hello everybody does it actually work yes all right so uh this was us in 2005 uh we were just out of college uh we packed ourselves into my Civic and we drove up into Boston where we've just been accepted thankfully into the summer Founders program uh it's very first year our backup plan was to go live with our parents so that was great both Justin and I were very relieved that we could get our own place albeit a uh little tiny bedroom in Roxbury which is all we could afford at the time and uh that
summer was amazing uh I still to this day don't quite know what they saw in us uh to accept us because looking back on it we knew none of the things we needed uh in order to succeed in startups and we missed my first slide which is a big slide that says imagine in front of you don't give up uh because that's the only important uh thing that I really had going in uh when we started here was a determination not to give up because if you look back on it we kind of knew how
to program we weren't very good in retrospect we didn't really know what we were doing uh I thought that you had to use a database from java I didn't understand that that was like a separate thing and that they had nothing to do with each other uh I was we really really didn't know what we were doing we didn't know how to make product decisions we didn't know how to raise money we didn't know how to hire people we certainly didn't know how to manage people and we had basically none of the skills all we
had what was a desire to make it happen and an amazing support network of people who were helping us make it happen and so we started our our company Kiko calendar um and Kiko calendar was a story in just repeated mistake and failure um we were we were building basically Google Calendar I wasn't called that at the time because Google Calendar hadn't been released but we'd seen Gmail as had almost everyone else and we and about nine other companies Al had the same brilliant idea at the same time which is we should make a calendar
that works like gmail which is actually a pretty good idea it turns out but everyone had that same idea so it probably wasn't a great startup to start at the time anyway so not only did we have a kind of not so great idea but we couldn't stay focused on it for more than like five weeks in a row so we had like this founder add we'd go and we'd uh work on Kiko for about five weeks and then it wouldn't it wouldn't explode overnight mysteriously for some reason and we get demoralized and we'd give
up and we go la build and launch some other product like a social network families or uh a search engine for Myspace um Myspace was big at the time not Facebook so just you know context and uh we built actually we built a something called sound zap which was a uh imagine SoundCloud but built by people who didn't have any idea of or any vision for how to grow it from there and uh we we just we we we did get a really great education in prototyping products like we built and launched I think no
less than six uh startup ideas in a year and a half uh and we kept going back to Kiko when that inevitably also failed to explode and so uh we learned a lot through that we learned a lot about how uh add definitely prevents you from succeeding we learned about how to program I was much better by the end of that than I was at the beginning as was Justin we hired our first employees um screwed up hiring our first employees and managing them but uh learning experience and then we sold it on eBay because
uh Google Calendar had been launched and we had no idea how to compete with that so uh that takes us uh to The Next Step so we we knew after we did that we wanted to keep doing startups um we'd sold it on eBay for about A4 million dollar which at the time was like a inconceivably large amount of money we didn't keep all of that our investors got most of it but still it was it was H seemed like sort of a win um and we raised more money from YC with uh this basic
concept that we were going to build a reality television show around Justin's life um again I'm not sure the the their decision- making by YC Looking Back Now looks good but at the time I I can't really understand what they were thinking um so so we knew at the time we knew two things we knew we were missing two really crucial skills uh in order to make a startup happen we needed someone who could keep us from just like Meandering to build a third startup so we brought on um our friend from college Michael cyel
um to be the CEO and be uh be our be our our parent sort of you know keep us uh product focused uh guys from getting add and leaving the project and keep us on on the straight and narrow and we promised him we'd move to New York really quick um it would be great he should just come up to Silicon Valley for us to uh uh to launch it we'll raise some money and we'll move to New York and that was that was all lies we never moved to New York um I think we
kind of intended to but not really um and so then we uh we brought on Kyle our fourth co-founder because we needed someone who actually knew how to build Hardware like we we were thought we were smart but we were like kind of juniores programmers at the time and definitely couldn't build uh what we thought we needed to build uh for Justin TV to launch it um to launch a live 247 reality TV television show she brought Kyle in for that and this was our awesome four person founding team um four-person founding teams are generally
a bad idea ours worked uh I don't generally recommend it uh but something about the the way the Team Dynamics gel uh made it function and we launched the show and uh it was our first time launching a show where we got the attention of the whole country I mean maybe not everybody but like a lot of people heard about us we were on an Curry on like the morning show we like we we built something that people outside of Silicon Valley cared about and that was really really cool and we had this awesome Spike
of growth we had hit like 150,000 uniques in the first month and then it turns out we like have no no idea what we were doing in terms of producing reality television we did not understand that um so we went back to what we knew about which was the technology and the platform the thing we'd spent the previous year and a half working on and we opened up the Justin TV platform to everyone and made it into the uh website you may have actually visited at some point which is a platform for anyone to broadcast
live video um and so uh the come on there we go okay so you can see Justin TV uh being flat for a very long time as we had no idea what we were doing and bumbled around with the reality television show you can see that bend in the curve that's us figuring out oh yeah we should probably just not produce the content and let other people do it um it was really important that we didn't give up right so the the key thing that happened there is we had a failed project and a failed
startup like it wasn't working we were it was clearly going nowhere but rather than give up on it we deci said okay how do we repurpose this how do we keep going we somehow managed to raise money despite the fact that it was not a good idea um like before we opened the platform people believed in us and gave us money there sort of a current theme Here We convince people to Believe in Us and give us money before we actually had figured it out uh and that's uh that was really really good for us
because it let us it let us keep going and not give up but we would have kept going anyways I think we would we all really committed even if we hadn't been able to draw draw a salary which we couldn't for months in the middle uh we would have kept going um so then it's great it we got product Market fit or we sort of thought we did we didn't really but we we'd hit something we'd like stumbled accidentally into something people really wanted and the growth sort of speaks to that and so then you
get to this period in just TV's history where you have some growth and everyone's really excited and it's really just heads down I've never scaled anything before so this is another skill we didn't have I had no idea how to run a web service that got more than like three users at a time uh and now that did Kyle and so we had a lot of downtime a lot of downtime kept growing anyways uh and got a lot better at it learned how to scale a web service um and then uh the ne the sad
thing happened which is that we didn't understand what was generating our growth and so we couldn't cause it to keep going we hit some point and stopped growing and it was totally mysterious to us why this happened like we didn't we really if you'd asked us why were you growing 3 months ago and you're not growing now we would not have been able to tell you because we couldn't have told you why we started growing in the first place other than we made some changes and it seemed like it worked uh so we kept going
we kept going for for years we realized okay well we're not growing uh it's 2008 so if you cast your mind back the market has totally collapsed uh there's no way we're going raise money and we were like well we better start making some money and so we worked really hard on monetizing our site we cut costs uh and we clawed our way I wouldn't call it profitability but at least we'd staunch the bleeding and then we kind of found ourselves stuck in this place where what do we do now like we've got this thing
we could stay here we hav able to make it profitable we could work on it for a while you know it's not really going anywhere and so we had this moment where we all met up and we like we need need to do something with this company and there's sort of two schools of thought one of them was uh mobile uh at the time the iPhone was new and we thought there's this real opportunity to build uh mobile video there was no good mobile video players in the space and we thought that that that could
be big and there was this sort of second idea around gaming um which I was interested in primarily because it was the only content on Justin TV that I personally watched um and we actually said okay this time rather than just launch random features and see but I don't know just sort of guess whether they worked or not we're going to set real goals for two projects one around mobile one around gaming and we're going to try to hit those goals and so we set up two teams internally um one led by uh Michael our
then CEO uh which turned into social cam one up getting spun off um and then a second one led by me uh and uh in partnership with Kevin Lynn who was our coo um and the two of us really believed in the gaming part mostly because we're big Gamers and uh I done some handwavy math about how IGN was big so maybe we could be too and uh we we' looked into it and so okay there's no really content issues with this we can we can go get the gaming content it's not incredibly expensive the
way Sports would be and uh we realized that advertisers were okay with gaming um we were like okay great all the market research is done let's go do it um that basically was in fact the ENT of the market research and so uh that was this this project that was code named zarth um anyone who's ever worked with me knows that I love code names um I will code name anything I will code name reorgs I will code name like moving the kitchen anything I love code name so our project code name for This was
zarth um which no one else in the company loved but I really loved and I actually really wanted to launch twitch as zarth but uh they wouldn't let me so we had to come with a new name um and the best thing about uh about the work we did then was that that was when uh that was when the light bulb went off that was when uh I finally sort of I guess made the the final step this is five six years into as an entrepreneur uh and got the had put together all the skills
I needed to actually run a company I could I could build products I understood the engineering side I could manage people I'd spent years painfully making mistakes losing lots of employees sorry Eric sorry Tim you were learning experiences um and uh we we I i' figured out how to do um you know hiring we figured out how to scale products if we needed to um we knew I knew about how make companies might make money might lose money um and what I finally could do uh when we were when we were here is I I
finally got the extra bonus skill of figuring out how to talk to users so now you're all thinking I've heard about you have to talk to users yeah yeah yeah of course I talked to users and I thought I talked to users before uh we did uh before we did twitch I was wrong I didn't actually understand how to talk to users and 80% of you when you go start your startup we'll make the exact same mistake I did which is you go talk to some users and you'll think you've done it right it's really
hard uh it's something that we you know we train product managers on when they uh when they come into the company it's something that I think is uh really one of the key skills for a startup founder it certainly was for me one of the missing skills um and so we finally built things for our users it was like we'd been we've been bumbling around in the dark trying to get across the room right and if you got across the room that's product Market fit and so we'd be like aha we know it's that way
and then we'd go oh ah stepped on a Lego bump my leg foot into a chair and that's like that was what building stuff was like and you could actually make progress that way every time you hit something you back up and you you know go around and then you hit something else you back up you go around and eventually you like get closer and closer to the direction you want to go in it was like I just turned the light switch on oh I see there's some Legos there and the chair is there and
I should just like walk in this path and I'll get across the room and it was really it was really a magical experience and you put all of those things six year accumulation of six years of experience together of basically more or less failing to do the right thing in a startup together and you finally got um Twitch TV which we launched uh at E3 uh in 2011 uh about 9 months after the project started and about 4 months after I had this Epiphany and uh this logo is not very good my designer is probably
very it's not bad my designer's very unhappy I put it up here because he's not happy with it because I made him do it in like 24 hours because I was like oh right we need a logo we're launching in 24 hours make it um and uh and so he did I actually think he did a pretty good job for a 24-hour logo um and that was the whole thing of twitch was like we basically just threw these like two or three things together like we didn't do that much work compared to the amount of
work we' done for Justin TV we applied it in the right places in the right uh directions um because we finally knew what we were doing well enough to apply it apply our effort efficiently um and that was uh that was twitch and actually from that point on the story gets like way more boring because we basically did the same thing over and over and over again we went and we talked to the users we'd ask them like what do you want and we'd get to know that what what their not just what they wanted
but like what their life goals were and like their experiences they have today how they made money today what their jobs were like uh what they wanted to do and we identifi really importantly which users were the most important to us and that was the broadcasters we had to build a place that was amazing for people to broadcast gaming video and we had to build a place that was amazing for gamers um and so we would just cycle that we would talk to them we'd go build stuff some of them would switch we'd get enough
leverage that uh through promotion that we could get bring more people onto the platform we started being able to do business development deals because we got bigger don't do business development deals if you're starting a company it's like useless uh you see big companies do it or even mediumsized startups do it sometimes it can be quite effective later uh don't don't imitate them it doesn't work early uh every time we tried to do a business development deal during Justin TV when we didn't have a product that was taking off it was a gigantic distraction and
waste of time they only it's only beneficial once you get later on into the process um at any rate so you've probably seen this graph before uh I think this graph was actually inspired by Justin TV because this is this is what it feels like doing a startup and this is what Justin TV and uh felt like the whole time which is this Rush of excitement in the beginning as you're first building something that you are really excited about you have this idea it's awesome you're taking it to the world this long period of like
pain where it doesn't work and you don't know what you're doing and you are probably screwing it up like you could probably if everyone was super skilled and knew everything they need to know from day one they might be able to enter that growth curve immediately but you just can't you have to massive learning experience and learning experience is specific to every startup that's why I don't really think giving generic startup advice usually works because even that business development advice I just gave that's wrong like some number of people that's that's actually the completely the
wrong advice you should actually go do bis Dev deals before you even launch your company uh I don't know what startup that would be for but there's got to be one out there that that fits that pattern and So eventually it gets better I think that's the the real message eventually if you stick with it uh even if you have to change your idea even if you have to uh pivot the coal company in a different direction uh if you have to start over with a new product idea entirely uh you get there eventually you
get something that is uh actually working and it's it's a reflection of you as much it as it is of learning about the domain I mean being a domain expert is valuable but you also have to build the skills and we I know when we started Justin TV when we started Kiko way back in 2005 we didn't have the skills and it was only through sticking with it the entire time that we built them so don't give up um and uh if you just keep at it you will get better and even if you're first
doesn't work maybe your second one will um in my case it took three tries uh uh I'm apparently a bit of a slow learner because the other people seem to have done it faster sometimes but uh this was a it was a great experience the whole time and if you don't love it you won't make it through the long period of pain that is inevitable so uh make sure that you take care of yourself during the process make sure that you take care of uh your mental health your physical health while you're doing it because
it's a long road um I think earlier they were saying you it takes an average of eight years it took us eight years like eight and a half and uh that's that's normal in fact it could have easily taken longer um the Amazon Deal kind of came out of nowhere we weren't really looking to sell the company we weren't expecting to and so uh it could have been 9 years 10 years before you you saw uh any kind of exit or end of the road on that stuff and for me it isn't even the end
of the road I mean I I actually after eight years of this I love it I like really like doing it and uh and for me it's something I want to keep doing going forward indefinitely into the future um I really enjoy en it and so that's really the most important thing is stick with it all the way and don't give up um and that's the most important thing it's the only way to succeed in startups thank you
