Emmett Shear: Twitch, Justin.tv, Y-Combinator, Management, Founder to CEO | The Quest Pod S2:4
Welcome to The Quest Season 2: Episode 4 with Emmett Shear: where I catch up with my best friend and Twitch CEO on our memories of NASA experiments, building Twitch, and CEO lessons.
Emmett Shear is my co-founder and the CEO of Twitch, the world's biggest live-streaming platform. Growing up, Emmett and I never lived more than a mile and a half away from each other. We've always wanted to build things: from dreaming of our own Scientology-like religion to launching an experiment with NASA into space (which we actually did as high school students). Many of these experiments failed, one turned out different - and we sold it to Amazon for a billion dollars.
On this episode, we reminisce on how the past 10 years went. We talk about writing web applications, building Kiko and Justin.tv, what we learned as investors, and whether capitalism works. Being a CEO is challenging - it's especially great to hear Emmett share some of his learnings, many of which I resonate with deeply.
*Note: due to technical issues, this episode is audio-only.
0:00 Intro
0:38 Childhood, default ‘yes’ and NASA experiments
16:26 Yale days and becoming web programmers (Kiko)
24:23 Finding focus in chaos
31:24 Engineering user behavior (Justin.tv)
40:33 Selling Twitch, money and ego drives
51:02 The capitalism debate
1:13:08 China, democracy and dictatorships
1:19:29 Learning to step back
1:23:57 Building trust as a CEO
1:34:43 The future of Twitch
1:38:34 What went wrong with Justin.tv
1:48:43 Founders to leaders
2:01:57 Justin’s confession to Emmett
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