Founder’s Field Guide
Episode 9 The New Language of the Internet
Founder’s Field Guide

Episode 9: The New Language of the Internet

The New Language of the Internet

Emmett is the co-founder and CEO of Twitch. We dive into how emotes are evolving into the new "language" for the internet, how Twitch's most successful products have come from watching users, and why founders should focus on "winning" a narrow niche of customers before expanding.

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[00:02:52] – (First question) – History of interactive entertainment

[00:04:10] – Interactivity from the clubs in Vienna and what he learned from that 

[00:05:16] – Origins of Justin.TV and when gaming became the focus for Twitch

[00:08:59] – What he enjoyed about video streaming games early on

[00:10:21] – Interactive experience between creators and community

[00:12:28] – Emotes on twitch and how they came to be 

[00:14:45] – Business of emotes and the affiliates 

[00:16:27] – How these features are proliferating out on the internet and changing it

[00:17:21] – How far we are in the streamer-influencer phenomenon 

[00:20:00] – Building an effective platform for fans

[00:23:07] – Evolution of the just chatting piece of Twitch

[00:24:58] – Favorite parts of Twitch from followers: Chess

[00:26:45] – Running a business within a larger business

[00:28:09] – Most interesting trend in the market today 

[00:30:40] – Effective ways for recruiting the team

[00:31:35] – Most curious about what is happening on the internet today

[00:33:06] – Advice from the early days of Twitch

[00:35:55] – Ira Glass video taste and making things

[00:36:34] – Focus on strategic mission

[00:38:06] – Identifying the customer

[00:40:40] – Starting small

[00:41:45] – Investors focus on potential market size

[00:43:00] – Most common reasons talented people fail

[00:43:47] – Kindest thing anyone has done for him

The New Language of the Internet

Introduction

Patrick
My guest today is Emmett Shear, the founder and CEO of Twitch. Twitch's the world's leading live streaming platform for gamers and was acquired by Amazon. In 2014, we talk about how Twitch empower streamers to monetize their audience. The necessity of picking a customer early in a business, and the lessons Emmitt learned scaling Twitch from an online reality TV show to a global brand inside of Amazon. We also discussed how Twitch has helped create a new language on the internet with emotes, a topic I'm fascinated by. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

The History of Interactive Entertainment and Justin.tv

Patrick
So Emmet, thank you so much for doing this with me today. I know that you are a student of history and so I thought an interesting place to begin would be the history of interactive entertainment and how Twitch sort of figures into all of that. I love the perspective you bring on the long history of this topic. And so maybe you could frame that history for people before diving into Twitch, the business.

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