Justin Kan describes how gaming grew from a small feature on Justin.tv into Twitch, a standalone platform. Emmett Shear spotted the potential after StarCraft II launched, and the team built features by asking creators what they needed. A dedicated team led by Kevin Lin targeted specific game communities and hosted tournaments like Evolution, growing monthly users from 10 million to 45 million.
Chapters
At what point did gaming start becoming kind of a big part of the Justin.tv platform? And eventually, obviously, that was spun off to Twitch, but when did that really start to be—
So gaming was, you know, something, one of those many ideas that people wanted to do on Justin.tv, and it was actually pretty small compared to like a lot of our other content. The site grew pretty quickly over the next couple years, and we spent a lot of time figuring out how to scale and racking servers and building better technology and kind of doing what we did best as engineers. And 3 or 4 years later, we're kind of like, the site had grown a lot, but it was flattening out. We weren't growing very much anymore. So we started looking at things on the site that we thought could be bigger.
Mm-hmm.
And Emmett, my co-founder, really identified gaming as something He was like, basically, this is the only content I like to watch. StarCraft II had just come out, and that was pretty popular. And people were uploading videos to YouTube. And he was like, we should try to get more of this content on the site.
Right.
So we started working on it just internally at Justin.tv on the gaming section of the site. And then basically going to the people who were creating gaming content, asking them, how can we make this better for you? How can we make the experience better for you? What do you want? Turns out they wanted to make money from it, they wanted to be able to do it full-time, they wanted better resolution on the video quality, and then we just started working on those things, and then eventually it grew and grew and grew. And then when it got big enough, we were like, okay, we can spin this off to its own brand. Created a new site around it.
I gotta say, I've been in the fighting game community actually since at least the '90s, and I remember— You play Zangief?
What's that?
You play Zangief?
No, no.
And actually, Justin.tv and Twitch solved a huge problem that we had in that we would have what's called Evolution, which is pretty much the world's fighting game tournament. And we would have people come from Japan, Kuwait, England out to— sometimes it was LA, sometimes Las Vegas. But we would have these epic matches. And then the only way for everyone to see them was to either send out VHS tapes back in the '90s or trade DVDs. And then eventually it became, well, we can get kind of a shaky phone cam on YouTube looking over their shoulders. And then when it became that you could livestream this stuff, it was like, it was a huge game changer in the community. It was just like, all of a sudden it was like, it's almost like sports at this point.
Yeah.
And then I remember when you guys became Twitch, And all of a sudden it was like Twitch was everywhere. Like people I used to play with all of a sudden were working with Twitch. There were Twitch t-shirts all over the place, Twitch merchandise. Every stream was Twitch. And you guys really pushed in there. And even though it's a small— I guess it's a small audience compared to the world, you guys still like really got in there and really just grabbed it and became the main— pretty much the main source for watching anything fighting game related.
Yeah.
I was wondering, can you go a little bit into how you guys kind of— did you guys purposely build a campaign to just grab on to certain game communities and pretty much be the source for that?
Absolutely. I mean, basically, we— Twitch, it wasn't just like put it out there and see what happens, right? It was like a lot of— because the technology wasn't that different from Justin.tv. streaming video and then chat. And that's what it looks like today for the most part. I think that one of the things that Emmett and Kevin Lin, who was our COO of Justin.tv and then was really into gaming and he just wanted to work on the gaming stuff, so basically became like a co-founder of Twitch site. Emmett would like go and talk to the users and say, like, what do you— build features that they wanted to like make it better make Justin.tv better for gaming, effectively. And then Kevin really built out this network development team of people who were in the gaming community and really target different verticals, like fighting games or shooters or MOBA games, and figure out who the people were to kind of the tentpole content. How do we get Evo, right?
Mm-hmm.
How do we get people who are very popular broadcasters and influencers, and how do we get them back on the site, help them get set up? help them get some traffic and help promote them. So we, you know, I think that was like the community development part was like super important and like getting, you know, hiring this large network development team of people who would like go out to the events and like give away t-shirts and like take people out and like help them get set up on Twitch was a huge kind of like, it was the basis by which, you know, everyone heard about it.
Right.
And I mean, it was super effective.
How much manpower did you need to do that?
We hired our very first people who were working on network development very early, like Fishsticks and The Gun Run, all these guys who were in the community, and DJ Wheat. Pretty quickly it scaled up to maybe 4 or 5 people, and then it grew and grew and grew from there. Dozens of people now who are like, at any gaming event, there's probably Twitch people there representing Twitch.
Yeah, I think there still is too.
Yeah, absolutely. That's a huge part of it. And now there are people all over the world who kind of work for Twitch, but go to various— because the gaming community is so global. We have people everywhere.
So you build this huge thing. It's becoming very successful, and then you sell it, or, well, it gets acquired. Could you talk about a little bit the lead-up to that?
Well, I mean, Emmett was a, you know, as soon as we kind of pivoted the entire Justin.tv company to Twitch, and with that we made Emmett the CEO. He was our CTO before, my co-founder for all the projects, you know, since the calendar. And he was like, really believed in gaming, right? He was like, this is what I wanna watch. And so he actually, you know, it was his product vision. He became the CEO of the company and we made Kevin continue to be the CEO, but like mostly focused on Twitch. And at that point they just grew and grew the company and it was very, you know, like they were really focused on just figuring out how to like continue growing, right?
Mm-hmm.
I remember when we started off, we were like, if we could only be, I think, 10 million uniques a month, we'd be the biggest gaming video site, bigger than GameTrailers.com. And that'd be something. But we grew far beyond that in the first couple years. Eventually reached around 45 million uniques a month. And at that point, people started coming around and saying, hey, this is actually a real thing. A lot of the time when we were talk about Twitch, you know, people who weren't in the gaming community, they would say, you know, like, no one's ever gonna watch other people play video games. It's like made up, you know? Especially around Silicon Valley, like, it was not a very popular idea.
Yeah.
But, you know, eventually you get big enough and people have to like kind of recognize that it's actually a thing that some people are doing, even if you aren't. And so we kind of got to that point and there was never really like, No one was ever like, oh, we should sell the company. It was more like, it seemed like we got some fair, there was a fair price for it, and with a great partner, and I was really up to Emmett at the end of the day. And now he's still running the company today, and I think loves it.
