Chris Barton is an American tech entrepreneur, inventor, investor, and keynote speaker. He founded Shazam, a music identification and discovery company, and was its first CEO.[1][3][4]
Chris Barton was born and raised in the United States, and lives in California. His father, John P. Barton, was a professor in nuclear physics, and his mother, Claudia F. Barton, was a professor in the field of computer science.[5][6] His father is British and his mother is French, which he cites as giving him both the interest in living in the UK and the passport to do so;[7] his parents also set up a nuclear physics consultancy, which he credits as inspiration for his choice of an entrepreneurial career.[1]
Barton graduated from University of California, Berkeley, with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in Economics, and later pursued a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from the same institution.[1][8][9] Barton also earned a Master in Finance degree from the University of Cambridge.[9]
Barton's career began as a strategy consultant at L.E.K. Consulting in London and the San Francisco Consulting Group, and it also included an internship at Microsoft in London.[9]
In summer 1999 while on an internship in his MBA program, Barton conceived of the idea for Shazam as a service to enable consumers to find out what songs were playing where music could be heard, based on recording the song's audio and pattern-matching it to a database of songs.[4][6][10] After conceiving the idea for Shazam, Barton co-founded the company in 2000, along with co-founders Philip Inghelbrecht and Dhiraj Mukherjee, and later, Avery Wang as the fourth co-founder.[11][12][13][14] Barton located the company in London, based on the UK being the world-leading country (at the time) as measured by per-capita music purchases.[6]
В начале своего пребывания в Shazam на посту генерального директора Бартон привлек ангельское финансирование для компании, чему способствовал технологический прорыв лета 2000 года, совершенный техническим соучредителем Эйвери Вангом, который позволил ему продемонстрировать технологию распознавания музыки на презентациях по сбору средств. [15] В качестве генерального директора Бартон привлек 7,5 миллионов долларов венчурного капитала [16] и заключил первоначальные партнерские отношения по распространению с четырьмя ведущими мобильными операторами Великобритании, что позволило Shazam коммерчески запуститься в 2002 году. Бартон ушел, чтобы присоединиться к Google в начале 2004 года, когда Google все еще частная компания. [6] Он продолжал участвовать в управлении Shazam в качестве директора совета директоров до 2018 года, когда Shazam была приобретена Apple . [9] [17]