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
Seibel: Twitch would have failed without his three technical co-founders
“I was the single non-technical person on a four-person co-founding team at JustinTV and Twitch, and like I'll just make it plain, without my three other co-founders, none of that shit happens.”
Seibel: Justin.tv hit breakeven in two months and generated $1.2M profit
“By October, we were breakeven. By the end of December, we had generated 1.2 million dollars in profit, and we saved the company.”
Seibel: Justin.tv faced imminent death with $500K cash and $250K burn
“We had raised about seven or eight million dollars. We had grown to about, I don't know, let's say like thirty million monthly people were watching content. We were making about 750,000 dollars a month in revenue, but we were, we had a million dollars a month …”
Seibel: Gamers were 20% of Justin.tv traffic for years before Twitch launched
“Gamers have been streaming on Justin TV since almost the beginning. At any given time, they were 20% of our traffic for years.”
Seibel: Justin.tv reached $24M in five years, then $1B in three
“And if you look at the history of Justin TV, in the first five years, it went from being worth nothing to being worth about twenty four million dollars. In the next three years, it went being worth twenty four million dollars to being worth a billion.”
Seibel: Justin.tv survived due to technical founders, low spending, and ego
“Those were the three things that saved our company, made our company work, and strangely, I don't even think, if you take one of those things away, any one of them, we would have died.”
Seibel: Early Justin.tv founders paid themselves $500 monthly
“We were each given 500 dollars a month walking around money, which technically is against the law because it was below minimum wage, but who cares about laws?”
Buchheit: Acquirers rejected Justin.tv because they believed the team lacked talent
“So this company, they actually even tried to do an acquihire several years in, but no one would acquihire them because they thought they didn't have any talent. They couldn't do a talent acquisition because the acquirers thought there was no talent.”
Seibel: Paul Buchheit's advice is why Justin.tv and Twitch exist
“Paul Buhite, he basically threw a piece of advice as the reason why we built a video system, which is the reason why Justin TV could exist, which is the reason why Twitch could exist.”
The idea for Twitch came only after Justin.tv achieved profitability
“Well, and what's crazy is the idea for Twitch happened after that.”
Justin.tv Succeeded When Founders Stopped Copying Competitors, Says Seibel
“The company only started working when Emmett and Kevin started actually talking to the users and figuring out what they wanted. Instead of, you know, the years where all of us just looked at each other, all the competitors just looked at each other, copying ea…”
Seibel: Programmers avoided starting code before lunch due to midday interruption
“Nothing got done before lunch. Like, getting to work was all about, like, getting in, answering your email, doing a couple meetings, like, it was just, like, no one who was writing code even wanted to start writing code before lunch, because lunch was the big,…”
Seibel says Justin.tv made $8 million in its first monetization year
“The first year we really tried to monetize, he made eight million dollars in annual revenue”
Seibel: Justin.tv secretly delayed celebrity streams to scale video servers
“So what happened now in this setup is that some celebrity would start streaming, they would think they were live, no one was seeing their stream, while we were propagating their stream to all the video servers that are needed, and then suddenly the stream woul…”
Seibel: Justin.tv used a manual button to turn overloaded pages static
“So we actually had a button that could make any page on Justin TV a static page. All those features would stop working. Your name wouldn't appear, the view count wouldn't update, like, literally a static page that loaded our video player, and You couldn't touc…”
Seibel: Before Stripe, accepting credit cards required a 30-page contract
“It took us three months to start accepting credit cards. I think there was a 30 page contract that we had to read and figure out a sign.”
Seibel: Justin.tv reached 30 million monthly visitors while struggling financially
“Even though the company wasn't doing well for years, we always had a lot of traffic, you know, like the company wasn't doing well and we had like thirty million monthly visitors, like, and we were streaming like years of video to them.”
Seibel: Justin.tv's 2006 chat-right, video-left layout survived unchanged on Twitch
“The major product decisions that Justin TV made that carried through to Twitch to today was chat on the right, video on the left. We decided that in 2006. It is the same way, 2018.”
Seibel: Justin.tv's biggest product mistake was spending months swinging for home runs
“Our mistake was that at JustinTV. It was thinking every time, we've got the home run. Let's only swing for home runs. And of course, it would take three months to do it, because we gotta make it perfect, right? And then the whole spike, spiral of death.”
Buchheit: Kyle Vogt built Justin.tv's streaming server in a single weekend
“It turns out it took him maybe like a whole weekend, but he did in fact write their own streaming media server, and this is actually the reason that Justin TV survived it all. Right? Because they, there was no way the business was viable if they were paying so…”