The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Stebbings: Hot seed rounds raised by executive founders consistently underperformed
“I looked at the seeds, and I looked at those that haven't really worked, and all of those that haven't really worked have often been head of product at Twitter, head of product at Twitch, head of product at amazing company, the hottest of hot seed rounds with …”
Paik: Poaching creators from rival platforms using minimum guarantees never works
“On navigating competitive environments, I think seeing Twitch firsthand gave me one of my mental frameworks, which is, are like companies or platforms that start with the explicit strategy of poaching, like economically incentivizing supply from another platfo…”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
Maples: Floodgate returned 300x on Twitter, 205x on Lyft, 94x on Twitch
“Twitter was a little over 300 X and gets all the credit for Lyft, that was like about two, 205 X what else? Applied. Applied is probably encroaching on a hundred X in the first check. Twitch got close, but not quite there. It got to 94 X.”
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.”
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…”
Kan: The happiness of selling Twitch for $1B lasted a week
“When we sold Twitch, Almost a billion dollars. Like I was very happy for one day, two days, even a week. But after that, I was just, I remember, you know, kind of just went, okay, that's the new normal. And now I'm back here at my baseline.”
Maples: Backed Cruise Over Internal Pushback Because Kyle Vogt Made Him Money
“I came in and I said, I want to do this cruise deal. I think that Kyle's really smart. He made me money on Twitch and I, you know, I've decided I want to do it. And a lot of people read me the riot act and said, this is crazy.”
Amazon's Twitch Acquisition Exceeded $1 Billion After Employee Retention Packages
“We ended up selling to Twitch To Amazon for nine or seventy million dollars. Does that annoy you that it's not a billion? I think they specifically did that, but you know, it's after retention, it was over a billion”
Twitch succeeded by focusing on broadcaster retention from day one
“There is one platform like this. It's called Twitch. Twitch from the get go focused on broadcaster attention.”
Justin Kan: Navigating nightlife sober forces you to build real confidence
“I would never have thought that I could have fun without being hammered at nightlife before, but it's kind of like having to actually just live your life in Normal mode instead of easy mode, you know, and figure out how you can have the confidence and be okay …”
Kan wanted to quit Twitch and Justin.tv every single summer
“When I was in my first section of my entrepreneurial career, you know, building Justin TV and Twitch, I remember that every summer I would want to quit and go get a job or do something else.”
Kurzweil: Direct Pattern Matching in VC Creates Investment Traps
“A lot of people do look for the exact repetition of history, and they'll look for the pattern recognition of this type of founder, this type of company, and just applying it to some other area, and I'd say, you know, it's very tempting to do that, and I think …”
Maples: Invested in Twitch When Justin Kan Wore Camera Cap
“Twitch.tv started out as justin.tv and literally I invested when Justin Kahn walked into a coffee shop with a camera on his baseball cap with wires going into a backpack.”
Allebest: Chess.com was live streaming on Justin.tv before Twitch existed
“We were doing live streaming back when it was justin.tv long before it was Twitch.”
Shear: Twitch CEO role shifted to resource allocation around 400 employees
“And I think for me at Twitch, that happened somewhere around 400 people. It stopped being something where my main job was to figure out what we should do and where we should go and how to meet the customer needs and started being more about deciding where to a…”