Insight
Shear: Enterprise software requires good enough product and great sales to win
“It's not building great, beautiful software to win. It's building good enough software and great sales.”
Insight
Shear: Game streaming acts as marketing; movie streaming is substitution
“Watching a movie for free on a service instead of buying the movie to watch it is a substitution for what you're doing. But watching someone else play a game is actually marketing for the game.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shear: Twitch pitched 40 venture capital firms and every single one passed
“We talked to 40 VCs, everyone turned us down.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shear: Twitch revenue relies on mid-sized streamers, not top-tier channels
“What's interesting about Twitch is we actually have this very thriving middle class, because big streams monetize much more poorly per viewer than medium-sized streams do. And so there's this, most of the money actually gets made Not in the top tier of streame…”
Insight
Shear: Content cannot go viral on Twitch because broadcasts are ephemeral
“Unlike most social media, You can't really go viral on Twitch. It's almost, because it's live, it can't go, you can't get to, oh my god, look at this, millions of people see it. It's like, however many people saw it, it's over.”
Assertion Supported
Shear: Kiko built Google Calendar roughly a year before Google did
“Basically, we built Google Calendar roughly a year before Google Calendar was released.”
Insight
Shear: Great founders neither rebel nor acquiesce when challenged
“I think what YC is looking for is people who can communicate clearly, but most of all, people who, when they're challenged, they neither rebel nor acquiesce. And I think that's a, that's one of the most important traits in startup founders, actually.”
Insight
Shear: Early-stage angel investors should back strong teams with bad ideas
“In the beginning, the investable asset is not the idea and it's not the execution and it's not the research or whatever. The investable asset is the founders. And you're much better off investing in a good team that has no idea what they're doing or there was …”
Insight
Shear: Viewers prefer direct chat interaction over point-of-view activities
“Actually, one of the big things we discovered was, almost immediately, people liked him taking off the camera and talking to them more than they liked almost anything he could be doing. If he was doing something really interesting, like he's taking a trapeze l…”
Insight
Shear: Handling swatting incidents off-camera reduced streamer harassment
“We had the fire trucks called, and even if the fire trucks had showed up, we would deal with it off camera so that there wasn't a reward for the person doing it. And that it definitely over time Cut down on the amount of harassment we experienced.”
Insight
Shear: Justin.tv succeeded because the founders built for their own streamer needs
“I think Justin TV worked to some degree because our actual customer was the streamer. And because we were trying to build something that worked for us as a streamer we built something that actually worked because we deeply understood the needs of our customers…”
Assertion Supported
Shear: Justin.tv hit $1M annualized profit run rate in six months
“And six months later, we'd, we'd gotten to a million dollars a year of run, you know, a 100,000 dollars a month of profit.”
Insight
Shear: Persistent founders in Silicon Valley eventually find luck and success
“I've now been around the valley for 15 years, and I came here with a bunch of people who started making companies, and I don't know anyone who persisted and tried again and then tried a new thing and then tried again Who hasn't had some level of success. Event…”
Insight
Shear: College offers unmatched intellectual capital access at the lowest opportunity cost
“He looked around in college and he said specifically, not that we should start a company, but we have better access to intellectual capital today than we ever will in the future at a lower opportunity cost. And so we should take advantage of that, which means …”
Assertion Supported
Shear: Kiko Sold on eBay for $265,000 After 13 Bids
“It was on eBay. I believe 265,000 dollars was the winning bid. 13 bidders.”
Assertion Contradicted
Shear: Justin.tv reached 50 to 60 million monthly users around 2010
“I think, 50, sixty million a month.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shear: In 2011, just 200 streamers drove 80% of gaming viewership
“There were about 200 people who are streaming video games across every service, including ours, who garnered maybe 80% of the total audience at the time.”
Assertion Supported
Shear: Ustream Had More Gaming and Was Bigger Than Justin.tv in 2011
“Ustream was a live streaming competitor. They had more gaming and they were bigger than us.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shear: Justin.tv gaming grew 25-30% monthly for nine months before Twitch launch
“We'd been growing at 25%, 30% a month for Almost nine months before we ever launched Twitch.”
Assertion Supported
Shear: Twitch's final funding round before Amazon was valued at $100M
“The last round we raised had been a hundred million dollar valuation, not that long ago, a year ago, year and a half ago.”
Assertion Supported
Shear: Inaugural YC interviews lasted 40 minutes instead of modern 10 minutes
“The original YC was heavy on, like, show us a demo, and interviews are now 10 minutes. At the time, you've got 40 minutes per Per interview.”
Emmett Shear