⏰ Quest Minutes : Emmett Shear
Twitch, 10 Years Later
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👾 Introducing: Emmett Shear
To catch the full conversation with Emmett, click below:
Emmett Shear is an Internet entrepreneur, investor and childhood friend of Justin Kan. He is known as the:
Co-founder of Kiko, a web-based online calendar, alongside Justin and was a part of the first Y Combinator batch in 2005.
Co-founder of Justin.tv, and CEO of Twitch (acquired by Amazon for $970M)
Early Life
Emmett and Justin have been friends since second grade. During middle school, they would often walk around a nearby lake, brain-storming ideas for hours at a time. They dreamed big - though many of their ideas remained figments of their imagination.
Despite attending different high schools, they were reunited years later by a mutual friend who encouraged them to work on a project for a NASA sponsored competition. Initially, they had no clue what they were doing. But in true entrepreneurial fashion, they were able to scrap together just enough understanding to become one of the winning teams.
Bias towards action
The approach that Emmett and Justin took during that first project turned out to be invaluable in their future startup ventures.
Jumping into things head first with little to no background knowledge forced them to construct solutions to problems they faced from first principles rather than conventional wisdom. In startups, this approach may not be the quickest or easiest one, but it’s a crucial part of building an innovative product.
By becoming comfortable with this uncertainty, they strengthened their bias toward action: an attribute that served them well in a world where execution matters far more than ideas.
Getting into Y Combinator
As students at Yale, Emmett and Justin teamed up again to work on Kiko, a web-calendar app during their senior year. By sheer chance, they heard about Y Combinator and applied just before the deadline.
After they joined YC (turning down lucrative postgrad consulting jobs in the process), Emmett and Justin quickly realized that Kiko wasn’t working and pivoted a number of times.
They worked on over 5 different ideas before landing on Justin.tv, Everything from a music sharing site to a to-do list app to a social network for families.
While none of those ideas worked, they were still extremely valuable in accelerating the pair’s learning. Their prolific output during that time made them significantly better engineers.
Twitch origin story
Twitch really picked up steam when the team started producing their own live reality show. Back then it was called Justin.tv, a 24-hour livestream of Justin’s life. They focused on building features they wanted for themselves.
“We were building the software that we wished existed to help us produce the reality show of our dreams”
When they eventually stopped producing the show, they briefly lost their way because they didn’t focus on talking to users.
“Startups must build for themselves as a customer or for a specific customer they can talk to.“
Scaling as the CEO
When Emmett became the face of the company, he realized he had to change his view on management. Before, he thought he could contribute by being a good programmer or a product guy. As a leader, management became an important skill he had to learn just like any other. He credits books like High Output Management as instrumental to his learning.
Letting go
One of his biggest early challenges as CEO was allowing employees to make mistakes the same way he did in the past. He realized that it was much more effective to empower others to make their own decisions and learn from the outcome.
In 2014, Twitch sold to Amazon for $970M. Looking back, Emmett feels this was the right decision. He was exhausted and the acquisition allowed him to keep working on the company he loved without having to raise more money in the future.
Life at Amazon
Emmett’s biggest adjustment under Amazon was transitioning from a front-line to a rear-line leader. As the company scaled, it became too big for him to know every employee personally and to drive every decision. Instead he focused on encouraged individuals to act decisively on their own, and building trust so that they could understand the decision making process.
The Future of Twitch
Looking forward, Emmett wants to make it easier for people to build an audience on Twitch without streaming for 40+ hours per week. As they expand into niches like cooking and music, this will be a big part of supporting new creators.
✍🏼 Quest Fellows Feature: Andrew Tokar
Hi! I’m Andrew, a second year undergrad at Emory University studying Creative Writing and Film. Right now though, I’m on a gap year with the goal of getting some work experience and exploring my interests.
I first caught the entrepreneurial bug in high school when I started a few random side hustles including swim lesson coaching and a retail arbitrage business. I loved the feeling of building something from scratch and seeing money come in. Soon enough, I became obsessed with reading Techcrunch articles and decided that startups were my calling. In hindsight, I had no idea what I really wanted to do. I was probably more attracted to the flashy valuations I saw in those headlines than to the actual content of those articles.
Now that I've done some real work in startups, I've realized that my instinct back then was correct. My startup journey has lead me to Co-Found a mini edTech startup with a few internet friends, work on Product & Growth at a YC-backed startup, join Contrary Capital to invest in student founders, and work on more awesome side projects with inspiring people than I can count. And the best part of it all? My favorite moments have been the ones where I'm in over my head, tackling the hardest problems and filled with energy every step of the way.
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