Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Shear: College offers unmatched intellectual capital access at the lowest opportunity cost

Emmett Shear · Twitch: Emmett Shear · Jul 18, 2022 · at 7:41

Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear recalls college friend Matt Fong's economic rationale for why they should launch a startup while undergraduates at Yale.

0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 we should start a company.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Emmett Shear

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.”
Emmett Shear Jul 18, 2022 ▶ 45:14 Twitch: Emmett Shear
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.”
Emmett Shear Jul 18, 2022 ▶ 1:00:49 Twitch: Emmett Shear
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.”
Emmett Shear Jul 18, 2022 ▶ 1:01:56 Twitch: Emmett Shear
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…”
Emmett Shear Jul 18, 2022 ▶ 1:07:00 Twitch: Emmett Shear
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.”
Emmett Shear Jul 18, 2022 ▶ 1:15:05 Twitch: Emmett Shear
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.”
Emmett Shear Jul 18, 2022 ▶ 11:02 Twitch: Emmett Shear
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 800 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.