# London Executive Forum 2026 - Closing Keynote: A Visionary to End the Day

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** AWS Events
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYfrJY14IU
- **Дата:** 21.05.2026
- **Длительность:** 30:08
- **Просмотры:** 55

## Описание

In a world where technology is evolving faster than anyone can fully comprehend, the greatest barrier to progress is not technical complexity — it is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of making mistakes, fear of obsolescence. This closing keynote confronts that reality head-on, drawing on the deeply personal entrepreneurial journey of Shazam co-founder Dhiraj Mukherjee to offer leaders a different operating model: one rooted in curiosity, empathy, and the courage to act without certainty. From climbing Kilimanjaro unprepared to building a groundbreaking music recognition company with no technology, no database, and no business model, Mukherjee shares candid stories of navigating the impossible — and argues that today's leaders must embrace the same entrepreneurial mindset. In an era where even the creators of AI admit they don't know what comes next, the imperative is clear: learn faster than the market is changing, replace fear with confidence, and lead with the empathy to bring your teams along for the journey.

Speaker: Dhiraj Mukherjee, Co-founder, Shazam

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## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYfrJY14IU) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

Oh, thank you so much, Jonathan. And it's such a pleasure to be here. I've been here all day and I have learned so much. As Jonathan said, I'm not here to talk about technology because I'm not technical and my experience really is learning on the job. U I was an entrepreneur in the dinosaur era. uh everything that I learned about building technology and business is irrelevant today. So what I just wanted to share was some of the stories that I picked up, some of the adventures and misadventures, some of the things which I just learned without even being aware that I was going to learn about them. And I'd love to just have a conversation. So as I launch into these stories, if you have any questions, just put up your hand, ask me, just jump in. I will save some time at the end as well. But we're all in this together. We're all discovering and exploring as we go. Let me tell you a little bit about myself before I I dive in. I'm originally from India. My father used to work for Air India and I lived all over the world when I was growing up. I was born in Delhi. We moved to Athens. We lived in Paris and then in back in India in Bombay and in Singapore and in Tokyo. So I had a very mixed up childhood. Um lots of different schools and languages and education and I feel like it gave me a sense of um I guess uh wonder of discovery of exploring. Um this picture is in Goa and I'm there next to my grandfather and my grandfather it was a huge inspiration to me. I knew him um since the time I was born. Um and when he retired uh he was the admiral of the Indian Navy, the first full Navy. And for me he was an inspiring figure not as an officer but as a family member. I remember him saying to me when I was young he would say you know if you put your mind to something you can make it happen. That was his philosophy. That was his belief. And that's something which stayed with me. Um and when I was uh a young man uh growing up in India, I applied to university in the United States. I ended up at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where I had four fantastic years. Um I worked for a management consulting firm called Bane in Boston. And um when I applied to business school, I didn't get in. Um I had a year off. They said, "We have no room for you this year, but come back this next year. " So, I took that time to travel. I went all over from Hawaii to Thailand to Eastern Europe. Um, and um, it was a fantastic adventure and I guess that u there were times when I just landed up in places I wasn't expecting. I did a mountaineering course in the Himalayas for a month. But when I got to the stage towards the back end of that year where I wanted, you know, more of a challenge, um, I decided to go to Africa solo without a guide book because having a guide book made things too easy. I just wanted to be able to just navigate my way by talking to people, by seeing the lay of the land. Um and I ended up in Zanzibar in the foothills of uh Mount Kilimanjaro and ended up climbing Kilimanjaro almost by accident. And this was not a plan at all. I spoke to some people and they just come back off the mountain and they were talking about what an amazing experience it was and I decided to get myself a guide and some porters and four of us climbed Kilimanjaro in 5 days. Now I look back now and I would never do anything like that. First of all, it's incredibly physically difficult. Second, I was completely unprepared. Uh but I remember the sense of excitement, the adventure, doing something which I'd never done before of, you know, pushing myself as far as I could go. Um and then when I came back down, it is definitely the hardest thing which I've ever done. But I still keep that feeling with me of of doing something which has not been done before which has really pushed my limits. I don't remember feeling a sense of fear. I never felt that fear even though at that altitude it really messes with your mind as you climb the slope is made of scree. So each step that you take, you slide backwards and because of the lack of oxygen, it actually messes with your judgment. Um, and I don't remember anything other than that desire to get to the summit. And

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYfrJY14IU&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

even when you're at the summit, you can only spend a couple of minutes there because it's so cold before you need to come back down. So I'm not a big believer in fear. I'm now 56 and I feel like I experience fear much more than I used to. And fear is something which I hate. I don't think fear is a great motivator. brings out the best in me or anyone else. I don't think that fear has a place in our lives. Why should we have fear? But I'm experiencing this myself. I called my mother this morning on the way here. She said, "What are you doing? " I said, "Oh, I'm doing a talk for AWS. " She said, "What's it about? " I said, "I'm going to be talking about fear. " She said, "Oh, you know, I feel fear. I had a call this morning and these people wanted me to transfer some money, but it turns out this number doesn't exist. And I feel like I'm turning into my mother in some ways. I've got no business to be afraid of technology. I mean, I've worked in technology for 25 or 30 years. This is what I do. I mean, I invest in technology companies. I'm supposed to understand this stuff, but I still feel fear. And why do I feel this fear? I feel like I, you know, I don't really fully understand it. I haven't experienced this before. H how do I use it? How do I get started? Uh what if I what if I don't get it right? What if I make a mistake? And these feelings are not things which I'm happy with or comfortable with but I'm experiencing it myself. And when I talk to leaders corporate leaders as well as entrepreneurs, what I'm picking up on from them is that they are seeing fear in their organizations as well. So these are people who are leading big teams, small teams, technical teams, mixed teams, building cutting edge stuff or working in traditional businesses and industries. And this is what I'm picking up on and I don't like it. So what do I mean by that? I mean I think at a most basic level there people who are just afraid of technology. If it's new, it's not for me. Ooh, you know, bad things could happen. And that's to a certain extent normal. Not everyone is going to be an innovator. early adopter. And that's okay because there are genuine risks. There are real problems associated with what we're creating today. But then there's layers to this fear that I'm coming across that I'm encountering. Like how does it work? like how do I put these tools to use? And as soon as you learn one thing, then the technology moves on and changes and what you knew before doesn't work today. You've experienced that, right? Um as I said, if you have questions, don't hesitate to give me a wave. I'll ask a mic to come over, finding the right tool for the job. So there's so many things which are out there now. Which one is the right one? How do I get the best results? How do I know? Um, I haven't started using granola yet. I've heard about it so many times from friends of mine. Um, but I haven't actually got hands-on with it. Um, what does it do? How is it different from the options out there? Then personal tools versus corporate tools. For those of you who are managing large teams in large organizations, don't start tearing your hair out, but I know exactly how it feels when you have employees turning up with unlicensed and unauthorized tools doing who knows what, causing vulnerabilities potentially and creates absolute chaos. But then they're just trying their best. They're trying to improvise. They're trying to experiment. Uh but then you have this kind of conflict about what's allowed and what's not allowed. And then you get this insidious fear which is wait so if I'm ahead of the game and I'm actually using these AI tools then what if I look idle? So it makes me look bad if I'm more efficient. Have you come across this by the way? this this fear uh people are genuinely afraid of looking like they've got too much time on their hands because they've been more efficient in actually doing their work. Now these fears from my perspective are just holding things back. I think what we should be working with is it's been said before today, curiosity, um playfulness, you know, being able to try out new things. Um that feeling of security of knowing that you're not

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYfrJY14IU&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

going to get it right every single time. Lack of trust, I think, just holds us back, creates these barriers which doesn't bring out the best of ourselves, the best of our capabilities. Now, I'm not saying that there's no risk. I'm not saying we should get rid of guardrails. I'm not saying that let people do whatever they want. No. On the contrary, I absolutely think that we need to have those security guard rails policies and procedures in place, but they're difficult to communicate. They're difficult to get across. They're difficult for people to understand, particularly if they're changing. And that creates another you know barrier that I'm seeing or hearing about. And then the one which gets talked about not with respect to ourselves but with our kids. What will my kid do? What will job will they have? Is it better being a plumber than being a lawyer? And I'm sure you have these conversations as well, which is the unstated fear of being made redundant, where technology replaces you altogether. I was at an event uh just earlier this week uh hosted by a venture capital firm called MMC. Uh they're investors in a company called Redsift, which is a cyber security company. Uh one of my first angel investments. and the head of research there, Advika, had a fantastic presentation and she was talking about basically replicating herself, creating a digital twin. I went to speak to her afterwards. I said, "That's fascinating because most people are afraid of being replaced by technology. You're a step ahead of the game. " And she said, "This started with an existential fear. When AI has all the answers, not just the information, but all the answers, what role is there for a researcher and the answer is it's your mental model. It's what you bring on top of all the answers which are out there. It's not about being replaced by the technology because you are bringing your judgment, you're bringing your context, your ability to join the dots in a way that the full repertoire of answers doesn't provide. And that gave me comfort because one of these days there's going to be a robot standing here and then I'll be looking pretty silly as a speaker. But that day is not imminent. For a lot of people they can feel that threat which I think creates these blockers and these behaviors. And so what happens that I see is there's this fingerpointing between employees and management. Leaders want to go faster. They want people to adopt the tools. They want to see those productivity gains. the quality go up. But I think employees are trapped where they don't know exactly how they should be operating. How can they be their best selves? Management doesn't seem to have a plan or if they have a plan, it keeps changing every 6 months. And so there's no point. You don't benefit from the blame game. You don't make progress if you're pointing fingers at each other. I'm going to pause. Is this making sense? Does this resonate with what you're experiencing in your organizations? So, what's the solution? And the solution for me is I think it's acknowledging uh the feelings and acknowledging the emotions and having, you know, empathy. What we're experiencing is this um nervousness, this anxiety which comes from being well outside our comfort zones. And the more we can acknowledge that, put ourselves in the shoes of our teams, the people who are following our lead, trying to get inspiration from where we're going. And this brings me back to um Hollywood. Um there was a famous uh producer called uh William Goldberg who said about Hollywood, no one knows anything. If there were a recipe to write a hit movie, every movie would be a hit. They just don't know. And not knowing as a leader is a scary position to have. You're supposed to know. You're the leader. Well, that's what in my experience, leadership is about. And all I can say is I'm just speaking from experience because as an entrepreneur, we had no clue what we were doing when we started. I mean, I'll tell you just a couple of examples just for fun. So, so my partners and I, we started Shazam in the year 2000. This was long before smartphones. the technology that we take for granted today. Literally, we wanted to be entrepreneurs because there was a internet boom and we were in Silicon

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYfrJY14IU&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

Valley and everyone wanted to be an entrepreneur. So we said to ourselves, hey, we want to be entrepreneurs as well. And we used to go out to the pub and have drinks and try to come up with an idea. And we didn't have many good ideas at all. Um, but we'd hear music and, you know, like what is that song? And we'd look at each other, we had no idea. And so my partner Chris came up with this concept, which is, hey, what if we could use a mobile phone to identify any kind of music we hear anywhere? And I was like, oh well, that's a really good idea. It's the first good idea he's had. But how are we going to do this? He said, "Oh, well, we'll invent the technology. " I'm like, "Wait, so now he went to Berkeley for his MBA. I went to Stanford. If you get a bunch of MBAs together, they're not going to invent a single thing. " Um, and um, I was like, "Right, okay. So, how are we going to, you know, find all this music? " He said, "Oh, don't worry. We'll speak to the record companies. I'm sure they have all this music in digital format. Now, it just so happened that after I finished my MBA, I went on to be a consultant in the internet space and my client was Universal Music and I knew perfectly well. They didn't have a database of all the digital music under the sun and so on and so forth. I won't bore you with these stories, but we were totally clueless. We had no idea whatsoever. Actually, we were so clueless, we didn't even know what domain of science we're talking about. It turns out it was digital signal processing and the experts happened to be at Stanford in Berkeley. So, we were just in the right place at the right time. And we spoke to the head of Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and we said, "Help us, please. We need to invent this technology which can identify any music based on, you know, 10 seconds of using your mobile phone. It's got to, you know, come through the little microphone. Some of you must have used those old Nokia 3210 phones back in the day. Um, you know, this tiny little microphone over the GSM network, which has compression and will distort the signal and we need to match it against a database of a million tracks, which we don't have yet, by the way. Um, and um, you know, come up with an answer with the right song. you know, it's got to happen quickly so the user doesn't look silly standing there with their mobile in the air for a minute and a half. Um, can you help us with this problem? And he said, "Sure. Let me introduce you to the best PhD student I've had in my entire time, Dr. Avery Wang. " So, we brought Dr. Avery Wang as our business partner, as our fourth co-founder, and we said, "Look, you've got three months to invent this technology. Go. " Um, and so Avery went off and tried to, you know, invent this groundbreaking algorithm which had never been done before. And it got to the point where 3 months had already gone by and he was in a cafe in Palo Alto literally sweating rehearsing his speech to tell us that he couldn't do it when he had this epiphany and um managed to create this algorithm uh which led to the first prototype that Shazam built which led us to be able to raise money etc. If any of you are technical, by the way, if you can tell me what these scribbles actually mean, I'd be really grateful because I have no idea what the science actually says. But I was um interviewed on uh on the radio on the BBC a couple of years ago and uh the presenter said, "Oh, being an entrepreneur, it's a little bit like building a bridge as you cross it. " I'm like, "Yeah, that's exactly right. " You know, you're standing on this side of the torrent and you're trying to build a bridge while you cross it because you know you want to get to the other side. That's the vision. That's the dream. But there's nothing that gets you across. And while you're building it, you're trying to bring your team along with you as well. And when I speak to corporate audiences, I say, look, entrepreneurs never do pilots. I've never once heard an entrepreneur say, I'm building a pilot. You build. If it works, you keep going. If it doesn't work, you throw it away and you build something else. That's how it goes. That's how entrepreneurs think. It's just natural to us. Experimentation. There's no other way because to do it. You have to take a chance. You have to put everything behind it. It's your one goal. If it doesn't work, then try again. And this is the mentality which I feel today's leaders have to adopt because there's no option. Things are changing so quickly and they're so uncertain. No one knows. I heard an interview with Sam Alman which was hilarious. Um uh and in this podcast he said about 10 times um I don't know. And the interview said Theo Vaughn actually who was a comedian he said hey man if you don't know then who

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYfrJY14IU&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

does and the answer is no one knows because this technology is emergent because we are inventing as we go because we're discovering even the leading edge researchers at OpenAI I happen to be an early investor so I know a little bit about how they work are basically discovering as they go and that is the position we find ourselves no matter what we're doing as leaders. Sorry, I'm getting a bit carried away here, but um you know, when I told my partners that there was no music database, I was right. There was no database of music. So now we had to figure this out. So we're like, what are we going to do? Philip, my other partner, came up with an idea. He's like, who has all the music in the UK? There was a distributor of music which supplied all the record shops in the UK who had every single CD. This is back in the year 2000. They had 100,000 CDs in their warehouse. He's like, "Let's go and get those CDs. " So he did a deal with them. They said, "Yep, be my guest. " So we started basically building these machines by hand with three CD racks so we could grab a CD, pop it in, uh, rip the content, extract the fingerprint which Shazam needed for the algorithm to work. We had temps like typing in the name of every song and every artist, scanning the cover art because it just literally didn't exist. And so then we started just hiring people, you know, just as quickly as possible until we had about 70 people colllocated in this warehouse in the west of London digitizing every single CD in 4 months flat just because we couldn't figure out any other way to do it. It got so out of control, we had to hire a US Marine called Bart to keep an eye on all of this and make sure we could get the music in time for launch. Now, I shouldn't say we were literally making it up as we went along because we had no other choice. And these things happened. You know, I'd love to be able to say there was no tears, there was no mistakes, there was no setbacks. It's simply not true. We kept making little mistakes. Fortunately, no fatal mistakes, but those setbacks are stepping stones. And again as leaders it's sometimes difficult to acknowledge I don't know and I'm going to make mistakes and you don't know and it's okay for you to make mistakes as well because that's how we can go forward. So one of the mistakes we made for instance we were so hellbent on this technology which was going to identify music from your mobile phone no matter where you were in a bar in a club in a pub etc. We just didn't pay any attention at all to the other applications of the technology. And it turns out that our timing for the business couldn't have been worse. We started in 2000, which seemed like a brilliant time. I quit my job in the peak of the dot boom. It was April of 2000 and then something changed and the market started going down and down. The NASDAQ lost 70% of its value. And when we launched, we literally we didn't have a business model. We thought, "Oh, we'll make money because people will buy CDs after they identify a song. " Rubbish. I knew it was not going to work. And sure enough, we were just, you know, burning cash. And the only way we could stay alive was to sell our technology. This was our crown jewels. And we sold the technology to a US company which monitored what's being played on radio stations so they could pay royalties to artists. And that gave us just enough money to stay alive for a few more years. This was in 2005. We survived 2006. 2007 something changed. That's when the iPhone launched. And in 2008 when the App Store launched, Shazam became one of the first apps on the App Store. And that's when everything changed. That's when people didn't have to remember a phone number to call. So they could hold their phone to an IVR system which would hang up on you after 30 seconds and send you a text message with the name of the song and the artist. That's how the service originally worked. I think some of you in this room might remember those days and that time and um it was crazy. Things have changed so much. This story does have a happy ending. So once uh the iPhone had launched and Shazam became an app suddenly usage changed. It took 10 years before we were used a billion times. It took just one more year for the next billion and then 2 months for the next billion. So it was just this exponential increase which then allowed us to raise money from Kleiner Perkins

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYfrJY14IU&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

one of the best known venture capital firms in the valley. we bought back our technology and uh I'm happy to say that uh had a successful exit in 2018 to Apple. Now this is not what I would wish on any aspiring entrepreneur and uh hopefully there no aspiring entrepreneurs here but if you are don't follow this example but what I got from this was character um and um I read this line in a golf book I was reading um which my golf game is not going well by the way um so character is destiny that's what shapes where you go and I believe that knowledge is worth nothing. So my learnings from 25 years ago are worth nothing. I got a call this week from someone saying, "What was your experience with this investor? " It's not worth anything at all. What for me, what's worth something is how fast do you learn, how fast can you move, how quickly can you develop your faculties? And that speed of learning beats everything. In our case as entrepreneurs, if you don't learn faster than the markets, you're out of business. So that is your imperative. Can you learn faster than the market is changing? And that's the situation we find ourselves and I find us myself in every single day. Now, I do find it exciting. I don't want to stand here and say that I'm afraid because I don't think I am. But I don't like that feeling when they're being held back because of fear. To me, it's about being an explorer. It's about seeking out new experiences, the opportunity to broaden one's horizons and perspective. And that's what I hang on to. I did a corporate job as well. Um, this where I got the suit. I used to be head of innovation at Virgin Money. And Virgin Money was developing um products for students. And I said, "Oo, I know the best way to get into their heads is actually to spend time with young people and to understand like what their needs are. " So I went up to Newcastle University and spent a couple of hours with young people understanding how they use credit cards and bank accounts, etc. And what I came away with is they don't need any more financial products. That is not the problem. The real issue is they're lacking financial literacy. They're missing an understanding of money. How does it actually work? That is their pain. If you ask them, they can't tell you. They can't say I lack financial literacy. But it was clear when I put myself in their shoes when I tried to relate to the problem they were trying to solve. And so my idea was it's not about another financial product. It's about financial education. I don't want to go on and on with stories, but the reality is we just don't know. As we go, sometimes we're going to win, and learn. And both of those are okay because in this world, it we don't have the option anymore of doing things the old-fashioned way. And that's why I believe whether it's for customers, whether it's for employees, whether it's for partners, the starting point needs to be empathy to understand where that person is coming from. What's their context? What's the emotion which is guiding their decision or their action or their response? And I think the more we can do that, the better positioned we are to basically build what we need to drive into the future, which I think it's about confidence. It's about boldness, being willing and able to, you know, put oneself on the edge. It's about that mindset which is no matter what the setbacks, challenges, no matter what the missteps, we can get through this. And I think that's what leads to character where character basically means I can take on adversity. I can look it in the face. I can laugh at it and I can move on from there. So I don't want to belabor this but I feel like I call myself a recovering entrepreneur but I still believe in the mindset of the entrepreneur. And I believe that today more than any other time in my experience that mindset can help carry us forward. So all I would say to all of you um it's been such a fantastic day today. If you can just take you know one thing which is that learning and setting yourself and your teams up for success and I wish you all the best in all your

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYfrJY14IU&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 30:00)

endeavors. Thank you.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/51703*