Chris Barton: Founder of Shazam, 2025 NeoCon Keynote Speaker

This transcript was made, in part, by an automative service. In some cases it may contain errors. 

Chris: [00:00:00] I think that great innovations come from ultimately really delighting users. So that's the true endpoint, and I always like to say start from the end and work backwards.

Andrew: Welcome to a special edition of Barriers to Entry, a Design Innovation podcast on the surround podcast network. This is the show where we obsess over the not too distant future of the architecture, design, and creative industries and the ideas, tools, technologies, and talent that will take us there.

I'm Andrew Lane, uh, one of the co-founders at digby and with me as always, chief Marketing and Revenue Officer at Standout Design Group. And, uh, one of the guys who knows a, a thing or two about NeoCon. I'm gonna go out here with a hunch and say, Mr. Bobby Benet. Bobby, we are recording this before anyone arrives at Chicago, but if people are tuning in right when this episode drops, they may actually be in the merchandise mar.

What's going on these next couple of days, and why is this podcast so exciting and so special? Well,

Bobby: I mean, I think everybody knows why [00:01:00] this podcast is so exciting and, and special, but this particular episode though. Okay, thank you Andrew. Um, so I, I, I will note that, uh, we might be in your ears if you are also subscriber to Neo Conversations because this is a special episode of Barriers to Entry, a special summer of BTE NeoCon episode.

We'll be bringing on a guest in a couple of minutes who has a very close association with. This year's NeoCon event. Mm-hmm. And you can find Chris later this week at the Merchandise Marts. We'll talk more about Chris Barton in just a moment, but there's a lot going on with, uh, the barriers to entry crew.

Mm-hmm. And with standout design Group across, uh, across NeoCon, we have our inaugural NeoCon Podcast Lounge on the third floor programming. All week long. Standout Design Group is activating in design scene on the 11th floor. This is, I think, our fourth or fifth year of design scene. Um, you can find Design TV at Marshall's Landing.

And then just as, uh, we'd love for you to slam that subscribe button for barriers to Entry, Neo Conversations is back, and we're, uh, we're programming that this year with, uh, producer Rob, [00:02:00] and producer Rachel, what's happening for you this year at NeoCon Andrew?

Andrew: Well, very similarly busy Bobby. Like, just, that's what NeoCon's all about.

Just running around, uh, the core of Chicago for three days, four days, kind of depending, I'm taking part of a really interesting, um, think lab event talking about ai, um, on the Saturday night, which I'm really excited about with friend of the pod, Amanda Schneider and, and her team. And I'm gonna be coming by the, uh.

Pizza and podcasts conversation that features yourself and Amanda Tuesday at 12 o'clock and producer, Rob, moderating. For those of you who've been always wanting to see producer Rob in the flesh, that's your opportunity. But otherwise, just running around, talking to, uh, talking to some clients, seeing some showrooms.

And, um, you know, enjoying the, uh, the bounties of Chicago.

Bobby: Well, I mentioned it earlier and today on this special NeoCon edition of Barriers to Entry, we're fortunate to be joined by one of this year's NeoCon keynote speakers, Chris Barton, who will be presenting on Wednesday morning [00:03:00] at the Merchandise Smartest, the founder of Shazam, a platform and technology for audio discovery that I'd venture to say everyone.

Who listens to this podcast and certainly everybody on this podcast has used and probably uses regularly. Chris is an inventor, a collaborator, an entrepreneur, and a magician. Uh, we can't wait to see and hear what he has in store for his NeoCon, day three keynote. But before that, we're excited to give a preview and welcome him to Barriers to Entry.

So welcome to the podcast Barton. Welcome Chris.

Chris: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Bobby: I wanna kick things off here given we're recording on the eve of NeoCon releasing this episode, Monday Day one of NeoCon NeoCon, obviously the commercial design industry Super Bowl. You're presenting on Wednesday, the final day of the show.

What led to the connection between you and NeoCon and the interiors industry?

Chris: No, that's a great question. Um, I actually, I can't recall where it started. I, I, I remember I somehow we got connected, um, and it was a while back. I think it might have been before the prior year's event. Mm. I think we were chatting about [00:04:00] that event and then that didn't work out.

So, yeah, I, I actually can't recall the details because sometimes things just come inbound to me and I'm not really sure where they start.

Bobby: I bet. Mm. Without any spoilers. Chris, what are some of the key themes that you'll be spotlighting, um, on Wednesday in your presentation?

Chris: Yeah. Uh, so I'm really focused on a type of different thinking.

Shall we say that that's really applicable in any, any industry that's trying to kind of. Change with the times. You know, AI is sort of changing the world around us. We're all trying to move at a brisk pace to keep up with the, uh, pace of innovation. Um, and, uh, I, I, I, I, I've got some learnings from my own experience that I love to share.

Um, and what I found is that really every industry. Says they wanna be innovative, right? It's hard to come across an industry that says, no, we're not really too concerned with innovation. And so that certainly applies to commercial design. So I'd love to share stories about creating Shazam, but most importantly I [00:05:00] tie into those stories and, and it is quite a wild ride of a story and some different ways of thinking to bring amazing things to life, to be innovative.

I these ways thinking from, by looking, really digging experiences. Of Shazam and then getting through all the incredible obstacles that we had to get past to bring Shazam to life, uh, way ahead of its time. But also, uh, because in addition to founding Shazam, um, while staying on the board of Shazam, I, uh, also got to be part so of some other innovative companies.

So I joined Google. Quite early, uh, when it was, uh, still a private company, about six months from going public. Wow. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It only had one product, and that was called Search. It hadn't even launched Gmail at the time. And so being part of Google, being their first mobile partnerships employee, I filed patents for Google.

I did some of the big partnerships. I was called as the second witness for.

Andrew: We won't [00:06:00] go too deep on that today. We won't open those wounds up.

Chris: Right, right, right. And then being part of the Android team at Google, uh, when there was just one Android phone in the world, just, it was just, uh, they called the G one phone on T-Mobile in the United States. Um, and of course, Android became mm-hmm, huge.

And, and smartphones. It's now 80% market share. So eight years spent at Google and then, um, and really seeing how they think. Also, you know, how these great innovators at Google think, uh, the product managers, the founders, Larry and Sergei and so on. Um, and then after eight years of Google joining Dropbox, when it was quite a, a young company, it was about 90 people.

So now it would, you know, couple thousand people. It was still duct tape on the floor sort of covering the wires. And so you

amazing. To life. And of course you can see a commonality there between Shazam, Google, and Dropbox, because in all three cases you have like a one very simple [00:07:00] step that gets you to solve a problem. And behind the scenes is a very hard technology. Um, but for the, for the end user, it's a delightful and simple experience.

Andrew: So let's, let's dig into sort of the genesis of. One particular delightful and simple experience. Bobby alluded to it in the intro, but I mean, we're both, uh, Shazam fans. We talked in the pre-call about, you know, my personal connections back with digital audio going back a really long way. So let's go back in time as the youths like to call it to the 19 hundreds.

This is almost a decade before there was an Apple app store. And you had the spark of this idea for what was then and what is now Shazam. Can you take us through kind of that, um, that origin story that, that genesis of where. The concept came from.

Chris: So some people have said to me that you invented an app eight years before apps existed.

I had never thought of it that way, but of course that is what happened. You know, when I came up with the idea for [00:08:00] Shazam, apps were not only not a thing they, but they weren't even being contemplated, right? I mean, apple wasn't even contemplating the iPhone at. So the setting was really that, you know, we're at a period now and, and so the idea, by the way, Suzanne came to me in 19 nine and, uh, at that time, uh, if you roll the clock back and bring back your memories to that point in time, um, basically we at a point where everyone was just getting their first mobile phone.

I mean, there were a few people who got it in a little bit earlier than that, but that was the case for me. I got my first mobile phone right around that time, maybe 1998. Um, and so everyone's getting their first mobile phone and it's just so useful to kind of care, walk around with this phone and be able to make phone calls from anywhere and receive phone calls from anywhere.

Uh, but I, I was just thinking about the fact that everyone's carrying these phones in their pockets and.

That was it. And I just thought, gosh, what if I could come up with something else? What if I could come up with something else you could do with these phones? Because that would just be amazing because everyone [00:09:00] has these phones wherever they go. Um, and so that was, that was sort of one sort of, um, in inspirational thought was what could I come up with that you could do with all these phones.

The second one is sort of two in a way. You could, you.

Thinking the opportunity, right? This new market of everyone carrying mobile phones around. Um, and then the second one was, uh, this problem that I had in my life, and frankly, so many people had, which was just, just simply that I would hear songs and not know what they were. Literally, the only solution would be to ask people.

I mean, that that was it. You know, you

Bobby: start humming it. Yeah,

Chris: yeah, yeah. Or humming it. You know, I would usually not do the humming thing because by then I would forget how to hum it, but it would just be like, you're at a party or you're at a bar, and then you, and then sometimes you'd hear it, maybe the second or a third time, they'd like, oh yeah, there's that song I've been trying to get.

You know? And then you, you, there were times I even went up to the, like the bartender at a bar and said, you know what this is, and maybe they were playing a CD in the back. And so once in a while, and of [00:10:00] course it's not every song, but it would be certain ones that you really love. And, uh, I would just try to find out what they were and I would kind of, uh, you know, write, keep a list of some of my favorite songs.

So that, that was the secondary thing. And so it was a combination of those two things that really led to the. Aha. Moment of Shazam. And then finally, there's this sort of the true aha moment, uh, which I get into in my keynote. Um, I don't know if I wanna spoil it here.

Bobby: No spoilers. Teasers. No spoilers.

Teasers. Yeah.

Chris: But, uh, yeah, so. There's a real aha moment that's a little surprising. I'll just leave it at that. And, uh, and that's what leads to, to this sort of lesson around thinking differently, basically around really kind of breaking through barriers and thinking in a different way that that opens up a lot of possibilities to be, to kind of create new innovations.

Andrew: So Chris, around the same time I was working on my, my first company and we were a content. Driven company, and so we created what was an app before. There were apps as well, but we created it in the form of a [00:11:00] 2000 pound kiosk that was hardwired to the internet because we wanted to deliver a certain type of content to a certain audience at a certain place.

Obviously, that didn't succeed for very long at all, and. Shazam endures to this day, although in a little bit of a different format. Can you talk a little bit about, I loved this story of just the way that you guys started to deliver that experience. 'cause clearly, you know, we were thinking about the content, you were thinking about the experience that a person has.

How did you start, and then how did that kind of evolve with technology?

Chris: I like to think that from the very beginning we started from design thinking, you know, and, and I, I tend to think that way really with just naturally with everything, because I guess you could, you could argue that, you know, that I think that great innovations come from ultimately really delighting users and how do you delight?

So that's the true endpoint, and I always like to say, start from the end and work backwards. Mm-hmm.

[00:12:00] Well, you, it means you need to design an amazing experience, right? So you're right back, you're, you're second step, you're right at design right there. And, uh, in the, in the case of Zam, now remember we have, we always have constraints on design, right? So this, um, you know, we have to work within the constraints.

And at the time of Shazam, as I mentioned, there were no apps. So you couldn't do a nice flashy, you know, that was known as a graphical user interface gui, right? So mobile phones on.

Pixels or so, um, monochrome, uh, so non-color. Um, and, um, but again, we wanted to create an amazing experience of how are we gonna launch this music recognition given that that's our constraints. Uh, and so, uh, so the, the idea was to come up with something very simple, which was simply a phone call. So you make a phone call, um, and then you dial into our system, an automated system known as an interactive voice response system.

I much like you get when you call your airline, [00:13:00] United Airlines or whatever. And then, um, and then we would answer the phone. We'd say, hold your phone to the music. And then we'd record 15 seconds of sound. Um, it was a fixed amount at that time. Um, and then, uh, and then after recording the 15 seconds of sound, which hopefully contained the ambient music and the environment that you're in, um, we would just simply terminate the phone call 'cause we captured your caller ID so you didn't have to enter your phone number.

'cause we, we saw it with a caller id. Uh, and then we got, we, uh, basically instantly, like in milliseconds, did, did a search, found the matching song, and sent a text message. Phone of the user, uh, with the name, the song, so Experience You It. Right Call Followed Message.

Clunky experience where you're listening to what the song is over the phone, right? Because you're probably in a noisy bar. And then one more thing that was just incredibly heavy [00:14:00] lifting is we thought, well, if we launch with this phone number in a text message, which is, it is how we launched in the summer of 2002.

It's just clunky to be a phone number at all because. If I told you, Hey, Shazam is, you know, and then tell you this long number, how are you gonna remember that, right? I mean, that's a long number. So we wanted to get a short code number. Um, and so a short code number is like, um, well the most famous one would be 9 1 1 for emergencies, right?

Dialing 9 1 1. Um, there were other ones at the time, like 4 1 1, which directory inquiries you?

By the individual mobile networks like, so, Verizon, AT&T, sprint, they each program those themselves. Of course, by law they have to make 9 1 1 route the emergency. Um, but they have other ones that they'll use, like customer service. They might, it might be Verizon. They say, you know, six is customer service.

So we, we actually had to go and negotiate to get that a short code with each of the mobile operators. Now our first market was the [00:15:00] United Kingdom. We started Shazam in London and we launched in our first market, United Kingdom, which meant there were four major mobile operators in the United Kingdom at the time, Vodafone Orange, T-Mobile, and oh two.

And so we had to get a short code with all four of them and get the same short code with all four. Um, and just to give you a sense, um, of how difficult that was. They had never given a short coat to any private company. Right? So they had only used them for their own services and stuff. So even Domino's Pizza, United Airlines, 1-800-FLOWERS, none of those people had a shortcut.

Mm-hmm. And you can imagine those are, you know, they would be, uh, it would be very useful for them to have a short code. And so here we are, this little tiny startup that no one's ever heard of and has no customers, and we're trying to convince them to give heavy lifting. To get that partnership because it was not a standard product that they gave to third parties.

And then one more aspect that I like, which is that short codes by nature, they're a short number of digits, right? Like 4 1, 1 and, and 9 1 1 and so on. And so we wanted to get something we weren't sure what to ask for, and we know we thought 1, 2, 3, 4, or 1, 1, [00:16:00] 2, 2 or who knows? We're kind of brainstorming things.

And then a design person. So it was a professional design person, um, that we were chatting with and was giving us a bit of guidance. Simon Coley was his name. He said, I have an idea for you. He said, how about picking the only four digits on a mobile phone? Are in a straight line, 2, 5, 8, 0, and we're like, oh my gosh, that's amazing.

So you wouldn't think 2, 5, 8, 0 is a me memorable number, but knowing just that it's the four digit, straight on the middle of the phone, you know, that, that, that is memorable. So that's what we asked for, uh, was 2, 5 8, and that's what we launched with as a design centric number that would, you would never forget straight down the middle of the, so you dial this number.

Get a voice call record, 15 seconds of sound and get a text message to your phone with the name of the song.

Andrew: It's kind of crazy. The listeners wouldn't have saw this, but Chris just held up his iPhone and still you don't think about this 'cause nobody knows anybody's phone number anymore. Two five eight zero is still the only four numbers that are in a straight line.

I. Down the center of [00:17:00] your phone. So that design element has persisted through a lot of change. It's pretty interesting.

Bobby: It wasn't all smooth sailing for the app before the app store, as you talked with us about, and creative persistence was necessary really from 2002 to 2008. So what did that look like internally from a development standpoint, a marketing standpoint, a technology standpoint, a creative standpoint?

How did you make sure that the platform was able to persist, if you will, until you got to the point where somebody could download it onto their iPhone?

Chris: Yeah, so I mean, I'm gonna be honest with you. During that entire period until became an iPhone app, we struggled. We had barely any users and we were lucky to stay alive.

Um, although we did everything we could to create this sort of. Beautiful experience and um, and design centric experiences. I mentioned still the reality was that, you know, it was using Shazam was, was an uphill battle. Basically what you're doing is you're ch we were having to do something that is the worst thing that a startup should ever have to do, which is to change user behavior.[00:18:00]

At that time, you made on mobile phones, you made phone calls. Maybe you sent text messages message, but like dialing a number to identify a song was a fundamental change of user behavior. The big lesson for me was that changing user behavior is a very hard thing. So we would show Shazam, uh, to someone you know, for the first time and go up to them maybe in a bar and say, look, you just dial this number.

And you just hold your phone up and, and 15 seconds later you've got a text message with the name of the song and people go, wow, that is amazing. Like they could not believe it. I would use that all the time. Right. Um, but um, but to get to think of the heavy lifting involved, to educate all these people, like the whole world of people that are mobile phones about the service.

I mean, that's very costly when you only make a little bit money recognition. The economics just simply don't work, right? So try to educate people, make them aware of this feature, um, and then get them to change their behavior. It's just such heavy lifting. And so we struggled. We really struggled. We launched in [00:19:00] 2002 and we got, you know, a few tens of thousands of users.

But I mean, we needed, you know, today Shazam has over 300 million users using Shazam month.

Year after year after year, trying to just do whatever we could to get educate users. Um, we did actually, uh, evolve with some of the, there were early versions of apps before the iPhone app store called Java and Brew, but most of those apps, there were no app stores. You had to kind of get, build the app and then partner with someone like Motorola or at t to get it, get it preloaded on a.

And it wasn't until the app store came out in 2008 that suddenly we were no longer changing behavior because now it was just a thing that you downloaded apps and you did stuff with the apps. Right. And in this beautiful, gooey experience. And uh, and so then that's when all this friction was removed and suddenly we just went from like, if you saw like a curve of the Shazam users, it'd.[00:20:00]

And then 2008 when the app store launched, it just goes like this, you know, just like hockey stick growth basically. Um, that just grew with the adoption of smartphones, both on, uh, the iPhone and also on Android.

Andrew: It is an interesting app to this day. Like I've had it on my phone for well over a decade, and it's just one of those things that like, I don't think about it every day, but when I'm in a certain situation, I know I go to it instantly. Like it's just sort of the, oh, this is an instance where I need Shazam.

Um, and I think that's because it just works so kind of perfectly for the situation, for the moment where it's needed. So what was sort of the design conversation when we heard that iPhones like that the iPhone came out and there were gonna be these things called apps and you were going to be able to [00:21:00] have that gooey, um, experience.

You know, how did you, how did you guys go through that process of moving from the four digit short code to the really elegant single button experience? That is pretty largely unchanged, I think, all these years later

Chris: for people that are non-technical to understand is that, you know, you have. And software and and computation and so on.

That goes on anytime you use an app on a phone, right? But the layer of complexity between what's on the actual app versus what's behind the scenes, right? Mm-hmm. Is tremendously different. So like, say, look at the Uber app for example. You know, an Uber, you order a car, right? You go in, you say. Your credit card and so on.

So there's that. There's, there's some engineering involved in that. And then there's the engineering behind the scenes that's up in the cloud, right where, where it's there servers that are sort of like routing cars everywhere and, and uh, checking availability and repricing based on demand and so on. And so all the really hard stuff goes [00:22:00] on there.

And the app is really just a frontend, you know, it's just really a frontend experience. Um, and that's very true for Shazam, right? I mean, so the app is just this like, you know, like it probably any developer would look at the Shazam app and say, I could today, especially, I could develop that in 24 hours, right?

Because it's basically just a big blue screen with a big button. Um, and you know, of course a little bit of, you know, a little bit of it interactivity on here's your list of songs and so on, but really all the stuff's going on. What happens? Back at the servers, right. Shazam, right with like a massive, uh, database of all the fingerprints of all the music and a giant search engine that searches across all that music in milliseconds and, and all the algorithms for this search and, uh, of course all the international music and, and so on.

And then maintaining the list of songs that people have, Shazamed and so on. But that's the really.

Relatively lightweight, right? Compared to what Shazam had done before. You could [00:23:00] argue that really one of the advantages Shazam had by being so far ahead of its time was that it had done all the really, really hard stuff for years before the iPhone app store launched, and when the iPhone app store launched, okay, now we can just add this little app interface layer and then, but all the really hard stuff that was heavy lifting of.

Going out and finding databases of music around the world and building search engines that are very fast and optimizing the algorithm so that it's really robust and noisy environments and all that stuff was years of iteration that we had already done by that point in preparation for the day of adding the app interface layer for the app store launch in 2008.

But yeah, the design for sure, the design was important. I mean, because experience.

All it really is, is just a button. You just wanna push it and then it starts to identify the song. So you wanna, you wanna make it as simple as you can, and there is a temptation, you know, you'd be surprised at like how

Andrew: I was gonna ask, how tempted were you to fiddle? You know, [00:24:00]

Chris: it horrifies me still when I, when I'll go into some experiences and it's like the very first thing is like, okay, I'm ready to do whatever you wanna do, and.

What type of music? Please list the four genres of music that you like before you start this experience or whatever. You know, you could just imagine all the things as a temptation, as a product creator to do. Um, but if you do do that, you think, oh, I'm optimizing, you know, my vision by doing this. But really what you're doing is introducing friction.

That's frustrating People, for example, Microsoft Teams.

Two kind of permissions I'm giving before I'm in the Zoom, but with Microsoft teams, I think it's about four, you know? Mm-hmm. And so it's like, click here and then click here and click here, and then click, and finally, now I'm in the call, type in your name, you know? And so like each of those is just friction, friction, you know?

And it just, it's just frustrating. So yeah, so Shazam definitely, we, we definitely got that right in [00:25:00] creating this like simple, simple interface you.

Boom it, and you get the answer one button and you get the answer. It almost represents the ultimate removal of friction, right? Mm-hmm. It's just to you, in fact, to the point where people will talk about, I'm gonna create Shazam for something, you know, Shazam for, you know, I mean the Shazam for everything.

Shazam for shopping. I mean, it doesn't, people use it to describe their vision, but when people say, I'm gonna create Shazam for something. In a way, what they're really saying is that it's gonna be one button and you're just gonna get what you want. That's it, you know? Um, whether it's Shazam for fashion, Shazam for insurance, approvals, you know, it could be anything.

Andrew: Where did you come to the name from? Because like the current experience is very much like a genie, like it's very Shazam, you know? Yeah. Like what was it that led you to that particular name?

Chris: Shazam. The word, if you look in the urban dictionary, it means to conjure magic. Contra magic, you're making magic happen.

And it was used, I mean, most famous, it's been used in multiple places, multiple TV shows and movies and so [00:26:00] on. It's sort of this urban dictionary word. The most famous usage was Marvel Comics. Um, with this, uh, comic series that was more recently made into movies, there's a little boy named Billy Batson and he, he says, Shazam.

So it's an exclamation of, to conjure magic. And honestly, it j the name just came to me. It sort of just came to me in the same way that the idea for Suzanne came to me, because I just thought, and again, you have to picture those old mobile phones and there were no apps at all. And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, people are gonna take out this little old clunky Nokia phone, which we didn't think it was clunky at the time.

And just hold it up in the air. You know, not normally they're used to putting it right next to their ear, but they're gonna hold it up in the. It's just gonna like, suck the music right outta the air and then just tell them what it is. You know? I was like, that is, that's like magic. And, and it's, and so to me just the act of holding the phone in the air to kind of like connect to that music felt like this just, you're creating magic.

And so it just, I just thought [00:27:00] Shazam that that's what it should be called. And yeah, that's how I came up with the name. There

Bobby: are so many. Really transferrable lessons there. Chris, focusing on a core competency is something that Shazams obviously done since its inception. I get it asked quite a bit by folks in the industry about how to approach their product assortment, how to approach their business should they consider diversifying or doubling down on what's working for them.

And, and I think that's always a consideration, frictionless and smart and and streamlined user interface. How do you make sure that your customers, your clients, your users, are having as pleasurable experience as possible without feeling as though they're. Trading their souls for access to a platform.

And then timing. I mean, the timing was just impeccable. Ultimately in terms of the advent of the App Store and Shazam being ready to, just like you said, Chris, put a layer on top of an incredibly complex and thoughtful technology stack to make, to make magic happen. So I wanna swing the conversation forward and thinking about designing for what's next.

I know you're really passionate about ai, for example. You, you said in our pre-call that [00:28:00] innovation isn't just about technology and it's about behavior. So as somebody who has a really, um, meaningful story from a design standpoint, from from a, a user acquisition standpoint, from an engineering standpoint, what shifts in user behavior today do you think will shape how we design for the future?

Chris: You know, I think the expectation that we have for just getting right to what we want. Has just gone through the roof. I watched this with my son, you know, because of course now they, they everyone has access to all this ai, right? And chat GT and Gemini and all these things. And you know, I just constantly like watch, you know, of course I'm someone using these things and we all are, but just constantly reminded of, did not exist for so long, and mind blowing.

But I think that what that's doing is it's, it's kind of re, it's resetting the [00:29:00] brain. I mean, I, I watched my son and the expectation of it to get to what you want is so high now, actually quite fascinating to look at the user experiences of these different chat bots. There are variations in terms of, you know, how the responses come back.

How, because of course they have to tailor their responses to. Many paragraphs or a very, very concise response, and certain things gonna be in bold and will it be bulleted or paragraphs. And there's many, many opportunities to change the experience as well as the interface. And do I wanna ask the, the fast version or the deep research version and so on?

I think that basically our expectations are high. That we are gonna basically. That it's almost gonna know what we want and just get us there really quickly. Um, and of, I do think the AI is gonna sense, like this kind of question, they probably just want a short answer, but this kind of question, they probably want a longer, deeper answer and almost try to think about, you know, they talk about, ultimate prompting is about, you know, really being clear about what you want.

But I think the real ultimate prompting is when you don't have what you write, the [00:30:00] versions, what basically behind the. Engineering and design, that's ultimately getting you to what you exactly what you want. Expectations are through the roof now. We want it delightful experience. We don't want any frustration.

Andrew: You talked about this or we talked about this on the pre-call that your son, who's 16 is using chat, g PT to do homework and you, you know. Partnering with him and with the LLM to do that. What's going through your mind as both, you know, someone who's so experienced on the technology side, but also as a parent, as you kind of see, um, those two things coming together in such an interesting way?

Chris: Yeah, so, you know. I should clarify that, you know, that chappy, gb, GBT, you know, it needs to be used appropriately, right? By all students. Um, but you know, it can't be avoided. It's part of our life now. It's transforming the way that students do things. Uh, and it's, it's just a [00:31:00] reality, you know? I mean, if you look, if you took it.

Back 10 years and showed it to someone, it would just be like, that's taking away the whole point of education because now it's really, AI is doing the learning and you're, you know, and you're using this tool that's really unfair. I view it as like, similar to computers and things, as technology evolves, you have access to better and better tools and, and you have to find this balance of learning.

How are you gonna learn and how these tools are gonna help you learn. I think that it's an early sign that education. Change dramatically. Education, you know, changes a little bit more slowly than chat bots do. It does, uh, really show how I think, you know, it's sort of inevitable that education is gonna sort of have to catch up to, to ai and it's gonna become more personalized.

It's gonna become more interactive, uh, and tailored and.

Immersive experience so that the students are really diving in and [00:32:00]learning with the ai. So I think that, you know, basically, you know, it's, it's sort of a new fact, a new reality just like Google and just like computers and all these things that becomes part of the experience that we have and therefore, part of education, the access to AI kind of makes sort of someone that was.

Kind of be able to like lead a career as if they're an expert because they have this full AI behind them. Um, so it's like, it's a super enhancement of, of our, of our brains with the right capabilities, we have the opportunity to create amazing things.

Bobby: Yeah. It's, it's sort of on a much grander scale. When we were in school, Chris and our teachers told us we'd never be able to carry a calculator around everywhere.

Yeah. And now we do. Right. Um, you know, I, I think, uh, my daughters are, are all in, uh, elementary school. And they use Canva for generative, uh, design, uh, in class. And when they came home and told me that, I was like, that's, that's crazy. I didn't expect that. But, but there are ways in which I think it's unlocking creativity in a, in a new and meaningful way and, and probably for folks with, with different abilities.

Chris, I'm, [00:33:00] I'm wondering because I. You find yourself in lots of different places now. Your background is so impressive, and you've, you've had three hit makers, Google, Dropbox, and, and Shazam In terms of your affiliation, where you've worked and, and what you've founded, where do you draw inspiration from?

Now? I'm just like trying to picture in my mind, you wrap up your keynote, you're in this giant building with a bunch of commercial furniture. Are there things you're looking for that, that inspire the way in which you're thinking about the future of design and the future of technology? How's that net out for you?

Chris: Yeah, you know, uh, because I'm definitely just. As we, as we all are mesmerized by the pace of innovation going on in ai, I'm non-technical by background. Um, so I'm thinking of myself as someone that's sort of very creative and I sort of vision oriented and that I love to work with technology to create new things and I think there's opportunities for many non-technical people to really.

Incredible new things with technology, even though they're non-technical. But one, one thing I love to do to, to keep up with the piece of what's going on in the thinking is I'm obsessed with what's happening [00:34:00] in all, all these sort of this, uh, race to, uh, take AI forward. Um, and so I love to consume. Deep kind of podcast interviews and YouTube interviews with actual technical founders of a lot of these AI platforms.

So no, they're not sort of business people, kind of just describing the business implications. Um, but literally the, the technical founders of these, of a lot of these sort of, um, major platforms and or, or keep technical players and so on, and talking about what's coming, what some of.

To these things. You know, there's what memory? There's context windows, there's, there's latency, there's um, there's the technical platforms behind them, the compute platforms, the chips, there's all the data sets and there's constant, and there's of course the reasoning models that are very iterative and, and there's, and there's just so many pieces that, that are just taking these things forward.

And so.[00:35:00]

So where we're gonna be in 12 months time.

Andrew: I heard a really interesting take that all of those different components of what's driving AI forward are all kind of operating under some kind of variation of Moore's Law in terms of the rate at which they're progressing. Mm. And so when you stack all of them on top of each other, it actually doesn't just add, it multiplies.

So the, the rate of improvement is going to be exponential in a way that we've never seen a technology improve before. Uh, which is partly where you get some fear mongering.

Bobby: I

Andrew: think

Bobby: Well, and also the, are these models gonna start to train themselves with the generative mm-hmm. Answers that you're finding in search and on platforms Now there's also that.

Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah. So this is a moment of optimism. Yeah. Versus perhaps terror. I wonder which, uh, if, if you had a, a, a thought on either side of that before we kind of wrap up, Chris.

Chris: Yeah, I tend to, and the one you just mentioned, Bobby, as I'm fascinated by that one that Google just recently announced among the millions announcements at Google [00:36:00] io, they mentioned Al, uh, what's called Alpha Evolve, where the AI basically comes up with new ideas for ai, tries them out and then and tests to see if they work and if they do implements it.

And literally AI makes better ai mind blowing. But yeah, so. When I think about the speed of this, and you know by the way, a lot of experts get interviewed and say, when is a GI coming? Of course, it's hard to measure what a is just true. Ultimate intelligence comparable to a human. A lot of the predictions are sort of within five years, think wow.

I tend to be an optimist, so I know there are, there's a lot of interviews that are like the world end and not

in measures, like I've heard. Don't give AI. To money, for example, because if, if AI has access to money, then it just, it's, it basically has.[00:37:00]

Yeah, so I tend to be, uh, an optimist. Optimist because the things that I'm really excited about, like, for example, alpha Fold, which I was another, you know, won the Nobel Prize from, um, from Google inventors, um, to, to advance the rate at which we can, um, model the folding of proteins, which really accelerates, uh, our innovations in healthcare and, and, and curing diseases.

Some of that, it's actually some of the healthcare stuff that I'm most excited about in terms of the impact. When we look back five years from now and we say, look at how AI changed our world. Okay? We're in self-driving cars. Yes, that's super exciting and we're getting answers to whatever we want and we're all super efficient.

But what? But wow, what about the healthcare stuff where like all these diseases that just couldn't, we couldn't find a solution to for decades, and now we have solutions that are six months away. Um, so, um, yeah, so I, I'm an optimist because of all the benefits, um, and I have no doubt there's risks and we have to, we have to be very thoughtful about them.

But, uh, but uh, overall I'm optimistic.

Bobby: Yeah, [00:38:00] my, my optimistic angle is, um, I think that the power users of these platforms are some of the most discerning or, or comprise some of the most discerning generations across the planet. And you know, I, I was reading a lot about, you know, the AI models trending themselves, like you mentioned Chris.

And, and I think at some point there might a state where we have diminishing returns in terms of the quality of content we're receiving from AI as it starts to kind of power itself a little bit more. And I look at, you know, the Gen Z generation, the gen alpha generation that's growing up here, the millennial generation in particular.

There's an understanding of what's BS and what's not bs. Um, just from growing up in, in internet. So I've, I've tried to mold myself into, into, into an optimistic place amongst, amidst all of the headlines that you mentioned and, and that Andrew and I talk about quite a bit. I dunno where you sit, Andrew. Uh, before we, before we close out,

Andrew: I'm always an optimist, Bobby Atta boy.

This was reference, reference season three of barriers to entry. I've been, I'm an optimist through and through, so excited for the next five years and, and Chris, I absolutely agree with your healthcare point.

Bobby: Yeah. Yeah. [00:39:00]

Andrew: Exciting

Chris: stuff.

Bobby: I'm gonna get you outta here, Chris, but a couple of last standard questions.

First of all, um, we always like to give our guests the mic just to plug what they're up to. So, um, if you wanna share a little bit about your time on the road delivering keynotes or, or any other interesting project that you've got on your plate right now.

Chris: Yeah, I do, I do multiple things. Yeah, I, I give keynote speeches, um, quite a few per year, all over the US and all over the world.

Um, and really enjoy that with the impact with different audiences to, um, about bringing great things to life, being innovative and, and a very story based experience. Excited to do in Chicago. And then, um, I actually am working on a book right now that will be a narrative nonfiction book. It'll read like Moneyball, almost like where you're just turning the pages like it's a novel, but of course a true story.

Uh, so I'm working on that. That's early stages. And then, um, I have a couple startups, of course, 'cause I'm an entrepreneur at heart and I won't go into the details of them because they're very so early stage, but.

Actually in swimming pools. And then, um, uh, just because, I dunno anyone to drown, but I think it's a meaningful thing to, to [00:40:00] try to solve. And then a second one, um, more related to dyslexia because I have dyslexia and my son has dyslexia and I really can relate to how challenging that can be. So that's what I keep myself busy with.

That's super

Andrew: exciting. Chris, the last thing we ask all of our guests, is there any advice, uh, that you'd give? You mentioned, you know, you listen to some deep dive podcasts, maybe share. A few of those, uh, of those hosts who, uh, you spend more time with than others. But for anyone who's really looking to build their innovation muscle or spark their own founder mindset, uh, what were some things that you might recommend to them?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, look, I, I, I believe that for innovators and entrepreneurs and, you know, I, I, I like to say it's like game tape.

Bryan became such an amazing basketball player. He was obsessed with the game tape and just watching all the tape and saying, what can I do better? What can I learn from? And, and so I think the holds true in entrepreneurship. You just wanna watch other entrepreneurs how learn from their stories and what they did, and it's [00:41:00] not sort of academic style, but you really can map.

There are learnings, um, to whatever you wanna do in your entrepreneurship or innovation. So I like some of the, you know, higher quality deep dives. Um, there's one podcast I love called 20 vc, really excellent interviews with all kinds of different entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Um, and then another one that I like specifically in the world of AI called Unsupervised Learning, which is a podcast put on by a venture capital firm where they, uh, do some great interviews of experts and technical experts in the field of ai.

So, among.

Andrew: I'm taking these down literally for myself.

Bobby: Yeah. Andrew's on his pod catcher, uh, subscribing.

Andrew: Yeah, exactly. But, um, I, I love that idea of game tape. And as someone who is a big basketball fan, uh, I'm, I'm shocked that I've not put that together because I also love a good podcast. So I, I'm gonna take that for sure, for myself and obviously for our show notes for the listeners.

Bobby: Yeah. Chris, this is a great, great job. Um, I, I know that a one way for folks to be inspired during the econ is to check out your keynote [00:42:00] on Wednesday and, and we will be there. And I really appreciate you previewing everything for us today on Barriers to Entry.

Chris: Thanks for having me. We'll see you in Chicago.

Bobby: Yeah, as always, uh, we'd like to extend a big thank you to the Barriers to Entry Production team, our producer, Rob Schulte and everyone else back at the studio by Sandow. Pod Cave Barriers to Entry is part of the Surround podcast network. Make sure you go to surround podcasts. Dot com. That's podcast.

That's with an S. Smash the follow button here. Then head over to the neo conversations feed and follow over there and join us next time as we continue to break down the barriers to entry.

Chris: What was the name of that company that you just mentioned?

Andrew: It was a product called Arts Post. You know you get those phones now when you walk into a museum and you go around with them? Oh yeah. Yeah. It was the exceptionally heavy predecessor to that.