Rich, left, Alexandra, Luke, Michael, Matthew and Michelle Riley.
A few years ago, when Rich and Michelle Riley were trying to decide in which Fairfield County town to settle and raise their family, New Canaan had everything they wanted, but Rich had one stressor — getting back and forth to work in Manhattan.
“I was concerned with the length of the train ride,” he said. “We’d just lived in Geneva, Switzerland, where I rode my bike to work, through vineyards, with Mont Blanc in the background. So I was a little spoiled, put it that way.”
His worry was for naught, as he soon discovered the Talmadge Hill train into Grand Central Station was direct and barely over an hour. “And I’ve found that the ride is a very productive time for me,” he admitted. “I just crank out emails and work.”
As the CEO of Shazam, one of the planet’s top 20 apps (there are 1.4 million apps in the iOS App Store), Riley’s world is one of non-stop action and travel weekdays, and family togetherness weekends.
His career arc is shooting straight up. At 41 he is leading a major international technology company, after first starting his own small business, selling it to Yahoo, then working there for over 13 years.
After living in Geneva, London, San Francisco and New York, he was recruited to captain Shazam, which needed someone to take the company to the next level. While his globetrotting hasn’t changed, he has established a permanent base here with Michelle and their four children.
“I travel well over 100,000 miles a year,” he said. “Silicon Valley is a very frequent stop. In my Yahoo role I ran teams across the Middle East, Europe and Africa. There were offices in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Munich, Paris, Madrid and many other places.
“With Shazam I’ve been from Seattle to Seoul in the last year. Typically when I’m on the road I just go all-in, a total workathon. I’ll work every second I can, and then I’m going to get home to New Canaan. I almost never miss a weekend here. So if I’m going far away, I’ll fly out late Sunday night and get back Friday.”
Good thing, because his presence weekends is definitely required.
The Riley kids include Alexandra, 12, a 7th grader at Saxe Middle School; Michael, 11, a 5th grader at Saxe; Matthew, 8, a 2nd grader at South Elementary School; and Luke, 6, in kindergarten at South.
Rich at his home office desk.
Michelle was attending the University of Pennsylvania when she met Rich, who was in the school’s Wharton undergrad program. She would earn a master’s degree in education and teach high school after they married. When the kids started coming and the family moved to Europe, she became a full-time mom, a role she cherishes.
She too is delighted with their choice of towns.
“I love New Canaan,” she said. “It’s a wonderful community. People are very warm and welcoming. It’s a good place to settle and raise a family. Now that the children are getting a little older I want to be more active in education. Maybe start subbing first so I can get to know the schools better. I really miss teaching and being in classrooms.”
Rich and Michelle were in for a little culture shock living in Europe before moving to New Canaan with their kids coming of age.
“With four kids all playing several sports each, it’s a lot of time on the fields and in the gym,” said Rich. “Michelle’s driving, I’m driving… and we sometimes have babysitters helping!
“I knew I’d sort of gone native when Michael made the travel basketball team. There’s like three games and two practices a week, and that sounded perfectly good to me, sounded great.”
Come the end of the weekend, Rich’s mind turns back to Shazam, and what’s next for him and his company. The plaudits and growth seem to be multiplying exponentially. Riley’s journey that would eventually land him at Shazam began when he had an idea many years ago.
“I was on a plane and thought of organizing usernames and passwords,” he said. “I started a company and we invented the Toolbar. In time we would sell it to Jerry Yang and Yahoo, and we moved to San Francisco to work for Yahoo. We came back to New York, where I was running the Americas region for them.”
Eventually Riley was contacted by a friend at an executive search firm who thought he’d be a great fit at Shazam. It came together, and now the native of Austin, TX. is guiding a company that started as a simple smartphone application that can identify songs to one moving into retail, movies and many other segments.
Music remains the core, though, and Riley was recently named #57 on Billboard magazine’s Power 100, the most powerful people in music.
“That was a nice reinforcement of Shazam’s importance to the music business,” he said.
The privately held company was just valued at $1 billion after raising $30 million in new funding. There are rumors that an initial public offering could follow at some point soon.
Shazam has more than 100 million monthly active mobile users, placing the company in an elite echelon of only a handful of mobile brands.
“We’re excited to continue to focus on user growth and engagement, building on our strength in music and innovating to increase the universe of what is Shazamable in order to realize the enormous potential of Shazam,” Riley stated.
So, what about the Riley kids? Do they know dad has more than a little clout in an industry teens with their smartphones love to access?
“They’re starting to,” said a bemused Michelle. “If they talk about someone cool, Rich can say he knows who they are and has talked to their manager. Taylor Swift is coming this summer, so that’s a concert request they’ve made, but we try to keep it under control.”
Rich enjoys a few music perks as well, such as attending the Grammy Awards, but even then his mind is focused on Shazam.
“The Grammies were Shazamed 1.6 million times,” he said. “We’ve become a verb. ‘Shazam this, Shazam that.’ It used to be that you’d just use Shazam to ID a song. Now we have content based on what’s Shazamed.
“We are on hundreds of millions of phones already. We update the app every month. So the whole company, over 250 people now and growing, is on a monthly sprint.”
The Rileys slow down, so to speak, on weekends. They have embraced the New Canaan community. Michelle is involved with New Canaan Cares, Newcomers, the International Club, the school PTCs, and does work with New Canaan Library and Community Foundations as well as the family’s church, St. Aloysius.
Rich coaches a youth basketball team in town, is a member of the Young Presidents Organization, and is on the Board of the Entrepreneurship Department at the Wharton School.
It is a full, busy life for both.
“We are a happy family and feel good about things,” Rich said. “It’s life at full speed. We have to make sure today works, tomorrow is set up properly and the next day after that, too. There’s not a lot of time for reflection. But of course we’re grateful that business has worked out and that our kids are all doing well. We’re happy with the schools and community, and have made a lot of friends.”