Chris Barton

Wednesday, June 24 | Main Stage

Every era celebrates innovation. Few are honest about what it costs.

Before breakthroughs look inevitable, they look inconvenient. Underfunded. Easy to dismiss. Most ideas don’t die because they are wrong. They die because resistance arrives early, validation arrives late, and persistence runs out in between.

Building Shazam meant staying with a problem the world kept saying couldn’t be solved. The technology wasn’t ready. The economics didn’t work. The market wasn’t asking yet. Chris Barton didn’t win by out-inventing everyone in a single moment of brilliance. He won by refusing to abandon the question, by challenging assumptions others accepted as facts, and by recognizing progress where most people saw dead ends.

This session is about that discipline. Persistence not as stubbornness, but as strategy. And why the ideas that matter most demand more patience, creativity, and conviction than anyone expects at the start.

Because the ideas that matter most don’t announce themselves as breakthroughs. They ask one question instead.

How long are you willing to stay?

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Chris Barton is the founder & first CEO of Shazam. Shazam has been downloaded 2 billion times and was purchased by Apple in 2018 for a reported $400 million. Chris also spent eight years at Google where he created Android’s mobile carrier partnerships framework from scratch. Chris spent four years at Dropbox where he created their first mobile carrier partnerships. An expert on the unique mindsets that lead to game-changing innovation, Chris has 12 patents including one found today within the Google search algorithm used by billions of people. He has starred in a Superbowl TV ad featuring “mobile innovators” and is now building his third start-up company which will detect drowning in swimming pools using artificial intelligence.