Matty Beckerman Wants to Make Star Wars Shoppable

How does someone’s career pivot from running a record label, to running a film company, to image recognition and visual search? IRCODE founder and CEO Matty Beckerman—the latest subject of video series Resume Rewind, sponsored by entertainment wiki hosting service Fandom—explained his journey.

Beckerman’s father is a mechanical engineer, so he said his first job was assembling circuit boards on a manufacturing floor, but his real first job was working at the mall at Sam Goody, “when people actually went to record stores.”

He interned for Epic Records, working with artists like Korn and Rage Against the Machine, before starting his own record label in his dorm room during his freshman year of college.

Beckerman said selling that record label “was devastating and freedom at the same moment,” and he moved on to a company doing soundtracks and music supervision for films and television, which spurred his next big pivot.

“There’s a real parallel between running an independent record label and running an independent film company,” he said, and he spent the next 15 years doing the latter, buying scripts and starting a film fund, before beginning to invest in early-stage startups.

That brought him to IRCODE and its QR code technology, which lets advertisers, agencies, and brands create custom, interactive experiences triggered by people pointing their smartphone at an existing image.

Beckerman said his dream would be to incorporate IRCODE’s technology into the Star Wars universe and make the original episodes shoppable, “figuring out what you could buy from that, all the toys, all the stuff behind it.”