Emmett Shear at Startup School SV 2014

Founding Background (2005)

• The founders, fresh out of college, joined the Summer Founders Program in Boston, admitting they lacked essential startup skills, including understanding database architecture, hiring, and management.
• Their primary asset was a determination to persist despite building a company, Kiko Calendar, in a saturated market where nine other startups held the same "Gmail-like calendar" idea.

Kiko Calendar and Initial Failure

• The founders suffered from "founder ADD," cycling through six different startup ideas in 18 months (including a family social network, a MySpace search engine, and "Sounds App") before returning to Kiko.
• Kiko failed to gain traction after Google Calendar launched; the founders sold the company to eBay for approximately $250,000, with investors receiving the majority of the proceeds.

Pivot to Justin.tv

• Post-exit, the founders raised Y Combinator funding to launch a reality TV show around Justin's life, a project that initially stalled due to a lack of production expertise.
• To fix operational issues, they added Michael Seibel as CEO to enforce focus and Kyle as a hardware co-founder to enable live streaming capabilities.
• Strategic Pivot: After realizing they could not compete in professional reality TV production, they opened the Justin.tv platform to allow anyone to broadcast live video, effectively pivoting from content creation to a broadcasting platform.
• Growth Trajectory: The platform hit 150,000 unique users in its first month post-pivot, though the founders initially could not replicate this growth or understand the metrics driving it.

Market Challenges and Internal Reorganization

• Facing the 2008 market collapse and an inability to raise capital, the company focused on cost-cutting and monetization to stop financial bleeding.
• Leadership established two internal teams with specific goals: one focused on mobile video (which spun off as SocialCam) and another focused on gaming (codenamed "Xarth" or "Zarth").
• The gaming team, led by the speaker and COO Kevin Lin, bypassed extensive market research, relying instead on the founder's personal gaming experience and assumptions about advertising viability.

The Twitch Breakthrough

• The speaker identified a critical missing skill: the ability to effectively talk to users to understand their specific needs and life goals.
• Twitch Launch: Applying accumulated skills from previous failures, Twitch was launched at E3 in 2011, roughly nine months after the project began.
• Product-Market Fit Strategy: The company focused specifically on broadcasters (sellers) and gamers (buyers), iterating based on direct user feedback rather than guesswork.
• The speaker explicitly advises against pursuing business development deals early in a company's lifecycle, noting they are often a distraction until a product achieves traction.

Long-term Metrics and Exit

• The journey from Kiko to Twitch's acquisition by Amazon spanned eight to eight-and-a-half years, characterized by a long period of "pain" and learning before scaling.
• The sale to Amazon was unplanned and unexpected, occurring after the founders had achieved profitability and product-market fit.
• The speaker emphasizes that persistence, even after pivoting multiple times, is the critical factor in startup success, as skills are often built only through the process of failure.

Key Takeaways for Founders

• Generic startup advice is often ineffective because every company's learning curve is unique to its specific domain and founder dynamics.
• Mental and physical health maintenance is essential for surviving the typical 8+ year runway of a startup.
• Success requires loving the process enough to endure the inevitable period of failure and uncertainty.