Kevin Lin - On Founding Twitch, Getting Acquired, and Life Thereafter

Kevin Lynn. We've interviewed a lot of influencers in front of the tech. Kevin is one of the few so far that we've had that basically created the tech. And I think that that's just as important because without you, there would be no doctor disrespect, there'd be no Ninja. I mean there'd be, but what would they be doing playing video games by themselves exactly. So, so we're really happy to have you here. Welcome, Welcome, So Kevin and Kevin,

there's so much to talk about. Kevin actually is one of my husband's best friends, so I know a little about him. He enjoys Taco Bell thoroughly. Who actually KFC huge? Oh is it Popeye's I forgot forgot. I forgot is pretty good. Yeah, you're from Nolan's. Did I say that? We just say New Orleans? I don't know, Knowlins, Like a lot of people come and they're like, hey, we're

in Nolins, and everyone just like we just say New Orleans. Well, when I visited Nolan's, the uber driver insisted on teaching me the proper way to say it, and he was like, it's Nolins And I was like, Nalins, but everyone else, you know, it's something for everybody there. So I kind of say it however, you like, I suppose. Yeah, New Orleans though, were supremely lazy Arleans. I like that. Actually, what an interesting place to grow up, by the way,

definitely a strange place to grow up. How was that? I don't know. I I struggled to like fit in. I started smoking weed when I was fourteen, went to a lot of like just roamed around with like one or two friends. Didn't go to school. It just didn't like it. Still managed to get three days. They could have kicked me out, but somehow they didn't. Yeah, I don't know, just roamed around a lot, lived in the suburbs. I mean, I grew up in Kenna, where such precious

people as DJ Khalid hail from. Um. Like, I've never been to your town. Like, actually you have. If you've ever flown in in New Orleans, you've flown into the New Orleans International Airport, which is actually in Kenner, which makes Canada the gateway to the world. Um and uh so as the suburb, you know, suburbs and uh you went to school. There's like all boys Catholic school for high school, which which taught me a lot like this.

My brother went through the same school and just like refused to go back to Louisiana for quite some time as a result of his experience there, but then ended up going to this boarding school up in Nakadish like northwestern Louisiana, like middle of nowhere where Steel Magnolias was filmed, beautiful little southern town. Um where basically all the people who just couldn't fit in where they were in Louisiana went. I was like a magnet school. So that was great.

That was a lifesaver. But yeah, this is great. Music is great, foods great. People are actually super nice. People are very nice. They're actually Um, I was there for a movie junket and I remember thinking the one thing I was a little shocked by was during the middle of the day, just people drinking and smoking cigarettes. There's that's I think New Orleans honestly has a bit of a marketing problem, so there's a lot of people that

go through every year. I think it's something like, I don't know, twelve million people flow through New Orleans every year, and it's this little bright spot in the South that's just very different from everywhere else. People know it from music, but people also associate just like super ratchet heavy drinking, what the bro culture on Bourbon Street um, but really, like, sincerely,

there's something there for everybody. Like I started taking my friends to Marty Crawl the last few years and they're like, holy crap, Like we thought this was going to just be like a NonStop hangover fest with like, you know, a bunch of college kids, which is there. You can certainly go to that part of Marty Gral, but it's very family friendly. When I was a kid, my parents would take me to Marty Gral every single year. Is

my favorite time of year. Schools out. They were teachers to schools out for them too, and we just go and just like park it at ten am, wait for the floats to come. My dabby drinking beer. We'd be eating like hot dogs. I'm catching beads and like random trinkets, and it was like, awesome. You go home with all this loot, you sort through it, you organize it. I guess I did that. It was do that. But yeah, like I prepared as if I was ever going to

ride in a float one day. I had like tie them all together, like perfect, perfect dozens and so on. But it was really fun and you know, your your friends come out with you. You like my my parents, friends, families would would come out too, and it was a great time. Lots of music, lots of cool art. The floats are all designed. It takes them all year to do these things, and an army and it's like one of the biggest parties in the world. Takes over an

entire city for really about a month. You know, a lot of people associated with the last couple of days when people go from like Friday till that Tuesday, but it's really going on in the city the whole time. But that happens all the time. People just wake up one day and they're like, you know what I feel good.

I feel real good. They call their friends, they send out a flyer, they put like this elaborate costume on, and then they just go march down the road, uh and party music, aunts food and they just meander through the city kind of wherever they want. You gotta obviously, like let the cops know that you're doing it so they'll help and protect you and make sure traffics routed properly. But that stuff happens all the time. Yeah, you're right, it is. It does have a marketing issue because I

would have never known any of these things. Yeah, everyone just so it's like it's like Vegas South, right, A lot of people think of it that way, and you know, Harris promotes themselves a lot. There's a casino down there. It's a much friendlier experience, and a lot of people, imagine people think it's just really like heavy drinking. Uh, like you know, one of those types of experiences. But you can go and do how do it however? You like? Food is amazing. I remember a few meals that I

had there. I was like, holy shit, this is amazing. But also it's going to give me diabetes probably, Yeah, you know that is so like the it's a very you know, let the good time's role, as they say, type of place. And I think the thing I greatly

like about being there's everyone has good balance. They work hard and in the case of like you know, startups and corporate workers, they work a lot, but they'll you know, they'll they'll take the time to go to happy hour, to go spend time with their family and friends every night. I think the result of that, as you notice, is people are just a little happier and they're just not like they hustle, but they don't overdo it. But the food and the drinking is a big part of the culture.

There's a big part of this, like local community culture. I mean you see bars, restaurants. There's not a lot of national change. You see them of course, like Taco Bell Popay is actually from the rolling so people embrace it. Raising Keynes is a new new fried chicken spot from Louisiana that people like. But there's a lot of local stuff that you can go to and people like to congregate.

People actually like to go out and hang out. It could be in the neighborhood, it could be at a bar, at a restaurant, but they like to see each other in person, which is cool. So when you go down there as a tourist, you're not just seeing a bunch of other tourist, You're seeing a lot of locals and they're they're they're happy to welcome you. But yeah, the they have a fitness problem in addition to a marketing

problem of the city that people got to exercise. Maybe they're the best lives and they don't care they are. But then you know, you think about, like we have a huge diabetes problem. We have a huge The Optioner Hospital in Louisiana is like the number one liver transplant hospital in the world. I mean, congratulations, but you know

you might want to some community outreach about Lily. You fly to the airport, big sign Ostener Hospital, number one, that transplant hospital in the world in the airport right when you arrived, right when you get that, like, yo, check out this awesome thing we do. Well. No one's pointing out that it's because of the ben years for all fish. No, but my mistake was going there without you. The next time. I'm definitely going to go with you.

This year. I really wanted to go with you because you had your own float, which, by the way, I had no idea. It was so hard to acquire or be a part of a float. It's like a whole situation. We wrote in Orpheus, I mean flow. It's one of those things I never really imagined that ever do. And it's you know, generally historically reserved for fairly wealthy people,

very networked people. But Orpheus was started by Harry Connick Jr. And what he wanted to do was create a parade where anybody had a shot at riding, and it wasn't about how much money you had. And it was also about diversity. So if you look at like most of the parades were all male historically, then a couple popped up, like Muses that became all female, and Harry's was the first to be mixed. And he was just like, fucking I can do this. I'm Harry Conic Junior. Why not?

And so it was all about embracing that, It's all about celebrating the arts. He's got a nonprofit that supports all that stuff, and he's done so much for the city. So I don't know. We Ryan invited us to go to Orpheus capaid so they all have balls after the parade and so we went to Orpheus Capaid the last couple of years, and then two years ago Marty Gras he was like, hey, do you guys wanna do a float and sure, why not? Happened I fall right near my birthday, so I worked out. It was great fun.

It was weird. Honestly, it was kind of a really weird experience to be on the float on and just sort of you drive through so many neighborhoods and you can see how much of a dichotomy there is just from one block to the next. Sometimes maybe you see the city in different light. That's that's insane, especially since you grew up there. When did you leave New Arlands? Okay,

so college? I was born there, stay there till I was sixteen, and then tenth grade I went to Louisiana School up in Nakadish and I spent two years there. I mean I was going back home every month, driving back and forth. It was like a four and a half hour drive up to Nakadish, and they made us go home once a month just to make sure we're still being with family and everything. And then eighteen, so year two thousand, I went to college. Where'd you go

to school? I went to Yale for undergrad I've never heard of that school. Yeah, it's it's it's you know, it's it's, it's it's it's okay, honestly, Um, yeah, So Yale is this where all the magic started happening. This is where all yeah, something like that. Um, I went to Yale studied college way. But let's reverse because you said you never went to school and you smoked pot, but you still got great grades. Why is it that I meet these successful people all the time who were

like I barely tried. Then I went to Harvard, and I'm like, what what happened in between? I think about this a lot, actually, because I also encounter similar people and so, like in high school, I just didn't go. I didn't once I went to school called Jesuits, all boys, Catholic schools. It was terrible experience. The sad reality is our educational system is one of the worst. I think it is second worst, if not our first, first, worst, most worst, whatever, the worst. See, this is what happens

if you don't finish high school. I finished high school, so I went there, and I just didn't enjoy going for for multiple reasons. A lot of bullying a lot of just boredom, um, a lot of just like they're they're like forcing religion on you. And I just wasn't prepared and my parents didn't know how to prepare me for that type of schooling. And now I understand why

my brother is so bitter about his experience. You're supposed to be able to skip like ten days a semester or semester every half years, so twenty days a year. I skipped like forty because I just didn't want to go in and still got straight days, and so they didn't kick me out. But many times I went to see the guidance council and they're, hey, you gotta come to school or else we're gonna gonna have to drop you out. And I remember, I remember this, this is

just popping my head. Random moment of redemption I think I had where my ninth grade geometry teacher came and said, hey, will you come to me Alpha data the like math competition with us, because if you come, we think we'll win. And I was like, no, that's my girlfriend's birthday that weekend, so I'm just not gonna come. And then after that they just wrote me off and I left to go

to Louisiana school, but the schools tearing. You know, I'd sit, I go to home room in the morning and all the kids in class would be like, Hey, which one are you, Dan Tran, don Wyn, Kevin Lynn. You know. That happened almost every day and gotten fights eventually found this really small community of magic, the gathering players. So we literally like we were so egregious about it. We sat in the basement between the coke machines playing magic and it grew from like five of us to like

ten of us to twelve of us. And there's this guy Brian Funk like a bunch of my friends, like Charles Prrett's, Charles Press, Charles noon As. Kevin Walker didn't play, but he was like a baseball card gather and he just hung out with us. But it's like a bunch of kids who just couldn't quite fit in. So we just play magic together during lunchtime for everyone to see, right, We're like sat down with me, now, yeah you want

to go? And I actually got They actually banned us event well, they tried to ban us at some point because they thought the cards were satanic um. Because this was like, you know what the year was this like I don't know, nine six or something, and it was the cards were like demonic or demonic tutors, so they like literally would rifle through my cards looking for things that look satanic and like, okay, you can't play this game anymore. Luckily I found out about this boarding school

and left. But it wasn't great. I mean, they just don't They don't teach the kids there how to like be good community members. They just kind of let them run rampant, very jock driven school, like the Jesuit would win you know, the football state championships and blah blah blah. Like they were really into sports and I wasn't into sports. So another mark against me, you know, but you know, it's fine. It's a good learning experience. I got to meet lots of cool people ended up and and you know,

it's okay. Survived. Louisiana school was awesome, though much different. And then you get into Yale because you just got into Yo. Yeah. I think it was like, you know, like seven people from Louisiana get into Yale every year. What made you apply to Yale? You had good grades? You had good grades, obviously, you probably scored well on your S A T. S. I'm assuming, yeah, I did okay, we did A C T and S A T. I did all. I did fine, I got good, I got

I got great good grades. My brother went to Harvard, so my parents like, go to Harvard. Just apply, like blah blah blah. My guidance counselor um Joanne forrest in at Louisiana school, I was like, hey, you should apply to Yale. And honestly, I've never heard of Yelle at the time, and I was like, this is like a luck company, right, Maybe don't say that because there's a lot of kids out there right now who are likely

I had never here. I am like seventeen years old, and I'm like, I don't know what that school is like. At the time, I was trying to come to my parents let me stay in Louisiana because at a high school sweetheart I wanted to stay nearby. She was in Mobile, Alabama. How did that work out? I didn't work out? Unfortunately, but or fortunately, I guess, I don't know. She's great.

We keep in touch, but my parents like, you know, if it's meant to be, it's meant to be, right, And so applied for Yale played for everywhere we always one of the first response I went up there. I went actually to Shreveport for an interview with this random dude who was like, I don't know what he did. He was like a lawyer. I think a big building in Shreveport, Louisiana. Brought him a kingcake. I thought it was a nice thing to do, and he and I

just got along awesome. And then and then they sent me and then and then they did a follow up interview at school on campus. Some some like an army guy came in I remember his name, but he came in and he was el grad and I think he was CIA, and he came in and spent some time with me, and it's like army outfit. I'm like, this is the most intimidating interview ever. But he was also super nice. So when they sent me the acceptance, I was like, Okay, cool, this seems good to ask my brother.

And my brother was like, look, you'll have better You'll have a better time at Yelden pretty much anywhere else, so just go there. It's like it probably will suit you the best. And he was right, you know, good advice. Oh. The other piece of my advice my brother gave me that was very simple but correct. I think it was just major and whatever you like, like it doesn't really matter. You'll see people that are history majors and polyside majors

that go be a doctor, people that are econ majors. Like, you know, it doesn't matter. It's sort of like it just a period in your life where you're self discovering. So just try to find the thing you really enjoy. And so I switched, much to my parents chagrin, from biomedical engineering because my dad's an engineer as a professor at You and I University in New Orleans. My mom was also a special ed teacher, and so they're like, go be an engineer, but don't do what we did.

Don't teach you after go get a go get a real job, but learn engineering is really important. And ideally, go be a doctor. That was was pre medtracked. I had it all figured out. Yeah, that was that. That was the plan. And then I took this a class called e B one oh one, which was the Diversity of Life with his teacher named Leo Busts, who was this like awesome ecologist guy and loved it. And I was like I'm going to switch to ecology and evolutionary

apology as my major. There was like the first rift I had with my parents were like, no paying for school. You're going to study engineering and you're gonna go to med school. That's like, that's what we're paying for. Switched anyway. I had a blast, love my major, love my classes. I learned how to do bug collecting. That was my

favorite class for sure. Did you have a plan at that point when you chose the major, what the and game would be or were you just like, I'm focusing on what interests me right now and I'll figured out later. So in reality, that's what was happening. What I told my parents was, oh, I don't want to be a doctor doctor. I want to be a veterinarian. And so

that became the reason to switch. And so I'm studying animals, animal science, ecology, anthropology like a really he is a very wide variety of of of classes you know, to take, like hard math classes like differential equations, which to this day still doesn't make any sense to me. And that

was the excuse. And then then you had to do likes of veterinary volunteering in order to even apply and there's only like at the time, I don't know how like twenty something veterinary schools in the nation, and so U C. Davis is one of the best ones. And I think north I don't remember anymore, Uh, Northwestern maybe, And so that was the quote unquote path I had selected.

And so I spent my summer in my junior year doing uh internship at the Autuman Center for Research of Endangered Species also known as ACRES back in Louisiana on the west bank of New Orleans in like the middle of the swamp. That was my veterinary experience need I guess fulfillment. And it was great, honestly. It's like part zookeeper work, part what they called reproductive physiology work, which was a nice way of describing that we were just trying to make sperm and eggs last longer in transit.

And then so from that, you graduate with this major, did you you didn't switch again? No? Stay in? And then what was your next step after that? I didn't have any job lined up after graduation. I had met this girl my senior year on this random trip in Taiwan, and she was in New York. She was an N Y year. Her name was Jenny. We had we just hit it off. It was great. We weren't dating or anything.

But we started hanging out in New York towards the end of my senior year and I was like, oh, yeah, totally, Like all my friends are going to New York. I'll just come to New York. And she's like, that'd be great. I'm gonna stay here. She was working at a hotel because she wanted to go through like hotel management program and so on, and so I was like that sounds awesome. Like I'll just move there and maybe I'll find a job.

All my friends are like they got a job at you know, some bank or some some consulting group paying real salary. I get there and I'm like, okay, I need to find a job. It's expensive. Man. And my brother hooked me up with this group that he knew called Usual Suspects. They're like an events production company. I did a ton of events in college, lots of parties,

lots of actual events. And I talked to them and they're like, oh, you should go talk to this company called n y C And Company, but we'll give you some freelance works. I just had a bunch of random event project coordination for a little while, and eventually worked for NYC and Company, not the fashion company, but the Convention and Visitors Bureau doing events for them. And my boss is Barbara Lorber, I mean one of my She taught me a lot and she was amazing. She she

she's my Jewish aunt. And so we did a random events and we also worked in the NYC twenty twelve Olympic bid. So that was pretty cool to to be able to work on that. This was in two thousand and four, and I remember I walked into this room and it's like Dan dr Off all these all these like people in New York that have the power to do crazy things. I'm like, hey, guys, how is this logistically possible? You have to get people from Staten Island to Queens to Brooklyn. You're even doing some ship in

New Jersey, Like, this doesn't seem feasible. For like when a million people congregated together, this seems impossible. And so anyway, I was an invited to those meetings after that, but we worked on a bunch of events. We did, like a culture Fest in Battery Park, which was just about bringing all the performing arts and other art, art organizations, music and so on, down to one big sort of festival in the park at Great Perks. I go to

any museum free. I could go to any dance show or art show or music show for free, because because I knew all all those people, so it was awesome. Didn't get paid a whole lot. Yeah, it was. It was great. It was great to experience New York, complete opposite of New Orleans, just the polar opposite, polar opposite.

So from there, I mean there, there's so many things that probably happened in between starting what you didn't even know Twitch was going to exist, but going over to you were a part of social cam and justin TV and all the stuff. How did you meet which would later be dubbed the Twitch mafia? Okay, how did we meet them? All? Right? So I met a bunch of these dudes in college. Funny enough, I didn't know Emmett

at all in college. Maybe we ran across each other at some point, but I certainly didn't know the guy. And now he's my you know, co founder and one of my best buds. But Michael Seibel I knew very well at Yale. You have all these residential colleges. I was in one called Ezra Styles, which was like basically in bump New Haven, Connecticut. No one ever went to hang out there, so I was super lazy, so I end up just crashing on my friends couches in Branford.

Branford was much more central on campus, and I had met this dude named David Waite who lived with Michael and a bunch of our other friends. They called themselves as a God Quad because that was like the name of the suite they lived in in Branford. Michael's just like big football player hit a huge beautiful afro in college too, was amazing, and he was living with them.

But I met David at this random time when he's American Society event that I went to my freshman year, and he was standing there like he had this like he looked super proper, slicked hair, slicked back, tall dude from Texas, you know, black slacks, this like maroon button up shirt. And he's like, Hey, I'm David, I'm Kevin. Where are you from. I'm from Texas. I was like, oh, fun, I'm from Louisiana. Like didn't think I've met any from the South like that. Quickly here, and so we hit

it off. And then I eventually met his sweet mates, of which Michael was one, And so Michael and I became quite close friends, and we were We just played video games together all the time, played a variety of games. They played a lot of Command and Conquered Generals. We played a lot of Time Splitters, James Spawned, and so on. So we just we just hang out and play video games together, throw some parties together here every now and then. So Michael and I stayed in touch. We ended up

being quite close junior senior year. He ended up staying one extra year, and all the while, Justin Khan, who was one year younger than than we were at the time, he was oh five, we were oh four. We'd run into each other all the time, loved him like always. We never we weren't honestly, were not super close close in in college, but certainly ran in in ran into each other all the time. So flash four. A couple of years two thousand and six, I just moved to

San Francisco and I was working for a beverage company. Eventually, like uh, like in the middle of six. I remember exactly what time of year I think was spring. Justin and Emmett after graduation. They graduate two thousand and five. They had built a calendar company called Kiko Calendar. It was before Google. Calendar was like an Ajax type of calendar. They sold it on eBay. They saw their company on eBay for like twood Bucks first, I think first and still only company to be sold on eBay to a

company called Two Cows. Packed up their stuff, drove across the country with Mike. Michael was working for Quasium Fume raising money for a Senate campaign in Baltimore his year after graduation, but they kept in touch. They got together, drove drove Acrostic country and I was house sitting from my old boss at the beverage company, at the CEO of the beverage company, Flora's son, who was also a great boss. And my I just come over. No one's there,

I was. I was really dog sitting. It just happened to be at their house. There did this beautiful black lab named Loki. It's like when you stay out there to take care of him, so invite him over for a barbecue. Was hanging out in the hot tub and and Justin's like, I got we got this idea for a business. I was like, okay, what we're gonna stream my life? Seven? And could you imagine one of your friends being like I have this genius idea. You guys

are gonna stream my life? Yeah? Yeah, no. And it's just like you know, you look, I'm just like sitting there, like, you know, I really like you guys, and it's awesome, a really happier moving to San Francisco. And I really don't want to discourage you or offer anything that might prevent you from starting your dream, but that idea is really kind of the worst, and like why would you

do this to yourself? And they explained it and like okay, cool. Well, you know, like they had they raised they were raising money from angels and a lot. They already had this idea in motion. They were already starting to talk to people about it, and and I was like, okay, cool, like let me know if I can help you know, like I I is this a hot tub conversation was one of the hob and Barbecue conversation. Okay, so let's

just let's pretend everyone's in the hot tub. So it's justin Cohn, Emateer, Michael Cybob and Kevin Lynn, and they were like I think a couple of other people, but I was so zoned in on this conversation, just thinking through like what in blaze? What could this act? So Justin's pitching you in the hot tub? Yeah, totally, this is this is the pitching this genius idea. He's already spoken to angel investors, so it's not like he's like

brewing the idea and running and already tested it. He tested testing it with many people and people are like, yeah, sure, we'll give you money for that. And you got to remember, like in in like the early two thousands, there was all kinds of weird experimental stuff that was happening in live video. I don't know if you've seen this movie called We'd Of in Public un you should watch Actually, you know what, save it. I'll come over to your house and we'll watch it together with Colin and we

won't be stoned. It'll blow your mind. You might want to be slightly stoned. We will definitely. Yeah, if there as a child comes out smoking sounds excellent. I will

be there anyway. So a lot of people were experimenting with like you know now, with the with the with the promise of the Internet, like the ability to just do whatever you want and demonstrate that to whoever feels like watching you, was tested a lot before that, but the technology wasn't there, the infrastructure wasn't there, So the timing window around when they decided to start dreaming and walking around San Francisco's two thousand and seven, it was still e V D oh you know, if you're lucky

bits per second, So it's still choppy video, low quality. Um. But as we were growing up, the timing was just right. Um. But really they actually did this show for a while. Justin streamed himself sleeping, waking up and getting ready, going to the bathroom, sitting and working, walking around San Francis. Are you involved at this point or I'm like on the periphery, I'm still I had just you know, I moved in two thousand and six in San Francisco, so

I didn't want to. You know, they didn't ask me too, because I was frankly, would have been completely useless to them, questionable if I was ever actually useful to them. Um. But anyway, I was delivering beverages and I was like, oh, I want to help these guys, and so I go to there like that. You know, Michael was originally the producer. His title was a producer. Justin was CEO, and Michael would cook for everybody every day, cooking all these delicious meals.

He loves cooking, but he what he was doing was really gathering people around what they were up to. And so friends from Dropbox, Airbnb like at the time, all would just come hang out over dinners. So we would go hang out with those guys and meanwhile, you know, go work in the warehouse and deliver sugar water on the Bay Area. And I was like, I gotta help them. So if we eventually I found a sponsor for them, Balls Energy Drink, which was just an in kind sponsor.

They sent one thousand and twenty four bottles of Balls to them. Um, but help them, help them get stuff like that. We were one of the distributors there in San Francisco for that. They actually contacted Balls. But then Balls hit me up and they hey, you're like our distributor here, like will you hook these guys up? And

I was like, oh great, there's there's a sponsorship. So they were starting to like, you know, quote unquote define the business model, so to speak, not really because it was just energy drink, but still so ahead of your time to even be doing that. Yeah, they were just so they were yeah. And so the show went on for a while and eventually the feedback from the audience was, hey, we want to do this too, like is it possible?

And so I remember there was one day Justin went off offline for the first time during the show and this girl I Justine, had come up to San Francisco to take the to take the gear, the backpack and the camera and just to do that day. And so she did one day of streaming and then it went back to Justin. You know, then as uh laptops got a bit small, Like there was this Sony Vaio laptop that had a cellular chip inside UH and this was like back when it was like singular and and and

sprint and so on, primarily for those those laptops. And that made it a bit easier to instead of carrying on like eighty pounds of batteries like Justin originally had to carry around. Became a little bit more feasible. So we started shipping those laptops to people. But there's but the original intention was not for others to stream. Was the original intention just Justin is creating this huge production.

The original idea was just yeah, there was no okay, because it would make sense if he was like, I'm going to spearhead the movement and then other people are going to want to be a part of it. He pictured to you guys, as we're going to stream my life end of sentence. Yes, that was the pitch. You know, probably in the back of their minds, they're thinking about it the way they you know, the big picture, Yes, just thinking through and the investors certainly we're thinking about that, right.

Just okay, if you need to do this, there's actually a whole crap ton of technology you need to build. It doesn't exist today. That technology doesn't exist today. So um, there is a real there's a real tech business here so to speak, behind the show as a as a business front. But you know, the original pitch was definitely

Justin TV. But all the guys that are involved, if you think about it, are such forward thinking people that of course they thought that this would go beyond otherwise I don't think that would be worth their time, right. So okay, So now other people are You're starting to ship out these smaller laptops. You are still on the sidelines at this point, just kind of homies with everybody

watching everything happen. What are you thinking as this is kind of expanding before your eyes at this It's funny because like Michael was such a good friend and he'd tell me what was going on, and I'm just like, guys are like, what is it? What are you doing? You guys are crazy? Like is this going to work? Like how how is this business going to really build? How are you going to make money? Does someone buy you?

Like what really happens? And you know, I'm just I had moved to San Francisco not for tech, and I had no no knowledge of the industry. I didn't know how it worked. I didn't know how fundraising work. I didn't know how monetization worked. I didn't know I didn't know how the internet worked. Honestly, I knew that it worked and it was awesome, but I didn't really study it.

I wasn't obsessed with it in that way. And so to me, on the periphery, I just saw justin popping up on like Today show, on the front page of the s F Chronicle, like doing all this stuff, kind of doing it like becoming this internet celebrity by streaming himself to me for something. And it's just like that's so wild because I tune in and I'm like, this is the most boring shit ever, and you're just sitting there just like looking at this laptop, like why do

people watch this? But it was for these moments, all of a sudden something would happen and that was enough. Like one day they bumped into Dave Chappelle and that was a big deal, right, So it was cool to start see to start to see like, Okay, I see that people will tune in to wait for these things. But guess what they weren't just doing that. They were talking with each other. They're talking to Justin. Justin's responding

to them and chat. So it's actually not as boring as as if you digg just one tiny little bit layer deeper. People were just hanging out and that was that was what I finally realized, was like this, this power of this platform that they were building was it's a way for people just to hang out with other people when they're alone or with other people, but mostly for when you're alone, you know, you when you're walking

around somewhere you're doing your errands or whatever. Wouldn't be nice if you could just chat with somebody, you know, if you don't have somebody to be there with you. So that that's that's when we started to resonate. But that was you know, it really was like it was just crazy to see. It was crazy to see that people were really paying attention to it too, and just like really intensively curious about it, and that their audience

was continuing to grow. Like it wasn't huge. You know, there's like tens of thousands of people will tune in here and there, but it wasn't like millions and millions of people just yet. But once they once they started to open it up for other people, I guess that's when that's when they were like, okay, we forget you know now that the tech works let shut down the show and let other people do it. Was that social cam? Or was that justin justin TV? Okay, so it's justin TV?

How are you? How's everybody making money? How is everybody paying rent? They raised money from a bunch of angels and company are a VC called Alsop Louis. They saw it, you know, they're like, okay, behind this crazy show. Idea is a bunch of tech and as all the other Angel investors did, I think some people just invested on the sheer boldness of the idea and and just In, Justin and Emmett and Michael, because they're just insanely smart,

crazy people. And so it's rare to see someone like that roll up in Silicon Valley and just be like, Hey, we're gonna do some weird stuff here. So they raised money, and so they were they were paying each other or paying themselves salary from vc K a year in San Francisco, which back in two thousand two nine was not six ten, was still not a lot of money, right, It's it's not it's not great these days, a lot of young kids pay themselves way too much money and don't have

the urgency of busting asked to to win. But that's how we, you know, we we we kept a pretty shoe string for everything, shoestring budget for for the office. We eventually did food and stuff for this. You're saying, so at this point, okay, so I should tell you that that origin story, right. Okay, So Michael calls me one day, I'm like working at this beverage company. And he's like, I need to do some math. You're like, I know matth. I was once asked should be in

a math Yes? Yes, I was like, okay, someone once told me I'm good at math. So he's like, I need you to come help me put together like a model. I need to put a set of projections together and to go out and raise money. And so it's like, okay, cool, I can help you put that together. But I'm like, dude, I don't know anything about the internet. I don't know how it works. I don't know what it costs. I don't know how you make money. And he's like, no,

I just need your help to come. And so I was like, Okay, I have to meet you at seven am because I have this other job I have to go to. So can you meet me at seven I honestly thought he wasn't gonna show up. But he shows up. I show up somehow, both of us. I mean, the fact that we both showed up was nothing short of a

a miracle. So we go show up and we start research, researching for like a week, just scouring the internet for how the internet works, and we built these projections and helped him kind of mess with his pitch deck a little bit. I'm like, okay, cool, Like I'm gonna go back to my normal job now. Good luck keep me posted if I can help. And then one day Justin's like, hey,

come have lunch with us. So they take me to Louisiana Fried Chicken, which was right across from the ballpark on King King and third, which was right around the corner from the office. The office was it. It was like an old art gallery cannery building and nothing. They're a great place, though, And so we go there and we order food. Before I can even sit down, Justin' just like you should join us. And I told him, look,

I'm gonna tell you the samething. I told Michael. I'm like, they're literally tens of thousands, if not more, of people who are way more qualified to do anything for you, Guys that know how the internet works, who've been there, who've done that, who understand the business, who have a network. And Justin was like, I don't care. We just want to work with people we like and trust. And I was like, okay, cool, that's that sounds like an ideal

place to be. I thought about it for a couple of days, and joined the left the world of sugar Water, and and and and joining the joining the Internet a far far cry from being about yeah no totally that completely didn't work out, That didn't happen at all. What kind of content was on Justin TV at that point? Was it similar to what Justin was doing or yeah,

it was a lot of what Justin was doing. So the channels back then were people like Paris Harris, which was this like fashion fashionista guy down in l A. I think it was in l A. He was all over the place, but he would go and stream fashion shows and just do walk abouts around cities, but his focus was fashion. There was this guy named Moon Cricket Beto. Um. He did a lot of interesting like B boys subculture stuff, be boy stuff, roller skating, like a lot of dance

and music. Um, but very sort of underground feel. And part of it is his Justin TV experience, which is really cool that they he captured this like really dark moment in his life on Justin TV. But there are lots of lots of different streamers like that that. We had farm camps, like people literally just set up a

camera on their chicken coop. We had mud truck TV, which we could never I don't think it was live, but it was just clips of mud trucks, trucks driving through mud as promised by the name UM, and a bunch of random stuff, super obscure stuff, anything like people's desk cams, lots of different shows. What were you at that point thinking about just people's use of the internet? It was that was that opening your mind up to other possibilities and inspiring other things that you thought this

could be much bigger than any of us could imagine. Yeah, for sure, I mean we were, you know, we started thinking about different ways to use the platform. YouTube was skyrocketing then and then eventually got acquired UM and became this like level of aspiration for us. Right Instagram, same timing UM. And around two eight that's YouTube was doing partner programs. So were you guys seeing the partner programs that YouTube and thinking maybe we should be doing a

partner program Yes, for sure. We didn't really do partnerships. Actually in the very beginning, we just we were it was moving too fast and we were too small of a team. But we so two thousand either recession hits, I think that was one of those, you know, it was hard, but it was one of the most important things we that that could happen to the company, which

was realized. We had to figure out how to monetize because our costs were starting to get out of control because the traffic was running so quickly and it's global traffic, and certain countries are just way more expensive to deliver continent too. But we're starting to spend. You know, in theory we could get very quickly to millions of dollars of costs per month, and we hadn't raised that much money.

And meanwhile, our competitor, you Stream, where Colin was at. Yes, I was going to say to you, what what point does you stream enter the picture, because you guys were first. Yeah, the timing was pretty close. We so we raised some money in two thousand and eight, in two thousand and nine and two trenches, but we had only raised I

think it was about twelve million total. Then you Stream goes out and raises sixty million dollars and moves actually their office to a vantage point of ours, like a really nice new building that literally looked onto our shitty barn door, and we're like, okay, like, what are we gonna do? We either go out and try to raise more money, or we just battened down the hatches and figure out how to get costs under control and how

to make money. So we made a number of critical hires than Kyle what co founder, who was our requisite college dropout. I was gonna say another person who casually got into m I T and just decided, Yeah, he was like a robotics he's a genius. He's in general, I mean he is a true, true renaissance man, like true also casually the nicest human I've ever met, super nice, super generous, and he eventually built Cruise Automation and sold GM in like two years for just two casual billion

dollar a chill. Yeah, you know. You know anyway, Kyle, like you know, one of the m I T Safe Cracking competition, he like participated wait stop he did. Yeah, and he participated in battle bots at like the tender age of fourteen. Your crew is hands out, I always tell people, and that's why I referred to it as

the Twitch mafia. You guys are just every single one of you is so interesting, has done so much amazing ship and you just happened to be nice, Which is weird because a lot of people in your positions would be like kiss my feet please, But you're the polar opposite, every single one of you. I mean, it's how we wish together friends that makes me really happy. Okay, let's

keep going. Before so we start making some critical hires John Shipman, for instance, who built YouTube Youtubes' infrastructure, built a bunch of structure for eBay and PayPal. We try to hire some sales people to do ads. We just figured it out. Like all of us, we all spent time every day thinking about how do we do advertising, how do we do subscriptions. So we started just reaching out, going going to events, networking in the ad world, and we figured out between two thousand two nine how to

make money and we actually became profitable. And so in two thousand nine we go back to our view season, like, hey, we made it through the like, well, it still feels like the recession. We don't know what's gonna end, but hey, like we're making money now and like that's awesome. Like maybe we should think about selling, Maybe we should see testing acquisition offers. And so we did into that early and didn't feel right, and you know, it just didn't

feel like it was it was the right time. But by becoming profitable, it allowed us to really start to think about what we could do with the platform to your question earlier, and so we thought of many different directions, like do we go compete with YouTube? Do we focus on on on demand in addition to Live? Realized nope, you know, Live is just our d n A, that's what we like, and it's gonna be really hard to compete with YouTube now that they're part of Google and

so on, so let's just do our thing. So this type of thinking happens between two thousand nine and two thousand eleven, and people are drifting constantly in and out, in and out doing other things. Justin and I started a fashion company. I should say Justin started and asked me to help him. Is his idea called Saboteur. It was hilarious. Actually there was a He made a jacket

called Invincible, which is a waterproof blazer. Looks like a blazer where to a nice party, silver insides like nice redlining, You button up and you know it's waterproof. We're clearly getting distracted. Something is happening, and we as a team are getting distracted. Okay, so real quick on that Invincible jacket. Justin's like, how do we market this thing? And I was like, why don't we go through a car wash with you wearing it? And so we did at uh

and it was a terrible idea of the videos. Somewhere I should find it and send it to you. Um, but it totally worked. All Right, we're doing a live test of the Invincible jacket. We're going to find out today how waterproof it actually is by running through a car wash. Okay, let's Jesus Christ gonna check the jacket. But check the jacket. It's looking good. It's looking good. I'm actually surprisingly dry underneath. He was completely dry except

for the rest of his body. Um. So uh So anyway, we're drifting, were drifting and we're like, okay, what are we gonna do? And we started talking about mobile. I remember having all these baits where half the team was like, no, let's not do mobile. That's stupid, it's bullshit, and then other happy and like, no, mobile obviously is the future. Let's do something there. And so we started to test JTV broadcasting. So Kyle built our first sort of mobile

broadcasting app, and that was from your mobile phones. So you walk around now there's three G. Right, it's like the on the cusp of three G before LT, so you theoretically could work. So there's this JTV mobile broadcasting tool, live broadcasting from your phone from wherever you are. What we learned from that was that no one was tuning in during the live mobile broadcast. It was too short.

People were only streaming for a few minutes. My theory was just because it got tiring holding out of the phone, but you know, just it was probably multiple multitude of things, signal cutting in and out. You know, it's a really quick momentary capture. But what people were doing was they were sharing afterwards and people were watching the clips, and so like, okay, let's turn that into just a clip sharing app. So that became social camp Instagram for video

as we called it. Meanwhile, we're playing a bunch of video games in the office. A street Fighter was like kind of one of those always on games, like this is droning street Fighter background music that was always on in the office. Then one day StarCraft to Beta comes out. This was in Mayo intent. Somehow we got access to

it and we were already thinking about games. But then this game comes out, we get it and we were playing it non stop and we're watching we realized that we're going home and watching videos on YouTube trying to get better learning, and we're like, huh, this should be live, Like why would this not be live? And sure enough we had a We had a small community of gamers

back in the day. This was like Kaiba four player podcast you stream had a bunch of Lord Cat and so on, and so there was there was a small community of game streamers on a variety of platforms, and so we started reaching out what can we build for you?

And a lot of people that we reached out to in the beginning that we eventually like eventually worked with us or became a partner where like you guys are terrible, we hate you does and TV brand sucks, like go away and like no, no no, please, like let us ask you some questions and we promise will go away, but we might build some stuff for you. Will let you know that. Just continue to to sort of positively spiral more conversations, more feature development. We branched out the subdomain

called JTV gaming and that became like the home. That was one of the big pieces of feedback we got was the first one being we got to figure out how to make money. Then there all these technical features like transcoding, high quality, blah blah blah, all these important things that we we had to build very quickly. But the big thing was they like, we want a home. We want a place where we can go and hang out with other gamers, not all this other weird stuff,

not all his noise. We want a home for gamers. And so that's how really the idea started to come to be. We were toying with it as justin t JTV gaming. We didn't launch as that. We just did it. We built, just built a brand, but we didn't really make noise about it. Then on June eleven eleven, we launched Twitch TV. It was this old like heavy metal space theme logo with a little TV with a ghost in it that Jacob design. Why Twitch A variety of

stories is how we got there. But we were combing the Internet for pronounceable, single syllable domain names that were available for sale. So Bill who built chat and among many other things that at the company, Bill Morier Bill

Bland back then was his name. So he built this like domain crawler where he crawled all available domains that were like theoretically single syllable, so roughly a vowel in the middle that seemed pronounceable, that were available for sale, and one of the first that popped on the list for all of us was and it was available. We looked up on Urban Dictionary. It means like the supreme state of being awesome or something like that. So that seems okay but impossible to spell. What do you do

with that? But we came up with all these ideas arthlings, like users could be Zarthlings. It was hilarious, but we're like, that's not that's not right. Then one day m it's like, all right, guys, if no one comes up with anything better, we're gonna use zarth And that's when we're like, okay, scramble. So we're like figuring out all these other brands and then the word twitch comes up for for like I think,

so I don't to me. When it popped into my head, we were talking about like what do things gamers need to be good? And so it's like fast twitch muscles, blah blah blah, but really that we're just kind of stuck in all of ourselves. Perfect. It was perfect. It was an empty vessel. You could tell you know, there's a story there about games, but it's just a word we liked. We bought Twitch dot tv. We tried to

buy Twitch dot com. Email the dude and I I gotta get on the phone call with him, and I'm like, hey, man, like, we've got ten thous dollars with your name on it if you sell us this domain. And he's like, wow, ed Ev from Twitter? Do you know from Twitter? He tried to buy this domain from me, you know, like years ago. He offered me like three hundred thousand dollars and I didn't take that. I was like, cool, congratulations, I've still got ten thousand dollars with your name on it.

And he's like, let me think about it. Comes back he asked for like seven grams, Like okay, screw. So we just stuck with the dot tv dommain. That's how it came to be. That's how it started, and we designed to Tacob designed the logo and then one year later two twelve launched the new logo that you see today. That that that that that more retro homage logo, and initially it was like green, silver and black like our

original logo. We launched and people really embraced it, you know, they're like, great, it's only for gamers, awesome, and we just took off it really just we were just like the fastest growing website in the world, I think for like eighteen months straight from that moment on until two at this point. So you're you're, you know, an exact over at Justin TV, but then also Twitches launching. So how do you guys kind of separate who focusing on what?

Because it feels like two very separate companies. So we split up, yep, So we in in. We we made the decision and talked to the board in two thousand and ten and two thousand and eleven about splitting the company. So Social Camp split off. Michael continued to be a co founder of that, and you have two other co founders a'm on and g and then Twitch myself and Emmett did so and obviously the other founders are all still heavily involved along the way. Eventually, you know, Justin

started a bunch of other companies. Kyle left and started Cruise, Michael that went and sold Social Cam and eventually joined y C. So yeah, but that's how we split. So we recapped the business raised money for both sides, But it was tough. It was a hard decision, you know, it's like it sucks to kind of split up, but it felt it was the right thing to do. And obviously we all went off and did a bunch of random,

crazy stuff, but it was cool. It was it was it was cool if the board was was down for that, but we had to be fair to write make sure all the shareholders our whole when you when you just split. And so after you split, though, Justin TV was around for a little bit longer before what did you How did you guys make that decision on Justin TV to kind of let that fizz. Yeah, so the think about

justin TV. It was still making money, so we didn't want to just totally shut it down, but we didn't really want to do too much with it because we want to make sure the resources. We promised the new investors that Um the resources we would we would put the resources towards Twitch primarily that's our primary business now, and so we just maintained justin TV. That's actually when we met Um. We found out about him as he was at you stream and I remember actually driving to

like the Elephant Bar near SFO. It was some random bar off like the airport side road and met him before like he left town or was like just coming into town. We just sort of sniped him before he did anything else, sat him down, brought an offer letter like, dude, you need to join us. I remember this day to just coming crystal clear. He was like, they met me, they made an offer the same day, and I was like, who are these people? Because also we're living in l A.

You know, you stream had an l A office. We had no idea, but it sounded like an exciting opportunity. He really liked you guys. At the end of the day, he took the job because of you guys. I mean, it's the fact. And we we like, we were completely smitten right the moment we met him. And didn't you write an offer letter on their napkin or something like? We were like sketching it all out, but we came with that actual print out. So and then Colin came in and helped maintain us in TV and put together

the plan to actually sunset it. The odd thing is we sunset it like right before acquisitions. So a lot of people thought that's why, I know, we were like we were intending to do so for a while. We just want to make sure that community had an alternative place to go. We didn't want to just abandon them immediately, so we want to make sure they had time to

figure out where they were going to end up. But yeah, it was it was a you know, it was it was quite a day inn at history, I think, and and you know, it was sad to see it go away, but it was the right decision for us as a business. I mean, you have to make very hard decisions like that in this world, at the speed that the internet moves like you have to be very quick about focused decisions and do the right thing. But it was great. I mean, Justin TV is the reason why all these

platforms exist. It was a testing ground for all the tech that's behind it. We learned so much throughout the process. Um, again, super sad to see it go, but I don't see it as a sad Obviously you're more emotionally invested than me. But it seemed like a new chapter from something else. It was like a birthing process, almost totally, totally a

birthing process. Yeah, so Justin TV gave birth to Twitch and then casually Bezos is like, hey, a couple of years later he was he really liked the idea, and you guys got acquired by Amazon. How many years after Twitch was born? So Twitch eleven we were purchased in two and fourteen. Is that somebody who has invested in many startups and launched startups? Is that pretty quick turnaround? As a brand? That is an incredibly fast turnaround. The reality is the tech had been starting to be built

since two thousand and seven. So if you if you consider the justin TV era side of this, and without the learnings of advertising and subscriptions and so on, we couldn't have done Twitch, not not that fast anyway. So if you count that, that's like about a seven year spread,

and you have to count that. I think the common misconception with Twitches, oh my god, they came out of nowhere and two and a half years or three years later they got they get bobbed for over a billion dollars and people don't realize this was many, many iterations in the works, almost a decade. Almost a decade. Yeah,

so right, so it was it was a while. But from the brand's perspective, yeah, it's about a little over three years that we got acquired, but from from an actual businessing perspective seven years and as somebody who us you know and exactly the company did? You guys have a bunch of offers and obviously we're not going to discuss who, but how did you know that Amazon was the right one? Because I'm sure you had other offers. We talked to all kinds of people. I mean, it was,

it was. It was fascinating because the people from all over the world, companies from all over the world and from different industries, some of which were unexpected potential like acquirers, all reached out. They all started to reach out in two thousand and fourteen, and you know, we were not naive about it, but we're kind of like, yeah, we're not really interested in selling right now. Everything is going

so well. We just raised our serious c and h let's just meet Let's just meet them because it'd be cool just to see what's up. And you know, it's like all you know, it doesn't matter all CEOs of media companies that come to reaching out, and so we have all these meetings and we go through a variety of processes, learn a lot along the way. But Amazon felt right for many reasons, so a lot of people were surprised. But at the time they told us these

are all public now. But they had this whole game thesis that they around, this ecosystem idea that they were building involved a game engine which eventually launched a lumber yard. It involved a bunch of first party games studios at Amazon. The Amazon was funding that they were building on this this game engine. The idea being many game companies use AWS and increasingly more so, how do they make it easier and better for game companies? Then they have Amazon Retail.

While they weren't huge on digital, there was you know, some desire to do so obviously, and there was all this other stuff they were doing around Amazon Prime Video. So like, okay, cool, this kind of makes sense. We are the thesis with them when it came to game development, future game sales made a lot of sense, and it felt right, you know, we we weren't gonna be a cog. We were so perpendicular to anything that they were doing at the time that it felt like they would let

us do our thing. And so in as we discussed with them, they're like, yeah, totally, like we don't none of us do anything close what you guys do, You would want you to do your thing, will resource you up um, love for you to work with other other teams at Amazon over time as as you desire, but no pressure, just do your thing. We just really like what you guys are up to, and so it just made sense. And but that's that's a very unique situation also because a lot of companies when they get acquired,

they kind of sell their souls in a sense. And I remember asking Colin, is this going to change twitches? The community going to be upset? Are they going to start making you do things that don't really make sense for the gaming community? And he was like, they're awesome. They just want us to do our thing, and they did. They really let you do your thing into this day. That's pretty awesome and it worked out on Amazon's killing it. So yeah, so you guys kind of everything. You made

the right decision. I don't think you need me to tell you that. Super lucky, very fortunate, right, Like super there's a lot of lucky in the business, and we're very lucky. We picked right. It wasn't easy, I'll be honest. And there are like the learnings of becoming part of a large corporation are hard, but no, they always trusted us just to continue to do our thing. To me, it's all efficiency. I like. I I'm much rather work with the frankly, a small team, move fast, iterate experiment.

That's just it just my my style a bit more so, it's like and that's for a lot of people that grew up with Twitch right in Twitch as part of the team, so learning that was not the easiest thing to do, but we figured it out. So there might be a founder of a startup listening right now who is potentially considering an acquisition. There's a lot to weigh out.

Is there a piece of advice now in hindsight, since you've been through the whole process with a really big deal, that you would give that person prior to making a huge decision like that. Yeah, Number one, really think through and accept. Make sure you accept the fact that everything will change for you. It is no longer your company. While it does happen that acquisitions are managed well and the teams stay happy, that is unfortunately the rare state.

So that's number one. Make sure you know that if you're going to sell, you lose control, you lose you lose that and it's not really about control. Control is wrong. It's not your baby anymore. It is in a sense of like the longevity. You still want it to work, you still want it to be the thing that you wanted to be, but it's not yours. The second is talk to people who have been through it before. Definitely get advice. Everyone's willing to share really about that process

and mentor you through it again. On the on point one like, really know that this is an irreversible decision. Do you want to continue to build this forever with the hopes of making money and maybe never but enjoying it all a while, or sell it and risk not enjoying it anymore. That's basically in a simple binary way of thinking about it. But talk to people at a certain scale, like if you're selling for hundreds of millions and up talked about banker, it's not the worst thing

that you don't necessarily have to hire them. Jimmy Kim from Catalyst, who worked with us, was awesome. He got to know us super early, helped us network, coached us through a number of things, including fundraises, Like he was just a super awesome nice guy that we trust. It like most times founders meet bankers like fun, I don't, I don't, I don't like I don't like these guys.

I don't like these people will like go away. But if you find the right banker that you drive with, you trust like they don't necessarily expect you to hire them, but they'll help you. And so we were really lucky to have gotten to know Jimmy over the course of several years. Uh And eventually he's like, look, I know what's going on. Let me just let me help you, no zero presumption. And eventually we're like, Okay, dude, please

do please do this for us. But also just really ask a lot of questions of your potential acquire What are they gonna do with the company, what's the future vision? Make sure they have a plan that it's not some short term thing. It's not some short term opportunity because some facet of some industries growing quick. Many many entreprenees that just build the flip right, they just want to build something that they know solves for a gap in the market with the hope that fit into it fits

into another business. That's great. But if if that's not your ambition with your company, just make sure you know what they're gonna do with it right, ask the ask the right questions. Number one thing I think you need a mentor, a mentor someone who can really tell it like it is, give you real raw feedback. Also ideally open up networks and just general knowledge for you. But

it's really about asking for help. I mean, there were moments in our career where we almost had to close the doors, you know, like they're definitely moments where like, how are we going to pay salary next month? Like it was like pretty tight sometimes and it was with the help of a lot of friends and a lot of business partners, investors, advisors, part like and everything in

between that got us through everything. And so you've got to be able to reach out though, and this community, if like they like you and your idea and what you're building, people will help. It's very unusual versus other industry like the beverage industry. It's all fight for shelf space. There's some knowledge sharing, but not nearly as much as as as as in the internet world. But it's hard, and you know, it's hard, and companies fail and it's

okay to fail. Well, a lot more companies failed than our successful and I think I mean, I can speak for myself. I'm even jaded by you guys, like your group of friends, because it seems like everything you touch turns to gold, you know. And if you think about your circle of friends, from Kyle to Justin to you to Michael and Collin's doing things like everyone's kind of

has their hands and some really cool stuff. And I think a lot of it is attributed to your relationships with each other, because I think that you guys advise each other, you help each other. Do you think that you're at a wild advantage because of your circle of friends? I think now are our lives are just yes, fundamentally different now right, We've built a lot of knowledge, we built a lot of experience, a lot of grit, and a lot of different network than we had when we started.

So back then, you know, we had to just talk to people. I remember once Michael was like, why do you talk to everyone? And I'm like, I don't know, like why not, Like everyone's doing cool stuff out there. And it wasn't that it wasn't like a negative accused or anything, because like what do you do? You know, you seem to like anyone who will email you'll just like take a quick phone call with them, just see what see what they're up to. Why I'm like, well,

I don't know, I'm learning. That's that's the way I learned. So it's really about like making sure you're you're absorbing as much information as possible along the way and building a network. That's so critical and a lot of people don't think about that in early entrepreneur age. Is what you're really doing over time too, is getting to know people, learning about their expertise, helping them as they help you, and so on. And that's how good community building happens.

But that's for your career, you know, that's really important for you. You never know when you're gonna meet someone who might invest in you, who might become a paid partner, who might mentor you one day like that. You don't know, and so it's good to keep an open mind. Obviously you have to focus and not be too distracted, but if you find those sort of right paths, it's it's

it's okay to do that. But it's that networking that we have now where we this group right justin Michael Emmett, Kyle, Colin John and so on, like we all Jacob, we all still talk and help each other and share ideas. We send each other interesting companies, not necessarily with the you know, presumption of investing, but just hey, like, this is really cool group of entrepreneurs. I'd like for you to meet your background uniquely you can be helpful to them,

So help them, you know. It's a lot of giving back to really well, that's That's one of the things that I love about you most is you have done a lot of collaborating along the way, and you have networked with a lot of people along the way. But you seem to just keep up with everything and you give back. You're not just taking and saying, oh, I know all these like powerful people and I'm a powerful person. You really go out of your way to give back.

My mind is always boggled by your specific network, not just your little group of friends, but like you have a huge, huge network of people. How do you keep up with all these people and no one's ever pissed at you? Like you managed to be there for every

single person. I wonder when you sleep or eat. I know you find ways to get that taco bell postmated, But I mean I text a lot texts like a good good way to keep in touch, ask quick questions and so on, particularly for like startups that need help, like those text me stuff. Just text text me. If I need to call you explain, I'll call you, like real quick. But and so I think that's that's really powerful tool to meet emails like so old and kind of antiquated. Now it's just too slow. So I like that,

But I don't know, I do feel bad. I feel bad a lot, Like there's a lot of people I I lost touch with, you know, in the last eleven years, like just being so focused on on work as a personally, yeah, imbalance in life, Like I lost touch with a lot of really great friends from high school and college, and some of those are irreparable unfortunately. So I think these days I try to be a bit more conscious of it. I don't know. For me, I don't sleep a lot,

so I'm trying to. I'm trying to get seven hours. I think it's very important to roughly sleep the human average. But I don't see a lot to siend up like, you know, staying up late, texting, I bond with I connect with friends over video games. I'll you know, go go to events and stuff like that. But when I go like I try to just not think about anything, but typically if someone reaches out to a friend, I'll feel compelled to help if however I can, whether that's

simple introductions or a phone call for advice. To me, it's just about lifting each other up. We had a lot of people that believed in us and helped us and without whom we would not be here today. Many partners who like the specifics of bailing us out, and when we needed money, we had a lot of people that helped us out. And that's part of the untold story. But that's the reality is you need help, you need people around you, and you have to reciprocate. So that's it.

I don't know, I don't balance super well. I actually think there's space for a technological solution to this problem of how do you keep in touch with people better. I don't think it's like, you know, the social networks today, they are not what they were promised to be in the beginning, no longer, So I think there's space for that.

My most favorite time spent at Twitch was talking to creators about their show ideas, helping them really hone in on what they should do and how the tech can support that, you know, like I remember when people started using green screens for the first time on on Twitch and transporting themselves into the video game instead of having this like random wall back drop, and that seemingly small change was massive and and and that type of small iteration,

but really talking. One of my favorite projects last year was talking to Bernie Sue about artificial So he did this crazy live scripted sci fi show they Just Want a Peabody, And it was just cool to think through how content and tech really intersect and how platforms like ours can really enable the next generation of television consumption. What does that look like? How is it interactive? How are users engaging with each other and engaging with the content.

I like Twitch and where we're at because we let anyone. We really do give anyone the chance of success. And I like that kind of system where anyone can turn on a free stream on Twitch, broadcast to the whole world for free, and everyone in that world can watch you for free. So you're on this show because you're a tech influencer. Who is somebody that you look up to and you consider a tech influencer that we can stock.

Aside from the homies, we've talked about already. Yes, somebody outside of the friend group, the intimate friend group, somebody that you kind of always have your your eyes on and you're like, oh, this person is doing something. Oh there's so many I mean, okay. So one of my most favorite people and one of my mentors throughout my career. I don't even think he realized he was being a mentor was Mike Mooreheim, who was the founder and up until recently CEO of Blizzard. They've made all of my

favorite games, StarCraft, Diablo, Hearthstone, etcetera. And he was just like the sweetest guy. And you know, in today's terms in business, you describe him as like incredibly inclusive and so on. Like he just built this team of people who were super nice to each other, who drove each other so aggressively in the sense of let's move, let's build awesome things fast, and let's build them right for the users. And he kept the gamers as the heart of the company, just as we try to create creators

treat creators as the heart of Twitch. He's one of my just favorite people and I'm always curious as to what he's up to, what he's thinking about, you know, there's one of my favorite people I've ever met was Adam bain Uh. He was CEO at Twitter and we were just talking about all these crazy ideas that Twitch and Twitter could do, and he eventually left because one of those dudes is so generous, super thoughtful, gave you

advice when you didn't even ask for it. He could just almost detect what you were thinking about, what your business was going through. He just had those strong instincts. And then he started just to connect you with people for free, no presumption. All you listeners, if you find someone that says, yeah, I'll introduce some people, it's going to take some equity in your business to do that,

don't talk to them. Please stay away from them. A good person, a good person who's actually trying to help you, will help you for free, with no presumption of getting any equity in your business. And there are some you should approach yourself that are particularly helpful and say, hey, I want to give you some advisory shares. Will you help me? And don't overpressure it. But like a rare

occasion you want to do that. But for people that really want to help you, reward them, of course, but not only the presumption that they're gonna be rewarded for free. If people don't share their knowledge and share their networks to me, things break down and you can't really find that next great generation of people who are going to make a difference. I run into a lot of those people these days. I just said, he just gives me

a bad feeling. And then in closing, you gave advice to these new startup kids, the kids kids, the kids? What advice would you give Kevin sitting in the basement playing magic in hindsight career wise? Like, what would be one token that you would like to just drop into little Kevin's brain? Uh? Wow, I've never been Okay, that's uh, you have all the info. Now what are you telling little Kevin with his Satanic cards? I think the thing I wish I did, honestly was was being able to

talk to my parents about my experience growing up. It was so weird and stressful and depressing honestly at times, and my parents did know how to deal with it. You know. I think that's why my my my my brother is still kind of you know, not into going back ever. He went back with me recently, but he was just had such a traumatic experience. I think it's

important for parents to be able to do that. And I don't believe my parents at all, and they were probably experiencing stuff that I didn't know about that they never talked to me about, And I kind of wish we could have talked through that, because you know, my identity throughout my life has changed so much in college heavily involved in Asian and Asian American groups and post college life, and when we were doing justin TV was

so crazy busy. I felt bad. I felt this connection from that community, and now I'm working with that community again and it's great. But being able to talk about things like that identity with with parents and friends I think would have been valued and talk to my friends in New ormands that much about it for fear of backlash, for fear that people were like, well, yeah, of course people aren't you like that, right, And so I didn't

know how people were reacted. Never tackled. I never tackled it until I was older, and so I kind of wish that because I think it would have opened up, it would have maybe enjoy my childhood there more because then I would have understood why I didn't understand why the bullying was happening, or that people were so at the time, I described stupid. Why are people so stupid? They weren't stupid. I just didn't know better. You know, maybe they're just poking fun because that's what you do

as kids. But I translate in my head as like people hate me for X, Y or Z reason, and I never able was able to talk to anybody about that. So I think that's what I would tell kept to do. I mean, but it seems like despite all of that, you are still a very social person, very confident person. One of the most social confident people I know to date. So it worked out right. Thanks. Yeah, I still feel like I'm shy, but I don't. I mean, maybe it's just because I know you. Yeah, definitely open up. Hey,

whatever happened along the way, it worked out. I think I've already taken up so much of your time. We probably could. I mean, there's so many layers to start up world. But I really liked learning the origin story because I think it's really helpful for people who are in that position right now. And just like the main message of what you start with will not be what you end up with, and that's okay, and it's actually awesome.

But yeah, there's so many different things I could dabble into with you, but I feel like we'd be here for six hours and you probably have a hundred people to meet. Thanks for stopping by. I am so excited for everyone to hear this interview, and I'm sure you'll be back. They would love to love to come back. Okay, yeah, please do please do all right, Kevin, Kevin Lynne, everybody, Thank you, Thanks everybody, Thanks for listening. Thanks to appreciated anytime.

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