Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Shear: Product-market fit doesn't reduce startup work, it shifts the sprint

Emmett Shear · 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale · Feb 21, 2020 · at 10:14

Emmett Shear, co-founder and CEO of Twitch, uses a boulder analogy to describe how execution changes before and after finding product-market fit.

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“Product market fit is just as much work. It's a different kind of work, but you're sprinting after it as hard as you can, barely keeping up with this boulder rolling downhill, rather than agonizingly trying to push it up the hill.”

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Insight
Shear: Org structure has only two moves: centralizing and decentralizing
“There is a fundamental tension or trade-off between centralizing and decentralizing, and those are really the only two moves.”
Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 14:22 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale
Insight
Shear: Growing companies inevitably require reorgs every 18 to 36 months
“You just sort of inevitably wind up on a 18, 24 month, 36 month beat, having a reorg at some level. And that's not something to fear, but something that you should embrace.”
Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 16:46 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale
Insight
Shear: Communities cannot be built directly, they must be grown like gardens
“The particular object level advice would be that you don't build communities, you grow them. Your communities are more like a garden than they are a building. And like a garden, it's important that you, there's things you can do to make the garden more likely …”
Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 29:11 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale
Insight
Shear: Early startup CEOs must lead product or sales, not allocate resources
“So in the beginning, that's, I think that's absolutely not true. Like, I think that you're a six person startup. The best CEO is either an amazing salesperson or an amazing product leader. Or a brilliant engineer, and they, whatever it is that the company real…”
Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 23:24 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale
Disclosure
Twitch pitched around 40 VCs before raising post-pivot round with Bessemer
“The first VC round after the pivot was with Bessemer and we struggled to raise that round. We had to pitch a lot of VCs, but Bessemer is amazing, but like we probably pitched four EVCs in that round. It was a struggle. Nobody wanted to invest in Twitch at firs…”
Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 30:46 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale
Prediction Held up
Shear predicts Twitch will expand into non-gaming live streaming over five years
“For Twitch, I think the next five years is all about growing the base of the kinds of content that you can live stream. And interact around and making that really easy.”
Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 32:19 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale
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