May 19, 2024

Emmett Shear — How Twitch Changed Media by Merging It With Gaming | Pattern Breakers with Mike Maples, Jr.

Check out the Episode Page

Be non-consensus, but right: Great startups identify something that is missing in the future that no one else realizes is missing
Figure out what you want that you can’t already get, then build it
It is important for the founders of a company to truly want the thing that they are creating
You must be willing to have thoughts and say things that cause investors to say, “that is the dumbest thing that I’ve ever heard”
You can succeed with a consensus idea if you are willing to relentlessly out-execute everyone else, but it is going to be much harder than succeeding with a non-consensus idea
Seek honest feedback from users and consumers instead of seeking validation from them
Have a broad hypothesis, but be open to the non-obvious thing when it presents itself or when you discover it
Winning is a mindset that pervades all else
Err on the side of over-persistence; people tend to give up before they really give something a shot

Emmett Shear (@eshear) is the founder and former CEO of Twitch
In this conversation, Emmett Shear and Mike Maples, Jr. discuss Emmett’s early days as an entrepreneur, advice for young founders, the power of being non-consensus but right, developing a winning mindset, getting team construction right, starting Twitch, how to leverage customer feedback, when you should give up on a startup, and so much more
Check out these Podcast Notes on Mike’s conversation with Blake Scholl of Boom Supersonic
Host: Mike Maples, Jr. (@m2jr)

After graduation from Yale, Emmett Shear tried several entrepreneurial endeavors but achieved minimal traction with each respective one
He built Kiko, an online calendar, with his longtime friend Justin Kan; they eventually sold Kiko on eBay for $250,000 in 2006
Paul Graham wrote Emmett and Justin a check to start what became “Justin.tv”, which was a live stream of Justin Kan’s life
They built various technologies to make a live stream show a reality; it was the perfect premise for a startup in the mid-2000s
Companies start from made-up ideas, and sometimes those ideas are dumb
It is important for the founders of a company to truly want the thing that they are creating
You must build something that you want
Figure out what you want that you can’t already get, then build it
It is not an accident that Uber started in San Francisco, the city with the worst cab system in the world

Founders tend to live in the future
Great startups identify something that is missing in the future that no one else realizes is missing
Most people tend to be hostile towards new, pattern-breaking technologies
Do not confuse being non-consensus with being a wacky contrarian
Do not be afraid of the consensus
You must be willing to have thoughts and say things that cause investors to say, “that is the dumbest thing that I’ve ever heard”
- If you are not willing to hear that, then your thinking may be constrained to consensus ideas
You can succeed with a consensus idea if you are willing to relentlessly out-execute everyone else, but it is going to be much harder than succeeding with a non-consensus idea
You can win with a consensus idea if you have the very best team in the world
Stop thinking about what everyone else thinks, and instead, think about what you want
Trying to find out what is true can be unsettling if you take it seriously

Winning is a mindset that pervades all else
Wildly successful companies often appear to be much better run than they actually are
Management quality tends to improve later on in a company’s lifespan
Startup founders tend to be young, and young people are often bad managers because they do not have much management experience
As a startup grows, people have to learn new skills required by their new level of management; this can be a daunting task
Ensure you have a minimum viable team size before hitting product-market fit
Stay in your current zone and grow slowly for as long as you possibly can
Go too fast and you will miss your potential, but the same is true for going too slow

Justin.tv took off for the same reason that YouTube did: people used it to re-stream television
They realized that building B2B software was probably the better business plan to pursue than others, but they decided against building something that they did not necessarily want to build
After Instagram sold to Facebook for billions in 2008, they realized that the future was mobile, and that video on mobile would be huge
Emmett started watching gamers stream their gameplay using Justin.tv
- He realized that he was not loyal to Justin.tv but he was loyal to the streamer
- It was at this point that he realized that he needed to seek feedback from the streamer

Seek honest feedback from users and consumers instead of seeking validation from them
Your ideas cannot improve if you are only seeking validation from feedback
Streamers told Emmett that they wanted to make money using the platform and didn’t care if was going only going to be a few dollars per month
Emmett took the feedback and created an ad product that enables streamers to earn a profit-share of ads displayed during their stream
You will only discover the non-obvious thing by being surprised
Have a broad hypothesis, but be open to the non-obvious thing when it presents itself or when you discover it
If you form a narrow hypothesis, you increase your probability of missing the big thing

Anyone creating content is fundamentally insecure, and they want three things: money, fame, and love
Content creators desire some kind of feedback on their creative process
- Creating a chat function allowed streamers to receive positive feedback from their viewers
“Overnight successes” after five years of trying are typical

It is difficult to know when to give up on a startup and when not to
People tend to give up before they really give something a shot
If you consistently give up too early, you will never succeed
If you consistently give up two years too early, you will inject two years of delay before you succeed
Err on the side of over-persistence
Startups are not for everyone; you should probably not start or join one if painful struggling over several years does not sound fun to you
If you choose to start a company, be sure that you are doing it with people you want to be around