Dhiraj Mukherjee

Published: 10/03/2022

Dhiraj Mukherjee is one of the co-founders of Shazam, the phone app that allows you to identify ambient music that was sold to Apple for circa $400million in 2018. Since the sale, Dhiraj has spent his time investing in mission-driven ‘Tech for Good’ entrepreneurship.

The foundations of Dhiraj Mukherjee

Across the two decades he spent building Shazam with his three partners, Dhiraj received a lot of advice and support from friends, colleagues, and mentors. However, the words that have guided him most through his career came from a very different source – his grandfather, who Dhiraj knew affectionately as ‘Dadu,’ and who served as an admiral in the Indian Navy.

As a young man, Dhiraj’s grandfather rose through the ranks of the navy at a time when discrimination was rife. Despite setbacks and challenges, he totally trusted in the power of self-belief. ‘

This mantra has guided Dhiraj throughout his entrepreneurial journey, he learned quickly when Shazam was starting out that persistence can be a powerful tool.

How Shazam started

When Shazam first launched, before smartphones existed, users would need to dial a four-digit code to activate the service. These codes were in very short supply and providers were extremely selective with the start-ups they partnered with. One provider refused to engage with Shazam, but eventually Dhiraj and his business partners’ tenacity paid off. ‘We called them 44 times before finally getting a meeting and then getting the code,’ Dhiraj recalls.

In addition to his belief in resilience and determination, Dhiraj acknowledges how important surrounding yourself with people who have shared values and complementary skillsets is to uncover the ingenuity that can lead to success.

Dhiraj and two of his business partners Chris and Philip had similar backgrounds, coming from business school in the US and going on to work in different but complementary areas of management consulting. The team of co-founders was completed by Avery, their chief scientist who invented the algorithm that powers Shazam.

Their combination of individual strengths and skills is what allowed their individual ingenuity to flourish and drove the company to success. ‘I refer to it now as the mind of the entrepreneur. It’s a can-do attitude. It's problem-solving. It’s energy, enthusiasm, and resilience,’ Dhiraj says.

‘Just because things might be going against you momentarily doesn't mean you say I'm a loser or it can’t be done,’ Dhiraj asserts. Instead, he prefers to think back to his grandfather in moments of doubt and remind himself that yes, you can do this.

Passing on advice to future generations

He believes that success can’t be manufactured, and there‘s less value in planning for the future than working hard in the present, and enjoying the journey. Building off this, the advice he’d like to share with others usually involves questions like: are you surrounding yourself with people that you want to spend time with? And can you go with the flow? ‘That’s what I’d remind people to focus on.’

Dhiraj received some great advice from his grandfather that’s shaped his entrepreneurial career to date and led him to learn his own lessons, like the power of shared values among co-founders or colleagues.

In fact, it goes against many of the traditional ideas around entrepreneurship, so when you need to slow down for the sake of your business, bringing everyone on board can be a challenge. At one point, Dhiraj declared himself ‘chief slowdown officer’ to help encourage his team to allow the space and time for certain things to come together and opportunities to reveal themselves.

‘Just because things might be going against you momentarily doesn't mean you say I'm a loser or it can’t be done,’ Dhiraj asserts. Instead, he prefers to think back to his grandfather in moments of doubt and remind himself that yes, you can do this.

He believes that success can’t be manufactured, and there‘s less value in planning for the future than working hard in the present, and enjoying the journey. Building off this, the advice he’d like to share with others usually involves questions like: are you surrounding yourself with people that you want to spend time with? And can you go with the flow? ‘That’s what I’d remind people to focus on.’

Dhiraj received some great advice from his grandfather that’s shaped his entrepreneurial career to date and led him to learn his own lessons, like the power of shared values among co-founders or colleagues. The final advice Dhiraj says he would pass on to the next generation of entrepreneurs is to ‘enjoy the journey and go with the flow’. This is a mindset that embraces the value of relationships and learning from advice and lessons along the way.