Justin Kan
General Partner, Goat Capital. On 3 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Justin Kan is best known as the co-founder of Justin.tv and live-streaming platform Twitch, and formerly served as a partner at Y Combinator. He has since founded companies including Atrium and actively invests in early-stage startups through Goat Capital.
3shows
5appearances
47statements
6resolved
5supported
0contradicted
83%fully supported
33said about them ↓ Everything Justin Kan said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Justin Kan: Many Silicon Valley Startups Succeed Despite Management, Driven by PMF
“I think a lot of companies in Silicon Valley, Kind of succeed despite their management, actually, not because of it. And what I mean by that is, like, the idea was so good that a bunch of 25 year olds could run the company, right? That core product market fit …”
Justin Kan Defends Zenefits Founder Parker Conrad as an Impressive Leader
“I always think that he is like a very impressive founder and someone who is like relentlessly bent on growing his company.”
Justin Kan: Venture Capital Is Easy Because VCs Do No Real Work
“Because you don't do any of the real work. You know, like, this is, I can, I talk to founders all day, and I give them my advice, and they either do it or they don't do it. But at the end of the day, you know, I, you don't have any control. And so you wait, se…”
Kan: Y Combinator is so stable you "can't fuck it up"
“And the time at YC was nice because YC is very stable as an organization. It's a brand. People want to go there. You know, you kind of like can't fuck it up really. And so the kind of mental burden was like way off by comparison to startups.”
Justin Kan: First-Time Founders Must Take Market Risk, Veterans Execution Risk
“When you have nothing going for you, except for you're like willing to put in hard amount, you know, like long hours and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears Then you should focus on things that are like, where there's a lot of market risk, because ideas where the…”
Justin Kan: Repeat Founders Have No Advantage Finding Consumer Product-Market Fit
“Like, I don't have any advantage in finding product market fit with a consumer app more than the twenty-two-year-old Justin.”
Justin Kan: Emmett Shear Was the Only Founder Who Believed in Twitch
“When we pivoted Justin TV to Twitch, nobody believed that there would, and this was a market, right? No one believed, no investors, very few of our, even internal employees like believe, and even the founders were skeptical. You know, Emmett deserves the credi…”
Justin Kan Was Too Rich to Waste Time With Slow Seed Rounds
“But for me personally, you know, where it's an execution risk business, I'm too rich to like, Fuck around with the like, you know, ok, I'm just going to do a seed round and like, and just like take a long time, right? Like for me, speed to market and execution…”
YC Continuity Fund Was Designed to Compete With Public Market Investors
“The continuity fund originally was conceived of as a way to compete with more of the growth stage investors that were coming into the market in the later stage. So that's people who weren't actually classically VCs. I think as you've seen like tech companies, …”
Kan refuses to build startups through constant stress and fear
“Maybe I don't think it's the case, but it could be the case of like being super wound up about like your company is what's going to work best, but I'm not going to live that way. So we're going to run the experiment and see if this works.”
Kan on shutting down Atrium: laying off 180, losing tens of millions
“By doing that, I was able to pay off a 180 people and tell a bunch of people I'd lost millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, and be okay, and know like, oh, this is gonna pass, and I'm okay with it, and I mean, it sucks right now, it's, this experie…”
Kan: Incumbent law firms are heavily incentivized not to innovate
“Found a lot of things that I thought were like broken about the legal market and legal industry that created incentives for the incumbents themselves. Not to change.”
Kan: Founders have a fiduciary duty to investors to avoid burnout
“And if you burn out, you are not doing yourself or your investors or your employees or your customers any favors. You need to like retain yourself. And so you need to create a situation inside your company where you are going to be retained for a long time. I …”
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.”
Kan: It is a myth that founders must suffer to build startups
“I think people feel like they have to suffer in order to do a startup, and I actually just disagree with that. I don't think you have to suffer. You're going to experience pain, definitely. Things aren't always going to go right, but you don't have to suffer.”
Kan: Treating Atrium like an investor was my biggest early mistake
“I think I approached Atrium with a little bit too much of an investor attitude in the beginning, which was a little bit too much like hands off. Like I'm just going to build a team and the team is going to do everything without like really myself getting in th…”
Justin Kan: Atrium Raised Seed Funding From Over 90 Silicon Valley Investors
“And so we ended up going out and raising money for our seed round of, you know, over 90 different investors from all over Silicon Valley because I felt like it would be really good to have those investors on our side and recommending Atrium as a channel partne…”
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”
Justin Kan: Snapchat Is the Most Compelling Product of the Past Decade
“Their product teams are like pretty good and they've Really built a, what I think is the most compelling product I've seen in the last 10 years.”
Kan: Committing to permanent sobriety is easier than temporary breaks
“But the part of it, I think more of it was just like knowing that there was no, like, Something to wait for at the end of the tunnel. Like it was just like, oh, this is the way it is the new normal for the rest of my life. That was my commitment made it way ea…”
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 …”
Justin Kan: Quitting alcohol is tech's easiest performance optimization
“Yeah, I think it's becoming much more socially acceptable and in this, I guess, especially in Silicon Valley, you know, where people are looking for all these performance optimization things and they're intermittent fasting and eating keto and meditating and l…”
Kan: Learning as a startup founder is an inherently painful process
“When you're the founder of a startup, you are forced to learn things. The thing I forgot about that process is that when you're learning is actually mostly a painful process. And what I mean by that is it's mostly involves failing at things until you finally g…”
The other half of the tape: Justin Kan's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 32 times in 21 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 17Alex Lieberman 4Steve Huffman 3Mike Maples 2Emmett Shear 2Jon Dishotsky 1Immad Akhund 1Eric Glyman 1
Statements about Justin Kan, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 27
Founder's Journal 4
the a16z Podcast 1
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 5 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Competing in a Crowd of Incumbents with Mercury's Immad Akhund
- First Time Founders vs. Second Time Founders
- Why Storytelling is the Key to Your Pitch
- Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- How to Crush Investor Updates
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
- 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
- 20VC: Floodgate's Mike Maples on 3 Key Breakthroughs Startups Experience in Success, The Rise of Angel and Operator Funds, Multi-Stage Funds Re-Entering Seed Investing and The Insight Development Framework
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 8 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on Scaling Teams; What Works and What Does Not, A CEO's Relationship with Stress and Managing It & How To Structure Internal Decision-Making Effectively
- 20VC: Y Combinator's New President, Geoff Ralston on The Single Most Important Perspective An Investor Can Provide A Founder, The Biggest Lessons From Working Alongside Paul Graham & Why You Will Lose As An Investor If You "Profile Invest"
- 20VC Exclusive: Roy Bahat on Bloomberg Beta's New Fund, The Truth About Valuation That Very Few VCs Will Tell You & Why Founders of Venture Backed Startups Make The Best Angels
- 20VC: Mercury Founder Immad Akhund on Why Angel Investing Makes Founders Better Operators, The Right Way For Founders To Discuss and Present Competition To Investors & How To Think About Your Initial Wedge Into The Market and How It Expands Over Time
- 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige
- 20VC: The Power Of A Concentrated Seed Portfolio, Why Operational Value Add Models At Seed Do Not Make Sense & Why We Will See A Shakeout Of Growth Stage Investors with Roger Ehrenberg, Founder & Managing Partner @ IA Ventures
- 20VC: Why You Should Build Your Investor Team Like A Sports Team & How To Leverage The Abilities Of Your Investors Effectively with Ted Blosser, Founder & CEO @ WorkRamp
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Floodgate's Mike Maples on What Makes Category Kings, What Most Venture Funds Do Wrong When Hiring & 'The Dance Of Product Market Fit'
- 20VC: Why The Whole Industry Is Backward Looking, The Best Funds Are Entrepreneur Led and Venture Is All About Access with Alex Bangash, Founder @ Trusted Insight
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
2015 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Justin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | General Partner, Goat Capital | 3 | 26 | 100% 4/4 | full record on 20VC → |
| a16zLEDGER | General Partner, Goat Capital | 1 | 15 | 0% 0/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| FOUNDER'S JOURNALLEDGER | General Partner, Goat Capital | 1 | 6 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Founder's Journal → |