Tim DraperFounder and Managing Partne, Draper Associate · I back the ideas that look crazy first

Parting Advice | Twitch.tv's Justin Kan

8 Apr 2015 · 2 min

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This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube video titled "Parting Advice | Twitch.tv's Justin Kan" (uploaded 2015-04-08) containing an English talk/interview excerpt in which Justin Kan (from Twitch) gives advice to founders. He emphasizes starting with something people want, the opportunity in niche markets amplified by global mobile internet growth, aggregating users across geographies (citing Twitch growing to ~50M monthly viewers), and the importance of persistence through early slow growth.

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You're trying to sell something. Okay, so my big thing that I would say, and I've said repeatedly to people, is that, you know, if you start something that people want, like even if it's a small number of people, the internet, and especially like mobile, and especially mobile internet in developing world, is growing, right? It's growing so quickly that like even things that seem like niche things become big things over time. Twitch, you know, lots of people tried to actually create a video game TV TV channels, but they were focused on like one geo, right? Like by aggregating all these different, like the entire world, we were, you know, Twitch is now a 50 million viewer a month website. And, you know, in the United States it's a fraction of that, or in Europe it's a fraction of that, and maybe not even a big enough fraction to support kind of like an offline TV channel. But you're able to create a lot of value by like building something that's, focused on a niche and then, like, again, aggregating all those users who could use your product in that niche. And so I think that, like, even small things will grow, can grow to be really big things, and I have a lot of friends who have started companies that started off small and it looked like they were growing linearly until, like, you know, if you look at that early part of the curve, and then, you know, they've rocket-shipped. They've, you know, they, it wasn't clear that they should stick with it in the first couple years. So I mean, I think that, like, persistence and really having a belief, a fundamental belief in your, idea is very important to get to the point where you're actually a big website.