'I'm Just Some F**cking Guy' & A Billion Dollar Sale To Amazon - Twitch’s Justin Kan's Wisdom

I'm not an Olympic athlete here. I'm just some fucking guy. So I think it's really important that people set the bar low enough that they can actually do these, you know, these things they want to do consistently. It's more important to be consistent than it is to be, you know, excellent every day.

All right, everyone, super excited to bring you Justin Kan today. Big fan of all the work that he's done in the past. I mean, former co-founder of Twitch, which sold to Amazon for Billy, and he also founded a couple other companies. Now he's working on a couple new projects, got a new podcast, got a new fund called GOAT Capital, which we'll all talk about. Justin, first and foremost, welcome to the show. How's it going?

It's going well. Thanks for having me, Eric.

You, you did the Twitch thing and then you had a couple other things going on afterwards, and then now you decided to start GOAT Capital. So I'd like to learn more about GOAT Capital first and then kind of what you're working on, why you decided to do that instead of maybe Sure.

So I started GO Capital with my friend Robin Chan a couple months ago, and it's an early-stage fund dedicated to investing in seed-stage companies, and then we are incubating our own companies as well. And so really the idea was to combine what we'd love to do, which was build early-stage companies and mentor early-stage founders, and build a business around that. And so I found the reason I didn't want to start my own company again, or like a single company, was just I found like I had just started a company last, you know, a couple years ago. It was called Atrium. We grew it and we raised a lot of money for it and ultimately it didn't really work out. We shut it down. And at the same time, I incubated another company called Alto. I mentored the founders and a very similar type of business, like an online to offline operationally intensive business. And that company like, you know, really grew and accelerated and is now an 800-person company. It's a digital pharmacy company. 800 people, multiple states, tens of thousands of patients, raised $350 million in follow-on capital. And so I realized maybe my higher purpose and what I'm really good at now is on the mentorship side and being the coach role rather than operating the companies myself. And so that's what I decided to focus on.

That's interesting because you guys are incubating and you guys are also funding companies. So I guess, how are you guys structuring that right now? How does that incubator work? I mean, obviously we're going Kind of all remote right now.

So yeah, so it's really about, you know, we have a bunch of ideas of startups we want to start and we think are good ideas that can be hugely impactful in the world. And then it's about finding the right partners, operating partners to start them with, and then, you know, just getting them out the door. And so that's really what I love to do. I'm, you know, I love the early stages. I spent most of my career building companies at the early stage and like just getting initial teams together and building a first version of the product and launching it. And so really, we think of it as a vehicle to do more of that.

Just so the audience knows, maybe they want to raise money from GOAT Capital, I mean, what type of companies are you looking for?

We're looking for generally just really excellent companies with great founders, but there's a couple of interest areas we have. Climate change is one. I think consumer behavior is changing a lot in terms of wanting to support companies that are environmentally friendly or have an environmental mission. And then the founders are also going to solve the world's biggest problem. Lots of founders are being attracted to work on climate change companies. So that's one. Another area is our backgrounds are in gaming and digital commerce, and so companies in new forms of digital entertainment and commerce are interesting to us. Another is healthcare. Both of us have made investments in healthcare, and it's currently being reshaped by coronavirus. So healthcare is being transformed, and we're interested in investing in digital healthcare companies. And then lastly, robotics and automation. You know, I think there's a huge wave, automation wave happening on the industrial side. And so companies that support the robotics revolution are interesting to us.

And I do want to talk about— I mean, you were part of the first batch for YC, and I think it's good for people to be aware of, you know, what type of network or how strong the network is. So can you talk a little bit about YC and kind of your experiences there, just so people know in case they want to apply in the future?

Sure, yeah. So I was part of the first batch of YC in 2005. It's when YC just started, and Paul and Jessica, Trevor and Robert, you know, it was their idea. They launched it, they had this request for startups to apply, and then they accepted 8 companies in that first batch, and we were one of them, along with Reddit and Sam Altman's company, which was Looped at the time. And so, you know, from there it's grown into a network of thousands of founders. I don't even know how many now, probably like 5,000+ founders, and thousands of companies, and obviously it's a big organization today accepting, I think, 500 companies a year. So it's almost like the Harvard Business School of Silicon Valley. It's a great network to be in. I think there's something about going through an experience where you're an early-stage founder and you are surrounded by other early-stage founders where it's such a stressful experience, you naturally bond with the people around you. And so some of my best friends are YC founders, either my co-founders or You know, Steve from Reddit, that's experiences like really going through this, you know, this foundational moment in your own story. And then in your companies surrounded by other people, like-minded people.

You said your Snap went viral. And it was basically, I think at the time I might've read like one, like, oh, these are the people to follow on Snap, right? These are like the tech people to follow. And then I followed you, I guess. How big did you get?

There was a moment where I was getting like 11,000 views a story or something like that. It wasn't that much, you know, and then it plateaued. Like Snapchat did a number of things that made it like more difficult to, you know, to grow. And they like, they really didn't support the creators in the way that Instagram did, which I think is why Instagram like has kind of won, you know, the celebrities and this, and which is really the content that people want to create and the content creators, because Instagram created a lot more like support. for those creators. I really, I think Snapchat just kind of dropped the ball on that. But yeah, it got up to about 11,000. I mean, when I knew it was like, it was kind of a thing when I had a few moments where like I was walking in Singapore and making Snapchat snaps and then like someone in Singapore was like watching and they came and like met me, you know, or like I was in UAE, like in Abu Dhabi and someone recognized me, you know, on the street. There were some moments where I was like, oh, this is really global. I hadn't realized how big Snapchat was at the time.

I do want to talk about your podcast, The Quest. So you decided to not only start a fund called GOAT, which I think is a great name, but The Quest is great too because there's a gaming connotation there. So what is The Quest? What are you trying to do there?

Part of my own experience, my own journey through being a founder and then being— I grew up in this industry. to adulthood as a startup founder and then I've been pretty successful and then gotten to my mid-30s now. And I spent the first part of my life so tortured by being a founder, right? Like I was— by the external circumstances or like the need for external approval. The way I navigated the world was very much like as a seeker, right? I was like desperately wanted all these things that I thought would like fulfill me. And so, you know, those were a consequence of how I grew up and, you know, the holes that I had in my childhood where I was like, you know, I wanted the approval of my peers and didn't feel like I got it or whatever. And so, you know, I had this experience and I eventually got everything I wanted, or I thought I wanted, right? I became successful. And then afterwards, I was still wanting, you know, I still was like, oh, there's more, you know, I want to have a bigger company. I want to have like a more money, more fame, whatever it was. And so, you know, only after I had like a kind of a hit a rock bottom point where I was super stressed and, you know, really unhappy with my situation, I was like, I started investing in like internal things, you know, stuff like meditation and gratitude and I drank ayahuasca for the first time, just a bunch of different stuff and Consequently, the TL;DR is like, after that I realized, you know, a lot of, you know, most of my internal wellness and happiness comes from within, right? It doesn't come from your external circumstances. And so that was my journey through this situation, and I think it was a very different journey from what people expected, seeing, you know, looking from the outside. And so the idea behind The Quest is really to tell those stories, right? Like my story, the stories of friends of mine who have gone through similar journeys, or maybe they have a really big company but they've struggled with depression, or they're, you know, some of the most famous artists out there, but they've, you know, they've gone through their own ups and downs. It hasn't been a straight shot to success and just really give people like a taste of what the human experience is.

So I do want to talk, I mean, you, you kind of teed this one up, but I had noted down here, I was looking at your Twitter, some of the pictures. I mean, you did a deep fast for 120 hours, which is nuts to me. You know, you talk about ayahuasca, talk about meditation, talk about all the things. So I just want to know like from a, You're not only optimizing your health, but you're optimizing your mind. So what are you doing exactly? And let's start with ayahuasca because it was kind of the, um, you know, there's this period of time where I was listening to podcasts and it was like, there's, there's ayahuasca binge. Like everyone was doing it. Right. So can you talk about that? Where did you go exactly and how that experience was?

Yeah. Sorry. It was really like, I walk into this house on the California coast. I had no idea what to expect. And so we all sit down and, uh, you know, they start the ceremony. I didn't know anything about like what a ceremony was like, what, you know, what the kind of, context really for taking this medicine is we sat down and drank it and, you know, it was the wildest experience I'd had ever in my life. It was almost like splitting, splicing 3 movies together. You know, one movie was the Justin Therapy Show where like people in my life would show up and I'd be having these conversations, oftentimes very stressful emotional ones with them. And then there was like the psychedelic movie where it was like Tron. I was traveling into this alien city or something and seeing all these lights. And then there's this movie of like almost like A Perfect Storm, if you remember that, from when I was a kid where I felt like I was on this lifeboat in the middle of a hurricane or something and I was just getting tossed around and feeling really nauseous and going from extreme discomfort to moments of Calm and clarity. And so it's like all these things were just cut together. And, you know, that was 6 hours of that. And then by the time I woke up, I was covered in a pool of sweat and I was lying in my own sweat. And I was like, one jacket, one arm through the wrong sleeve of my jacket. And I'm just like, you know, lying there like shivering, like I've just recovered from the flu. It took me a year to unpack like everything, you know, kind of what that meant. And really process that and bring the lessons back into my own life. But that was the seed of learning, for example, that everything I'd done in my past as an adult was really to try to seek the approval of other people. So stuff like that where I had all these learnings and they really made a big difference in my life. And from there I could decide like, how do I want to conduct myself going forward? How do I want to live? Maybe I had sought approval in the past, but like, Is that how I want to be driven moving forward?

So that was basically like a year of therapy compacted into— I mean, you had to unpack it, but it was 6 hours, like, here, take this.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. It was like a year of therapy packed into, you know, one night.

How about deep fasting for 120 hours? What brought that and what benefits did you see?

You know, this common theme, I guess, among all this stuff is that early in my life, I actually thought you couldn't improve. Like, most of my life, I thought people were, you know, kind of baked by adulthood. You know, by 18 you have the habits. A couple years ago I realized like actually by making incremental steps and like not worrying about so much about the goal but worrying more about building a framework for being healthier or more mentally well or, you know, more fit, I could improve, right? And so a lot of it came from the stuff in Atomic Habits or Tiny Habits, you know, really about creating like frameworks for me to make incremental progress every day. And so that got me on this wellness journey where I was starting to think about like, what else can I do? You know, first it was meditating every day and then was working out every day. And then eventually it, you know, expanded to this whole world of, you know, different, you know, self-growth modalities. And so fasting is one, you know, and I decided, you know, I'd been fasting for doing like intermittent fasting or one meal a day fasting for a couple of years and I'd always wanted to do an extended fast, but I never had felt like it was the right time, right? It's always like, oh well, you know, I have these meetings or this trip or whatever. And so I finally just decided, maybe this was like a month and a half ago, I was like, okay, I'm just gonna do it. And so I, without any preparation, I just said, okay, I'll start, you know, start the day. I had this like kind of big weekend for food where I'd eaten a lot and I was like, okay, diet, you know, fasting starts today and I'm just, you know, I'm gonna try to go for 5 days, which is my goal, you know? And so I just did it and it was hard. Hour 40 was when really hunger starts to kick in. And then after, you know, in day 3 and through 5, it was more just being weak. You know, I couldn't barely go upstairs. Like stairs were the worst, my worst enemy. I felt like I was tired all the time, but I had a lot of mental clarity and I was actually able to work the whole time. So.

What did you learn from kind of the Atrium experience, the Whale experience? I guess, what did you, What's the commonalities across these different projects?

Yeah, so the commonality among all the projects I've failed at is insufficiently zeroing in on a specific set of customers and what they specifically want. So I mean, I think that's the real thing. It's not zeroing in on the customer well enough. And so with Whale, it was like, okay, who are we really serving? It was this idea for a social app, but it wasn't like, Like it wasn't clear like who was gonna benefit most from it. And I think with Atrium, it's like we were pulled in multiple directions between the clients and the lawyers. And I think we were trying to make it best for, you know, good for both parties, but like we really didn't have like a core constituency where we're like, okay, we're just building this to be the ultimate tool for this kind of lawyer or something like that.

Justin, this has been great. What is the best way for people to find you online?

Yeah. So you can find me on Twitter @JustinKhan, check out my podcast, The Quest. I'm super stoked about that. It's just like, The thing I'm having fun, kind of like the early days when I was doing Snapchat. It's like the thing I'm having the most fun with right now online. So.

Cool. Good deal, man. Justin, thanks so much for doing this.

All right, Eric. Sure.