have to kind of cope and come up with your own coping strategies and find your own, define your own ways.
0
SPEAKER_02
Wait a second.
0
SPEAKER_02
Now you just blew my mind because didn t you go to Cambridge and didn t you get a degree?
0
SPEAKER_02
What was your degree in Cambridge?
0
SPEAKER_03
That was a master s in finance.
0
SPEAKER_02
In finance?
0
SPEAKER_02
And you have dyslexia?
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_02
That s wild.
0
SPEAKER_02
Tell us how you managed it.
0
SPEAKER_03
I remember when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley and I remember when I arrived, the first thing I did is I went and got the syllabus for each class and I thought, okay, which classes can I take that have the least reading involved?
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And so I just kept pivoting towards majors and focuses areas that had the least reading.
0
SPEAKER_03
Wow.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, because it s such a challenge.
0
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So you had dyslexia, did it make you more creative?
0
SPEAKER_03
Yes, so I teach my son this, and I ve read about dyslexia and ADHD, and what s interesting about both of them is that while they make
0
SPEAKER_03
traditional academics a challenge and they make it hard to get good grades, so people like Charles Schwab and Richard Branson are dyslexic.
0
SPEAKER_03
I really believe it gives you superpowers.
0
SPEAKER_03
In fact they call the thinking of dyslexics, they call it big picture thinking.
0
SPEAKER_03
Like an ability to see orders of magnitude more variables at the same time and almost just have clarity about what s going to happen.
0
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Just think about that belief, everybody.
0
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When you take what everybody else tries to make a limitation and you see it as your superpower, and you find its benefit, that s how your life changes.
0
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It shifts your identity.
0
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Once your identity shifts, your whole world shifts.
0
SPEAKER_02
So you go to school, and what was your intention?
0
SPEAKER_02
What did you think you were going to do?
0
SPEAKER_02
Were you entrepreneurial?
0
SPEAKER_03
No, initially I did, I started at Berkeley as an engineering major, switched out of that to economics and business.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I kind of did a traditional route.
0
SPEAKER_03
I did management consulting in my first years out of college.
0
SPEAKER_03
And it wasn t really on my radar to start a company at that point.
0
SPEAKER_03
It was only when I was doing my MBA, I went back to Berkeley to do my MBA, still not realizing that I wanted to start a company.
0
SPEAKER_03
And it was actually in the first week of my MBA program, I was in the computer lab, and next to me was a guy that was one year ahead of me in the second year of the MBA.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I said, oh, what did you do before the MBA program here at Berkeley?
0
SPEAKER_03
And he said, oh, I was an Air Force pilot.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I thought, Air Force pilot, wow.
0
SPEAKER_03
And then he said, I said, well, what are you doing now?
0
SPEAKER_03
He said, well, I m starting a company.
0
SPEAKER_03
It actually ended up going public, that company, a real estate company called Zip Realty.
0
SPEAKER_02
And was it on the web?
0
SPEAKER_03
It was a web, an early web.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, because this is in 2000.
0
SPEAKER_03
This is 1998.
0
SPEAKER_03
So early internet days.
0
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_03
So so yeah, he said, I m starting a real estate internet company.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I thought, wow, an Air Force pilot is suddenly starting a company.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I thought, now I have no excuse.
0
SPEAKER_03
Because I mean, this is about as far as you can get in terms of skill set, right?
0
SPEAKER_03
I mean, I m sure he s great at flying planes.
0
SPEAKER_03
And so it was very inspiring for me.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I kind of thought, well, you can really just define your own path.
0
SPEAKER_03
And if you just want to do it, you just do it.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I thought, well, I m going to start a company as well.
0
SPEAKER_02
And did you have any idea what kind of company you want to start?
0
SPEAKER_02
Or did you start something before Shazam?
0
SPEAKER_03
No, I did not.
0
SPEAKER_03
It was my first company ever, yes.
0
SPEAKER_03
Up until then, I had just been a cookie cutter management consultant, you know, just traditional, you know, check in for a job and work hard long hours.
0
SPEAKER_03
But yeah, it never occurred to me to really start a company.
0
SPEAKER_03
What was the aha moment where you got the idea for Shazam then?
0
SPEAKER_03
I first chose co-founders before we actually knew what business we were going to start.
0
SPEAKER_03
Oh, you knew before the company.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, so we thought, OK, well, let s start a company together.
0
SPEAKER_03
And these were friends of yours or people you went out and got directly?
0
SPEAKER_03
No, they re actually friends, two friends.
0
SPEAKER_03
The fourth one was not a friend.
0
SPEAKER_03
We had to hunt him down.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, the engineer.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, exactly, the inventor.
1
SPEAKER_00
These two, one of them was a classmate in business school and one of them was just a friend from around the city, both talented guys.
1
SPEAKER_01
And you re living, just to give a bit of context, in the UK at the time.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so we were living, well I was doing my MBA at Berkeley, but then I was doing, then I went out and did a semester at London Business School, and so I was in London, yeah, correct.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so we were, and it was during that period when I was in London, doing an internship and so on at Microsoft,
1
SPEAKER_00
that we were in this mode of, say, we re going to start a company.
1
SPEAKER_00
We have no idea what, but something.
1
SPEAKER_00
And we would literally meet at cafes in London and just brainstorm.
1
SPEAKER_00
We would just throw out ideas, write them down on paper.
1
SPEAKER_00
What were some of the early companies you considered?
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, the one that I thought about doing quite seriously for a bit was contact lenses, selling contact lenses and all eye-related care on the web.
1
SPEAKER_00
Again, this is 1998, so actually had we done that, it could have been very successful.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think 1-800-CONTACTS became a huge business.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I just found that I couldn t get that excited about it.
1
SPEAKER_00
I kind of thought, can I wake up every morning going,
1
SPEAKER_00
need to sell contacts on the web.
1
SPEAKER_00
And as you know, you need to put in a lot of passion and energy to start a company.
1
SPEAKER_00
So the breakthrough idea actually with Shazam was not, hey, wouldn t it be great if you could identify a song with a mobile phone?
1
SPEAKER_00
That was not the breakthrough idea.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because actually there were about 6 companies doing that, but... Doing what?
1
SPEAKER_00
They were all embarked on trying to identify songs with a mobile phone.
1
SPEAKER_00
Even though there were no real smartphones at that point, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Right, this was early days, so one was Sony Corporation, they had a little startup called eMarker, it was actually a device, that was not a phone, it was a little device you clicked.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then there was one called... gosh, I can t remember the names of these companies now.
1
SPEAKER_00
But anyway, so, basically, what they were all doing is doing the traditional thing that one would do when you start a business, which is just, OK, here s a business I want to start, how do I go about it, and so the logical thing, working with existing technologies and building something, was to monitor radio play.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so that s what they were all doing, they were monitoring the radio stations, and then with these services you d say, I m listening to this radio station, you know, 105.3,
1
SPEAKER_00
And then you d enter that on your phone, and then they would tell you, OK, here s a song that s playing at this moment on the radio.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because that was technically feasible, we know what songs are playing on the radio, it s not a hard problem to figure that out.
1
SPEAKER_00
So the breakthrough with Shazam was that I was thinking about that business, because it was early days and no one had really taken off yet, and I thought, wouldn t it be great to come up with something like that, but...
1
SPEAKER_00
I was taking a class at London Business School called Strategic Innovation, taught by Costas Markidis, and it was really encouraging to think outside the box about everything, question everything.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I was thinking about, if I created a business where I would track what s going on in all these radio stations, and it would be similar to these other startups, what could someone do that would leapfrog me, that would just leave me behind in the dust?
1
SPEAKER_00
That s the strategic innovation.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you thought in terms of your competitor if you were in that business.
1
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
1
SPEAKER_00
What would just... I invest all these years building this business, what would just leave me in the dust and just make me irrelevant?
1
SPEAKER_00
And then that was the breakthrough, because then I thought, what if you could just identify the song from the air?
1
SPEAKER_00
Not from the radio stations, literally in the air, and then you wouldn t have to enter the radio station.
1
SPEAKER_00
And not only that, but it wouldn t just work for radio play, you d use it in cafes, bars, clubs, movie theaters, you know, everywhere you go, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Shopping malls, anywhere you re a song, because it s not just radio out there.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s wild.
1
SPEAKER_01
One of the things I try to teach all entrepreneurs is there s always two businesses you re running, the business you re in and the business you re becoming.
1
SPEAKER_01
In order to be the business you re becoming, you ve got to think about what would knock you off.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you actually used that principle on your own.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s pretty awesome.
1
SPEAKER_01
Tell me, so you come up with the idea.
1
SPEAKER_01
You ve got some initial partners.
1
SPEAKER_01
You start, as I understand it, to try to ask people, and they all say, it s impossible.
1
SPEAKER_01
which lights your fire, which I love.
1
SPEAKER_01
Tell us more about those early days when it s impossible, and then tell us how you got to your fourth partner, your engineer.
1
SPEAKER_00
Avery.
1
SPEAKER_00
So here we have this idea, and again, we re non-technical guys, the three of us.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so we re like, oh yeah, we ll just invent this technology, you hold your phone up, and it s pattern recognition.
1
SPEAKER_00
it will hear the sound over the phone, and these are ancient phones, right, this is in 2000, and it will identify the song.
1
SPEAKER_00
Great, so now how do we go about doing this?
1
SPEAKER_00
Go on to Google, type in a few things, a few queries, and we start to realize, OK, the people that are really advanced in this audio area, sort of pattern recognition, are basically people who have focused on electrical engineering, with a focus on digital signal processing, with a focus on
1
SPEAKER_00
audio signal processing, and then among those people focused on audio signal processing, some people had a particular interest in music.
1
SPEAKER_00
And we find these people on the web, they ve published papers, done various studies, and they typically had come out of places like MIT Media Lab, or Stanford had a group called the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
1
SPEAKER_00
And maybe in this program two or three PhDs would graduate each year.
1
SPEAKER_00
And with a music PhD, music acoustics PhD.
1
SPEAKER_00
So we go out and we meet these guys, a few of them that we find, just reach out to them.
1
SPEAKER_00
And we re like, we have a top secret idea, you can t tell anyone.
1
SPEAKER_00
But we need to invent this technology that can identify songs on a mobile phone, OK?
1
SPEAKER_00
And they said, I m sorry.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s just not possible.
1
SPEAKER_00
I know every technology out there, I don t know of any way to do something like that, and the reason is because you re dealing with in-pattern recognition when you combine two core challenges, and those, one is scale, a lot of music, and then the other one is noise.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, because you re in a bar, you ve got people talking, and still being able to... and recognize a song at any point in the song too, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
any point in the song, and there could be all kinds of audio challenges and so on, the phones have vocoders that emphasize the human voice and de-emphasize all other sounds, noise cancellation, just all these technologies working against you.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it was just incredible, we would capture some of these sound samples and you could barely hear the music.
1
SPEAKER_00
So they just had no idea how to do it.
1
SPEAKER_00
We finally found this professor who was kind of famous in this little circle of audio signal processing people, Professor Julius Smith at Stanford, he was famous because he had invented the algorithms behind the Yamaha synthesizers that are out there today, and all Yamaha are all electronic keyboards.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so we went to him and he said, I have no idea how to do this either, but he said, I think it s a great idea and I d be happy to be your advisor and help out.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so his first project as advisor was I brought him a list of names and I said, I found all these names and they re pretty much all PhDs, mostly out of MIT and Stanford and Berkeley and so on.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I said, we need a co-founder and we need him to be a genius.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so he knew all the names, because it s a small world, they go to the same conferences.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I just said, can you just rank the five smartest guys on this list?
1
SPEAKER_00
And just guys and gals.
1
SPEAKER_00
And we re gonna go after those people as our co-founder.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I want them to be people that, because clearly they re all very smart, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
They re all PhDs from MIT and so on.
1
SPEAKER_00
But anyway, we said we need them to be like an inventor.
1
SPEAKER_00
And actually an abstract thinker.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
And someone that was just going to go down to the core principles and really think about how can we invent this type of technology.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so on that list, we had a little list of the top five.
1
SPEAKER_00
And number one was this guy Avery Wang that had done his PhD under Julius.
1
SPEAKER_00
He had four or five degrees from Stanford in mathematics and electrical engineering.
1
SPEAKER_01
Four or five degrees?
1
SPEAKER_01
How old was he?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, yeah, I think he s probably still 15 years old now.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s amazing.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I don t know.
1
SPEAKER_00
He s one of those math geniuses.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think now he, I don t know how old he is today, but he was a young guy.
1
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, just a genius.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so we went to meet him.
1
SPEAKER_00
Actually, he told us later, the only reason he took the meeting with us is because we were referred by this professor.
1
SPEAKER_00
But he went out and met us in a little cafe over a burger in Silicon Valley, and we pitched our little deck to him and said, we need you to invent this technology.
1
SPEAKER_00
And he decided it was perfect timing because his own startup was failing.
1
SPEAKER_00
He needed something to do and he said, why not?
1
SPEAKER_01
He didn t think it was impossible.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, no, that is a problem.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he actually did think it was impossible.
1
SPEAKER_01
He still thought it was impossible, but I ll give it a shot.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he thought I d give it a shot.
1
SPEAKER_00
And one problem I faced is that he kept facing kind of that brick wall feeling like, I don t think I can do it.
2
SPEAKER_00
He was unsure whether it would be possible, basically, and I think he just didn t know if he could keep going, because he was trying for months, working with Julius to invent this.
2
SPEAKER_00
And actually Julius was such a positive, you know, we can do anything kind of guy.
2
SPEAKER_00
that I would organize a barbecue, and then to keep my co-founder motivated, I would say, Julius, and I think, this is the professor he did his PhD under, come over here, Julius, don t you think this should be possible?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s gotta be possible, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And Julius would be like, yes, it does.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I thought it had to be possible.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so Avery would just feel the pressure because he s like, okay, they all have these expectations, I better invent something.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s wild.
2
SPEAKER_01
And how long did it take before you got the first?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, first of all, in order to do this at that time, there s no Spotify, there s no iTunes.
2
SPEAKER_01
So how did you build the database?
2
SPEAKER_01
Forget even the technology, the noise cancellation and all the other problems you would have.
2
SPEAKER_01
How did you come up with a database that could be recognized?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so, because this is early days, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So what year would this be?
2
SPEAKER_00
So this is basically when we raised our Angel round, that was the summer of 2000.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then our Venture round a year later.
2
SPEAKER_00
And iTunes came in in what, 2004?
2
SPEAKER_01
I think it was about Susan they have three or four around there and I phone with iPhones 2007 and the App Store 2008 So you re like seven years before the phone three or four years before iTunes Yeah, and there s no database in those days.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re buying stuff on CDs and ripping it.
2
SPEAKER_00
What did you do?
2
SPEAKER_01
Like I saw if you went to a music store back then I know because I was looking at stats They had about 200,000 songs.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you know in total.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah a lot of songs.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I
2
SPEAKER_01
So how did you get 200,000 songs into a database?
2
SPEAKER_00
So we also had a limited amount of capital.
2
SPEAKER_00
How much did you raise, first of all?
2
SPEAKER_00
So we had $7.5 million, which is quite a lot of money.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s a tough raise.
2
SPEAKER_00
But to do what we were trying to do, you needed a lot of money.
2
SPEAKER_00
Especially when you re starting from scratch, because we had to build our own search engine as well from scratch.
2
SPEAKER_00
Did you go to VCs for that money?
2
SPEAKER_00
We went to VCs, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
And how many did you have to go to before somebody said yes?
2
SPEAKER_01
It was about over 100 VCs, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Give me a fist bump on that, brother.
2
SPEAKER_01
Ladies and gentlemen, over 100 VCs, tell them no.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
2
SPEAKER_01
Every great entrepreneur I ve ever met, virtually, and I m sure there s some exception, who has made it, has always gone through 100, 200, 500, 1,000 no s, literally, to get to that point.
2
SPEAKER_01
That is the dividing line from reality, turn your dreams into reality or not.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think I read somewhere one of the VCs said to you something about, no one would ever want to use this or something.
2
SPEAKER_00
What did they say?
2
SPEAKER_00
One of my favorite highlights.
2
SPEAKER_00
I won t name the VC, but it was a big VC.
2
SPEAKER_00
We showed him the demo, and at that point we had an actual demo, and identified a song and a text message came to the phone, and he said, I don t see why anyone would ever use that.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I was like...
2
SPEAKER_00
That just motivated me so much and I just thought By the way, I like to say have you ever heard the golden rule?
2
SPEAKER_00
The golden rule is he who has the gold makes the rules.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so the VCS make the rules That s when you re an entrepreneur.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you went through more than a hundred VCS.
2
SPEAKER_01
You got guys telling it s gonna be worthless You kept going you get seven half million bucks, which is not a lot of money for the level of tech You have to do with this stage.
2
SPEAKER_01
So tell us how did you even build the database?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so basically what we ended up doing is we first built software from scratch that would run on PCs and it would basically rip CDs, take the fingerprints of the music.
2
SPEAKER_00
We use fingerprints for music, so it s mathematical descriptions of the sound.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then we also, so we built that software, then we hired about 25, 30, 18-year-olds to work 3 shifts, 3 8-hour shifts, 24 hours a day, putting CDs into these computers, running our custom software, and then basically typing the name of every song and the album title and the artist, because that stuff is not... All by hand?
2
SPEAKER_00
All by hand, 24 hours a day, so we could launch in less than 9 months.
2
SPEAKER_01
Holy cow, and how many songs did you launch with?
2
SPEAKER_00
And we launched with 1.7 million songs.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it d be bigger than any music store.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it was probably a good six or seven times that of the largest record stores at the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, because in those days you went to Virgin or HMV or places like that in London.
2
SPEAKER_01
Here, Licorice Pizza, that kind of thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
Power Records.
2
SPEAKER_01
So literally this was all done by hand.
2
SPEAKER_01
So then tell us the first version.
2
SPEAKER_01
How long did it take to get that first version?
2
SPEAKER_01
And if I read right, I think you were on Nokia with those little grey screens.
2
SPEAKER_01
You could barely even text back then, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, really all people did with phones was make phone calls and send text messages.
2
SPEAKER_00
The one innovative thing you could do on a mobile phone was download a ringtone, we all remember that, and be like, oh, and it was a monophonic ringtone.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we were like one of the first services that you could be other than making phone calls or sending text messages.
2
SPEAKER_00
And did you think it was gonna just explode and what actually happened?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so I was convinced, because you d show it to people and they d say,
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it was like magic, I couldn t believe you d hold this phone up in the air, this very basic phone, and then after a few seconds a text message would appear on this phone and it would say the name of the song.
2
SPEAKER_00
You show this to people and they go, wow, that is incredible.
2
SPEAKER_00
Except for that one VC of course.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we thought, once we launch this thing it s just gonna take off like a rocket, or like wildfire.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the reality is that we had to have a business model at that time and there was no advertising, there wasn t even a graphical user interface.
2
SPEAKER_00
So our model was much like calling 411, which was each time you used it you paid a small fee, 50 cents, 50 pence.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so that was a bit of a problem, a bit of a hurdle to usage, but ultimately we learned that just getting the word out is such a difficult thing, and it doesn t matter...
2
SPEAKER_00
how great of an idea or great of a product you have.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes just getting the word out is so much harder than you realize.
2
SPEAKER_00
I worked at Dropbox and it was the same kind of thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s an amazing product, but getting the word out was just so difficult.
2
SPEAKER_01
Plus you were so far ahead of the time in terms of tech.
2
SPEAKER_01
Ray Kurzweil s a good friend of mine.
2
SPEAKER_01
He s one of the, I m sure you know, one of the greatest inventors of our time.
2
SPEAKER_01
And his great skill is being able to tell you 10 years from now what can be done.
2
SPEAKER_01
He doesn t know which tech will do it, but he knows based on compounding where it s gonna be
2
SPEAKER_01
And you have this vision.
2
SPEAKER_01
How did you know that we were going to go to smartphones?
2
SPEAKER_01
How did you know this was going to occur?
2
SPEAKER_01
What gave you that insight when people are still just using their phone to make phone calls?
2
SPEAKER_00
I think it was just, I had myself during business school had bought my first mobile phone, regular mobile phone.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like a flip phone in those days?
2
SPEAKER_00
A flip phone, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
I bought it on eBay, I forgot what kind of brand it was, but I don t think it was even Nokia.
2
SPEAKER_00
But anyway, I bought that and I kind of thought, I could just feel how everyone was getting mobile phones, it was just happening.
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you remember that day when suddenly it went from being, you know, a third of your friends had phones to suddenly like everyone had phones, all very rapidly and just a year or two.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I just thought, all these people are going to be walking around with phones, they need something to do, there s got to be something they can do with these phones.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that was definitely a contributor towards the Shazam concept was like, we re going to do something that everyone can do with a phone, not just your computer, but something that s going with you everywhere you go.
2
SPEAKER_01
So when you got a Nokia, you do this first exposure, it s hard to get the word out.
2
SPEAKER_01
You thought it would take off, it obviously didn t at the level you d hoped.
2
SPEAKER_01
Were you able to make money at that yet, or were you still in trouble?
2
SPEAKER_00
We were really struggling.
2
SPEAKER_00
We had a marketing budget, that was part of the $7.5 million, and we made web banner ads, radio ads, we even hired people to walk into bars and just tell people about Shazam.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we were doing everything you can.
2
SPEAKER_00
Our first market was the UK.
2
SPEAKER_00
And when we launched, we were usable by anyone with a mobile phone.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because it was just all you needed was a phone that could make a phone call and get a text message, which was all phones.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you didn t need some kind of advanced phone to use Shazam.
2
SPEAKER_00
We learned that just the amount you spend on marketing to drive awareness to someone was just more than the little bit of money that we made every time someone Shazammed.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we struggled.
2
SPEAKER_00
We barely survived.
2
SPEAKER_00
We actually had two rounds of layoffs.
2
SPEAKER_00
We probably were near bankruptcy for the entire six-year period between launching in 2002 and the app store coming out in 2008.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I read somewhere, I think in 2003 or 2004, like two or three of your partners left the company.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then I know, did you simultaneously, I read that you went to work at Google, you were interested in innovation and also you just mentioned, what do you call it, Dropbox?
2
SPEAKER_01
Dropbox, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Was that happening simultaneously?
2
SPEAKER_01
So you were trying to manage both these things?
2
SPEAKER_00
So basically, my full-time role, I moved over to Google and that was 2004 when it was an interesting
3
SPEAKER_00
2000 person company.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right before it went public, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Right, a few months before it went public, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then I just, my main role on Shazam was a board member.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was an artist working board member.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because I was working 20 hours a week on top of my Google job.
3
SPEAKER_00
And for many, many years just doing everything I can to try to make this baby a success.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then you went to Dropbox.
3
SPEAKER_01
Tell me, what are the lessons, if I may ask, what stood out to you from your experience at Google?
3
SPEAKER_01
Did any of that help you later as an entrepreneur in innovation?
3
SPEAKER_01
And then same thing with Dropbox.
3
SPEAKER_01
What did you learn there?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I learned so much at both places.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, just the way those two businesses went around about building, taking a core disruptive technology, and then making it so addressable to such large numbers of users in a scalable way and really being at the forefront of technology adoption and technology development.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was just fascinating.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I was lucky enough when I joined Google, my job was I was a business development guy, a partnerships guy, I m non technical.
3
SPEAKER_00
So my job was mobile partnerships.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was actually the first mobile partnerships guy at Google.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I had to do the relationships with AT&T and Verizon, but also European companies like Vodafone and Nokia in Finland and so on.
3
SPEAKER_00
But just being in that environment, I learned so much about how you think as a business long term.
3
SPEAKER_00
And from the founders, the way that the founders at Google would approach everything like it was a clean slate.
3
SPEAKER_00
They would say,
3
SPEAKER_00
Right down to, you know, how do we hire people?
3
SPEAKER_00
What do we say in the interviews?
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, how do we motivate people?
3
SPEAKER_00
How do we choose who to promote?
3
SPEAKER_00
Everything, they would just basically throw out all the standard stuff and then start from scratch.
3
SPEAKER_00
Everything is innovation, even down to how to recruit people.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s really amazing.
3
SPEAKER_01
And what about Dropbox?
3
SPEAKER_00
Dropbox is also amazing, I just think that company is just so amazing as an example of how Drew and Arash thought about the problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because if you think about it, basically, they were also, like Shazam, there were many music recognition attempts before, there were multiple attempts at cloud-type services before Dropbox, and none of them took off.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because they were clunky experiences where you had to download a piece of software and then every time you wanted to upload a file you would click upload, and every time you wanted the file back you would click download.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so they kind of said, OK, we re not going to even think about the cloud problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re going to give that to Amazon, let Amazon do all the cloud stuff.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re going to focus on the front-end experience and just make it seamless.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the way they did that is basically by conquering synchronization.
3
SPEAKER_00
And synchronization is one thing they conquered, and the second thing is integration with a file and folder system so that you can really look like your own folder.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they did that so well that basically now you just had a folder on your computer.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you put a file in there, it was in Dropbox, it was in the cloud.
3
SPEAKER_00
No upload or no download.
3
SPEAKER_00
And one early Dropboxer once said to me, he said, Chris, we had zero steps and all our predecessors had one step, click upload or click download, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
He said, and Chris, the difference between zero and one is infinite.
3
SPEAKER_01
I always talk about, to our team, that complexity is the enemy of execution.
3
SPEAKER_01
You make it too complex.
3
SPEAKER_01
You ve took something unbelievably complex and made it so simple for the user.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that seems to be the secret at Dropbox, certainly for Google, certainly what you did as well.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m curious.
3
SPEAKER_01
How did you keep the business funded when you re having to do layoffs and things and keep it going and there s no real distribution channel?
3
SPEAKER_01
How did you do it?
3
SPEAKER_01
Did you go to more money, more VCs?
3
SPEAKER_00
That would have never worked, as you say.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was going to say, I don t imagine them giving you any money at that stage.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and you would dilute to the point of non-existence.
3
SPEAKER_00
But luckily what we did, and this is something that I encourage so many entrepreneurs to think about, is that we found an easier way.
3
SPEAKER_00
I always like to say revenue is like oxygen.
3
SPEAKER_00
You need oxygen to survive.
3
SPEAKER_00
You need to keep breathing.
3
SPEAKER_00
You need revenue to survive as a startup, to bring something in, to pay the bills.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can t just keep relying on funding.
3
SPEAKER_00
And sometimes the revenue can come, the easier way to get revenue is to go after something that might be a parallel to your core business.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so for Shazam, we built a service to just monitor radio stations.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because it turns out, isn t that interesting?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because we found out that we had an amazing, highly efficient technology, and there were companies that wanted to know what was playing on the radio.
3
SPEAKER_01
Kind of monitor their competition, is that what it was?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well actually no, so ASCAP and BMI pay out a billion dollars.
3
SPEAKER_00
So they get paid.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh even smarter, wow.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they pay out a billion dollars a year to artists for all their royalties.
3
SPEAKER_00
And up until back then they were estimating what s played on the radio.
3
SPEAKER_00
They had people just listening to radio stations, writing it down and then listening to 1% of radio play and then projecting that up to 100%.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was very very archaic.
3
SPEAKER_00
So they ended up licensing our technology, and that brought in millions of dollars in revenue.
3
SPEAKER_00
Did it make you profitable at that stage, or just keep the doors open?
3
SPEAKER_00
It didn t make us profitable, but it brought money in.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then actually what we ended up doing is selling that business for a big chunk of money.
3
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that money that came in then funded the company for several years.
3
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_01
The name Shazam, where does it come from?
3
SPEAKER_01
And I heard a lot of people want to talk you out of it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Tell us about that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
So basically, when I came up with the idea for Shazam, I thought, you know, people are gonna hold their phone up in the air, and then they re gonna know the name of the song, and that just felt like magic, it really felt like magic.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and it s like, wow, how can that be?
3
SPEAKER_00
And so Shazam actually has been, it s a comic series, you know, it s been used, it s actually originally, I think, Arabic folklore it comes from, and it actually means to conjure magic.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so in the old Billy Batson comic series, this little boy would say, Shazam, and a lightning bolt would strike down from the sky, and he would become a superhero.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s been used in other contexts similar.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, it matched your whole identity as a superhero.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s awesome.
3
SPEAKER_01
But people try to talk you out of it, I heard.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, so one of my co-founders said, this is one of the things you learn for everyone here who has co-founders.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re not always going to agree on everything in life and everything in your business.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s going to be one of the struggles.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so one of my co-founders, he s an amazing guy.
3
SPEAKER_00
I always like to say he has the productivity of 10 superhumans.
3
SPEAKER_00
But he just said, hi.
3
SPEAKER_00
that name is terrible, he s like, that s a terrible name, we ve got to get rid of that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it wasn t just him by the way, I had VCs as well, we d pitch to them and they have the gold, and they would say, oh but you ve got to change that name, can t you call it something like Identify Song or something like that?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, something really emotional.
3
SPEAKER_01
Something moves you, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh my gosh.
3
SPEAKER_00
But how did you, you just persisted and... Yeah, and I was very nervous because at one point after raising the venture money, we hired this big marketing guy who had run all of marketing for Capital Radio Group, which is the largest radio group in the UK.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he said, okay, now we re going to hire an agency and we re going to evaluate what name to use for launch.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I kind of thought, oh no.
3
SPEAKER_00
Don t give up on Shazam.
3
SPEAKER_00
I just felt so just emotionally attached to it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And luckily, he included, oh, you guys have made enough traction with this name so far, even before launching.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re going to stick with it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, oh, thank you.
3
SPEAKER_00
Continuity saved you.
3
SPEAKER_01
Tell me, when did you know it was going to work?
3
SPEAKER_01
When was the breakthrough?
3
SPEAKER_01
Was it iTunes?
3
SPEAKER_01
When did the breakthrough happen for you?
3
SPEAKER_01
And then how did you get tied up with Apple?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so the day the App Store launched was definitely the day, and from that day forward... And you were on it from the very first day.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, from day one, Shazam was an app.
3
SPEAKER_00
In fact, Apple wanted to showcase amazing things that would show off their new phone.
3
SPEAKER_00
Remember, the iPhone had been out a year.
3
SPEAKER_00
So during that year, they reached out to various companies, a small set of companies, some of them gaming companies, for example,
3
SPEAKER_00
And they kind of thought, okay, what are some great showcase apps that we can co-develop actually, even give, they provide a guidance on what it can look like and so on.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so Shazam was right out the gate at the opening of the app store, there was Shazam.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they immediately had this concept of ranking apps based on popularity.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Shazam, and then the app store just grew and grew and grew and grew and grew with more and more apps and more and more people and more and more phones.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there Shazam just stayed there in that top,
3
SPEAKER_00
20 or even top 100, it varied by country and time.
3
SPEAKER_00
But it just always remained one of the most popular apps.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I remember in those first few years, the App Store, Apple would produce reports.
3
SPEAKER_00
They d publicly release and say, here are the top most downloaded apps.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you d see like Google Maps and Skype and Facebook.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then there was Shazam.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I have to admit, I did reach out to that venture capitalist, by the way.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I said, it turns out people will use this.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s awesome.
4
SPEAKER_00
I love that.
4
SPEAKER_00
How did he respond to that?
4
SPEAKER_00
Did he laugh?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he did.
4
SPEAKER_00
Actually, at that time, I was working at Google.
4
SPEAKER_00
And he came out.
4
SPEAKER_00
He said, let s have lunch.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we had lunch.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we just laughed about how it s just you can t predict the future.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can t predict the future.
4
SPEAKER_00
And yeah, it was great.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was great.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, was it a free app originally?
4
SPEAKER_00
It was a free app, but we had initially had a model where you could only use it five times a month.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you wanted to use it more than you paid for a premium version of Shazam.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I see.
4
SPEAKER_00
So that was one of our many iterations of business models.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, Shazam must have gone through, Shazam innovated more on business models than it did on technology.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so did you how soon before you you knew that app was taking off how soon before that?
4
SPEAKER_01
Converted into monetization then for you since people were doing it for free initially and so forth
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, I mean, so it s complicated.
4
SPEAKER_00
We always had revenue streams, it s just that they would change over time.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, initially it was pay-per-use on text.
4
SPEAKER_00
Then there were licensing models, which I skipped over, by the way.
4
SPEAKER_00
During the survival years, the six survival years, where we had B2B businesses and licenses, we also licensed Shazam.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there were like versions of Shazam that we preloaded on Motorola phones and Samsung phones.
4
SPEAKER_00
So that was a licensing model, pay per phone.
4
SPEAKER_00
Then the app launched in the App Store, and then we had this sort of certain percentage of paid users that we had.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then, actually, people were starting to download a lot of iTunes music.
4
SPEAKER_00
We actually became, I think, the number one affiliate of iTunes downloads.
4
SPEAKER_00
$300 million a year of music downloaded on Apple iTunes.
4
SPEAKER_01
Give him a hand with that, that s incredible.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s amazing.
4
SPEAKER_01
So at that point, did Apple approach you or did you approach Apple to say, buy the business?
4
SPEAKER_01
And did you have any sense that you were going to be able to sell it for $400 million?
4
SPEAKER_00
So yes, I would say that was within our target based on the venture capital round.
4
SPEAKER_00
How much had you raised at that point to keep the company going?
4
SPEAKER_00
We had raised actually close to $140 million.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wow.
4
SPEAKER_00
So when you raise that much, you need to make sure you sell for a big price tag to keep everyone happy.
4
SPEAKER_00
And did Apple approach you?
4
SPEAKER_00
Did you approach them?
4
SPEAKER_00
How did it come about?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, you know, the best, they say many of the best acquisitions are that come out of close relationships, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And there s no doubt that Shazam had a close relationship already.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, for years, when Apple would release new versions of its OS for iPhone and so on, they would make sure that Shazam already was up to speed right for the release of the new OS.
4
SPEAKER_00
We worked very closely with them on optimizing the flow-through experience to the iTunes download because we were such a big affiliate driver for them.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there were many things we were doing with Apple already and we had a very close partner relationship.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh also by the way, we powered Siri.
4
SPEAKER_00
So when you use Siri to identify a song, that was Shazam and that was a commercial relationship between Shazam and Apple.
4
SPEAKER_01
What year did that start happening?
4
SPEAKER_01
Because I only started using that like a year ago.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
No, no, that was a few years ago.
4
SPEAKER_00
That was before it was Apple bought Shazam.
4
SPEAKER_00
So Apple bought Shazam in 2018.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m going to say it could have been anywhere around 2015.
4
SPEAKER_01
Another example of, you know, the technology is there, but people don t, a lot of people didn t know to use it.
4
SPEAKER_01
They use Shazam, but not to use Syrian that way.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you re already integrated to a great extent.
4
SPEAKER_01
You re already there.
4
SPEAKER_01
How did the, how d the price come about?
4
SPEAKER_00
So we worked with a top tier investment bank for the roadshow of the M&A process, Goldman Sachs, who did an amazing job.
4
SPEAKER_00
And they re just incredible.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, they just opened the door to all the big decision makers at all the big companies.
4
SPEAKER_00
As you might imagine, we went through a process where we were having conversations, confidential conversations with a lot of the largest technology companies that would be good fits with Shazam.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think, you know, the Apple, ultimately the fit between Apple and Shazam was the strongest.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, Apple cares deeply about music.
4
SPEAKER_00
They ve always been the leader.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s part of their DNA.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s part of their DNA.
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And iTunes, I think at one point, iTunes represented 80 or 90% of all digital music in the world.
4
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And obviously they had Spotify as a real competitor now in streaming music, but Apple Music is definitely up there as the other leading service.
4
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And so it was just an excellent fit between.
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And then the other aspect that was an excellent fit is that fortunately Shazam had always been obsessed with simple, beautiful experiences that people loved, and we had
4
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very high ratings in the App Store.
4
SPEAKER_00
People love Shazam, and they love, and they just love, and that fit very well with the user experience focus of Apple as well.
4
SPEAKER_00
A billion downloads, is that, or I read, is that accurate?
4
SPEAKER_00
That was announced years ago, so it would be, it would be like north of that by now.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s exciting.
4
SPEAKER_01
What an exciting field.
4
SPEAKER_01
Tell me, what did you experience when you sold the company?
4
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Was there excitement, obviously?
4
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Was there any sense of loss because you built it?
4
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Was it a dream fulfilled?
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And did it change your life in any way?
4
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Yeah, I mean, I think, first of all, it was such a wonderful outcome as an entrepreneur because it is your baby and I was... Especially when everybody told you it was impossible.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes, I know.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it was so satisfying to see, okay, this is now out there and people use it and the awareness is incredible.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I was telling Dan and Angie, I remember going into like a grocery store and then suddenly right in front of me in line, the person says, what s that song?
4
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And the person behind the counter is like, look it out, Shazam.
4
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And this whole interaction is going on right in front of me.
4
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And those kind of moments are just so satisfying to see that in the wild.
4
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And then ultimately when you care so deeply about this baby that you re so obsessed with, and then it ends up where it ends up matters, and the fact that it ended up with Apple made me so happy.
4
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You know, Apple made, they actually made Shazam, the first thing they did is remove all the advertising.
4
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We needed advertising.
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That was the last of the business models that we got to, and it ended up becoming our primary revenue stream, because we had to survive.
4
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But Apple didn t need the advertising.
4
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So they just removed that, and then the app became even cleaner and faster and more beautiful.
4
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And it just fits so well with Apple the company.
4
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So I was delighted from day one that that s where it ended up.
4
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And then finally I could stop obsessing with Shazam.
4
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Don t call Apple and say, now you need to change this, you need to change that.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know they keep continuously improving anything.
4
SPEAKER_01
And what about the economics of it?
4
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Did it change your life radically?
4
SPEAKER_01
And what are you doing today?
4
SPEAKER_01
I have so many entrepreneurs.
4
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I was fortunate to sell a company to Apple as well, not for as much as yours, but a VR company.
4
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And they re really doing some nice things to it.
4
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So I know that sense of satisfaction.
4
SPEAKER_01
But on the economic side, some people s lives are really changed by it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Some people aren t much.
4
SPEAKER_01
I know a lot of entrepreneurs, they ve got to start the next thing.
4
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I know some entrepreneurs, it s like, no, I m just going to go enjoy my life for a while.
4
SPEAKER_01
What s your life like right now?
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And what are you doing with your life?
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What s fulfilling for you?
4
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Yeah, so I would say I m a little bit of a hybrid of those two.
4
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But yeah, definitely.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it was nice to have a financial outcome.
4
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And it was a good one.
4
SPEAKER_00
Not it was not.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it was a good outcome.
4
SPEAKER_00
Definitely.
4
SPEAKER_00
Great one.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so that gives you the financial freedom to choose what you want to do.
4
SPEAKER_00
I spent I love to be able to spend a lot of time with my son who like here I saw him.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, 13.
4
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13 and like me he is dyslexia.
4
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I get him.
4
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He got all my bad genes dyslexia I m gonna want to see what he s gonna create
4
SPEAKER_00
He s like, Daddy, I got the cleft chin from you.
4
SPEAKER_00
He calls it the butt chin.
4
SPEAKER_00
Tell him that s the Superman chin.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I just try to teach him, I try to give him the learnings and it s really working, you know, like these are your superpowers and you can get, just like Richard Branson and Charles Schwab, you can get bad grades in high school and still be a superstar.
4
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and maybe one day he ll be an entrepreneur.
4
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So I love putting a lot of time into that, spending time with my son.
4
SPEAKER_00
I do have, I am incubating a startup because I wanted to start a new company, but I wanted this one to not be nearly as high pressure, but still be meaningful impact.
4
SPEAKER_00
So this is impact-driven startup.
4
SPEAKER_00
Is it impossible?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s going to be very challenging because I definitely love the technically challenging aspect.
4
SPEAKER_00
I figured that.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it is computer vision, artificial intelligence.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
OK, great.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
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And it s and basically my goal is to see if I can prevent drowning in swimming pools using cameras and computer vision.
4
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
4
SPEAKER_00
So, yeah, so that s that s the idea.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the best way to think of it is like think of it like a smoke alarm, except it sits in a swimming pool.
4
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And the way you compare it to a smoke alarm is that you don t ever think about
5
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your smoke alarm.
5
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You don t come home and turn it on, say, is the smoke alarm on?
5
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It s just always on, always there in case a fire starts.
5
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And sadly, drownings are something that occur every year in swimming pools.
5
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It s actually one of the, I think it s the number one cause of accidental deaths for children under the age of five in the United States, even exceeding car accidents, gunshots, poisonings.
5
SPEAKER_02
Wow.
5
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Isn t that amazing?
5
SPEAKER_02
It s insane.
5
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Yeah, so basically this startup is called Guard, and the goal is to think in a similar kind of way of like how can we think in a disruptive technology way, but also create a very simple experience.
5
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That s key, very simple.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so that it s easy for people, you don t have to be complex in the background, but simple.
5
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but simple for the user.
5
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And just suddenly, if, God forbid, someone starts drowning, and it could be adults as well.
5
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I mean, one of, you know, famous adults, one of William Shatner s wives drowned, one of Michael Jackson s, I think, cousins drowned or something.
5
SPEAKER_02
So, yeah, if that were to happen, this would recognize the event by using computer vision, much like a self-driving car recognizes someone crossing the street.
5
SPEAKER_02
I mean, just very, very sophisticated recognition of visual events.
5
SPEAKER_04
and it makes an alarm, is that what occurs?
5
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It set off alarms all over the house and yard.
5
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And then, because it turns out that in most drownings, there s actually someone home.
5
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It s just that it s silent.
5
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A drowning is a silent event.
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In the movies, people say, help, help, but in reality, underwater.
5
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It d be interesting if, this is my crazy thought, it s completely wrong, but it d be interesting if there was something, in case someone s not there, that s released into the water that they could hold on to.
5
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That would be the next step, yeah.
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That would be an interesting piece, so that they could save themselves in the moment.
5
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Yeah.
5
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That s very cool.
5
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I love your drive, as always, to do something that lifts lives.
5
SPEAKER_04
You know, your product gives so much joy to people.
5
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What gives you the most joy?
5
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Gosh, I really, I love being in the outdoors and I love hanging out with my friends.
5
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The people that I love, my family and friends, you just realize that the basics in life, the things that are free are the best things.
5
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And they really, I just have so much gratitude for my family and my friends and just the ability to spend time with them.
5
SPEAKER_04
That s beautiful.
5
SPEAKER_04
Well, we re gonna go for three quick questions.
5
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Becky Blake, team seven, give it up for her, ladies and gentlemen.
5
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Becky, where are you in the world?
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I m in San Francisco.
5
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San Francisco, everybody.
5
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Give it up for them.
5
SPEAKER_04
What s your question, Chris?
5
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So I m just now getting started in my app in creating AI, and you re doing what I want to be doing.
5
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What are three things I need to focus on to actually do what you re doing?
5
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I think ultimately the most important thing is to focus on the end user and to make sure you re really keeping yourself in check with what is the end user experience, what are people going to, how are they going to experience your app, and how much benefit you re going to bring to them.
5
SPEAKER_02
It has to be, I mean, there s a saying that many people have read that, is it a vitamin or is it a painkiller?
5
SPEAKER_02
Have you ever heard that before?
5
SPEAKER_02
And so if it s a vitamin, it s a little bit better.
5
SPEAKER_02
But if it s a painkiller, we all jump for that ibuprofen or Tylenol once in a while, and you re really happy you had it.
5
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And so you really want to think about, is what I m offering a painkiller?
5
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Is it really just solving the problem and making it 100 times better?
5
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And I find that many entrepreneurs, they get so obsessed with their own vision that they sometimes lose sight of what other people think.
5
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So I think having the humility to always keep yourself in check and constantly ask people, what s not good enough about this?
5
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How could this be improved?
5
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Tell me what s bad about it.
5
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That s great feedback.
5
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And by the way, I know Becky, she really is phenomenal, and she works with people individually.
5
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She s not trying to convert it to an app.
5
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She s done miraculous work.
5
SPEAKER_04
Great to see you, Becky.
5
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Thank you so much.
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Give her a hand, everybody.
5
SPEAKER_04
Brian Lozano!
5
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Brian, where are you guys in the world?
5
SPEAKER_04
We re from Miami, Florida.
5
SPEAKER_04
Miami!
5
SPEAKER_04
Give it up!
5
SPEAKER_04
My heart is pounding right now.
5
SPEAKER_04
Oh my God.
5
SPEAKER_04
My question was for Chris actually in regarding the app development.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
5
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And my question is, with the advances that we ve had in technology, if you had to go through the whole development now in today s era, what would you do that would have sped up the process for Shazam?
5
SPEAKER_02
Well, I wouldn t have tried to build a search engine from the ground up.
5
SPEAKER_02
We just outsourced it to Amazon now.
5
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Things would have been a lot easier because really the app, what you see in the app is just a front end to an entire experience and most of the complexity and really heavy lifting of Shazam is behind the app layer.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so what we built behind, well it wasn t even an app at the beginning, it was actually a voice phone call and a text message, but it was obviously what s called a Beowulf Cluster PC, similar to what Google built, stacks of PCs, within the RAMs we stored the fingerprints of all the music, we built this huge database of all the music, constantly adding all the latest releases every week, and then just the end-to-end experience.
5
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All that stuff would have been literally a hundred times easier if we had started the company a few years ago instead of in 2000.
5
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And we would have been able to then put our resources into different things.
5
SPEAKER_02
So what those different things are, I would say comes back to that piece of advice I gave earlier to all entrepreneurs, which is go find that early, that low-hanging fruit revenue.
5
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What can you build that will start bringing in revenue right away, will start paying the bills?
5
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A lot of people don t.
5
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I realized that in the early days of Google, the revenue was a big check from Yahoo each year, because they were running search for Yahoo.
5
SPEAKER_02
And that paid the bills while they built that business to what we now know as Google.
5
SPEAKER_02
So that type of thinking, I think, is the stuff I would have put more resources into.
5
SPEAKER_04
Thank you, Brian.
5
SPEAKER_04
One more question, ladies and gentlemen.
5
SPEAKER_04
One more.
5
SPEAKER_04
Miles Grant.
5
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Where are you in the world, Miles?
5
SPEAKER_03
I am in Birmingham in the UK, brother.
5
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Give it up for the UK, ladies and gentlemen.
5
SPEAKER_03
My question is...
5
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How, what is going on in your mind when you are thinking of this incredible, my jaw dropped.
5
SPEAKER_03
When you told me this new start up, the swimming pools, my jaw dropped to the floor.
5
SPEAKER_03
I was like, what is going on in your mind that what s the set behind that that allows you to come up with this thinking to get to that stage where you come up with that idea?
5
SPEAKER_03
Cause it s just phenomenal.
5
SPEAKER_03
My jaw dropped.
5
SPEAKER_04
You mean because nobody else had done it.
5
SPEAKER_04
There was no way to distribute.
5
SPEAKER_04
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
5
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It s like, yeah, exactly.
5
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So by the way, my father did his university degree and PhD in Birmingham University.
5
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So you re in his.
5
SPEAKER_03
Wow.
5
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So.
5
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You know, I find that the ideation process, it s more of an art than a science.
5
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But I do think that, you know, we all can sit here and come up with ideas, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
You can brainstorm ideas and sometimes you just stumble across ideas.
5
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Sometimes it s a combination of things where you experience something, like in my case, my son was growing up as a toddler with his mom and there was a pool there and I thought, oh my gosh,
5
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that pool, you can think of it like a fire pit, that s a real risk.
5
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And so it made me very aware of the real, something that needs to be solved.
5
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Because I realized as a parent, it s hard, you can build fences and try to keep an eye on them all the time, but you don t know if you can have a foolproof solution.
5
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So that was inspiration.
5
SPEAKER_02
But there were also aspects where I thought, I believe as an entrepreneur, sometimes when you conquer a problem that s really hard, you re giving yourself an advantage because many, many,
5
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other entrepreneurs or even large companies are not going to do a very good job of that.
5
SPEAKER_02
And you have the advantage of doing it as well as you possibly can.
5
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And I kind of thought, part of solving this problem is that you re working with the infrastructure of an existing pool.
5
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There s a pool in the ground with concrete all around it and pool equipment off to the side.
5
SPEAKER_02
How are you going to work within that environment and introduce this new thing
6
SPEAKER_00
that needs consistent power and so on, and how are you going to implement it and create a user experience that doesn t involve jackhammering concrete all around the pool and spending $100,000 to install something.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I liked those challenges, the hardware aspects of this idea.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I guess in a nutshell, what I would say is that as you kind of navigate through different ideas, I think you almost, what I like to do is to think about these kind of certain aspects of it.
6
SPEAKER_00
So what s doable?
6
SPEAKER_00
What hasn t been done?
6
SPEAKER_00
And what can I do much better?
6
SPEAKER_00
What could use brand new approaches and my unique thinking?
6
SPEAKER_00
I often think that the secret weapon that we all have as business people is judgment.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because we all have resumes and experience and contacts and things like that, but those are kind of controlled and measured by other people.
6
SPEAKER_00
But your own judgment, you have 100% control of that.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s just all you.
6
SPEAKER_00
And your judgment is that secret thing that ultimately leads to that success outcome years later and people later go,
6
SPEAKER_00
Oh wow, he was right.
6
SPEAKER_00
He had this non-consensus insight that we just didn t see.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if you look at so many successful startups, whether it s Airbnb or Google or Skype or anything, there s a non-consensus insight they had.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was ultimately their very good judgment and knowing what the right thing to do is.
6
SPEAKER_00
So as you go through that ideation process, it s applying your judgment to think about what are the good ideas, what are the ones that really have legs, and almost like playing out in your mind whether this is going to be, has the potential to be a successful business.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that applied for this drowning thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
I felt like this is something that needs to exist, it needs to be affordable, it needs to be something that people can put in existing pools.
6
SPEAKER_00
and people can feel safe and we need to be able to save lives even if a parent is just, their attention is distracted and they re running to get lemonade for a few minutes.
6
SPEAKER_00
We need to be able to save lives in those situations.
6
SPEAKER_01
What s your timeline on this?
6
SPEAKER_01
I m curious.
6
SPEAKER_00
Sorry?
6
SPEAKER_01
What s your timeline on this product?
6
SPEAKER_01
Do you have any sense?
6
SPEAKER_00
This is going to be a multi-year project.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it would have to be.
6
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, hardware alone, they say, is hard.
6
SPEAKER_00
It takes a long time.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I m not at the stage of actual hardware development.
6
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, it s going to be a long-term project to do it well.
6
SPEAKER_01
And also, I would add, Miles, as he said earlier, it s also having enough passion behind your judgment.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because without that passion, you don t have enough fuel to push through all those years when it s lean and nothing s working, is another one.
6
SPEAKER_01
Thank you for your question, Miles.
6
SPEAKER_01
Let s do one more.
6
SPEAKER_01
By the way, Tracy Evans, she s so fired up in her room there, the fire alarm went off.
6
SPEAKER_01
She s joining in her Jeep while the fire department does their thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
Nice job, Tracy Evans.
6
SPEAKER_01
She s not missing a word you re going to say.
6
SPEAKER_01
Let s go with one more.
6
SPEAKER_01
Room 11, Team 11 here with Barbara.
6
SPEAKER_01
Give it up for Barbara.
6
SPEAKER_01
Barbara, where are you in the world?
6
SPEAKER_02
I m in Vienna.
6
SPEAKER_01
What s your question?
6
SPEAKER_02
Chris, you showed the picture with all the CDs, and I thought that s such a huge task.
6
SPEAKER_02
So how did you start to go for it?
6
SPEAKER_02
Did you buy the CDs?
6
SPEAKER_02
What did you do?
6
SPEAKER_02
I think you always be in front of such a huge task and you don t get started.
6
SPEAKER_01
So of the 1.5 million or 1.7 million songs, in other words, did you go buy all these CDs she s saying?
6
SPEAKER_00
How did you do it?
6
SPEAKER_00
I like to talk about this concept I call creative persistence.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because all entrepreneurs, we all have to be persistent.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I think what s really important is this kind of, this bringing them together, creative persistence, where you re being persistent, but you re also really thinking outside the box and thinking of unique ways to solve a problem.
6
SPEAKER_00
I saw this go on a lot at Google and Dropbox, when they solve so many different things, like when they ingested all the books in the world for Google Book Search, they invented a thing that just turns pages of books, so they could scan them all in a scalable way.
6
SPEAKER_00
In the case of the CDs, we thought, oh, we re this startup and we have a limited amount of funds and we need this much for marketing and this much for hiring and so on.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so we thought, it turns out the number of CDs that we needed, this is the number of total CDs available in the UK market, is 100,000 CDs.
6
SPEAKER_00
So if we had bought that, let s call it at the time $10 a CD, right, that s a million dollars.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s a lot when you re a startup and you only have a certain amount of funding.
6
SPEAKER_00
So the creative part of our persistence is that we went to the company that was the biggest distributor of CDs at the time, so it actually had about 4 or 5 times as many CDs as the biggest record stores, which had about 15,000 unique CDs in stock at a time.
6
SPEAKER_00
This company had 100,000 CDs, and we said, wouldn t you love to have a digital copy of all those CDs?
6
SPEAKER_00
Because the world is becoming digital.
6
SPEAKER_01
Wow, smart.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then, so we literally formed a partnership where we co-located at their warehouse outside of London, had our 25 to 30 18-year-olds located at their site, going into the warehouse, picking a CD from those racks, pulling it out, putting it in the computer, typing them in songs, and then returning it, and they didn t charge us a penny for that relationship.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because we shared the outcome with them.
6
SPEAKER_01
What I love is that some people just persist asking for something, but you found a good way to add value.
6
SPEAKER_01
And when you add value with that kind of creativity, that s brilliant.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m so glad you asked the question, Barbara.
6
SPEAKER_01
Give her a hand.
6
SPEAKER_01
Thank you very much.
6
SPEAKER_03
Oh, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony.
6
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wait a second.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_01
Hi.
6
SPEAKER_03
My name is Hannah.
6
SPEAKER_03
And, you know, because we re talking about music and I have the chance to speak to you.
6
SPEAKER_03
Oh, I m so nervous.
6
SPEAKER_03
Literally shivering.
6
SPEAKER_03
The thing is, I want to do the same as you do.
6
SPEAKER_03
I want to lead people to new perspectives and kind of lead them to their deep feelings and change their life.
6
SPEAKER_03
And for me, because music is so deep in me because of my dad and everything,
6
SPEAKER_03
that those icons and the interviews change my life and I want to be that person and the thing is in America there are so many open-minded people and we live in Austria and like the German culture and Austrian culture is kind of conservative and I m just pissed because there aren t I don t know many artists that
6
SPEAKER_03
I don t know, talk so open-minded about it and I want to be that.
6
SPEAKER_03
And my question is, I still have some fear talking about it and it s kind of such a big project.
6
SPEAKER_03
I need to develop the skills because I still think
6
SPEAKER_03
I need the singing skills, the songwriting and everything.
6
SPEAKER_03
And I don t know, I just wanted to share that with you.
6
SPEAKER_00
I can see you have the passion, definitely have the passion.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s the most important aspect.
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Because remember with the contact lens thing.
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If you wake up in the morning and you re like, I just can t see myself selling contact lenses on the web, that s hard.
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I can see that you have the passion to be a musician and to get involved in the musician industry.
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So that s the most important thing.
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But yeah, I would say go for it.
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The key is to navigate your way into the music industry and find the people that are already there and already experts and network with them and ask them all the questions you can think of.
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One of the most successful business people I ever met when I was very young was a multibillionaire, and I asked him how he became a multibillionaire.
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And he said to me, and I shared it earlier in this week, so I don t know if you heard it, but he said, proximity is power.
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If you look at somebody like Bill Gates, Bill Gates quit Harvard, and he
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didn t have any software for this company called Microsoft or the original company he went to, Altera.
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And yet he told them, I m going to go do this.
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But the real secret, besides being very bright and persistent, was he had direct relationships at IBM through his parents.
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They were on the board of directors.
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And as you connected with Apple and started to build a relationship, then you had proximity for someone to do it.
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So my advice to you is, number one,
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Stop caring about how conservative or unconservative it is.
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There s some of the greatest different radical types of music that s come out of Germany and Austria in the past.
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Hard metal, crazy stuff.
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So while there is a
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conservative culture, there s a segment that is extremely creative that comes up with things no one else does in your culture.
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And so instead of finding the limitations, find the strengths, or decide what every great leader does.
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Create your own culture.
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That s what a leader does.
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They don t adapt to the culture.
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I m sure you ve heard the old phrase that says, reasonable people adapt to the culture.
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Unreasonable people adapt the culture to themselves.
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That s why all breakthroughs come from unreasonable people.
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I m paraphrasing.
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That s not the right language, but that s the essence of it.
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And so it s like you have to then find within yourself that I have so much passion, so much certainty.
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I m going to build that certainty.
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And instead of getting overwhelmed by all the things you ve got to do, you re going to say, let me just make sure every day I m making progress.
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Every day I m going to take a step forward, and I m going to consistently get in proximity with brilliant people that are doing things in the direction of what I want to do.
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And if I have to work as a janitor, which is what I did in the beginning, day and night while I was still in school, to get around people, I would
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be a janitor at this place where I want to be around this executive.
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And quite honestly, I d read all his memos and things in the middle of the night so I could think about how he thought.
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Because I didn t have access like I have today.
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So get yourself in proximity with people who are making things happen.
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And if you do a great job at anything you do for them, when you work your guts out, you ll become appreciated.
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And as you re appreciated, you become part of their culture.
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As you become part of that culture, you ll get new insights.
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And then opportunities will happen.
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And this person, by the way, told me at one point, he said, what do you want to accomplish?
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And I gave him some of my dreams and goals.
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And he said, well, those are big.
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He said, how many private equity guys do you know?
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How many people, investment bankers do you know?
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And I said, no, I don t know, maybe a dozen.
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He goes, how many do you spend time with?
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I said, none.
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He said, I want you to go and spend time with him.
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I said, but I don t have something to give.
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I always have to give something.
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I m wired, right?
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I don t know what I really want yet or how to do it, because it doesn t matter.
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They re going to want to be around you.
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Get around them.
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And I did this for months.
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And then suddenly, one day, sure enough, he said, they re going to want to do a deal with you.
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And then somebody brought me this deal.
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And the deal, at the time, made me about $40 million in two months when I had never made
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$4 million in a year working 20-hour days.
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And then that deal fell apart afterwards.
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They wanted me to change the deal.
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And I learned from him, when somebody wants to change the deal, don t get pissed.
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Think about what you want.
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And I put that in a new deal where I made $400 million two years later.
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So proximity is power.
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Put yourself in proximity.
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Keep your passion alive.
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Keep making progress.
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And make sure you re trying to innovate or grow every day in some way.
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Face your fears every single day.
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You ll find it will change your life.
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Give her a hand.
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Let s have a hand for Chris, first of all.
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Everybody, a big hand for Chris.
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I m not sending you away.
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I want you to stay here, but I m gonna have to go two chairs over.
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Thanks so much.
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Let him hear you.
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It s Chris.
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No, let him hear you, ladies and gentlemen.
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Oh, yes.
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So you hear from Chris, you know, this highly technical business and trying to solve technical solutions.
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But you know, you can become incredibly successful with any proctor service if you take some of the same qualities Chris is living.
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He doesn t talk about it.
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You see him live it.
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He s demonstrating it by who he is.
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That s why he made it through all that time and got to the success he had.
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The Tony Robbins Podcast is inspired and directed by Tony Robbins and his teachings.
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It s produced by us, Team Tony.
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Copyright Robbins Research International.