The Future of Live Video is Social Broadcasting with Caffeine CEO Ben Keighran | Greymatter

Hi, everyone, I'm John Lilly, partner at Greylock Partners, and welcome to our podcast, Gray Matter. Today we're talking with Ben Kieran, CEO and founder of the live broadcasting platform Caffeine. Today in the podcast, we'll talk about Ben's experiences starting Caffeine and their product today, as well as his experiences leading up to it, which have helped him think about how to reinvent television, how we experience live, live content together. Ben, thanks for coming today. I'm really happy you're here.

Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to talk today.

Yeah. So I think maybe what we'll start is just by talking about your background and how we met. We met about 10 years ago, just about when you got off the plane from Sydney. You want to tell your story on how you found your way to Silicon Valley?

Yeah, totally. I, like many people here in Silicon Valley, have always loved building things on computers and on the Internet. And I grew up in Sydney, Australia, and. And not a huge population in Australia. There's about 20 million people in Australia, there's about 30 million people here in California. And so if you think about the amount of people that are working on the Internet and on computers, just based on proportion to population, like, it's a very small number of people. And so it was kind of a dream of mine since I was a teenager reading about things that were happening in California and Silicon Valley and on the Internet to get here one day. And so, like many founder stories, I went to universities, was studying computer science, and I ended up dropping out because I'd started a company. We've heard that story a million times.

I'm not sure I knew that you dropped out of university. You didn't finish.

I didn't finish. I actually only lasted about six months. So my parents would say that I never went to university and I pretty much didn't turn up that much, but I got in and it was a great school in Sydney. And I'd started a company actually before I even went to university, and it got venture funded over here. And so I moved over here and met you very soon after, actually.

How old were you when you started the company? It was called Blue Pulse.

It was called Blue Pulse. I probably incorporated the company when I was about 17 or 18. So it's kind of a weird sequence of events, but basically I accelerated high school, so I finished most of my high school, like about two years early. And then I had a whole lot of time, like I was still going to school, but I had a whole lot of time and So I got involved in a print media company that was doing like business cards and brochures and things. And a lot of their clients wanted to build websites and so I, I'd build websites for them and eventually they spun off a company that was a web design company and I was a small stakeholder in it. And then they sold the company about the same time that I finished high school. And so I got like this two year taste of finishing high school and doing startup Y sort of stuff at a really young age. And so I wanted to do it again. And so I ended up, you know, starting another company which was bluepulse, as a teenager. Took a while to sort of get the thing going. But yeah, I started at about 17. I didn't move over here actually until I was about 20 or 21.

And BluePulse was a social network before smartphones?

Yeah, it didn't start as that, but yes, that's what it became. And that's what it's known as is sort of on feature phones like Nokia phones, Motorola, you know, handsets. This is like around the early 2000s. I really wanted a way for people to have chat rooms and photo sharing and things, things like that that were happening on the Internet but were not happening on cell phones at that time. And so in Australia people had access to the Internet on their phones. They were texting like crazy. They were really like Asia, really ahead of the curve globally in terms of where they were in terms of mobile adoption. But chat rooms and the things you had on the web didn't exist on phones. And so I wanted to build that for me and my friends. And it got a lot of traction in South Africa and India at the time.

Yeah, it's scaled quite large, so easiest product to use given it's on. Yeah.

So the main app that you would download was a Java application. And so mid P1 mobile information device profile1 meant that the app could not be larger than like 64 kilobytes. And so I wrote this like 63 kilobyte XHTML browser which rendered XHTML in these three or four views, like a list view, a text view, like some really basic views. And so most of the app was in the cloud, so to speak. And it was just really just rendering these basic XHTML views in this very basic browser. But it made it work on like tons of feature phones, about 250 different handsets, which most people couldn't build an app to work on any handset because of the footprint. And so anyway it just like worked on lots of phones and gave people this rich messaging capability and that's what made it work. And that was just me like goofing around. I didn't have a plan or strategy.

Yeah, goofing around your way to 30 million users, whatever, that's unusual. But the thing I love about you is that it always starts for you as like, oh, I just want to do this with my mates, I want to do this with my friends. I want you to have a great time online. And you talk passionately about that, but then you talk just as passionately about the product aspects or the fact you built an XHTL browser. And so the thing I love about you is that you're excited about the whole thing, but the whole stack of stuff, but it's all in service of how do I have more fun with friends and how do I help other people do that too.

I'll tell you a quick story. When I was about 10 years old, I actually self taught, learned some C. A family friend gave me a book. I was really interested, really excited about it. Most kids in school are writing in the yearbook that their heroes like Michael Jackson and I'm writing like Dennis Ritchie as my, my hero.

Yeah, you're super, super weird.

Like Australia surfer dude kid. I just found really early on that I just loved so much like tinkering and playing, getting something to work that other people could use. And I ended up building a bulletin board service. Most people don't know what that is anymore, but a bulletin board service and had about a thousand people dialing into my parents home phone line every week. They ended up shutting it off because they thought I was doing something super illegal. But what happened was I just loved it so, so much. Like I could just be there all day, every day, every night. Like I just wanted to build, build, build, build and other people to use it. But what I found was that I wasn't really that good in any one particular area. And so I sought out other people that were really good at these things and wanted to work with them and get them excited about what we could build together. And so as I get older, I'm learning, oh, they're gonna need to get paid money and we're gonna need to tell people about the service and market it. And we're gonna need to like figure out all these things around how we create a business around this. Like if we really want to have a big impact and kind of get back to that freedom of being 10 years old, I'm tinkering around with the computer, there's all these other things I had to figure out in pursuit of. Of just wanting to build something really great for other people to use on computers.

Yeah, I think that's a very characteristic pattern for you. So you came here and you got Blue Pulse Venture back. It's always growing. And then you left the company a few years later and then you took some time off. Right. What did you do in your time off?

Well, for starters, I got kicked out of my own company at 25.

Why don't you talk about that quickly?

Yeah, the business wasn't generating any revenue and I'd been building it for about seven years. And it was really early for mobile. Like, there was no app store. There was no, like, in app purchases. There was no. There's no really good ways of monetizing. And in terms of advertising dollars or.

Even distribution was tough.

Distribution was tough. I mean, AdMob was around, which was offering some form of distribution. GetJar was offering some form. It was very, very early. And advertising seemed like the obvious probably path for it because it's sort of a social platform, but it was very much a communication product and ads wasn't great for that. And also the audience was in South Africa and India, and not a lot of advertisers wanted to reach people in South Africa and India at that time. Anyway, I ended up getting pushed out of the company. And the thing that was really difficult was it was my identity. Like, I'd been working on it since I was a late teenager and I still remember going to like a wedding maybe a month later and someone asking me who I was, and I almost like burst into tears. I was just like, I'm just Ben Kieran because I wasn't the CEO and founder of this thing. It was really hard. And I actually was like, I'm never doing this again. This is the worst ever. But Silicon Valley really opened up to me in that time. Like a lot of venture folks, entrepreneurs, all these people wanted to chat and I started to get exposure to just like tons of other interesting things. And so it took about two years before I went and started the next company. It was really actually quite an amazing journey to the next company.

But you did pick up some habits during the period. You started doing, like, downhill, a bunch of skiing and extreme sports and playing around with GoPros and trying to capture all that stuff. And then you played a lot of online games.

Yeah, I played a lot of online games, played a lot of World of Warcraft.

This seems a little irrelevant, but it's like hyper relevant for a few minutes from now. When you say a lot, you mean a lot.

Well, yeah, I've been playing World of Warcraft since the first beta or even alpha came out. And actually even when I was in the process of moving over here to the US I already had started playing. But for sure, like during that time. Yeah, I mean I lived in the World of Warcraft, like days, hours, like in fact, my main character in World of Warcraft, you can do this thing like slash, you type in slash play as a command and it will tell you. How many actual real world days of your life have you spent like playing this one individual character. I've got like tons of characters across tons of servers, but my main character has like more than 170 real world days on it.

Yeah.

So calculate the number of hours. That's how much time I spent like just, just playing that, that video game. I also during that time ended up meeting my, my now wife and getting married as well. And so I got exposure to, to snowboarding and took up that passion and gaming and met her and also like a ton of other companies and ideas.

Yeah, I find you in that period to be really creative and transformative and I think it was hard for you. It was 2008 came, the iPhone came, 2009 came. Like it's obvious that mobile is the future of everything. And so then you start this other company which I want to talk about just briefly. Chomp.

Yes.

With another Australian co founder.

With another Australian co founder named Kathy Edwards. She's awesome. And I'd known her for a while. I actually knew her back when I was building Blue Pulse. We had thought a lot about mobile. Kathy had a really long background in mobile and me too. And one of the things that struck me as really interesting about mobile is that it's new format, it's a new medium. And so I remember thinking, and this is going back quite a few years, but I do remember thinking a lot about the transformation from print media into like broadcast television or broadcasting to the Internet. All these shifts in terms of who are the winners and who are the losers in these new formats, these new ways of experiencing content. Even if you go from like reading the news on a piece of paper, reading the news on the Internet, there's so much change. Like you go from like receiving the news like once a day on something that was printed like last night or the day before to now. Updates happen instantaneously and can be shared and discussed with anyone. So it really changes the experience, it changes the format In a very material way. And so when I saw the App Store come along and the popularity of consumers really wanting the Internet on their phones and the format of an app, I was like, gosh, there's going to be like the next Flickr. Turns out that that might be Instagram and there's going to be a new version of PayPal, maybe that's, that's square or something. I don't know. Like, there's going to be new winners and new losers and it's not necessarily going to be the person before it. And during that two year break between the first company and the second company, I got involved with a company called Aardvark, which was a social search company.

Max Ventier, Max Venture's company.

Max? Yeah, Max Damon. Yeah, Max was the CEO and co founder there. And they made me an advisor, but ended up asking me to build them an iPhone app. I'd never built an iPhone app before. And I basically came in and was the first person to sit down and get into Xcode and start like playing around building. It taught me a lot about search technology, actually. And so when I was sort of thinking about, well, who's going to be the discovery engine for this sort of next generation of content, I thought that would be something really interesting to work on and really fun. And Kathy was super excited to do that too. So that's what ultimately became Chomp.

But you had to invent everything. You had to invent, like, how do we index these things? There's nothing like PageRank for mobile. Until you had to create all that stuff from scratch. That was a deep technical team that I think was underappreciated at the time.

Yeah, I mean, we were doing some pretty interesting stuff. So before Chomp, when you searched for an app, you really could just search for the name of the app. And so if you type in something generic like something thematical or like a category, you typed social networking or kids games. You would get an app called social networking or kids games. And so tf, idf term frequency and document frequency, like all the metadata, all the anchor text, all the things that you need. And the way that sort of web search engines work, it doesn't exist with a corpus of apps and app data. And so one of the things we looked at was probability algorithms like lda, latent, Dirichlet allocation. And essentially what we would do is take app descriptions and the categories and the names and sort of figure out all of the metadata we could around apps and then try and figure out the probability of different search terms. That might relate to different apps. And so we ended up creating something that gave you related topics and you can search by topic and just a much better search economy experience.

So you play forward a few years and then. So Apple acquired the company.

Yeah. So turns out that it was really, really hard to build a direct to consumer app on Apple or on Google. For doing that, like as a user you end up going, well, the search might be better but like I probably should just go to the store, I should go to Google Play or I should go to like the App Store or I don't know about this like third party thing for searching that. And we also didn't just search the native stores, we also searched for like HTML5 apps and other things that we thought users might find useful to them. So we were getting some audience and we were getting some traffic. But what we ended up doing was going and syndicating the search engine with a bunch of people that needed a better search engine and wanted to participate in ad revenue. Once we started to bring that into the search results. And so we actually got quite a few really nice syndication deals. The flagship one was with Verizon where it was going to make it the default search engine on many Verizon Android phones. And it would search not just Google Play, but it would search like get Jar and Amazon's App Store and like a whole bunch of app stores on the phone and Verizon's store as well and be a better search experience. But doing those deals, building the search technology was super, super, super hard. Then we were starting to have to build like an ad service for it as well. There was some just very, very difficult things that were going on and, and through that process of looking for people to syndicate the search engine with, we talked to Apple about powering search for them. And ultimately when they said we should just buy you and presented a pretty interesting idea around what that would look like, it meant that we could just focus on building that product and not have to worry about a lot of the deal stuff that had to happen around it. So it felt like the right outcome for Chomp once we learned more about the market we were in and the business we were building.

Definitely the right outcome for Chomp is an amazing sequence of events for you because you came in, you really reformed the whole App Store experience at Apple into what it's become today. You started them down the path, but then you had this amazing tour of duty inside Apple for the better part of four years. Yeah, can you talk about that?

And they actually gave me My five year award because they count the years of me building Chomp as well. It ended up being just shy of five years in Cupertino. But first of all, I was really excited to be there because I again, like many entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs a huge hero to me. And Apple is this very exciting place that builds these really incredible products that I admire. And I'm inspired a lot by the work that comes out of there. And so getting an opportunity to be on the inside walls, I thought, wow, this is going to be like a cool thing. Like, I wonder what I can learn here and do here and put out to users. What I found was the first three months of I didn't know what to think. Everything was new and everything was shiny. Probably the next six months after that it was really hard for me because I was not able to leverage all of my skill set and felt pretty focused on a large product which was itunes in the App Store on just one small area of it. Even though it's actually huge, like the amount of people that search on those products and the way that the team was sort of organized at Apple was just really different than what I'd experienced. And so it really wasn't for me staying on the search team there. I mean, we built some stuff and we got it out, we got the teams integrated, but I didn't know if I could last there. And but to Apple's credit and many of the executives, I mean, Eddie Q is the guy that bought the company and I talked to Eddie about it and talked to many folks at Apple about the struggles I was having as a lifelong entrepreneur at the big company. And to their credit, they really like allowed me to go browsing the company. They wanted me there. And I spent some time with the M and A folks, I spent some time with the Siri folks. I spent some time in a bunch of different areas. I was blown away because I would always sort of thought of myself as like a product builder or engineer. But I always loved design. Like, I love design. Like I love getting into the user experience. It's. I'm actually probably more passionate about the user experience than, than anything else. And it's what drives my language around how I think about marketing or business or engineering or everything. It's the design, the user experience. And so I got invited onto the design team to manage designers, which blew me away. I was like, what do they want with me? Like, I don't have any design background. Everyone in design at Apple has this like amazing pedigree. Like this. The greatest designers I'VE ever seen. And I got asked to go in and work on reimagining Apple TV and that was super interesting. That's what kept me there. My vesting wasn't that long or anything. Like I wasn't there for, for the money. I was there because I loved what we were building, which was Apple tv, the new Apple TV with the Siri remote.

I've chased you for years to work together and I remember we'd have breakfast every three months or so and you're like let's hang out. But I can't talk about anything. And I'm working on this amazing super secret project. I can't tell you anything about it, but it's amazing. My observation was that you learned about Apple's particular point of view on design and what it really meant from interaction design and visual design. And you get to work with some pretty special people, like all the designers and engineers there, but also Johnny and Eddie.

Yeah, I mean with Apple TV we'd see Eddie pretty much every week and you know, a lot of the executive team. It was really a phenomenal experience and because it was such a small group of people that were working on it in a big company with all these resources and again I think it's a testament to Apple is that if you are really passionate and can influence there and can like it's a matrix organization. So it's not about how many people have you got in your org necessarily that can add to your influence for sure. But like it's. It's really me leveraging my entrepreneurial skills, my business networking skills, my ability to sell all these things really came into action to sort of be the design lead and manage the designers for the new Apple tv. It was really fun and learned it in fact I thought I would never leave.

Actually I started thinking that too. I was trying to pull you out over the years I started feeling like maybe you wouldn't leave but it did give you a front row seat to be relevant for caffeine in a second to Eddie and Apple trying to go get content deals from the big studios. So I mean you learned a lot from there too and a healthy respect for how challenging that was.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean Eddie's been, I think really, really public about the media deals and things that he's worked on in the past, I don't feel bad saying. But you know, I got an inside scoop on kind of how that was what he was working on because it really impacted the product. My focus was on the design and engineering and the building the operating system and all the software on the box, not the industrial design, that's Johnny and his team. But you know, you work really closely with those guys because they all have to work together. And so it was to sort of get that bird's eye view from Apple level, Apple scale, like what is going on with cable television and what is going on with video. And it was super fascinating.

So you got to the end of your tours, you decided, ready to do something again. And that was a little under three years ago.

Now.

We set up some time to talk and you came and said, I want to do this new thing. I'm going to call it caffeine. Tell the audience what's caffeine.

Caffeine is a new kind of broadcasting company. I call the category social broadcasting. The thing about live broadcasting, the stuff you see on television, it's usually live events like live sports and live entertainment, live news, all of these things have one thing in common, which is there's commentators, there's people talking over the top of the content. And unlike movies and television shows where there's lots of on demand services like Netflix, Netflix is the category king for that. There isn't really a category king for live television. In fact, most of it has been behind a paywall for a very long time. And many thought that it would not leave the paywall for a very long time, even though subscriber numbers of cable networks has been declining for many, many years because they make so much money behind the paywall. And so with caffeine, I really wanted to reimagine a new kind of broadcasting company, the same way Netflix might have tried to reimagine a new kind of on demand movie and television show service. And so gaming, video gaming and esports is like quickly becoming a really important part to support. In fact, the amount of people that view esports now is about the viewership size of the people that watch, like NFL or FIFA World Soccer. It's competitive, there's prize money, there's athletes. It's quickly becoming that. But that wasn't behind a paywall. And so I wanted to make a new kind of broadcasting service, starting with gaming, but with the right business model and the right experience that would allow it to quickly expand into sports and other live television services. And it had to be cross platform, couldn't just be on iOS devices. Social is a huge part of experiencing live content together. It had to get into new kinds of business models and things that Apple wasn't necessarily into. And so it just ended up being something that I knew couldn't be built at Apple, but something that I felt people were really going to need, particularly over the next few years and definitely over the next decade as more and more cable cutting happens and people need a new way to watch television.

And so one of the things that's amazing about this is it's the collision of all the things you've been doing your whole entrepreneurial life and actually your personal life too, because it's social, like loopholes, it's gaming oriented, like World of Warcraft, it's sports oriented, like you're snowboarding. And then there's the TV stuff from Apple, the content stuff from Apple and Apple tv. That's all amazing. And when you said it, that's what you wanted to do, I'm like, oh, of course. And do you remember what my next reaction was? It's like, oh, my God, like, Twitch. Twitch is huge. Twitch is huge in a network effect. And so. But you said, no, no, hear me out, it's not Twitch. Do you want to talk about how your vision's a little different?

So I think you've got to look at three things. What is the content that you're going to get? Like, when you're looking at these different apps on your phone or you're planning on visiting one of these websites, what content do you think you're going to get from that service? The second thing is what the experience is. And maybe the third thing is what's the business model? And so when you go to a Twitch or you go to a Periscope or you go to a Facebook Live, you can just sort of ask yourself, like, what content am I expecting to get from that? And I would say if you mapped out all the different types of content that is out there, sports and gaming and like live television, content that feels like premium and something that you could imagine being on, like linear television. And then there's user generated, maybe I'm dating or flirting or eating soup or noodles or something along those lines. And so a Twitch or a caffeine are much more in that live gaming and sort of sports sort of category of things. And so this next piece is like, okay, so what's the experience of these two different things? And so for caffeine, we've really simplified the experience. We've made it so anybody can become a broadcaster with one click. We've made it so that it's very personal, so that when you open it up, you can see what the people you're following are watching or broadcasting. We've made the Community feel really positive and diverse because we filter all of the communication between the people you're connected to on caffeine. We've done everything in real time. So there's no delay between what you say and what the person hears. On something like Twitch, which doesn't have a real time WebRTC CDN, there's a delay most of the time, like a pretty big delay, like seconds, maybe up to a minute sometimes between what is said in the chat and what someone hears. So, so the experience is really different. And people always say like the simplicity of caffeine in the real time is really different. And then there's the business model. And so I feel like a lot of these live streaming, live broadcasting companies are building products now around different business models. And so I really wanted to pick content that was in its ascendancy, which is gaming and sports. I wanted to pick an experience that was in its ascendancy and that was social and real time. And I wanted to pick a business model that was in its ascendancy as well, and build the product around that. And so our business model is a lot like what you see in Fortnite or many of the live streaming services in China. It's about gamifying the experience and lots of like microtransactions. It's not about like running an ad over the top of the video or asking people to subscribe. Like you get on like linear television. And so those three things, like when people come into caffeine, they see gaming and sports, which is why they will attribute us most to sort of Twitch versus like Periscope or some other service. They quickly see our experience is really different and then they also see that there's no ads on there and that some people don't realize how we make money, but that's how we make money, is people buying all of these virtual items and things in the chat so.

People can go get the product to check it out. Now you can go to caffeine TV to view the web or over iPhone or have you seen other platforms?

Yes, it's in pre release at the moment. There's been a lot to build to get to this point, but yes, that's correct.

But the product experience is you go in, you see people who are broadcasting games or sports, you pop into one of their channels, you can see the video of them. You can see the video, what they're streaming usually, often video games now. And then there's chat. There's a chat that is a quite distinctive, I think, interesting, innovative chat system. The thing that's notable to me is that there's an intimacy and a qualitative difference that that on paper it sounds like Twitch or Periscope. In actual fact, it's not at all like that.

And certainly as we start to bring sports and other forms of live television into caffeine really quickly, that content story is going to feel really differentiated. And I think the experience in the business model already feels really differentiated. But a brand new user is going to care mostly about what content do I get on here and then find all those other things. And so the users that really love caffeine today are actually a lot of casual gamers and people that aren't necessarily that into Twitch. I think there's a little bit of overlap there, but as we sort of build up our content story, I think you're going to see some really differentiated stuff from that standpoint too.

Let's talk about your content story. So a couple months ago we announced a deal with Fox. Can you talk about that?

Yeah. You know, I started the company April 1, 2016, which is Apple's 40th birthday. That wasn't by coincidence, before even incorporating the company had written very long documents that I've never really shared with anyone, but just about my thoughts on the space and kind of where everything was going and why I felt like this was going to be important. And I sort of said like, unless we get like the experience and the business model and pick things that are going to work for not just gaming, but for sports and live entertainment and beyond, we're going to be trapped like in the Twitch world and be direct with Twitch. We need to build tools that make it easy. All the people that are not on Twitch, empower them to be broadcasters and build audiences. We need to go broader and be more mainstream. I thought that we would be doing pure video gaming and esports for many, many, many years. And so just in January, after building up like this real time cdn, these publishing tools, the social platform, working on our monetization engine, all this stuff that building up the team all in like a year and a half, basically a lot was going on, we finally did our first press and sort of said, hey, like we've got this thing in beta, it's gonna be in it for a while. Like here's what it does, here's what's different. And very quickly a lot of people in sports, like traditional sports, stick and ball sports, stick and ball, stick and ball sports, as opposed to video game sports or action sports like snowboarding and surf, which is more my. My scene.

Got it.

Contacted us and it blew me away. Like 30 different companies contacted us. And so, as you would know, I went to my board, you and Ben Horowitz, and was like, this feels like this could be a huge distraction taking.

These meetings because both of us preach focus pretty often. Yes, focus, focus, focus.

100%. And so we had some discussion around, should we actually take a look at some of these opportunities? Because there might be a bit of a, I don't know, a leapfrog opportunity to get some content onto caffeine ahead of where the community and the businesses and even the product is.

Yeah, well, I mean, the weird signal here is that people at the very highest level of these companies, whether it's Lachlan Murdoch at Fox or the head of ESPN or whatever, they all took you very seriously very quickly. And I think that surprised all of us.

Yeah, it's one thing getting the meetings and everyone always gets excited. It's a new thing. It's a new product experience.

It's a new.

A new business model. And there's business reasons. They all have different business reasons why, you know, Twitch, Amazon's not the right fit for them and their content, you know, they have reasons why it is the right fit for them too. I don't want to speak for them, but it is always going to be like an exciting conversation. But it can also be such a huge time waster. Right. For a little baby startup that needs to get to product fit, that needs to get out there and start really going to be a huge distraction. And so I got a lot of value working with you and Ben on that to figure out what should we do. And I think we ran a very tight process and we were successful. We ended up landing a huge deal with Fox Sports and deals with folks like Disney and Live Nation as well.

The Fox deal was like in some press announced as a funding deal, but that wasn't really what you're trying to do. Can you talk about what you're doing with Fox and why?

Absolutely. So the key thing, I mean, yes, you and Ben talk about focus a lot. I like to think I do too. But the other part of it was we definitely didn't need to raise any money. And so one of the things that you guys repeatedly would talk about is this is not a funding process. This is about getting strategic content onto the platform. Content that you're not gonna be able to see on any other platform in the world that's gonna have large audiences that want that content, that this is the Only place they're gonna be able to get it. And when they get there, they're gonna be able to see this phenomenal product experience. And no ads in this. Different business models. And so like, can we get the content? Like it was like, can we get the strategic content? Who would want to give us that content? There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm. How would that work? That's really what all the conversations are about. Every single time people would say, I want to invest in the company, it was like, we don't need the money, we want content. How does that work? And so what we ended up doing with 21st Century Fox, they personally invested overall $100 million. But we ended up using a huge chunk of that cash to create a content studio with them in their expertise in la. And what we're going to be doing with that studio is going after esports, content producing. Like you could imagine things like SportsCenter, but for video gaming, things that are made for caffeine. Leveraging the Fox linear network so that as we're building audience and we've got a much, much smaller audience for a baby audience compared to tw, we've got the ability to put stuff on the linear network with Fox. We've got the ability to go and get access to content again, like ahead of kind of where our audience and product and things are. In addition to that, it also provides a way for us to start to pass through sports rights that Fox Sports has access to. If you want the interactive version with your friends, you come to caffeine. If you want the lean back experience, you watch it on television, linear television through Fox. And so that was kind of the premise of putting that together is to get really interesting content onto caffeine and really beef up our position from that standpoint.

Lachlan Murdoch joined the board. He's the chair of 21st Century Fox now. And why do you think Disney and Fox care about it?

So Lachlan became chairman and chief executive officer of 21st Century Fox. Just after that, Disney came in and purchased their movie and television business. And so now you've got all the live, you've got Fox Broadcasting, you've got Fox Sports, you've got like all their live stuff that they're currently doing.

So they're basically a live company now. 21st Century Fox is all live.

Yes. And so they're looking for new formats and new business models that again are in their ascendancy for their content. It's a whole new Fox, it's a whole new company. I would Give a ton of credit to Lachlan Murdoch as well as Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch. Like, super forward thinking in terms of what's the next format, what's the next distribution model, what's the next business model for our content? And so they're definitely the front runner in terms of thought leadership and trying new things and really thinking through what that's going to look like. There's plenty of other folks in the live television, live broadcasting world, Disney and more that are definitely thinking about this too, but they've been like phenomenal, like real thought leaders, real visionary, like very visionary. Lachlan Murdoch, like, I couldn't speak highly enough in terms of being visionary in the space. And so it's part of his passion and interest in it. He didn't only want to make a big investment in caffeine. He actually called me up on a Sunday and was just like, hey, I'm not on too many boards and I don't have a lot of time, but would you consider me joining your board? Which was phenomenal, wasn't it expecting that?

Yeah, we had a debate on the merits of that too. On one hand, having a big corporate representative on the board, it's challenging. On the other hand, they can bring the resources to the board. But I think so far, so far so good. I think it shows how seriously they're taking caffeine as a signpost as to where live is headed.

I think so too. There's so much to learn from what has happened with linear broadcast television and how you build Fox Sports and how you think about content. There's so much to learn there and then there's so much for them to learn about. And when I say them, I'm talking about 21st Century Fox to learn about technology platforms and new business models and interactivity and the Internet. And so that deal was a really amazing fusion of two parties that were very interested, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, if you like, really wanting to come together and really collaborate. And so caffeine needs to be independent. That's why I left Apple. Not just from what platform it's on, but also from a content standpoint. So we had a deal with Disney, we have a deal with Live Nation, but having one of the big media moguls in the world on your board, the same way Bob Igerson, like the Apple board, I think sends a huge signal that we're really wanting to work very, very closely together and do something hopefully really phenomenal for users.

Yeah, I think it's made the conversations at a strategic level. For the management team and the board, much more complete than your typical technology company. Yeah. So you play forward a few years. So your goal was to reinvent how we experience live media together.

Live television.

Live television together. And then your starting point was gaming. You're moving into sports quite quickly if you play forward four or five years. Like, what's your sense of where live television, what will it be in four or five years?

When a lot of people think about live television, they really just think of sports. Sports is. Out of the hundred live things on linear broadcast television today, the majority of them, like, more than 80%. I don't know exactly what the percentage is, but it's. It's the lion's share of it, by a long way, is sports content. And a lot of people have looked at esports and definitely asked the question, is this a real sport? Like, these guys being legitimate? Like, what is this? And look, it's been created like many other sports have been created. Like, again, I really love action sports. If I think about skateboarding, like, it started off with marketing dollars to create competitions, to create athletes that ultimately sell products.

And that is a great new movie about that documentary.

It's actually. I think it's a fairly old movie.

Is that right?

It's called Z Dogs, and it's about, like, Tony Hawk and other people in Venice beach really igniting the kind of skateboarding revolution. And the same kind of thing is happening with esports right now. And I think, look, at the end of the day, the numbers do the most talking and the viewership is huge. Like here in the Bill Graham down in the Staples Center, LA, San Francisco, CA. Like, the audiences that are watching competitive gaming are bigger than a major league baseball final. If you add up the amount of people that are watching online and at the stadium, it's like the second or third biggest in the world, next to FIFA, world soccer and NFL. And so I would say, like, over some amount of time, five years feels too short, but over some amount of time, like, people are just gonna be like sports. And the big things in sports are video gaming, maybe the NBA, the NFL, like, things like that. So I think that there's not really a market leader or a category king for a single place that you can come to for all of that content, particularly as you start to get off linear television ad in gaming. And, like, because right now you go to ESPN or you go to Fox or you go to Twitch or like, you go to like, a bunch of different places or you might turn on the television. And so I Think for caffeine, like really thinking about gaming and sports and becoming a new category of social broadcasting where you're coming to not just watch the content, but you're coming to interact with the commentator and your friends. I think that's going to be a huge category, and I don't know that anybody is the market leader in that just yet. And so we want to do that first and foremost. And then in addition to that, I think there's a big opportunity just around live entertainment. And so gaming and sports is really what we'll be focused on for the next few years.

Great. This is amazing. You talked about the content, where the content's headed, but let's talk about the format a little bit. So one of the biggest things you guys have really ever launched is something you just launched in the past few weeks called live hosting. Can you talk about what that is and why it's important?

Internally, we call it live hosting, but to the user, it's just another way of creating a broadcast to sort of build something like caffeine. It really starts, as I say, with the content. It starts with the camera. You know, you want to use it to come in and you want them to be able to create content and put it out into the world. And so you build all these layers around. You build the social layers, you build, you know, the business model, you build all this gamification around it. There's all this stuff that sort of happens around it. And so we've made it really, really easy for someone to, like, one click, broadcast their video game. And we make our own broadcasting software, which is something I don't think anybody else does. And so as we start to get into sports, we want to make it so it's one click to be a commentator, not just over your video game, but be a commentator over the sports content. And so the same thing that you see, commentators like will be entertaining, they will narrate, they will talk to a live audience. They might just be fun to hang out with. There's a bunch of reasons why people like different commentators and they. The same thing, I think, can be said when you sort of talk over the top of yourself playing a video game or an esport event or a sporting match. And so, yeah, we've got a new feature that internally we've called live hosting, but it allows you to essentially add TV content, in this case sports content, to your broadcast and talk over it the same way you would a video game.

Yeah, I think it's going to be super interesting because it's A mix between high production quality football games, soccer games, stuff like that, and then UGC that is more relevant to individuals. So there's a lot of times I'll watch Stanford football or whatever. I wish we had different broadcasters than the ones we get. So I'll be looking forward to watching people I care about talk over the content.

Yeah, the thing that's that I think is fun is you could imagine having some really big celebrity influences like, I don't know, Jamie Foxx and the Rock talking over the top of some college football. Football. You could also have a commentator that you've seen on television before and for the first time be able to actually talk to them and interact with them and everyone else is watching. But it also could just be like a bunch of your friends that are just having fun and just. It's like being in the living room with them and just chatting away as well. And so we kind of want to leave that up to the user on what's the best commentator, the best broadcaster for them to have that social broadcast with.

Yeah, mass personalization has been for a long time where people can create the products just for you. It's never been like that on broadcasting. So creating the broadcast just for you seems like now it seems like an obvious. Ha ha.

Yeah.

Okay. Amazing. So this has been a fun conversation about like your background, how all roads led to caffeine for you and then your vision of the future of live TV and social tv. So thanks very much for spending time with us, Ben.

Thank you very much for having me. It's been fun.