This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube video titled "The Origin of Justin.TV | Twitch.TV Founder/Y Combinator Partner Justin Kan" (posted 2015-08-07). The excerpt is an interview-style transcript in English featuring Justin Kan and an interviewer (SPEAKER A). Justin describes the origin and early days of Justin.tv — selling a prior startup, pitching to Paul Graham at Y Combinator (receiving $50k funding with Robert Morris involved), building a 24/7 live video show in 2007, technical and logistical challenges, being swatted, and ultimately pivoting Justin.tv into a platform for others to broadcast.
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Where did Justin.tv come in?
So after we— so when we were like super depressed and like trying to figure out how to extricate ourselves from our startup situation, I was like, I'm never doing this again. This is terrible. It was like me and Emmett, and then we had like one employee, and we'd just like sit around in this like super hot apartment in Boston trying to like program and mostly just being distracted by doing other things because we weren't very excited or happy, like, working on this calendar. And so I was like, I want to get out of this industry. I don't know if it was an industry, but like out of working on this stuff, right? And as soon as we sold it, we were like, okay, that wasn't so bad. Maybe we could like start something else. And we ended up having— we had this idea actually. It wasn't for Justin.tv. It was for like an online publishing tool that would take your like blog and turn it into like a book, like a coffee table book.
Right.
And we went over to Paul Graham's house again, Y Combinator founder, and said, hey, we have this idea. You write online a lot. We have this idea. Would you use it? And he was like, no, never use that. That sounds stupid. And so he was like, well, what other ideas do you have for startups? And I had this idea for Justin.tv, like us making our own livestream without ourselves, just doing whatever. Had it for about a month or two before we had sold the company. And then, so I just kinda said, hey, I have this idea for this thing called Justin.tv. And they started, him and Robert Morris, who's a professor at MIT of computer science, who is one of the founders of Y Combinator, they were kind of intrigued. They were like, this sounds really crazy, but maybe it could be something.
Right.
Funded us right there, and we walked out of there with a check for $50 grand and started working on Justin.tv. Wow.
So what was, what was the moment though that, that you thought of Justin.tv? Did like something happen where you're just like, we have to do this, where it became like this, the idea that you had to pursue?
Well, it was the— when we thought of it, it was because we were trying to figure out how to sell the company, and we were having this discussion about like ideas of like how to do it. And we ended up, you know, one of the ideas I had was like, hey, this is a pretty interesting conversation, maybe we could do like a podcast or something. And that turned into this, it evolved from like just an audio feed to a video feed, and then that evolved to like a live video show 24/7. I don't know, that last jump was a little bit of a stretch, but—
Right.
Then we, you know, it never really became the idea that we had to do until we kind of pitched it and got funded for it.
Was it the primary pitch that day by any chance?
I mean, it was my— no, the primary pitch was, hey, this blog layout tool that you really could use, and nobody liked that, so then it became Justin.tv.
So Justin.tv takes off and people start coming to you and they want it to become a platform so that they can broadcast themselves. At what point do you realize that is the direction that Justin.tv should take?
Well, so we launched the show about 6 months later. We recruited 2 other friends of ours to be co-founders. And the 4 of us just kind of built this technology to stream live video from a computer, effectively, in a backpack with a camera attached to it, to the internet, and then from the internet to all these people watching. And that was kind of tricky. It was like 2007. This was before the iPhone. There was no GoPro.
Right.
We had to find all this stuff and put it together to make it work, and then build some software to do the streaming. It was very unreliable. And we built all of that, and then we went live with this show. And the first thing that happened was it kind of got some traction because it was such a weird idea. And then people just started pranking us nonstop.
Right.
Fire trucks would show up at our house, and the police would show up at our house. It was pretty funny in retrospect, but not really at the time.
You might have been one of the first people to get, I guess, swatted on livestream.
Yeah, we got swatted. Yeah, that was— it was kind of like, you know, why is this happening? But then, you know, the good thing was that all these other people showed up and were like, hey, you guys are like really bad at creating content, but I want to like make my own show. So like, how do I do it? How did you, you know, figure out this technology? And then You know, now, today everyone's like, oh, that was such a great idea for bootstrapping your platform. We actually did think we were entertaining enough to make our own show, which I guess real life proved us wrong. But luckily, we were in the position where all these people who were entertaining came to us and said, hey, I want to make my own livestream.
Right.
And then we pivoted into this platform for anyone to broadcast and kind of spent the next couple months working on that and launched it.
