Chris Barton wanted a way to identify songs anywhere he heard them. There wasn't one, so he invented Shazam. When he conceived the idea in 2000, professors at MIT and Stanford told him the technology was impossible. It was three years before iTunes and eight years before the App Store.

Shazam launched as a phone number you dialed, and the company teetered near bankruptcy for six years, until the App Store launched in 2008 and unleashed its full potential. In 2018, Apple acquired Shazam for a reported $400 million, making it Apple's sixth-largest acquisition. The app has been downloaded over 2 billion times.

Chris also played a key role in tech history as a founding member of Google's Android Partnerships team and was one of the first 100 employees at Dropbox. He holds 12 patents, including one found within the Google search algorithm. Today, he's building Guard, an AI system that detects drowning in swimming pools: another impossible problem he's determined to solve.