The Journey of Caffeine: Founder and CEO Ben Keighran's Vision for Broadcasting

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As an entrepreneur, you're going to have tens that you're going to have a lot of ones to get to those tens. And so you have to believe and have that resilience that you will find a way. The bad times and the good times, just breathe through it, keep being strategic, keep being patient and you'll get there.

To thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape, brands must move at an ever increasing pace. I'm Matt Britton, founder and CEO of su. Join me and key industry leaders as we dive deep into the shifting consumer trends within their industry, why it matters now, and how you can keep up. Welcome to the Speed of Culture.

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Today we're going to be speaking with Ben Kieran, an Australian born technology entrepreneur and the CEO of Caffeine, a groundbreaking social broadcast platform. Ben, so great to have you on the Speed of Culture. Thanks so much for joining today.

Thanks for having me Matt. I'm excited to be here.

Absolutely. So we have all different types of people on the Speed of Culture podcast. We have people that work for major brands and we've had our fair share of entrepreneurs and those are always some of my personal favorites because I love the journey, being an entrepreneur myself, of how to get a product from early inception to a full blown company. And you've done that many times over and would just love to hear from you. What do you think you experienced during your upbringing that enabled you to be an entrepreneur?

That's an awesome question. Thanks for asking it. Look, I think just growing up I always just loved building things that other people could use and it's look, I grew up by the beach in Australia, like surfing. That was my jam but just loved building computers. Working with computers actually was like a self taught programmer at 10 years old and just really got super passionate about the idea of making things that other people could get some use from. I just thought it was the coolest thing ever and feel really fortunate that I gravitated to that at such a young age.

So you just had a calling that technology was something that interested you. Was there anything that initiated that or is it just sort of something that you feel like is it was in your DNA?

In my early 40s now. And so it was like really kind of early 90s where Yahoo and the Internet and all these things were sort of turning off. We're talking like three 86s and four 86s and XT computers like they were before those, you know, that kind of time. And I just thought similar to maybe building like a Lego set or something. Like it was just so fun putting a video card in and installing RAM and then like the chipset and then building software on the computer. And like my mind was just blown away as just a little kid on the. As a creative outlet. And then when I saw that you could make things that other people could use and hopefully get some value from, I just was drawn to it for sure. And like as I said from like 10 years old, like, I mean one quick side story is like you're at school with like doing like the yearbook for like grade five or something and like who's your hero? And everyone else is writing like Michael Jackson and all this kind of stuff. I'm writing like Dennis Ritchie, the founder of C. There was something in it, something about it that I was so excited about and clearly am even today.

Yeah. And in 2003 you founded your first company, BluePulse. Tell us about the impetus behind that company.

Sure. So I mean I haven't told the story in a long time, but when sort of wireless technologies like 802.11 B Wi Fi started to emerge, Bluetooth was another sort of technology. I became so fascinated with the capabilities of those technologies. And I actually built this little remote control out of my Bluetooth mobile phone. One of the first ever Bluetooth mobile phones, the Ericsson T39, it was in Tomb Raider. Do you remember like the boom headset in Tomb Raider or like the Bluetooth thing? Anyways, I thought it was super cool, so I got my hands on that and I ended up making like a remote control for my mobile phone so you could like come into my apartment, which is about the size of a shoebox and the playlist on Winamp, the MP3 music player would like appear on the screen of the phone and you could use it to change tunes. And so this got me like really into sort of mobile application development and ultimately led to me building Blue Poles, which was a Java application that gave people these really rich messaging capabilities and things that you used to see on the Internet but on desktop computers. But people in South Africa and India at the time had never really experienced that. And so when I brought it to like the phones, it just exploded.

Yeah, it seems like it all came from again, you just having hands on keyboard, so to speak, understanding how to use the technology and really being more inventor in some ways. Right. Because I think a lot of software or tech entrepreneurs today, myself included, don't necessarily know how to code, so to speak. And I think, you know, there's so many no coding environments. And what it means to be a tech entrepreneur today is a little bit different than it was back then because then you really had to be more so technical in order to build things because there was no squarespace to build a website or no code environments, GitHub, et cetera, to put things together.

Totally, absolutely. And that's what I loved about it. It was a space that I understood really well. I'm definitely a play based learner. I like to just figure things out on my own. Plenty of subjects in school that I did not do well at as a result, but just really love the freedom and what I was able to do with computers and just keep following your heart, your passion, like keep digging into problems you're trying to solve and one thing after the next. But yeah, that's where it all started for me.

Awesome. And then you would go on to become CEO of a company called Chomp, which over time would be acquired by Apple. Tell us about Chomp and that journey leading up to Apple acquiring it in 2012.

Yeah, so look, I'd been around mobile phones and mobile apps for a long time. In fact, not a lot of people realize, but Asia, Southeast Asia was really ahead of the curve compared to say the U.S. in fact, I remember coming to the U.S. in about 2004 or 2005 and people were just like, what you're building? Like stuff on the Internet for phones and like symbiote applications and Java applications. Like people were still getting used to text messaging and I was like, this is odd because I grew up in the 90s with like a Nokia phone, like at school, like playing Snake under the table when I meant to be paying attention in class, like I was just really familiar with it. And so as smartphone, iPhone and things like this were sort of coming along, palm all these sorts of things, I kept thinking about the people that were successful on sort of desktop web in that generation of the Internet. What would be the successful applications and how would they be different in the mobile world? And I had a lot of experience with mobile. And so obviously content discovery was a huge issue on the web with like companies like Google and Yahoo and everybody else solving those kinds of problems. When it comes to apps and media, it's a different problem, right? There's no TF IDF term frequency and document frequency. There's no metadata, anchor, text. There's none of this kind of stuff. And so you have to come up with a completely different solution for how are we going to search for like apps and content and those kinds of things. And so I just really felt that based on the experience I'd had in life that this was going to be a huge problem. Worked on that. The business was going quite well, but Apple ended up stepping in and saying, hey, we could really use that technology over here, and ended up with them.

So what was that process like to sell a company to Apple? Because that's obviously an iconic company that puts privacy in the highest regard, design in the highest regard. It's not like selling to maybe an advertising holding company, I would imagine. Walk us through like that, what that experience was like.

At the time. I hadn't really heard of too many companies that had ever really sold to Apple. I mean, they've done more acquisitions in the last 10 years than what I'd seen in the previous 10 or 20 years. And so it definitely was a very unusual thing, I think. So what was it like? Well, what we were doing to get a lot of traction for our sort of content discovery technology was essentially powering other people's app stores and services. And so we would do licensing deals. And so we actually had a really big licensing deal which was beginning to roll out with Verizon Wireless. It was going to like power app search on Android phones. Verizon. We also had a deal with Yahoo where we were powering some of the search results in Yahoo for app search, things like that. And process was we were basically trying to work on the same deal with app. So we were saying to them, like, hey, like, we should power content discovery for you guys. And like, here's the technologies, here's how it works. And I would say, like, over the course of six months, we just became really close with the engineering team and different Folks, and it was all done in secrecy and couldn't sort of talk about this too much or at all, I should say. But we became really close to the engineering team and they just got to a tipping point where they were like, hey, we're not going to license the technology. And I remember being in the room with executives and everyone else and going, oh man, like I was really hoping we could like do this. And they were like, actually we'd like to buy the company instead. And so it's quite a hard choice, believe it or not, because as much as I'm super inspired by Apple and I love the company, I really wanted to build a standalone company that could stand on its feet. So it was a really weird moment, but that's kind of how it came about.

And then you ended up staying there for it looks like three to four years. What was your experience like working in Apple? Were you focused on the product you had built or did you kind of branch out a little bit to some of the other product lines at Apple?

Yeah, I ended up staying there a bit longer there. I ended up staying over five years, it might have been six actually in the end. But anyway, something like that. I loved it. Like I loved working out. It was the only time I'd ever had a job like before that it was like in startups and like it was the only time I'd ever actually worked for somebody else. And the story goes, in the first year it was really about integrating the technology and figuring out where the team was going to go. Like you don't get to stay as the same team you were, you sort of get built into the company. And for me it was really unclear because I've become more of a sort of technical product manager or technical product manager type CEO lead off. And Apple doesn't really have that kind of role. And so the thing that I think are pretty amazing of Apple was they allowed me to as long as, you know, the team and the tech was getting integrated correctly and I had all the support from that standpoint really explore Apple and where could I help out. And interestingly enough, even though I have mainly a technical background, I was invited onto the design team to be the design manager for Apple tv. And that was an incredible honor because I was like, well like how do I lead these the best designers I've ever seen in my entire life as a non trained designer like that, how's this going to work? But that's what happened and that's what kept me there because I loved it. It was like Almost doing a startup in this big company.

It's doing a startup. But you're also, I'm sure, learning so much from the people you work with in the organization, which probably set you up for what you ended up doing next.

It totally did. It was like I never got a university degree. I'm a dropout. I was there for six months doing computer science. It was the closest thing to a university degree for me. Like being in an organization.

Right. Apple University.

Apple University was incredible.

So after you left Apple University, you went on to found your current venture, which is caffeine, which I really want to dig into because did a little research on it. It looks super exciting and covers and overlays a lot of the areas that I pay particular attention to. So tell us and the audience what caffeine is, what the impetus behind founding that was and what you're working on today with the business.

Yeah, totally. So caffeine is a place where you can watch for free live sports, not the major live sports like NFL and NBA. What I would say is the majority of live sports, which is things like action sports and X Games and world surf league, street league basketball teams, all the way out to like pickleball and all sorts of interesting things like that. So it brings really passionate communities together, creates a home for live streaming of sports. You can watch it on a phone, you can watch it on the web, you can watch it on a couple of connected TVs as well. And it has over 40 million monthly active users here in the US under the age of 35. And so it's an ad supported thing. You will see some ads on there and it does have some in app purchase features too. But it's free to watch and a really cool sports streaming service I think people really enjoy.

And how did you get the idea for this concept?

As a hobby I'm a huge gamer, played in some of the top World of Warcraft rating guilds and all sorts of things over the years. And I'm a gamer. And so basically when Twitch came along, I was working on Apple tv. They were moving from Justin TV over to Twitch. And I'm also simultaneously in all of these executive conversations at Apple talking about the future of tv. And I just really felt that it was pretty clear like the way TV broadcasting, live television broadcasting was happening on cable wasn't going to stay that way. We were going to move to streaming like movies and TV shows and there was going to be a new sort of broadcast network emerge. And so the question I had was like, is Twitch going to do that not just for gaming but for all of live broadcast TV or if they don't do it, who's going to do that? And as you sort of play that out like a big element, I think of the future of live broadcast is interactivity is social is community is bringing people together to talk and interact around each other and at that point in time and Apple may be very different on it today. This is like 10 years ago. They weren't bullish on the idea of going into social and community and thinking about all those aspects of things. But I became kind of obsessed with it thinking like wow, whoever does this is going to be new technology and new business models and it could have a really positive and profound impact on humans. And so ultimately it was something that I couldn't work on at Apple and it's part of the reason why I left and part of the reason why I started caffeine. And so yeah, it's been quite a journey figuring out new technology and a new business model and the content rights and all the things that go with building what we're describing. But it's really working and it's on its way now and it's taken a few pivots to get there, but always with the same common vision of how we build the future Next generation live broadcasting network.

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Yeah, I mean there's a lot of themes in terms of what you're working on, one of which is just sounds like the long tail of sports. So you have FIFA and the NFL and the NBA, but you talk about you being a gamer in esports obviously falls in that category or pickleball, which is an emerging sport. So first of all, how do you find and identify and decide I'm going to go after this particular property? Like is that based upon what your audience wants or is it based upon what you're interested in and think might.

Be cool to broadcast the different phases that caffeine has been through. The initial phase was about hey Maybe this new technology could attract a new kind of content creator. It ended up attracting a lot of sort of small streamers in gamers and things like this that were familiar with Twitch, but looking at an alternative and it was growing, but not growing quite fast enough and, and it always as I say, had the bigger, broader vision of how do you build something broader than just gaming? Like gaming could be part of what I'm talking about for sure. So can, so could news, so could FIFA World Soccer, so could all these different things. But what's the sort of wedge, like the way to get into this market and really grow and not sort of cap out being just a place for the gamers which is still big, but there's more stuff than just that out there. The phase two was we had a lot of investment to sort of buy content rights. And as we started to buy sports rights, what I realized was a lot of these non sort of top 100, those major sports, believe it or not, there's 11,000 of these other. That's why I'm saying like the majority, you could say the long tail niche sport. I say like the majority of the sports are out there like 11,000 of them compared to like the top 100. These guys, like they got really passionate audiences and they don't really have a home. And I was like buying the content and really seeing like hey, it's really hard to reach these audience. It's really hard to like sort of super serve these communities. There's a lot of problems with it. And a lot of these guys, if we don't buy them, they're just putting the content on YouTube different places already. It's really fragmented, it's all over the place. They might build their own website, et cetera. And so incomes kind of like caffeine 3.0 which is like, okay, how do we work with these guys non exclusively? Like what are the people that are already trying a non licensing approach and how do we sort of band them together in super squares communities? And that's something that we've been really good at doing over the last 18 months with new technology and this business model. And so yeah, we have a content team that's looking to add content density, but also add breadth of categories focused on what we think the audience will like. But we're specifically looking for folks that are out there trying to non exclusively do things because we're not buying content rights, we're just working with non exclusive partners, aggregating them, super serving them, helping them get distribution, all of that, that's exactly it.

And in terms of TV in general, I mean, I would imagine you getting exposed to Apple tv, understanding where the TV market was going and understand we are moving to a streaming world, opened your eyes up to the possibility of where this is all headed, moving forward. I mean, where do you see TV heading? I mean, do you think linear TV is even going to exist five to ten years from now? And how do you see this current, I guess, progression away from linear TV continuing to accelerate?

Totally. So yeah, I mean I got to the front row seat at Apple on a lot of the most brilliant people I've ever met in my life, how they think about the market and where it's all going. And so even though I have mainly an engineering background with a nice design element there, I also got to pick up a lot of commercial aspects of things that you wouldn't get to sort of see as a just a regular tech entrepreneur. You got to be in conversation and see that. So between that now having lots of investment from cable companies and Disney and Fox and all these different guys in my board, I've seen and heard and looked at the market in a way that not a lot of people probably have seen. So where do I think it's going? Look, I think that linear TV as it stands is kind of going the way of the newspaper, right? Like it's still going to be consumed by a lot of people for a long period of time. But it is as we go into generation upon generation, like the next generation is not going to consume it like the previous generation. It's changing. And so what's it changing to? Well, there's really like two types of things that you would sort of consume on one linear tv. One is like movies and TV shows and the second is live. And that may be an oversimplification, but I'm like there's like live, which is generally sports and news, and then there's like movies and TV shows. Movies and TV shows were the first to sort of go to streaming services like Netflix and other places because they actually got like the smallest share of the cable TV bundle. It was easiest for them to sort of leave. Whereas the sports guys get paid so much money that very hard for them to leave. Challenge for movies and TV shows and streaming services like Hulu and Netflix and so on over the long term is that there's just been a real shift towards shorter and shorter form content. TikTok and so even when you're watching a movie and TV show as a kid these days, you're also on TikTok and Instagram and whatever else you're doing. But there's more of a trend going for on demand content like shorter form might get me the content. The thing that's interesting about Live is I think it's impossible to imagine a world where you don't want to see my family versus your family, or my state versus your state, or my college versus your college, or this person, this friend versus this friend. Like, competition brings people together around an outcome that they're all interested in seeing what happens. And even though the behavior is shifting towards shorter form content, live still brings people together for appointments, scheduled events, and for a longer session, like 15 plus minutes, which is kind of crazy. Like, I can't believe long form content's now at 15/ minutes, but that's how it's sort of categorized as daily. So let's hear over and over again. And so I think for live, you're going to see it fragmented for a bit. So like, You've got the NFL Sunday Ticket item, YouTube right now. You've got Major League Baseball that Fox mainly handles. You've got MLS that Apple's now doing. You've got an espn, all the NBA rights and things are over there. And it's going to create a quite a fragmented world for people for the next little while. But I think you will see sort of a reshaping and a re. Sort of framing of what we had on linear TV but over streaming services. And I think it's going to get brought to you not just on phones and connected TVs, but I think it's going to be really successful in VR as that starts to pick up as well. Because the live experience with other people in that is going to be epic, I think.

Yeah. I actually was just talking to the folks from Meta Reality Labs and they were saying the same thing, that they think both gaming and live sports are just huge applications of, you know, all these. I mean, Apple just came out with a new device and that usually means that it's ready for the mainstream if they're coming out with it. So I think that that's the new world. The other piece that I'm curious to get your thoughts on is just gambling. Gambling fantasy sports. The major leagues are now starting to adopt it and normalize it. And I mean, how far are we away from somebody watching caffeine and betting on a pickleball? I mean, do you see that in the future of your platform?

Yeah, I mean, for us, like we're going to be doing international next year. Will be a huge focus in getting further onto connected TVs, but further out. Like I think that partnering up with betting companies would be phenomenal, especially with the real time nature of caffeine. That's a standout technology aspect of caffeine is that everyone's seeing it within milliseconds of the action. And so betting would be incredible. I think E commerce opportunities around it too would also be amazing. Right. So you're watching something live and you want to buy a jersey or something that you're seeing sort of live and on screen right now. There's a lot of E commerce type opportunities I think around it. I also think that AI to create like shoulder content around it and also use for sort of discovery are all going to be like really interesting things that sort of make this format even more and more exciting and more easy for people to sort of get into. But yeah, betting I think will be huge. But betting plus these other things are all big area.

So kind of shifting gears a little bit. And just as we wrap up, as an entrepreneur, I'm running a company. Looks like you guys have raised over $150 million venture capital where uncertain macroeconomic landscape where you're getting, you know, your revenue primarily from advertisers. You're trying to stay relevant with consumers. It's a lot to juggle. I think only the best entrepreneurs will get through times like we're in today. But the ones that do are going to have a huge business on the other side. What do you do as an entrepreneur to I guess stay grounded, make sure that you're deploying your resources and your time in the right way so you can execute on the vision that you have for the business.

Yeah, I mean for me, I'm always thinking about the long term and I'm thinking about how to build a real business for the long term. And there's choices that were made like years ago at caffeine to keep things lean. Right. And to really just focus on a user. And today you've got a business that has no marketing costs. Like, I mean, okay, we have our firm that we work, but basically there's no quote, unquote like marketing. We don't even have a marketing leader on the executive team. There's no content cost, it's all non exclusive content. So it's like infrastructure which we are really good at and we own the full video stack and we're actually still driving down cost on that in a fairly small team. It's like 60 people and that's it. And so that gross from like 3 million to over 40 million in the last year has all happened without any marketing, without any content costs. And we're doing it more and more and more. And so as we monetize with ads and also sell in app purchases, even in this market, that's really tough. Caffeine's thriving and I think it's going to thrive even more. You're right, you know, as we sort of come out of it. And so for me, I'm like always thinking about the long term, I'm thinking about the user and I'm really trying to create a real business out of this and I've always been that way. And I'm be 8 years in April next year and I'm just super passionate and obsessed with it and just going to keep doing that.

Yeah. And what are you doing to make sure that you're keeping your finger on the pulse of the consumer and the changes? Because we talked about so many different innovations, whether it's, you know, VR or AR or gaming or streaming, the world's changing so fast. How are you able to stay, I guess, on top of what's next?

Yeah, so first and foremost, I talk to our users every single day. It's like I literally, like wake up, I log into caffme and I'm like talking to folks. I'm always trying to have my finger on the pulse of what's happening. I love the data as well, so I'm always looking at the data and seeing what's going on. But then outside of that, I'm a real user of, like, even though I'm now like 41 years old, like I'm on all the platforms every day, whether it's TikTok or YouTube or whatever, and doing a lot of work in Hollywood and LA as well, and having a lot of sort of celebrity investors and other people. I really try and keep my finger on the popular culture and what's happening. And it's just life for me. Like, it's just who I am and what I really enjoy doing. So it's not really work to talk to users or look at the data or talk to different famous people in LA about what's going on or, like, look, use all these different sort of social and Internet services. I just love it and it just helps give me a good feel for what I think is coming and what's happening and connecting it up with sort of the market information and the data and what you hear from board members and other stuff that's going on.

So to wrap up here, I mean, obviously had awesome career and have worked with so many cool companies and, you know, I definitely get the feeling you're just getting started. Obviously we never know what we should know when we're young and we're kind of making up as we go along. But if you had the opportunity to tell 20 year old Ben something based upon what you know today, what would you tell him in a way that maybe could help some of our younger listeners here at the podcast?

I think the younger band, like would hear the advice but probably wouldn't actually be able to do it because I was just always just so in a rush and like just so excited that like, I wouldn't think about things too much and just go, like, just keep going and just work all the time and just be like drinking from the fire hose. But I think in the end, like, being strategic and patient is really like the key. And that's what I'm saying. Like if you could think about a long term, think about the user, think about the problem that you're trying to solve and it's something that you're just super passionate about, like, it's going to be there tomorrow, it's going to be there next week, it's going to be there in a month. It all doesn't actually have to happen today. What is important is that you're patient, you're strategic, and you're making the right calls as you move through it. I think another like, lesson is some self care. Like, I mean, in my 20s, like I would go sometimes three days, no sleep, right? Like a lot of the time four hours and like that grind, like I couldn't do that anymore and that wouldn't be the way to build a company. But it felt like ingrained in the culture of Silicon Valley at that point that that's what you had to do to be hardcore. And I would just say, like, you do have to be hardcore and you have to work hard, but you also have to get sleep. It's your job to get sleep and not burned out and tired all the time. And like, it's your job to stay in the game and so be strategic, be patient is my quick answer.

And finally here is, do you have a saying or a mantra that you like to live by that helps you get through this rugged journey as an entrepreneur?

I have had written at the top of my to do list for eight years. The dream is real. I'll always find a way.

So it's about resilience, right? It's about believing in yourself and being unwavering.

Basically, that's it. Like, I think you have to have a problem that you want to fix, a user in mind that you want to be in service to a dream for like what that could look like. And just know that there's always ups, there's always downs. Like life can't be like if ten's like the best moment and one's a bad moment. Most a lot of people just want to have fives like every day. Every day, every day. As an entrepreneur, you're going to have tens that you're going to have a lot of ones to get to those tens. And so you have to believe and have that resilience that you will find a way. The bad times and the good times, just breathe through it, keep being strategic, keep being patient and you'll get there.

Well, listen, thank you so much for your time today. It's been really awesome to get to know your journey and I'll definitely be cheering from the sidelines and following along as you continue to build caffeine and whatever you do next.

Thanks Matt. Appreciate it.

On behalf of Susie and I, we team. Thanks again to Ben Kieran, CEO of Caffeine, for joining us today. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the Speed of Culture podcasts on your favorite podcast platform. Till next time. See you soon everyone. Take care. The Speed of Culture is brought to you by Suzy as part of the Adweek Podcast Network and AAST Creator Network. You can listen subscribe to all Adweek's podcast by visiting Adweek.com podcast to find out more about Suzy, head to Suzy Susie.com and make sure to search for the Speed of Culture in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found. Click follow so you don't miss out on any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Suzy, thanks for listening.

Finding the right audience shouldn't feel like doom scrolling with Experian. It doesn't. Experian syndicated audiences help you reach holiday shoppers, car buyers and more across over 200 top platforms with over 2,400 pre built audiences. There's no more doom scrolling. It's audience targeting you can trust. Made simple. Learn more@experian.com Adweek that's exp e R I a N com Adweek.