Twitch CEO Emmett Shear wasn’t born a leader, he became one almost by accident. And he now runs one of the most valuable video properties on the web.
The Justin.tv founding team, from left to right: Justin Kan, Kyle Vogt, Emmett Shear, and Michael Seibel.
Flickr / Karen / Via Flickr: misbehave
The genesis of Twitch, one of the most popular gaming-related Websites and applications in the world, can be traced to a few informal meetings in the fall of 2010, including one with Gideon Yu.
The former chief financial officer of YouTube, who negotiated that site's $1.65 billion sale to Google and parlayed some of his windfall into a 5% ownership stake in the San Francisco 49ers, came by Justin.tv's offices — which by then had raised $8 million in venture capital and had begun to generate revenue by morphing from a site originally conceived to stream the life of co-founder Justin Kan into a platform where anyone can stream video.
According to Michael Seibel, another Justin.tv co-founder, Yu came in and gave the company the kick in the pants it needed.
"He came by and basically said, 'You guys have got something, it's making some money, but you haven't really made anything of significant impact, so you can sit on your ass and make a salary and not run this like a startup, or you can build something real out," Seibel said.
That meeting, coupled with other conversations like one Kan had with SAY Media's Matt Sanchez, convinced the team to start a few skunkworks projects internally. Taken together, the discussions with Yu and Sanchez marked the start of a process that would eventually morph Justin.tv into two companies with two different missions — Twitch, a site consisting of video streams of people playing video games, and Socialcam, a mobile app for sharing video.
It also marked the beginning of Justin.tv co-founder Emmett Shear's evolution from engineer to executive, an unlikely ascent that transformed Twitch into one of the most valuable video-streaming companies in the world. Now Twitch is among the companies on Google's shopping list, being eyed for a reported price of around one billion dollars. (The company announced Tuesday that it would wind down Justin.tv's operations in order to devote all of its resources to Twitch.)
Shear and Vogt, wearing one of the original prototype "livecasting" cameras, in 2007.
Flickr / Brian Caldwell / Via Flickr: briancaldwell
Childhood friends Shear and Kan both attended The Evergreen School for Gifted Children on the northern end of Seattle. They were bonded by their proficiency in accelerated mathematics and Magic: the Gathering, one of the most famous fantasy-focused collectible card games. (Shear is actually known for playing a persistently frustrating version of the game dubbed "draw-go," in which the player does nothing on their actual turn but has an answer to everything his or her opponent plays.)
Though they went to separate high schools, they worked together as part of a NASA competition and eventually attended Yale together. They began working on their first startup, a Google-calendar like app called Kiko, during their senior year.
There was little evidence at the time of Kiko's founding that Shear would blossom into the leader he is today. He was an expert engineer, a coder who would stay up late into the night fixing the company's ever-changing (and ever-breaking) software. In Silicon Valley parlance, Shear was the "technical co-founder" that is often paired with someone with a good sense for design and product or a strong marketer who can sell a service to the masses. By the time Kiko was sold — on eBay of all places — for somewhere around $250,000, the entrepreneurial itch had taken hold of Shear and Kan.
"I wanted to build internet companies, and by the end of college I knew that," Shear told BuzzFeed. "I entered college thinking I wanted to go into science, but I realized my passion was doing more engineering-oriented things."
Shear and Kan next pitched Paul Graham, founder of prestigious Silicon Valley startup academy Y Combinator, on a service that laid out and printed web content into a physical coffee table book. Graham's response: "What else do you guys have?" That's when the duo pitched the idea of a 24/7 show of Kan's life streamed over the Internet.
Graham's response to this pitch, Kan said, was: "That sounds crazy enough that I'd fund it." They left the meeting with a check for $50,000 and their second acceptance into Y Combinator. (Kiko being the first.)
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