February 5, 2020 • 50 mins
We're officially at midseason, and I thought it would be a good idea to do a recap of some of our favorite episode, but brought together under a common theme. We're calling this a mashup of sorts. This first is one of my favs: Twitch. Not just because I'm biased, but because the whole 'streamer' and 'live video' platform warring going on right now is reaching peak crazy. In this episode we'll feature a creator, a founder, and the go-between who manages to work for both of them. Not just any creator, but the #1 most followed streamer on Twitch, Pokimane. Not just any founder, but Kevin Lin, the cofounder of Twitch. And, of course not just any go-betweener, but the VIPs', VIP, the go-to partner manager and starmaker, Anele of Twitch. We hope you enjoy listening to this mashup of different players, with different viewpoints, all pushing this phenomenon of live streaming.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Behind the Influence, a production of I Heart
Radio and t DC Media. Hey, guys, welcome back to
Behind the Influence. I'm Tatiana, and as you guys know,
our entire series is all about talking to pioneers within
their respective industries, whether it's gaming, streaming, YouTube, music, food, fashion, dance.
(00:20):
I mean, I could go on if you have not
had a chance to listen to every single episode, which
I don't know what your excuses, but I thought it'd
be a fun time in the middle of the season
to kind of do a recap in the form of
a mash up. What I'm thinking is, and if we
don't like this, we don't ever have to do this again.
But I was thinking, we go within each industry and
(00:42):
we kind of highlight to you guys, the listeners, the
big takeaways, the things that I thought were interesting within
each episode. In the event that, again you didn't have
the time to listen to the entire thing, We're going
to start off with a topic in a world that
is very near and dear to my heart, live streaming
and also twitch and it's kind of the same world
(01:03):
twitches near and dear in my heart because my husband
was a CSO of the company for a very long time,
and live streaming is something that I've been doing for
a very long time, and I really love that whole world.
I love how ron real it is, and I love
the connectivity with people who are listening or watching. Those
were actually some of the very first interviews I even
started off with. I thought it'd be a cool way
(01:24):
to kick off this little mash up series. And if
you guys don't like it, I'm listening to your feedback.
We don't have to do it ever again. I just
thought it'd be a cool way for you guys to
hear from different aspects within each world within one episode.
For this first episode, we're going to cover the world
of Twitch. Kevin Lynn is a co founder of Twitch,
and so that's how really the idea started to come
(01:45):
to be. And then we launched the brand in June
two thousand eleven and Poke Maine is the number one
most followed female streamer on Twitch. So I think the
first step is just trying it out. Is something that's enjoyable,
interacting with people, showcasing a gameplay. That's really how I
did it. And then there's a Neil who is the
director of partnerships at Twitch. It is a dream job
(02:07):
and to be perfectly awesome at you like I'm I'm
humbled to be in the every day doing what I'm doing.
I hope you guys enjoy this mash up. Let us
know what you think without further ado the world of Twitch. Baby,
if you haven't caught on by now, we're talking to
Kevin Lynn. You guys may know him as one of
the founders a small streaming company called Twitch. Without you,
(02:27):
there'd be no doctor disrespect, there'd be no Ninja. I
mean they're there'd be, but what would they be doing
playing video games by themselves? Exactly? She has three point
four million followers on Twitch. She has over eight one
million views on Twitch. You have is this accurate? Almost
twenty streamed on Twitch? I have no idea. Okay, I
(02:49):
don't know. It's actually a stat I always wish I
knew a Neil is the head of strategic Partnerships at Twitch,
a small, tiny, little company you may have heard of.
You've seen Twitch evolved over the last five six years,
Like God knows what's going to happen in the next
five to six after this. Then on June eleven, June eleven,
(03:13):
we launched Twitch TV. It was this old like heavy
metal space theme logo with a little TV with a
ghost in it that Jacob design Twitch a variety of stories,
that's how we got there. But we were combing the
Internet for pronounceable, single syllable domain names that were available
for sale. So Bill who built chat and among many
(03:33):
other things that at the company, Bill Morier, so he
built this like domain crawler where he crawled all available
domains that were like theoretically single syllable so roughly a
vowel in the middle that seemed pronounceable, that were available
for sale. And one of the first that popped on
the list for all of us was art and it
was available. We looked up on Urban Dictionary. It means
(03:54):
like the supreme state of being awesome or something like that.
So that seems okay right Then one day m it's like,
all right, guys, if no one comes up with anything better,
we're going to use Zarth. And that's when we're like, okay, scramble.
So we're like figuring out all these other brands, and
then the word Twitch comes up for like to me,
when it popped into my head when we were talking
about like, what do things gamers need to be good?
(04:14):
And so it's like fast twitch muscles blah blah blah,
but really that we're just kind of stuck in all
of ourselves. Perfect. It was perfect. It was an empty
vessel you could tell. You know, there's a story there
about games, but it's just a word we liked. We
bought Twitch dot tv. That's how it came to be.
That's how it started, and we designed and Jacob designed
the logo, and then one year later two launched the
new logo that you see today. That that that that
that more retro homage logo. It looks like Amazon has
(04:37):
purchased game streaming company Twitch dot tv for close to
one billion dollars. You have a lot of fans, you
have all these people watching you. You are doing this
five days a week as your career. How does one
get here? Well, interestingly enough, when I first started, I
(04:57):
never ever thought it would be this, And I feel
like everyone says that, and I kind of think that
that's a key aspect to becoming a good streamer is
when you start, it's genuinely just something that you enjoy,
that you would be happy to do as a hobby.
I think I sometimes see people get into it and
they're like, I want to make money, I want to
hit these mothstones, I want to hit these goals. And
(05:17):
if you're doing it with that in mind, as opposed
to this is an activity that I like. For example,
you're probably not going to find like an Olympian runner
that just hates running out right right. So I think
the first step is just trying it out as something
that's enjoyable, in tracting with people showcasing your gameplay. That's
really how I did it. Twitch is hands down one
(05:39):
of the most successful companies out there. When you think
back to how you landed the role, what were the
steps that you took in your own Because you got
the job when you were fairly young, So did you
have a background in streaming or were you just a
gamer who found out about this platform because you were
using it and you're like, I'm going to apply for
(06:00):
a job there. How did you land there? And I
don't even know where to begin. I'll give you the
condensed versional, at least what I would as seem to
be the most condensed version. When I was younger, I
actually competed in gaming when I was like fifteen sixteen,
I played a game called Counterstrike. Never heard of him.
It's a just kidding. Colin plays it all the time.
Oh my god. It almost caused multiple divorces. But let's
(06:22):
this isn't about me. We could talk about that off
the record. But I played a ship ton of counter
Strike when I was in high school. Actually funny story.
So my mom and I give me an option. They're like, Okay,
we could either build your brand new computer, or we'll
get you a car. And if I got a car,
I can go get a job and go make some
money and then buy a computer. But I was like, no,
funk that I want a computer. I want it right now.
(06:42):
So I got a computer. Ended up dropping like three
racks in two thousand and five, which was like a
ship ton of money for computer. Also, let's just a
lot of teenagers would have chosen a car. Yeah I'm
an idiot, but looking but it worked out. It did.
It was the best decision I made. But your parents
were probably like thinking they scored because they're like, we
don't have to get this kid a car, right, Yeah,
let's go get a three thousand dollar computer. That's fine,
(07:04):
He's not going out anymore. So I got into programing,
and I was doing for about a year. It really sucked.
That wasn't good. Why did you get into programing because
back then I don't even think it was It was
like it was like a cool thing. It was like
an underground community, you know, like there's websites. I got fragged.
You can go into that like shared scores and tournaments
(07:25):
from like all around the world. And back then it
was like a little underground society, like you only heard
about these tournaments happening in like Sweden, and you would
hear about like the World Cyber Games, and that was
like the pinnacle of like events. You know. Nowadays we
got a ton of events going on on like on
a monthly basis. Back then you only had one or
two worldwide. I did it for about a year and
I realized, look, my grades are failing. I'm not doing well.
I need to grow up. I need to like focus
(07:46):
on what teenagers care about, which is like going to
school and getting a job and meeting a girl and
all this other teenage ship. I end up going into
school for premed I did that for like three years,
and my mom and dad had to sit down with
me with my brothers, and we're like, would you really
want to do? And I'm like, I want to go
become a doctor. And they're like, no, you don't. We
know you don't want to be a doctor, we know
you hate it. What do you really want to do?
And that was like my breakthrough moment of like being
(08:08):
very honest with myself. What good parents? I feel like
the majority would be doing the polar opposite, especially in
a space that your parents probably were not familiar with
and did not understand. They didn't and they totally had
to read on me, like they knew me inside and out.
So I think it was like their own intuition. They
knew that I wasn't happy doing what I was doing
or trying to pursue what I what I thought I
(08:28):
wanted to do. Anyways, that caused me to like Dill back.
And coincidentally, at the same time, StarCraft two, which the
franchise was like everything to me, was getting announced, and
so I was like, you know what, I'm gonna get
back into playing some video games when we play StarCraft two,
and I really wanted to get good at the game.
So I went on YouTube and I started watching like sutorials,
and I found Justin TV, which was like the sister
(08:49):
company of Twitch back in the day, and t like
when I tell you, like I was an avid viewer,
Like I was on that ship all day. Really, I
was up until like five six am watching like the
Career in like Stark Half League, which was like going
on from like one am all way to like five
am every fucking night. And then I would roll into
class like half a week. But I did that, and
I loved it. You were a part of Social Cam
(09:10):
and Justin TV and all the stuff for years. Two
thousand and six, I just moved to San Francisco Justin
and Emmett after graduation. They graduate two thousand and five.
They had built a calendar company. They sold it on eBay.
They saw their company on eBay, packed up their stuff,
drove across the country with Michael. Michael was working for
Quasium Fume raising money for a Senate campaign in Baltimore.
They kept in touch, they got together, drove, drove across
(09:32):
the country, and I was house sitting from my old boss,
So invite him over for a barbecue, hanging out in
the hot tub, and and Justin's like, we got this
idea for a business. I was like, okay, what we're
gonna stream my life? Seven? And could you imagine one
of your friends being like, I have this genius idea.
You guys are gonna stream my life? Yeah? Yeah no,
(09:54):
And it's just like you know, you look, I'm just
like sitting there like, you know, I really like you guys,
And it's awesome, really happier moving to San Franci les Go.
And I really don't want to discourage you or offer
anything that might prevent you from starting your dream, but
that idea is really kind of the worst, and like
why would you do this to yourself? And they explained it,
and I was like, okay, cool. Well, you know like
they had they raised they were raising money from angels
(10:16):
and a lot. They already had this idea in motion.
They were already starting to talk to people about it,
and and I was like, okay, cool, Like let me
know if I can help you know, like I I
is this a hot tub conversation? Was one of the
hot tub and barbecue conversation. Okay, so let's just let's
pretend everyone's in the hot tub. So it's justin Cohn,
emateur Michael Cibo and Kevin Lynn and they were like,
(10:36):
I think a couple of other people, but I was
so zoned in on this conversation, just thinking through, like
what in blaze, what could this act? So Justin's pitching
you in the hot tub? Yeah, totally, this is this
is the pitching this genius idea. He's already spoken to
angel investors, so it's not like he's like brewing the
idea and running and already tested it. He tested testing
it with many people and people are like, yeah, sure,
(11:00):
give you money for that. And you gotta remember, like
in in like the early two thousand's, there was all
kinds of weird experimental stuff that was happening in live video.
I actually had like just a laptop and really bad internet,
and I had to beg my parents to upgrade the
internet so it was like streamable Internet. And I saved
up a bunch of money to buy a secondhand, custom
(11:23):
built PC off of Kijigi, which is like Canadian craigslist.
So yeah, I bought this PC. This was my senior
year of high school, so about six years ago. Now.
Really didn't like Envision much for it. I just thought
it was really fun to have people like come into
my channel and I talked to them and they respond
and create this connection. I kept streaming. Two years into it, well,
(11:48):
I ended up going to university because in my mind
it was always like very ingrained in me from my parents,
like you go to school, you get your degree, maybe
you do post grad or you become a doctor. I
don't know very much one of those households. So I
went to study chemical engineering at McMaster University and two
years into that, one month I made like a substantial
(12:11):
amount of money. And when I say substantial, I mean
like when you're a college kid and you're like at
least twenty thousand dollars in debt and you make like
five to ten k in a month off of like
sponsorships or subscriptions or donations, you're like, holy do I
store on this? Holy shit? And so they're like, go
be an engineer, but don't do it. We did. Don't
teach after go get a job, Go get a real job,
(12:33):
but learn engineering is really important, and ideally go be
a doctor. That was was pre med track, had it
all figured out. Yeah, that was that was the plan.
And then I took this a class called EB one
oh one, which was the Diversity of Life with his
teacher named Leo Busts, who was this like awesome ecologist
guy and loved it, and I was like, I'm going
to switch to ecology and evolutionary apology as my major.
There was like the first rift I had with my
(12:54):
parents were like, no paying for school, you are going
to study engineering. Meanwhile, we're playing a bunch of video
games in the office. A street Fighter was like kind
of one of those always on games like this just
droning Street Fighter background music that was always on in
the office. Then one day StarCraft to Beta comes out.
This was in May, intent somehow we got access to
it and we were already thinking about games. But then
(13:15):
this game comes out, we get it and we were
playing it NonStop and we're watching We realized that we're
going home and watching videos on YouTube trying to get
better learning, and we're like, huh, this should be live,
Like why would this not be live? And sure enough
we had a We had a small community of gamers
back in the day. This was like Kaiba four player podcast.
You stream had a bunch of Lord Cat and so on,
(13:38):
and so there was there was a small community of
game streamers on a variety of platforms, and so we
started reaching out what can we build for you? And
a lot of people that we reached out to in
the beginning that we eventually like eventually worked with us
or became a partner were like, you guys are terrible,
we hate you. Don't TV brand sucks, like go away,
and like no, no, please, like let us ask you
some questions and we promise we'll go away, but we
might build some stuff for you. We'll let you know that.
(13:59):
Just continue to to sort of positively spiral more conversations,
more feature development. We branched out the subdomain called JTV
gaming and that became like the home. That was one
of the big pieces of feedback we got. Was the
first one being we got to figure out how to
make money. Then there all these technical features like transcoding,
high quality, blah blah blah, all these important things that
we had to build very quickly. But the big thing
(14:21):
was they were like, we want a home. We want
a place where we can go and hang out with
other gamers, not all this other weird stuff, not all
this noise. We want a home for gamers. And so
that's how really the idea started to come to be.
We were toying with it as justin t JTV Gaming.
We didn't launch as that. We just did it. We built,
just built up brand, but we didn't really make noise
about it. Then on June eleven, June eleven, we launched
(14:43):
Twitch tv. And so to me on the periphery, I
just saw Justin popping up on like Today's show on
the front page of the s F Chronicle, like doing
all this stuff, kind of doing it, like becoming this
internet celebrity by streaming himself to me for something. And
it's just like that's so wild because I tune in
and I'm like, this is the most boring shit ever,
And you're just sitting there just like looking at this laptop,
(15:04):
like why do people watch this? But it was for
these moments, all of a sudden something would happen and
that was enough. Like one day they bumped into Dave
Chappelle and that was a big deal, right, So it
was cool to start see to start to see like, Okay,
I see that people will tune in to wait for
these things. But guess what they weren't just doing that.
They were talking with each other. They're talking to Justin,
Justin's responding to them and chat So it's actually not
(15:25):
as boring as as if you diggle just one tiny
little bit layer deeper. People were just hanging out and
that was that was what I finally realized, was like this,
this power of this platform that they were building was
it's a way for people just to hang out with
other people when they're alone or with other people, but
mostly for when you're alone. You know, you when you're
walking around somewhere, you're doing your errands or whatever. Wouldn't
(15:48):
it be nice if you could just chat with somebody,
you know, if you don't have somebody to be there
with you. So that that's that's when we started to resonate.
But that was you know, it really was like it
was just crazy to see. Yeah. So Kevin Lynn, who
was one of the founders actually is one of my
good friends, and we interviewed him for this show, and
he was saying, when they initially launched Justin TV, which
was prior to Twitch, people were just in there because
(16:09):
they were lonely and they just wanted interaction with other
people and being and they were just watching Justin do
day to day things. But ironically they were alone, but
they weren't alone because they call it your community right
on Twitch, it's a community. What would you say your
community is made up of? So for me, interestingly enough,
I think it's highly dependent on the game that I play,
(16:31):
and I can tell by the way that my chat changes,
Like if I play something like Fortnite or Minecraft, I
know the audience use younger. I know if I play
like League or do Ira all content like in person
or walk around or travel, then it's really just about anybody.
League is definitely like young adults. So, like you can
(16:51):
tell by the way your chat behaves, the kind of
stuff that people are saying, typically what the demo is like.
I like to think that I think I have more
female viewers than most people. I think that's very normal though,
because you know, when you watch content, it's a lot
easier to relate to someone who's of the same gender
as you. I think it's pretty wide because I can
(17:13):
kind of tap into different demos by playing different games,
which is really cool. I loved every bit of it.
And what was it? What was it about that that
hooked you? Was it you were trying to learn? Was
it a learning experience? Was it you were just the
voyeuristic element of it, which I think a lot of
people are drawn to that. Imagine picking up a new
hobby that doesn't really have much of a culture, much
(17:37):
of a community around it, and you find one little outlet,
one little outlet, and there's like one place where we
kind of feel like a sense of belonging and something
that you can actually take away on a day to
day something you can learn from. And for me that
was justin TV and watching like these Korean leagues at
the time. Plus you're interacting with other people in chat,
so there's like this other like kind of shared experience
that you kind of experienced with other people along the way.
(17:58):
And for me, that was every thing I told myself,
I'm like, one way or another, I'm gonna find a
way to get a job here anyway. So a lot
of people were experimenting with like you know now, with
the with the with the promise of the internet, like
the ability to just do whatever you want and demonstrate
that to whoever feels like watching you was tested a
lot before that, but the technology wasn't there, the infrastructure
(18:20):
wasn't there. So the timing window around when they decided
to start streaming and walking around San Francisco's two thousand
and seven, it was still e v D. Oh you know,
if you're lucky bits per second, So it's still choppy video,
low quality. Um. But really they actually did this show
for a while. Justin streamed himself sleeping to waking up
(18:41):
and getting ready, going to the bathroom, sitting and working,
walking around San Francis. Are you involved at this point
or I'm like on the periphery, I'm still I had
just you know, I moved in two thousand six in
San Francisco, so I didn't want to. You know, they
didn't ask me too, because I was frankly would have
been completely useless to them, questionable if I was ever
actually full to them. Um. But anyway, I was delivering
(19:03):
beverages and I was like, oh, I want to help
these guys, and so I go to there like that.
You know. Michael was originally the producer. His title was
a producer just In with CEO and Michael would cook
for everybody every day, cooking all these delicious meals. He
loves cooking. But he what he was doing was really
gathering people around what they were up to, and so
friends from dropbox, Airbnb like at the time, all would
(19:23):
just come hang out over dinners the Bay Area is
not a very big hut for gaming like l A is.
But the Bay wasn't any opportunity that there was an
event like I volunteered. I spent some time throwing my
own money into it, and then I got a job
at Zinga, and that was like my big break because
I was like my first step into the gaming industry.
And that is not necessarily the Pinnacle, like they're not
(19:43):
like a true like hardcore game company, but it was
in the gaming industry and I met a lot of
talented people there, made made a lot of friends, and
I used actually my salary at Zinga to bootstrap my
own StarCraft team and it was great. I loved every
minute of it. And anyways, over time, about a year
of doing that while working at single uh, the right
opportunity locked on my door Twitch and that interview process
(20:05):
took like three months. It was at this point was
it already Twitch? It was already Twitch. It was about
a year into it, which was already kind of like
a formed company. When you heard about Twitch for the
first time, what were your initial thoughts. I was like,
holy shit, I thought I can break in as a streamer.
It's actually stream for like two years. I wasn't good
at it. It really wasn't, but you know, I love
I love every bit of it. Uh And for me,
(20:27):
I would say Twitch had a really cool, like gothic,
like nerdy like steampunk. Looked at it back then, and
then like six months in or I think it was
about a year after, they like reframed it into this
whole purple company, which I absolutely loved because purposes the
Pemp color. You know, it's dope, Like you were saying,
back then, there weren't household names like Ninja making millions
(20:48):
of dollars where your parents not even close, where your
parents could point to a case study and say, Okay,
you know, it's not completely out of the question that
Pokey could make a live or your name was not
poke at that time, that that Iman could make that
much money and survive and make this a way of
life basically, so there was no case point proving that
(21:10):
this was an actual reality. You were just kind of
trying to convince some based off of nothing exactly, especially
because I mean, at least there's YouTube, and most people
know about YouTube, but live streaming even nowadays is still
relatively new and three or four years ago even more so,
like they didn't even really understand what it was, like,
is it a video? Is it not? Who are these
(21:30):
people texting you? You know? So I'm very very grateful
that they trusted me enough to take that chance. So yeah, okay,
so talk me through that first year. You have a
one year timeline. The pressure is on. Right at this point,
you open a Twitch account. I'm assuming this is was
it on Twitch you're streaming or somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah,
(21:52):
I've always streamed on Twitch the last six years. So
basically I started senior year of high school and then
two years into that, so for years ago I decided
to go full time got it. Yeah, and that was
two years into my university degree. So at that point
I was like, okay, I need to really give this
(22:13):
a full shot. And I come from Canada, that's where
I grew up, and I basically decided to momentarily move
to Los Angeles because that's basically where the sports hub is,
That's where all the sports players are, that's where a
lot of live streamers are, that's really where any event
in relation to gaming or e sports is typically held.
(22:35):
So I was like, I need to be here or
at least try it out and see how I feel
about it. It was a shifting culture. I think gaming
has always had the stigma from I guess pop culture
where it's like, you know, you're some kid that lives
in the basement eating hot pockets, so the whole South
Park reference, you know, the wild reference for your sit
at home living in a basement eting hot pockets, ship
like that. So for me, one of the things that
(22:57):
I've been very passionate was like moving away from that
stigma and really kind of unveiling the mask behind the
community and showing like, yo, these are just people like
everybody else. These are sucking, awesome people, are talented people,
they're cool people, and they're just like you and I.
They're not any different. And it's weird to say that.
Like gamers have always has this label of like, oh,
(23:17):
you're a gamer, so thus you're this type of person.
It's like, no, I'm not. Anyone's a gamer. What I
loved about is that a lot of people who in
the past would be quite about being a gamer, closet gamers,
if you may start to come out and realize like, hey,
it's actually cool for me to share this information with you.
It's like, I love fucking video games. As a matter
of fact, check out my entire collection. Weren't really a
parent or really present in social media before, and now
(23:39):
they are, and it's starting to become a more of
a widespread thing amongst culture. The families that you've built
will open any door that you want, So you do
have this influence. And if you want to do a
makeup line, one day, you're gonna do a makeup line
and it's going to do really well. And if you
want to sing, it's It's not just streaming. I mean,
think of YouTubers and think of the Internet in general.
(24:00):
It allows you to just reach such an insane amount
of people and it really helps you recognize that however
unique or particular you may feel, there were people that
will love that about you, and people that will want
to be part of your community. You just you know,
have to reach wider and water. What were you at
that point thinking about just people's use of the internet.
(24:22):
It was that was that opening your mind up to
other possibilities and inspiring other things that you thought this
could be much bigger than any of us could imagine. Yeah,
for sure, I mean we were you know, we started
thinking about different ways to use the platform. YouTube was
skyrocketing then and then eventually got acquired UM and became
this like level of aspiration for us right Instagram, same
(24:45):
timing UM. And around two eight that's YouTube was doing
partner programs. So were you guys seeing the partner programs
that YouTube and thinking maybe we should be doing a
partner program Yes, for sure. We didn't really do partnerships
actually in the very beginning, we just we were it
was moving too fast and we were too small of
a team. But we in so two thousand and eight
the recession hits. I think that was one of those
(25:07):
you know, it was hard, but was one of the
most important things we that that could happen to the company,
which was realized we had to figure out how to
monetize because our costs were starting to get out of
control because the traffic was going so quickly and it's
global traffic and certain countries are just way more expensive
to deliver continent too. But we're starting to spend you know,
in theory we could get very quickly to millions of
dollars of costs per month and we hadn't raised that
(25:29):
much money. And meanwhile, our competitor, you stream, where Colin
was at Yes, I was going to say to you,
what what point does you stream enter the picture, because
you guys were first. Yeah, the timing was pretty close.
We so we raised some money in two thousand and eight,
in two thousand and nine and two trenches, but we
had only raised I think it was about twelve million total.
(25:50):
Then you stream goes out and raises sixty million dollars
and moves actually their office to a vantage point of ours,
like a really nice new building that literally looked onto
our shitty barn door, and we're like, okay, like what
are we gonna do? So we started just reaching out,
going going to events, networking in the ad world, and
(26:10):
we figured out between thou nine how to make money
and we've actually became profitable. So with the streamers, because
you work with them so closely, I do want to
talk about without getting into specifics, because so many people
who don't understand the world world of streaming do not
understand how these people make a living. So, you know,
(26:32):
like my parents, for example, don't understand Twitch. Don't understand
how kids can spend all day long gaming and live
these great lives and make six seven figures. When did
this become a reality, because I know when you first
started in the in the streaming world, you were saying,
like making five thousand dollars. When did it start to
(26:54):
become very very real when it comes to making a
legit amount of money. I think as the new vectors
for monetizing started to become more apparent is when it
starts to become more of a reality and to kind
of like dive into that. You know, there's first party
victors like running advertisements in the stream, selling subscriptions, which
is affective, like people pledging to you on a monthly basis,
(27:14):
and exchange for stuff like custom e moticons, a cool badge.
And beyond that, we we we have plenty of other vectors.
We've we've launched a digital good called bits that you
can earn both by purchasing and also by watching advertisements.
You know, there's merchandise or sponsorships. I could go on
and on in terms of the first party, but what
(27:35):
has really become a big phenomenon is the sense of acknowledgement.
And you look at people who subscribe to channels. We've
actually built in first party tooling for people to be
recognized for that for the support. So if you were
to subscribe to my channel, you're paying me five bucks
to to to to to support me. That gets recognized
not only in my channel, but if I have overlaid
(27:57):
on my stream, I can kind of customize that experience
based on how I want. I can make it a big,
you know, big party. I can make it something really well,
or I can have it just be something that possible
to stream, and I can technology recognize you and thank
you for that personally. And for a lot of people,
that's free fulfilling and that's something that they kind of
get addicted to in terms of behavior. And you think
about that experience and you think about stuff like tipping
(28:19):
tipping his third party. People do that through vectors like PayPal,
and through that they can also added messages and usually
some people will do stuff like Texas speech, so they'll
put a message, it will read it out loud back
to the streamer as they're streaming, and they can respond
back to it live on stream. Or maybe sometimes people
will be really shitty and troll and see something inappropriate,
but it's still read out loud, and people do it
(28:39):
for the ships and giggles. Going back to earlier days
and even today, do you feel like in a sense
that sometimes you're almost like a casting director, you know,
early on I felt like that. I think the scene
has evolved quite a lot in the last year, UM
for the better, because before they're applying and they're like
telling you why they should be a partner? Is it
(29:00):
like now, how do people now apply to be a partner?
So the vector now is we have an internal system
that's kind of automated half of the trouble of like applying.
So what you gotta do now is actually qualify for
the metrics through what we have in our dashboards like
Twitch achievements. So you have to attain seventy years for
about two to three weeks, so that you're maintaining consistency,
(29:22):
and has to be raw numbers, so like you can't
have that from people hosting you, from people are reading.
It has to be numbers that you have been able
to attain and retain on your own over over the
two weeks two to three week period. So for those people,
once they've done that and once they've met a few
other criteria, they actually get a little button that allows
UM to apply the wants. They apply the same exact
(29:43):
flow as how it is from the past, which it's
like they have to tell us about themselves. But now
we've been able to reduce the vall with people who
are getting zero viewers, are just applying for the sake
of applying, and we're able to get in people who
are actually qualified. And it's a guided experience, so people
that aren't qualified, they'll understand why they're not qualified. They'll
be let's see what metrics you really need to attain
to get to that point back, and they didn't have that.
(30:04):
Sometimes it would take us weeks on end to get
back to you because of the volume of applications being
so high. But now we've been able to cut that
back and being able to keep it focus on quality
over quantity. We have had celebrities reschedule interviews on this
show because they're burnt out, they just went back to
back on tour, or you know, they've been shooting for
(30:26):
thirty days straight with no break. I imagine that the
world of streaming is very similar, if not more intense,
because you have all this pressure to put in. Like
you said, consistency is really key. How much is too much?
And is streaming burnout real? And do you step in
and intervene as somebody who works on the partners side,
(30:48):
for sure, I definitely acknowledge it as a real thing.
And I think burnout comes in different shapes and forms.
That could be traveling too much for for for different obligations.
It could be streaming too many hours. It could be
getting to hyper focus on one particular game. I mean,
burnard comes in different shapes and forms of different variations overall,
I think to to to answer your question, yeah, we
(31:10):
do intervene to what level I can go into specifics,
but you know, we we don't want our streamers, we
don't want our partners, our friends being affected by by burnout,
and when they are, when they are affected by it,
we try to intervene and try to help them out.
I'mnderstanding where they're coming from, and try to ultimately understand
what we can do proactively in the future rather than
(31:31):
being reactive. And I think that's the biggest issue is
like right now we're all learning together. You know, still
a brand new industry in terms of how people are
monetizing content, in terms of the community growing, and so
there's a lot of work to be done. I We'll say,
for from my personal standpoint, like this entire like, my
entire commitment this year has been focusing on how do
(31:52):
we minimize that burnout because it just becomeing more apparent
in situations like the Drake and Ninja event. Really has
evolved Twitch and it's kind of grown into like this
mainstream levels becoming a household name, which I'm really proud about.
But as a result, people are kind of experiencing it's
like supernova explosion and growth as well, and so they're
building up this anxiety of like, if I don't stream
(32:13):
for X amount of hours or X amount of days,
someone else is gonna take over. I'm gonna lose subscriptions.
I'm gonna lose momentum. How true is that, though? I mean,
is it? There are so many streamers on Twitch. If
you decide to take a week off, does that dramatically
change your viewership or your subscriptions in terms of the
run numbers if you're looking at from a rosstandpoint, like inevitably, yes,
(32:34):
it will. I think the issue is we need to
do a better job on our end in terms of
how we're presenting those numbers to you so you can
better understand what are those changes, because naturally people do
lose subscriptions on the day to day, even if they
are streaming, people do churn just because their subscriptions expire.
Some people said to not renew. They confuse that with
the days that they take off from streaming, as people
(32:56):
are unsubscribing to them or they're losing subscribers inevitably, Like
anytime we take off, yes, you're losing traffic your channel,
but we are trying to get creative with how we
resurface content in your channel and also how we alive
at that anxiety because ultimately that's my biggest pain point
right now is like I hate seeing people. I feel
(33:16):
like they have to be on behind a stream at
all times. They have to produce content because if they don't,
they lose momentum. It's a really shitty feeling because it
really start saying your fear with their personal life, and
how do you get out. You cannot get off the
hamster wheel. There's just it's it's there's too much at stake.
But I really think it's just about planning your time
ahead of time so that you can say I'm blocking
(33:37):
off these hours to stream. I can schedule this dinner
and at this time if I want to do a breakfast,
I'll just push my stream back and making sure that
you're at least putting in the effort to fit those
things in. Otherwise, if you just continue with your schedule
and never plan for anything else, or really avoid being
flexible in any way, you'll miss out on a lot
of like really good opportunities to build relationship ups or
(34:00):
put effort into your friendships. And that's really important. There
was actually a clip recently of a live streamer talking
about this, and he said something along the lines of
I grinded for many, many years. I'm really glad that
I kind of made it to the top of streaming,
but I've had to make a lot of sacrifices. I
basically don't have any friends or relationships or anything that sort.
It was a very very slip. Yeah, it's always something
(34:23):
that I wanted to kind of preach to all streamers
because it's very very easy to get lost in the
numbers and get stuck on like when is the optimal
time to stream. I have to be consistent, I have
to do this, I have to do that. But at
the end of the day, you have one life, and
friendships and relationships are such an essential part of that
your career can't be everything, especially on Twitch, because it's
(34:45):
very volatile and sometimes for reasons outside of your control,
so you have to make sure your happiness is tied
to other things. I really hope for him and for
any other people that are maybe very were consensive, they
learned how to fit in friendships and relationships and manage
their time. The shitty thing about the Internet really is
that you can you can hide behind the screen and
be whoever the fun you want to be. You could
be a dick, you could be an asshole, it could
(35:07):
be a racist, and a lot of people think they
can get away with it. And it's shitty because a
lot of people do it for the simple fact of
just like getting a reaction out of other people. They
don't really have a purpose, they don't really have an intent.
That's unfortunate. I hope culturally, with the entire Internet, that's
something that we start to pivot away from and change.
It's a pipe dream, but I really, I really think
that that's something that needs to happen as a whole.
It's not just within Twitch, it's not just within YouTube,
(35:29):
Twitter or any of the other like microcossing communities like
it's the entire Internet. And I think when you look
at Twitch and what we're doing, we have a we
have both product features that help prevent and protect streamers
from malicious behavior happening and also behaviors and even activity. Again,
I can't go into all the specifics in terms of what,
(35:50):
but we do have product features that allow for you
to moderate your channel automatical list. Maybe you don't have
moderais your channel. We have an automoti feature, so and
you can dial that from like a one to four
and adjust it to based on how how you want
your chat to be controlled, how you want to conduct
your community. And we also do a lot of education
when you become a partner. A lot of what our
(36:10):
team focuses on is empowering these streamers on how to
be more vigilant not only with the content that they're
putting on stream, but with their community, with their moderators,
and how they're thinking about their content on a day
to day basis. Because every time you're playing a new game,
you're welcoming a new opportunity for people to come in
and say something toxic, say something rude about you, and
it is a trained behavior. Training your community is a
(36:31):
very difficult thing to do, and so from a general perspective,
there's definitely a ton of education, there's product features, but
um when it comes to working with partner streamers, there's
a lot more involvement. There's a lot more proactive empowerment.
We do a lot of coaching and education around it.
It's a cat and mouse game, toxic people are always
looking for new vectors to be able to kind of
attack your stream and funk with you. And I think
(36:53):
it's it's going to continue to be an evolving, iterating
game where we have to improve upon and and basically
do more to to tech, not only our streamers, about
our entire community. I think that with any kind of change,
people are always gonna be resistant to it, and people
act on different ways. It kind of goes back to
what I'm saying earlier. When you're on the Internet, people
people act however they feel like acting. They might want
(37:14):
to be a ship head one day, they might be
cool about another day. But would change, especially in anything
on the Internet, like people always react negatively to it,
even if it is for the betterment of of everybody.
We're not trying to change the platform. What we're looking
at is adjacent content, right, it's a very gamer. You
like food, you're a gamer, you like music, and so
these are the things that we look at that are,
like wonderree, adjacent to what is gaming content. So we're
(37:37):
not deep anyway from what we are. We are a
gaming platform. We're gonna continue to be a gaming platform.
That is our community, that is our bread and butter.
But we are welcoming to everybody that is has an
interesting gaming content. We do have adjacent content that sels
available for you to do, but our core focus is gaming.
There are gonna be people who are gonna be resistant
to that. That's perfectly fine. I think you're going to
find that everywhere. For us, it's really just about making
(37:58):
sure that we have the most welcoming community, most welcoming platform.
People feel like it's a safe place for them to
be themselves. How do you work work life balance? Because
I look at your community of people, everyone's asking for
a meeting with you. Everyone wants to see you. You're
in l A now. I keep looking at the clock
because I have anxiety, and I'm like, he's in l
A for two days. I bet you he has five
(38:20):
people to meet with. It's not easy I mean, I
I think I I text a lot. Textas like a
good good way to keep in touch, asked quick questions
and so on, particularly for like startups that need help,
like those text me stof just text me that. But
I don't know, I do feel bad. I feel bad
a lot. Like there's a lot of people I lost
touch with, you know, in the last eleven years, like
(38:43):
just being so focused on the on work as a
mean personally, yeah, imbalance in life, Like I lost touch
with a lot of really great friends from high school
and college, and some of those are irreparable unfortunately. So
I think these days I try to be a bit
more conscious of it, try to check in to do events.
Events is a great way to get a bunch of
people together the same time get to know each other too,
(39:04):
and and and and and so on. But I don't
have a core group of friends I'll hang out with,
you know, just whenever you feel like relaxing, doing nothing,
playing video games. Maybe you know you're really good at
relaxing though, Like I noticed when you when you decide that,
like we are at a wedding and we're going to
just have fun, You're awesome at just removing work conversation,
which some people are like every conversation is like a
(39:26):
work conversation. You're really I think you're really good at
separating the two. That's the hard part of being in
San Francisco these days, and it's kind of always been
that way since I moved there thirteen years ago. Everyone
just talks about their projects and yeah, like guys, just
go chill. I don't know. For me, I don't sleep
a lot, so I'm trying to. I'm trying to get
seven hours. I think it's very important to roughly sleep
(39:47):
the human average, But I don't see a lot sigend
up like you know, staying up late, texting, I bond with,
connect with friends over video games. I'll you know, um,
go go to events and stuff like that. Instead of
being bothered by things in the community. I do my
best to kind of change the standard and educate people,
because that's the main you know, like that's where ignorance
(40:09):
comes from, just not understanding or lack of education. So
what I'll do is I'll say, okay, well, maybe like
I look this way because I'm sick or it's not
really something that's nice to call out. And the more
that you can kind of fix those types of behaviors,
but in a kind, loving, educational manner. The less likely
those things are to happen within your community, and then
(40:30):
the less people see that stuff, the less they want
to make similar comments elsewhere. So I also try to
set the standard, not only in a nice way, but
sometimes in a funny way, like if I see a
really really just dumb, rude comment, I will also make
a joke out of it, And I think that in
that same way, it kind of teaches a lot of
other people a lesson on why they shouldn't make comments
(40:52):
like that. It's so funny you say that because our
last generation of the show, it was a radio show,
so it was live and then we're also streaming it
on Twitch and it was like our first taste of chat.
And let me tell you, I would I don't know
how every every time the show wrapped, I would like
cry to Allison, like they're so mean. And it was
(41:13):
one mean comment, but it got under my skin, you know,
because I'm a sensitive bird, and you know, like that's
how humans are. It's like it's like people don't realize
there's an actual human on the other receiving end of this,
Like yes, we're entertaining you, and yes you're watching. But
the other thing that I found that was really interesting
was the troll If you called them out on the
(41:34):
live stream, all of a sudden, they're nice. Like they
would be like, you're a fucking idiot, and I'd be like,
you know what, Dominic two two seven to seven eight
seven basement, I am an idiot, how's your day going?
And then he'd be like, oh my god, I love
your show, and I'd be like, wait, so all you're
wanted was a shout out, no, yeah, attention. They just
(41:54):
want attention, And at the end of the day, you know,
it's kind of cute. It's like a little kid at
ing out and being crazy, but at the end of
the day, like they just want your attention. They just
want to play with you or talk or interact. So
that's so we started responding exactly. So we started responding
to the trolls, and they'd be like our best friends,
you know, we're sending them holiday cards now it's and
(42:16):
then other trolls. So then other trolls would come in,
and the troll that bullied me last week was like, Yo,
you better fucking get out of this chat. I'd be like,
and they're offering to be my mod. It's like, dude,
last week you were calling me a fucking idiot, but
we cool now that's fine. So the other thing I
want to touch on is how do you kind of
like block out because obviously you're a very confident woman.
(42:38):
You're inspiring others to be confident and just be themselves,
but you are human, So how do you kind of
block out the noise when you do see haters or
trolls or how do you even continue to stream? Because
I'm sensitive. I don't know. I definitely couldn't be a streamer,
but how do you cope? I am so glad that
(42:58):
for me it was like one step at a time
in the sense that I started off I was really small,
got to twenty viewers, a hundred was really exciting, triple digits,
and like, my growth has been like slow and steady
more or less. And because of that, I've kind of
learned to deal with them one step at a time
when you like, because you deal with that type of
(43:20):
attention very differently when you have a smaller community than
once you become like a larger name per se. I
think I kind of just limit exposure to that sort
of stuff because I recognize that it is so far
out of my control the kind of stuff that people
will comment or think of me or say about me.
(43:41):
So I think I kind of just if I know
that there's a certain area where a lot of people
will just be saying a lot of rude things about
me that and mind you, I think I'm specifically talking
about comments that aren't criticism, just like there's a common
term that's just like twitch thoughts or calling someone ugly,
or commenting on things you don't like about them, you know,
(44:02):
things that are related to like my looks that's not
something that's ever going to change, or if you hate
the way I sound, I can't change my vocal chords, right,
So things that literally are out of my control, it
only hurts me to continuously read that stuff. Whereas you know,
if there's feedback like oh I didn't really like this
thing that she said or this thing that she did,
even if the feedback is kind of set in a
(44:24):
rude way, at least I know that's something that I
can think about reflect on. Was I happy with the
way that I expressed myself in these situations? So those
are negative comments like I'm more than happy to take
and look at the ones that I can garner no
value from reading, I just won't read them. Um, And
it's not easy. It's definitely not easy, but you kind
(44:44):
of try to learn to get out of those habits
control yourself. Takes a lot of will power. But yeah,
definitely limiting exposure to comments that are just bad and
in chat moderators incredible well. Twitch chat moderation is like
a key parts streaming, like if you have to have it.
(45:05):
I did not know this in the beginning, so we
had a lot of ship going on in our chat.
I was like, oh my gosh, this is scary, Like,
somebody get these people out of here. So yeah, that's
I'm like having I'm having PTSD. No, it's fine, I'm
you're crying. I gotta say. I've also kind of grown
up on the internet, so I think I was a
(45:28):
bit more ready for these kind of situations. Have you
seen all the jokes about like the way kids are
on like Xbox Live lobbies, right, Like when you grow
up gaming online interacting with strangers, you know, sometimes like
it just goes down. People are yelling at each other,
insulting each other for no reason. So I had my
fair share that. Oh I me and my brother would
(45:50):
banter a lot when we were younger. So you're ready
for it a little bit, right, But no one's ever
ready for the kind of stuff that you get when
you're like a public figure on the internet. How many
partners does Twitch have on the platform today? I think
today rough count is about So there's thirty thousand people
that are your children. How do you personally keep track
(46:12):
of all of them and make sure that obviously you
have a team, it's not just you, but what is
a day to day like for you and your interactions
with the partners? In terms of interaction I'm spending I'm
spending less time communicating on a macro level nowadays and
focused much more on a micro level, so talking to
individual partners. I'm out here in l A right now,
(46:33):
wet with a few partners today and tomorrow from my team,
and the entire partnership's department is kind of broken down too,
different facets. So we have people that focus on individual
communities like I mentioned earlier, people who focus on first
person shooters, people who focus on fighting and communities like
street fighter, and other people who focus on stuff like charity,
and then beyond that, we also look at people who
(46:53):
are broken up by regions. So we have a Twitch
comedy in Europe, we have one in Latin America and Asia,
so we have different representatives and these different regions and
also have their own strengths. And for us, really that
plus partners that we have is kind of broken down
into each of those regions, and for us, we we
serve some in different ways, you know, and Asia there's
(47:13):
a lot of growing communities. So it's really about building
up a presence not only for Twitch, but for the
individual creators. Whereas in Europe and North America they're much
more prevalent, they're much more present in terms of the industry,
and so it's more about how do we grow them
beyond mainstream, how do we get them connected with sponsors
and advertisers that are non endemic to the brand. Every
day is different, Every day is different, and the way
(47:35):
that I'm working with the community isn't directly portrayed out
to the public on a day to day, but more
so in terms of events like E three, like packs
being at those events. There's a lot of things that
my team does not only from like a product standpoint,
but also just like a from an interaction standpoint, and
there's a lot that we do. We have usually parties
at these events. That gives us a big operatorny to
(47:57):
like communicate and reach out to partners so we've otherwise
not been able to talk to in the past and
really build up like a personal relationship and really forged
that bond between the partnership team and the individual crewers
because ultimately, the way I look at things, the partnership
seems like Tron and the partners are really the users
were fighting for them. What was the moment that you
realized you had real influence? Oh, I went to a
(48:19):
League of Legends finals kind of tournament. That was like
the first time that I was really like overwhelmed by
the amount of fans, Like there were people taking photos
of the fact that it was like me and then
like a bunch of fans and it became like a
fire hazard level. And I think I was really touched
by that because I woul't lie. The League of Legends
(48:40):
community excuse a bit more toxic than most other gaming communities,
and sometimes that's like mostly what you hear, just like
the toxicity and the rude comments and you're like, oh,
like I mustn't be like that loved or enjoyed, but
like showing up to an event and having like an
insane amount of people like around me or want to
take photo of say hi. I guess that's when I realized, like, wow,
(49:03):
we did a thing when when I like me, they
really like me. But hopefully everyone who listened got to
understand the world of Twitch a little bit more, and
also the partnership program and streaming and you've got a
lot on your plate. I'm happy to have it. Yeah,
it sounds for having me. It sounds like a really
fun job. It is. It's a dream come true. And
(49:24):
again like I'm humbled every day to be doing what
I'm doing. So you're not leaving Twitch anytime soon, like ever?
I know I want a job there too, now hiring
are Well, let's talk off air. Thanks for stopping by.
I am so excited for everyone to hear this interview.
And I'm sure you'll be back because something tells me
(49:44):
you have your your hands and a couple of pots
that I'm gonna want to learn about. I don't know,
I'm just guessing. Alright, guys, Well, I hope you enjoyed
the last ever podcast because I'm becoming a streamer out.
It was a nice having yet, but yeah, we will
let you go. Thank you for coming. We loved having you.
This was so much fun. We hope you know. I'm like,
thank you again, bye again, see you later again. Bye.
(50:12):
All right, folks, that's all she wrote. I hope you
guys enjoyed hearing from Kevin Lynn, co founder of Twitch,
Pokemon number one most followed female streamer, and of course
A Neil, the director of Partnerships at Twitch. I hope
you guys are having a lovely Wednesday. I am looking
forward to hearing feedback from you guys, and I will listen.
If you never want to hear this again, no problem.
(50:34):
In the meantime to Loup Behind the Influences, a production
of I Heart Radio and t DC Media
Welcome to Behind the Influence, a production of I Heart
Radio and t DC Media. Hey, guys, welcome back to
Behind the Influence. I'm Tatiana, and as you guys know,
our entire series is all about talking to pioneers within
their respective industries, whether it's gaming, streaming, YouTube, music, food, fashion, dance.
(00:20):
I mean, I could go on if you have not
had a chance to listen to every single episode, which
I don't know what your excuses, but I thought it'd
be a fun time in the middle of the season
to kind of do a recap in the form of
a mash up. What I'm thinking is, and if we
don't like this, we don't ever have to do this again.
But I was thinking, we go within each industry and
(00:42):
we kind of highlight to you guys, the listeners, the
big takeaways, the things that I thought were interesting within
each episode. In the event that, again you didn't have
the time to listen to the entire thing, We're going
to start off with a topic in a world that
is very near and dear to my heart, live streaming
and also twitch and it's kind of the same world
(01:03):
twitches near and dear in my heart because my husband
was a CSO of the company for a very long time,
and live streaming is something that I've been doing for
a very long time, and I really love that whole world.
I love how ron real it is, and I love
the connectivity with people who are listening or watching. Those
were actually some of the very first interviews I even
started off with. I thought it'd be a cool way
(01:24):
to kick off this little mash up series. And if
you guys don't like it, I'm listening to your feedback.
We don't have to do it ever again. I just
thought it'd be a cool way for you guys to
hear from different aspects within each world within one episode.
For this first episode, we're going to cover the world
of Twitch. Kevin Lynn is a co founder of Twitch,
and so that's how really the idea started to come
(01:45):
to be. And then we launched the brand in June
two thousand eleven and Poke Maine is the number one
most followed female streamer on Twitch. So I think the
first step is just trying it out. Is something that's enjoyable,
interacting with people, showcasing a gameplay. That's really how I
did it. And then there's a Neil who is the
director of partnerships at Twitch. It is a dream job
(02:07):
and to be perfectly awesome at you like I'm I'm
humbled to be in the every day doing what I'm doing.
I hope you guys enjoy this mash up. Let us
know what you think without further ado the world of Twitch. Baby,
if you haven't caught on by now, we're talking to
Kevin Lynn. You guys may know him as one of
the founders a small streaming company called Twitch. Without you,
(02:27):
there'd be no doctor disrespect, there'd be no Ninja. I
mean they're there'd be, but what would they be doing
playing video games by themselves? Exactly? She has three point
four million followers on Twitch. She has over eight one
million views on Twitch. You have is this accurate? Almost
twenty streamed on Twitch? I have no idea. Okay, I
(02:49):
don't know. It's actually a stat I always wish I
knew a Neil is the head of strategic Partnerships at Twitch,
a small, tiny, little company you may have heard of.
You've seen Twitch evolved over the last five six years,
Like God knows what's going to happen in the next
five to six after this. Then on June eleven, June eleven,
(03:13):
we launched Twitch TV. It was this old like heavy
metal space theme logo with a little TV with a
ghost in it that Jacob design Twitch a variety of stories,
that's how we got there. But we were combing the
Internet for pronounceable, single syllable domain names that were available
for sale. So Bill who built chat and among many
(03:33):
other things that at the company, Bill Morier, so he
built this like domain crawler where he crawled all available
domains that were like theoretically single syllable so roughly a
vowel in the middle that seemed pronounceable, that were available
for sale. And one of the first that popped on
the list for all of us was art and it
was available. We looked up on Urban Dictionary. It means
(03:54):
like the supreme state of being awesome or something like that.
So that seems okay right Then one day m it's like,
all right, guys, if no one comes up with anything better,
we're going to use Zarth. And that's when we're like, okay, scramble.
So we're like figuring out all these other brands, and
then the word Twitch comes up for like to me,
when it popped into my head when we were talking
about like, what do things gamers need to be good?
(04:14):
And so it's like fast twitch muscles blah blah blah,
but really that we're just kind of stuck in all
of ourselves. Perfect. It was perfect. It was an empty
vessel you could tell. You know, there's a story there
about games, but it's just a word we liked. We
bought Twitch dot tv. That's how it came to be.
That's how it started, and we designed and Jacob designed
the logo, and then one year later two launched the
new logo that you see today. That that that that
that more retro homage logo. It looks like Amazon has
(04:37):
purchased game streaming company Twitch dot tv for close to
one billion dollars. You have a lot of fans, you
have all these people watching you. You are doing this
five days a week as your career. How does one
get here? Well, interestingly enough, when I first started, I
(04:57):
never ever thought it would be this, And I feel
like everyone says that, and I kind of think that
that's a key aspect to becoming a good streamer is
when you start, it's genuinely just something that you enjoy,
that you would be happy to do as a hobby.
I think I sometimes see people get into it and
they're like, I want to make money, I want to
hit these mothstones, I want to hit these goals. And
(05:17):
if you're doing it with that in mind, as opposed
to this is an activity that I like. For example,
you're probably not going to find like an Olympian runner
that just hates running out right right. So I think
the first step is just trying it out as something
that's enjoyable, in tracting with people showcasing your gameplay. That's
really how I did it. Twitch is hands down one
(05:39):
of the most successful companies out there. When you think
back to how you landed the role, what were the
steps that you took in your own Because you got
the job when you were fairly young, So did you
have a background in streaming or were you just a
gamer who found out about this platform because you were
using it and you're like, I'm going to apply for
(06:00):
a job there. How did you land there? And I
don't even know where to begin. I'll give you the
condensed versional, at least what I would as seem to
be the most condensed version. When I was younger, I
actually competed in gaming when I was like fifteen sixteen,
I played a game called Counterstrike. Never heard of him.
It's a just kidding. Colin plays it all the time.
Oh my god. It almost caused multiple divorces. But let's
(06:22):
this isn't about me. We could talk about that off
the record. But I played a ship ton of counter
Strike when I was in high school. Actually funny story.
So my mom and I give me an option. They're like, Okay,
we could either build your brand new computer, or we'll
get you a car. And if I got a car,
I can go get a job and go make some
money and then buy a computer. But I was like, no,
funk that I want a computer. I want it right now.
(06:42):
So I got a computer. Ended up dropping like three
racks in two thousand and five, which was like a
ship ton of money for computer. Also, let's just a
lot of teenagers would have chosen a car. Yeah I'm
an idiot, but looking but it worked out. It did.
It was the best decision I made. But your parents
were probably like thinking they scored because they're like, we
don't have to get this kid a car, right, Yeah,
let's go get a three thousand dollar computer. That's fine,
(07:04):
He's not going out anymore. So I got into programing,
and I was doing for about a year. It really sucked.
That wasn't good. Why did you get into programing because
back then I don't even think it was It was
like it was like a cool thing. It was like
an underground community, you know, like there's websites. I got fragged.
You can go into that like shared scores and tournaments
(07:25):
from like all around the world. And back then it
was like a little underground society, like you only heard
about these tournaments happening in like Sweden, and you would
hear about like the World Cyber Games, and that was
like the pinnacle of like events. You know. Nowadays we
got a ton of events going on on like on
a monthly basis. Back then you only had one or
two worldwide. I did it for about a year and
I realized, look, my grades are failing. I'm not doing well.
I need to grow up. I need to like focus
(07:46):
on what teenagers care about, which is like going to
school and getting a job and meeting a girl and
all this other teenage ship. I end up going into
school for premed I did that for like three years,
and my mom and dad had to sit down with
me with my brothers, and we're like, would you really
want to do? And I'm like, I want to go
become a doctor. And they're like, no, you don't. We
know you don't want to be a doctor, we know
you hate it. What do you really want to do?
And that was like my breakthrough moment of like being
(08:08):
very honest with myself. What good parents? I feel like
the majority would be doing the polar opposite, especially in
a space that your parents probably were not familiar with
and did not understand. They didn't and they totally had
to read on me, like they knew me inside and out.
So I think it was like their own intuition. They
knew that I wasn't happy doing what I was doing
or trying to pursue what I what I thought I
(08:28):
wanted to do. Anyways, that caused me to like Dill back.
And coincidentally, at the same time, StarCraft two, which the
franchise was like everything to me, was getting announced, and
so I was like, you know what, I'm gonna get
back into playing some video games when we play StarCraft two,
and I really wanted to get good at the game.
So I went on YouTube and I started watching like sutorials,
and I found Justin TV, which was like the sister
(08:49):
company of Twitch back in the day, and t like
when I tell you, like I was an avid viewer,
Like I was on that ship all day. Really, I
was up until like five six am watching like the
Career in like Stark Half League, which was like going
on from like one am all way to like five
am every fucking night. And then I would roll into
class like half a week. But I did that, and
I loved it. You were a part of Social Cam
(09:10):
and Justin TV and all the stuff for years. Two
thousand and six, I just moved to San Francisco Justin
and Emmett after graduation. They graduate two thousand and five.
They had built a calendar company. They sold it on eBay.
They saw their company on eBay, packed up their stuff,
drove across the country with Michael. Michael was working for
Quasium Fume raising money for a Senate campaign in Baltimore.
They kept in touch, they got together, drove, drove across
(09:32):
the country, and I was house sitting from my old boss,
So invite him over for a barbecue, hanging out in
the hot tub, and and Justin's like, we got this
idea for a business. I was like, okay, what we're
gonna stream my life? Seven? And could you imagine one
of your friends being like, I have this genius idea.
You guys are gonna stream my life? Yeah? Yeah no,
(09:54):
And it's just like you know, you look, I'm just
like sitting there like, you know, I really like you guys,
And it's awesome, really happier moving to San Franci les Go.
And I really don't want to discourage you or offer
anything that might prevent you from starting your dream, but
that idea is really kind of the worst, and like
why would you do this to yourself? And they explained it,
and I was like, okay, cool. Well, you know like
they had they raised they were raising money from angels
(10:16):
and a lot. They already had this idea in motion.
They were already starting to talk to people about it,
and and I was like, okay, cool, Like let me
know if I can help you know, like I I
is this a hot tub conversation? Was one of the
hot tub and barbecue conversation. Okay, so let's just let's
pretend everyone's in the hot tub. So it's justin Cohn,
emateur Michael Cibo and Kevin Lynn and they were like,
(10:36):
I think a couple of other people, but I was
so zoned in on this conversation, just thinking through, like
what in blaze, what could this act? So Justin's pitching
you in the hot tub? Yeah, totally, this is this
is the pitching this genius idea. He's already spoken to
angel investors, so it's not like he's like brewing the
idea and running and already tested it. He tested testing
it with many people and people are like, yeah, sure,
(11:00):
give you money for that. And you gotta remember, like
in in like the early two thousand's, there was all
kinds of weird experimental stuff that was happening in live video.
I actually had like just a laptop and really bad internet,
and I had to beg my parents to upgrade the
internet so it was like streamable Internet. And I saved
up a bunch of money to buy a secondhand, custom
(11:23):
built PC off of Kijigi, which is like Canadian craigslist.
So yeah, I bought this PC. This was my senior
year of high school, so about six years ago. Now.
Really didn't like Envision much for it. I just thought
it was really fun to have people like come into
my channel and I talked to them and they respond
and create this connection. I kept streaming. Two years into it, well,
(11:48):
I ended up going to university because in my mind
it was always like very ingrained in me from my parents,
like you go to school, you get your degree, maybe
you do post grad or you become a doctor. I
don't know very much one of those households. So I
went to study chemical engineering at McMaster University and two
years into that, one month I made like a substantial
(12:11):
amount of money. And when I say substantial, I mean
like when you're a college kid and you're like at
least twenty thousand dollars in debt and you make like
five to ten k in a month off of like
sponsorships or subscriptions or donations, you're like, holy do I
store on this? Holy shit? And so they're like, go
be an engineer, but don't do it. We did. Don't
teach after go get a job, Go get a real job,
(12:33):
but learn engineering is really important, and ideally go be
a doctor. That was was pre med track, had it
all figured out. Yeah, that was that was the plan.
And then I took this a class called EB one
oh one, which was the Diversity of Life with his
teacher named Leo Busts, who was this like awesome ecologist
guy and loved it, and I was like, I'm going
to switch to ecology and evolutionary apology as my major.
There was like the first rift I had with my
(12:54):
parents were like, no paying for school, you are going
to study engineering. Meanwhile, we're playing a bunch of video
games in the office. A street Fighter was like kind
of one of those always on games like this just
droning Street Fighter background music that was always on in
the office. Then one day StarCraft to Beta comes out.
This was in May, intent somehow we got access to
it and we were already thinking about games. But then
(13:15):
this game comes out, we get it and we were
playing it NonStop and we're watching We realized that we're
going home and watching videos on YouTube trying to get
better learning, and we're like, huh, this should be live,
Like why would this not be live? And sure enough
we had a We had a small community of gamers
back in the day. This was like Kaiba four player podcast.
You stream had a bunch of Lord Cat and so on,
(13:38):
and so there was there was a small community of
game streamers on a variety of platforms, and so we
started reaching out what can we build for you? And
a lot of people that we reached out to in
the beginning that we eventually like eventually worked with us
or became a partner were like, you guys are terrible,
we hate you. Don't TV brand sucks, like go away,
and like no, no, please, like let us ask you
some questions and we promise we'll go away, but we
might build some stuff for you. We'll let you know that.
(13:59):
Just continue to to sort of positively spiral more conversations,
more feature development. We branched out the subdomain called JTV
gaming and that became like the home. That was one
of the big pieces of feedback we got. Was the
first one being we got to figure out how to
make money. Then there all these technical features like transcoding,
high quality, blah blah blah, all these important things that
we had to build very quickly. But the big thing
(14:21):
was they were like, we want a home. We want
a place where we can go and hang out with
other gamers, not all this other weird stuff, not all
this noise. We want a home for gamers. And so
that's how really the idea started to come to be.
We were toying with it as justin t JTV Gaming.
We didn't launch as that. We just did it. We built,
just built up brand, but we didn't really make noise
about it. Then on June eleven, June eleven, we launched
(14:43):
Twitch tv. And so to me on the periphery, I
just saw Justin popping up on like Today's show on
the front page of the s F Chronicle, like doing
all this stuff, kind of doing it, like becoming this
internet celebrity by streaming himself to me for something. And
it's just like that's so wild because I tune in
and I'm like, this is the most boring shit ever,
And you're just sitting there just like looking at this laptop,
(15:04):
like why do people watch this? But it was for
these moments, all of a sudden something would happen and
that was enough. Like one day they bumped into Dave
Chappelle and that was a big deal, right, So it
was cool to start see to start to see like, Okay,
I see that people will tune in to wait for
these things. But guess what they weren't just doing that.
They were talking with each other. They're talking to Justin,
Justin's responding to them and chat So it's actually not
(15:25):
as boring as as if you diggle just one tiny
little bit layer deeper. People were just hanging out and
that was that was what I finally realized, was like this,
this power of this platform that they were building was
it's a way for people just to hang out with
other people when they're alone or with other people, but
mostly for when you're alone. You know, you when you're
walking around somewhere, you're doing your errands or whatever. Wouldn't
(15:48):
it be nice if you could just chat with somebody,
you know, if you don't have somebody to be there
with you. So that that's that's when we started to resonate.
But that was you know, it really was like it
was just crazy to see. Yeah. So Kevin Lynn, who
was one of the founders actually is one of my
good friends, and we interviewed him for this show, and
he was saying, when they initially launched Justin TV, which
was prior to Twitch, people were just in there because
(16:09):
they were lonely and they just wanted interaction with other
people and being and they were just watching Justin do
day to day things. But ironically they were alone, but
they weren't alone because they call it your community right
on Twitch, it's a community. What would you say your
community is made up of? So for me, interestingly enough,
I think it's highly dependent on the game that I play,
(16:31):
and I can tell by the way that my chat changes,
Like if I play something like Fortnite or Minecraft, I
know the audience use younger. I know if I play
like League or do Ira all content like in person
or walk around or travel, then it's really just about anybody.
League is definitely like young adults. So, like you can
(16:51):
tell by the way your chat behaves, the kind of
stuff that people are saying, typically what the demo is like.
I like to think that I think I have more
female viewers than most people. I think that's very normal though,
because you know, when you watch content, it's a lot
easier to relate to someone who's of the same gender
as you. I think it's pretty wide because I can
(17:13):
kind of tap into different demos by playing different games,
which is really cool. I loved every bit of it.
And what was it? What was it about that that
hooked you? Was it you were trying to learn? Was
it a learning experience? Was it you were just the
voyeuristic element of it, which I think a lot of
people are drawn to that. Imagine picking up a new
hobby that doesn't really have much of a culture, much
(17:37):
of a community around it, and you find one little outlet,
one little outlet, and there's like one place where we
kind of feel like a sense of belonging and something
that you can actually take away on a day to
day something you can learn from. And for me that
was justin TV and watching like these Korean leagues at
the time. Plus you're interacting with other people in chat,
so there's like this other like kind of shared experience
that you kind of experienced with other people along the way.
(17:58):
And for me, that was every thing I told myself,
I'm like, one way or another, I'm gonna find a
way to get a job here anyway. So a lot
of people were experimenting with like you know now, with
the with the with the promise of the internet, like
the ability to just do whatever you want and demonstrate
that to whoever feels like watching you was tested a
lot before that, but the technology wasn't there, the infrastructure
(18:20):
wasn't there. So the timing window around when they decided
to start streaming and walking around San Francisco's two thousand
and seven, it was still e v D. Oh you know,
if you're lucky bits per second, So it's still choppy video,
low quality. Um. But really they actually did this show
for a while. Justin streamed himself sleeping to waking up
(18:41):
and getting ready, going to the bathroom, sitting and working,
walking around San Francis. Are you involved at this point
or I'm like on the periphery, I'm still I had
just you know, I moved in two thousand six in
San Francisco, so I didn't want to. You know, they
didn't ask me too, because I was frankly would have
been completely useless to them, questionable if I was ever
actually full to them. Um. But anyway, I was delivering
(19:03):
beverages and I was like, oh, I want to help
these guys, and so I go to there like that.
You know. Michael was originally the producer. His title was
a producer just In with CEO and Michael would cook
for everybody every day, cooking all these delicious meals. He
loves cooking. But he what he was doing was really
gathering people around what they were up to, and so
friends from dropbox, Airbnb like at the time, all would
(19:23):
just come hang out over dinners the Bay Area is
not a very big hut for gaming like l A is.
But the Bay wasn't any opportunity that there was an
event like I volunteered. I spent some time throwing my
own money into it, and then I got a job
at Zinga, and that was like my big break because
I was like my first step into the gaming industry.
And that is not necessarily the Pinnacle, like they're not
(19:43):
like a true like hardcore game company, but it was
in the gaming industry and I met a lot of
talented people there, made made a lot of friends, and
I used actually my salary at Zinga to bootstrap my
own StarCraft team and it was great. I loved every
minute of it. And anyways, over time, about a year
of doing that while working at single uh, the right
opportunity locked on my door Twitch and that interview process
(20:05):
took like three months. It was at this point was
it already Twitch? It was already Twitch. It was about
a year into it, which was already kind of like
a formed company. When you heard about Twitch for the
first time, what were your initial thoughts. I was like,
holy shit, I thought I can break in as a streamer.
It's actually stream for like two years. I wasn't good
at it. It really wasn't, but you know, I love
I love every bit of it. Uh And for me,
(20:27):
I would say Twitch had a really cool, like gothic,
like nerdy like steampunk. Looked at it back then, and
then like six months in or I think it was
about a year after, they like reframed it into this
whole purple company, which I absolutely loved because purposes the
Pemp color. You know, it's dope, Like you were saying,
back then, there weren't household names like Ninja making millions
(20:48):
of dollars where your parents not even close, where your
parents could point to a case study and say, Okay,
you know, it's not completely out of the question that
Pokey could make a live or your name was not
poke at that time, that that Iman could make that
much money and survive and make this a way of
life basically, so there was no case point proving that
(21:10):
this was an actual reality. You were just kind of
trying to convince some based off of nothing exactly, especially
because I mean, at least there's YouTube, and most people
know about YouTube, but live streaming even nowadays is still
relatively new and three or four years ago even more so,
like they didn't even really understand what it was, like,
is it a video? Is it not? Who are these
(21:30):
people texting you? You know? So I'm very very grateful
that they trusted me enough to take that chance. So yeah, okay,
so talk me through that first year. You have a
one year timeline. The pressure is on. Right at this point,
you open a Twitch account. I'm assuming this is was
it on Twitch you're streaming or somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah,
(21:52):
I've always streamed on Twitch the last six years. So
basically I started senior year of high school and then
two years into that, so for years ago I decided
to go full time got it. Yeah, and that was
two years into my university degree. So at that point
I was like, okay, I need to really give this
(22:13):
a full shot. And I come from Canada, that's where
I grew up, and I basically decided to momentarily move
to Los Angeles because that's basically where the sports hub is,
That's where all the sports players are, that's where a
lot of live streamers are, that's really where any event
in relation to gaming or e sports is typically held.
(22:35):
So I was like, I need to be here or
at least try it out and see how I feel
about it. It was a shifting culture. I think gaming
has always had the stigma from I guess pop culture
where it's like, you know, you're some kid that lives
in the basement eating hot pockets, so the whole South
Park reference, you know, the wild reference for your sit
at home living in a basement eting hot pockets, ship
like that. So for me, one of the things that
(22:57):
I've been very passionate was like moving away from that
stigma and really kind of unveiling the mask behind the
community and showing like, yo, these are just people like
everybody else. These are sucking, awesome people, are talented people,
they're cool people, and they're just like you and I.
They're not any different. And it's weird to say that.
Like gamers have always has this label of like, oh,
(23:17):
you're a gamer, so thus you're this type of person.
It's like, no, I'm not. Anyone's a gamer. What I
loved about is that a lot of people who in
the past would be quite about being a gamer, closet gamers,
if you may start to come out and realize like, hey,
it's actually cool for me to share this information with you.
It's like, I love fucking video games. As a matter
of fact, check out my entire collection. Weren't really a
parent or really present in social media before, and now
(23:39):
they are, and it's starting to become a more of
a widespread thing amongst culture. The families that you've built
will open any door that you want, So you do
have this influence. And if you want to do a
makeup line, one day, you're gonna do a makeup line
and it's going to do really well. And if you
want to sing, it's It's not just streaming. I mean,
think of YouTubers and think of the Internet in general.
(24:00):
It allows you to just reach such an insane amount
of people and it really helps you recognize that however
unique or particular you may feel, there were people that
will love that about you, and people that will want
to be part of your community. You just you know,
have to reach wider and water. What were you at
that point thinking about just people's use of the internet.
(24:22):
It was that was that opening your mind up to
other possibilities and inspiring other things that you thought this
could be much bigger than any of us could imagine. Yeah,
for sure, I mean we were you know, we started
thinking about different ways to use the platform. YouTube was
skyrocketing then and then eventually got acquired UM and became
this like level of aspiration for us right Instagram, same
(24:45):
timing UM. And around two eight that's YouTube was doing
partner programs. So were you guys seeing the partner programs
that YouTube and thinking maybe we should be doing a
partner program Yes, for sure. We didn't really do partnerships
actually in the very beginning, we just we were it
was moving too fast and we were too small of
a team. But we in so two thousand and eight
the recession hits. I think that was one of those
(25:07):
you know, it was hard, but was one of the
most important things we that that could happen to the company,
which was realized we had to figure out how to
monetize because our costs were starting to get out of
control because the traffic was going so quickly and it's
global traffic and certain countries are just way more expensive
to deliver continent too. But we're starting to spend you know,
in theory we could get very quickly to millions of
dollars of costs per month and we hadn't raised that
(25:29):
much money. And meanwhile, our competitor, you stream, where Colin
was at Yes, I was going to say to you,
what what point does you stream enter the picture, because
you guys were first. Yeah, the timing was pretty close.
We so we raised some money in two thousand and eight,
in two thousand and nine and two trenches, but we
had only raised I think it was about twelve million total.
(25:50):
Then you stream goes out and raises sixty million dollars
and moves actually their office to a vantage point of ours,
like a really nice new building that literally looked onto
our shitty barn door, and we're like, okay, like what
are we gonna do? So we started just reaching out,
going going to events, networking in the ad world, and
(26:10):
we figured out between thou nine how to make money
and we've actually became profitable. So with the streamers, because
you work with them so closely, I do want to
talk about without getting into specifics, because so many people
who don't understand the world world of streaming do not
understand how these people make a living. So, you know,
(26:32):
like my parents, for example, don't understand Twitch. Don't understand
how kids can spend all day long gaming and live
these great lives and make six seven figures. When did
this become a reality, because I know when you first
started in the in the streaming world, you were saying,
like making five thousand dollars. When did it start to
(26:54):
become very very real when it comes to making a
legit amount of money. I think as the new vectors
for monetizing started to become more apparent is when it
starts to become more of a reality and to kind
of like dive into that. You know, there's first party
victors like running advertisements in the stream, selling subscriptions, which
is affective, like people pledging to you on a monthly basis,
(27:14):
and exchange for stuff like custom e moticons, a cool badge.
And beyond that, we we we have plenty of other vectors.
We've we've launched a digital good called bits that you
can earn both by purchasing and also by watching advertisements.
You know, there's merchandise or sponsorships. I could go on
and on in terms of the first party, but what
(27:35):
has really become a big phenomenon is the sense of acknowledgement.
And you look at people who subscribe to channels. We've
actually built in first party tooling for people to be
recognized for that for the support. So if you were
to subscribe to my channel, you're paying me five bucks
to to to to to support me. That gets recognized
not only in my channel, but if I have overlaid
(27:57):
on my stream, I can kind of customize that experience
based on how I want. I can make it a big,
you know, big party. I can make it something really well,
or I can have it just be something that possible
to stream, and I can technology recognize you and thank
you for that personally. And for a lot of people,
that's free fulfilling and that's something that they kind of
get addicted to in terms of behavior. And you think
about that experience and you think about stuff like tipping
(28:19):
tipping his third party. People do that through vectors like PayPal,
and through that they can also added messages and usually
some people will do stuff like Texas speech, so they'll
put a message, it will read it out loud back
to the streamer as they're streaming, and they can respond
back to it live on stream. Or maybe sometimes people
will be really shitty and troll and see something inappropriate,
but it's still read out loud, and people do it
(28:39):
for the ships and giggles. Going back to earlier days
and even today, do you feel like in a sense
that sometimes you're almost like a casting director, you know,
early on I felt like that. I think the scene
has evolved quite a lot in the last year, UM
for the better, because before they're applying and they're like
telling you why they should be a partner? Is it
(29:00):
like now, how do people now apply to be a partner?
So the vector now is we have an internal system
that's kind of automated half of the trouble of like applying.
So what you gotta do now is actually qualify for
the metrics through what we have in our dashboards like
Twitch achievements. So you have to attain seventy years for
about two to three weeks, so that you're maintaining consistency,
(29:22):
and has to be raw numbers, so like you can't
have that from people hosting you, from people are reading.
It has to be numbers that you have been able
to attain and retain on your own over over the
two weeks two to three week period. So for those people,
once they've done that and once they've met a few
other criteria, they actually get a little button that allows
UM to apply the wants. They apply the same exact
(29:43):
flow as how it is from the past, which it's
like they have to tell us about themselves. But now
we've been able to reduce the vall with people who
are getting zero viewers, are just applying for the sake
of applying, and we're able to get in people who
are actually qualified. And it's a guided experience, so people
that aren't qualified, they'll understand why they're not qualified. They'll
be let's see what metrics you really need to attain
to get to that point back, and they didn't have that.
(30:04):
Sometimes it would take us weeks on end to get
back to you because of the volume of applications being
so high. But now we've been able to cut that
back and being able to keep it focus on quality
over quantity. We have had celebrities reschedule interviews on this
show because they're burnt out, they just went back to
back on tour, or you know, they've been shooting for
(30:26):
thirty days straight with no break. I imagine that the
world of streaming is very similar, if not more intense,
because you have all this pressure to put in. Like
you said, consistency is really key. How much is too much?
And is streaming burnout real? And do you step in
and intervene as somebody who works on the partners side,
(30:48):
for sure, I definitely acknowledge it as a real thing.
And I think burnout comes in different shapes and forms.
That could be traveling too much for for for different obligations.
It could be streaming too many hours. It could be
getting to hyper focus on one particular game. I mean,
burnard comes in different shapes and forms of different variations overall,
I think to to to answer your question, yeah, we
(31:10):
do intervene to what level I can go into specifics,
but you know, we we don't want our streamers, we
don't want our partners, our friends being affected by by burnout,
and when they are, when they are affected by it,
we try to intervene and try to help them out.
I'mnderstanding where they're coming from, and try to ultimately understand
what we can do proactively in the future rather than
(31:31):
being reactive. And I think that's the biggest issue is
like right now we're all learning together. You know, still
a brand new industry in terms of how people are
monetizing content, in terms of the community growing, and so
there's a lot of work to be done. I We'll say,
for from my personal standpoint, like this entire like, my
entire commitment this year has been focusing on how do
(31:52):
we minimize that burnout because it just becomeing more apparent
in situations like the Drake and Ninja event. Really has
evolved Twitch and it's kind of grown into like this
mainstream levels becoming a household name, which I'm really proud about.
But as a result, people are kind of experiencing it's
like supernova explosion and growth as well, and so they're
building up this anxiety of like, if I don't stream
(32:13):
for X amount of hours or X amount of days,
someone else is gonna take over. I'm gonna lose subscriptions.
I'm gonna lose momentum. How true is that, though? I mean,
is it? There are so many streamers on Twitch. If
you decide to take a week off, does that dramatically
change your viewership or your subscriptions in terms of the
run numbers if you're looking at from a rosstandpoint, like inevitably, yes,
(32:34):
it will. I think the issue is we need to
do a better job on our end in terms of
how we're presenting those numbers to you so you can
better understand what are those changes, because naturally people do
lose subscriptions on the day to day, even if they
are streaming, people do churn just because their subscriptions expire.
Some people said to not renew. They confuse that with
the days that they take off from streaming, as people
(32:56):
are unsubscribing to them or they're losing subscribers inevitably, Like
anytime we take off, yes, you're losing traffic your channel,
but we are trying to get creative with how we
resurface content in your channel and also how we alive
at that anxiety because ultimately that's my biggest pain point
right now is like I hate seeing people. I feel
(33:16):
like they have to be on behind a stream at
all times. They have to produce content because if they don't,
they lose momentum. It's a really shitty feeling because it
really start saying your fear with their personal life, and
how do you get out. You cannot get off the
hamster wheel. There's just it's it's there's too much at stake.
But I really think it's just about planning your time
ahead of time so that you can say I'm blocking
(33:37):
off these hours to stream. I can schedule this dinner
and at this time if I want to do a breakfast,
I'll just push my stream back and making sure that
you're at least putting in the effort to fit those
things in. Otherwise, if you just continue with your schedule
and never plan for anything else, or really avoid being
flexible in any way, you'll miss out on a lot
of like really good opportunities to build relationship ups or
(34:00):
put effort into your friendships. And that's really important. There
was actually a clip recently of a live streamer talking
about this, and he said something along the lines of
I grinded for many, many years. I'm really glad that
I kind of made it to the top of streaming,
but I've had to make a lot of sacrifices. I
basically don't have any friends or relationships or anything that sort.
It was a very very slip. Yeah, it's always something
(34:23):
that I wanted to kind of preach to all streamers
because it's very very easy to get lost in the
numbers and get stuck on like when is the optimal
time to stream. I have to be consistent, I have
to do this, I have to do that. But at
the end of the day, you have one life, and
friendships and relationships are such an essential part of that
your career can't be everything, especially on Twitch, because it's
(34:45):
very volatile and sometimes for reasons outside of your control,
so you have to make sure your happiness is tied
to other things. I really hope for him and for
any other people that are maybe very were consensive, they
learned how to fit in friendships and relationships and manage
their time. The shitty thing about the Internet really is
that you can you can hide behind the screen and
be whoever the fun you want to be. You could
be a dick, you could be an asshole, it could
(35:07):
be a racist, and a lot of people think they
can get away with it. And it's shitty because a
lot of people do it for the simple fact of
just like getting a reaction out of other people. They
don't really have a purpose, they don't really have an intent.
That's unfortunate. I hope culturally, with the entire Internet, that's
something that we start to pivot away from and change.
It's a pipe dream, but I really, I really think
that that's something that needs to happen as a whole.
It's not just within Twitch, it's not just within YouTube,
(35:29):
Twitter or any of the other like microcossing communities like
it's the entire Internet. And I think when you look
at Twitch and what we're doing, we have a we
have both product features that help prevent and protect streamers
from malicious behavior happening and also behaviors and even activity. Again,
I can't go into all the specifics in terms of what,
(35:50):
but we do have product features that allow for you
to moderate your channel automatical list. Maybe you don't have
moderais your channel. We have an automoti feature, so and
you can dial that from like a one to four
and adjust it to based on how how you want
your chat to be controlled, how you want to conduct
your community. And we also do a lot of education
when you become a partner. A lot of what our
(36:10):
team focuses on is empowering these streamers on how to
be more vigilant not only with the content that they're
putting on stream, but with their community, with their moderators,
and how they're thinking about their content on a day
to day basis. Because every time you're playing a new game,
you're welcoming a new opportunity for people to come in
and say something toxic, say something rude about you, and
it is a trained behavior. Training your community is a
(36:31):
very difficult thing to do, and so from a general perspective,
there's definitely a ton of education, there's product features, but
um when it comes to working with partner streamers, there's
a lot more involvement. There's a lot more proactive empowerment.
We do a lot of coaching and education around it.
It's a cat and mouse game, toxic people are always
looking for new vectors to be able to kind of
attack your stream and funk with you. And I think
(36:53):
it's it's going to continue to be an evolving, iterating
game where we have to improve upon and and basically
do more to to tech, not only our streamers, about
our entire community. I think that with any kind of change,
people are always gonna be resistant to it, and people
act on different ways. It kind of goes back to
what I'm saying earlier. When you're on the Internet, people
people act however they feel like acting. They might want
(37:14):
to be a ship head one day, they might be
cool about another day. But would change, especially in anything
on the Internet, like people always react negatively to it,
even if it is for the betterment of of everybody.
We're not trying to change the platform. What we're looking
at is adjacent content, right, it's a very gamer. You
like food, you're a gamer, you like music, and so
these are the things that we look at that are,
like wonderree, adjacent to what is gaming content. So we're
(37:37):
not deep anyway from what we are. We are a
gaming platform. We're gonna continue to be a gaming platform.
That is our community, that is our bread and butter.
But we are welcoming to everybody that is has an
interesting gaming content. We do have adjacent content that sels
available for you to do, but our core focus is gaming.
There are gonna be people who are gonna be resistant
to that. That's perfectly fine. I think you're going to
find that everywhere. For us, it's really just about making
(37:58):
sure that we have the most welcoming community, most welcoming platform.
People feel like it's a safe place for them to
be themselves. How do you work work life balance? Because
I look at your community of people, everyone's asking for
a meeting with you. Everyone wants to see you. You're
in l A now. I keep looking at the clock
because I have anxiety, and I'm like, he's in l
A for two days. I bet you he has five
(38:20):
people to meet with. It's not easy I mean, I
I think I I text a lot. Textas like a
good good way to keep in touch, asked quick questions
and so on, particularly for like startups that need help,
like those text me stof just text me that. But
I don't know, I do feel bad. I feel bad
a lot. Like there's a lot of people I lost
touch with, you know, in the last eleven years, like
(38:43):
just being so focused on the on work as a
mean personally, yeah, imbalance in life, Like I lost touch
with a lot of really great friends from high school
and college, and some of those are irreparable unfortunately. So
I think these days I try to be a bit
more conscious of it, try to check in to do events.
Events is a great way to get a bunch of
people together the same time get to know each other too,
(39:04):
and and and and and so on. But I don't
have a core group of friends I'll hang out with,
you know, just whenever you feel like relaxing, doing nothing,
playing video games. Maybe you know you're really good at
relaxing though, Like I noticed when you when you decide that,
like we are at a wedding and we're going to
just have fun, You're awesome at just removing work conversation,
which some people are like every conversation is like a
(39:26):
work conversation. You're really I think you're really good at
separating the two. That's the hard part of being in
San Francisco these days, and it's kind of always been
that way since I moved there thirteen years ago. Everyone
just talks about their projects and yeah, like guys, just
go chill. I don't know. For me, I don't sleep
a lot, so I'm trying to. I'm trying to get
seven hours. I think it's very important to roughly sleep
(39:47):
the human average, But I don't see a lot sigend
up like you know, staying up late, texting, I bond with,
connect with friends over video games. I'll you know, um,
go go to events and stuff like that. Instead of
being bothered by things in the community. I do my
best to kind of change the standard and educate people,
because that's the main you know, like that's where ignorance
(40:09):
comes from, just not understanding or lack of education. So
what I'll do is I'll say, okay, well, maybe like
I look this way because I'm sick or it's not
really something that's nice to call out. And the more
that you can kind of fix those types of behaviors,
but in a kind, loving, educational manner. The less likely
those things are to happen within your community, and then
(40:30):
the less people see that stuff, the less they want
to make similar comments elsewhere. So I also try to
set the standard, not only in a nice way, but
sometimes in a funny way, like if I see a
really really just dumb, rude comment, I will also make
a joke out of it, And I think that in
that same way, it kind of teaches a lot of
other people a lesson on why they shouldn't make comments
(40:52):
like that. It's so funny you say that because our
last generation of the show, it was a radio show,
so it was live and then we're also streaming it
on Twitch and it was like our first taste of chat.
And let me tell you, I would I don't know
how every every time the show wrapped, I would like
cry to Allison, like they're so mean. And it was
(41:13):
one mean comment, but it got under my skin, you know,
because I'm a sensitive bird, and you know, like that's
how humans are. It's like it's like people don't realize
there's an actual human on the other receiving end of this,
Like yes, we're entertaining you, and yes you're watching. But
the other thing that I found that was really interesting
was the troll If you called them out on the
(41:34):
live stream, all of a sudden, they're nice. Like they
would be like, you're a fucking idiot, and I'd be like,
you know what, Dominic two two seven to seven eight
seven basement, I am an idiot, how's your day going?
And then he'd be like, oh my god, I love
your show, and I'd be like, wait, so all you're
wanted was a shout out, no, yeah, attention. They just
(41:54):
want attention, And at the end of the day, you know,
it's kind of cute. It's like a little kid at
ing out and being crazy, but at the end of
the day, like they just want your attention. They just
want to play with you or talk or interact. So
that's so we started responding exactly. So we started responding
to the trolls, and they'd be like our best friends,
you know, we're sending them holiday cards now it's and
(42:16):
then other trolls. So then other trolls would come in,
and the troll that bullied me last week was like, Yo,
you better fucking get out of this chat. I'd be like,
and they're offering to be my mod. It's like, dude,
last week you were calling me a fucking idiot, but
we cool now that's fine. So the other thing I
want to touch on is how do you kind of
like block out because obviously you're a very confident woman.
(42:38):
You're inspiring others to be confident and just be themselves,
but you are human, So how do you kind of
block out the noise when you do see haters or
trolls or how do you even continue to stream? Because
I'm sensitive. I don't know. I definitely couldn't be a streamer,
but how do you cope? I am so glad that
(42:58):
for me it was like one step at a time
in the sense that I started off I was really small,
got to twenty viewers, a hundred was really exciting, triple digits,
and like, my growth has been like slow and steady
more or less. And because of that, I've kind of
learned to deal with them one step at a time
when you like, because you deal with that type of
(43:20):
attention very differently when you have a smaller community than
once you become like a larger name per se. I
think I kind of just limit exposure to that sort
of stuff because I recognize that it is so far
out of my control the kind of stuff that people
will comment or think of me or say about me.
(43:41):
So I think I kind of just if I know
that there's a certain area where a lot of people
will just be saying a lot of rude things about
me that and mind you, I think I'm specifically talking
about comments that aren't criticism, just like there's a common
term that's just like twitch thoughts or calling someone ugly,
or commenting on things you don't like about them, you know,
(44:02):
things that are related to like my looks that's not
something that's ever going to change, or if you hate
the way I sound, I can't change my vocal chords, right,
So things that literally are out of my control, it
only hurts me to continuously read that stuff. Whereas you know,
if there's feedback like oh I didn't really like this
thing that she said or this thing that she did,
even if the feedback is kind of set in a
(44:24):
rude way, at least I know that's something that I
can think about reflect on. Was I happy with the
way that I expressed myself in these situations? So those
are negative comments like I'm more than happy to take
and look at the ones that I can garner no
value from reading, I just won't read them. Um, And
it's not easy. It's definitely not easy, but you kind
(44:44):
of try to learn to get out of those habits
control yourself. Takes a lot of will power. But yeah,
definitely limiting exposure to comments that are just bad and
in chat moderators incredible well. Twitch chat moderation is like
a key parts streaming, like if you have to have it.
(45:05):
I did not know this in the beginning, so we
had a lot of ship going on in our chat.
I was like, oh my gosh, this is scary, Like,
somebody get these people out of here. So yeah, that's
I'm like having I'm having PTSD. No, it's fine, I'm
you're crying. I gotta say. I've also kind of grown
up on the internet, so I think I was a
(45:28):
bit more ready for these kind of situations. Have you
seen all the jokes about like the way kids are
on like Xbox Live lobbies, right, Like when you grow
up gaming online interacting with strangers, you know, sometimes like
it just goes down. People are yelling at each other,
insulting each other for no reason. So I had my
fair share that. Oh I me and my brother would
(45:50):
banter a lot when we were younger. So you're ready
for it a little bit, right, But no one's ever
ready for the kind of stuff that you get when
you're like a public figure on the internet. How many
partners does Twitch have on the platform today? I think
today rough count is about So there's thirty thousand people
that are your children. How do you personally keep track
(46:12):
of all of them and make sure that obviously you
have a team, it's not just you, but what is
a day to day like for you and your interactions
with the partners? In terms of interaction I'm spending I'm
spending less time communicating on a macro level nowadays and
focused much more on a micro level, so talking to
individual partners. I'm out here in l A right now,
(46:33):
wet with a few partners today and tomorrow from my team,
and the entire partnership's department is kind of broken down too,
different facets. So we have people that focus on individual
communities like I mentioned earlier, people who focus on first
person shooters, people who focus on fighting and communities like
street fighter, and other people who focus on stuff like charity,
and then beyond that, we also look at people who
(46:53):
are broken up by regions. So we have a Twitch
comedy in Europe, we have one in Latin America and Asia,
so we have different representatives and these different regions and
also have their own strengths. And for us, really that
plus partners that we have is kind of broken down
into each of those regions, and for us, we we
serve some in different ways, you know, and Asia there's
(47:13):
a lot of growing communities. So it's really about building
up a presence not only for Twitch, but for the
individual creators. Whereas in Europe and North America they're much
more prevalent, they're much more present in terms of the industry,
and so it's more about how do we grow them
beyond mainstream, how do we get them connected with sponsors
and advertisers that are non endemic to the brand. Every
day is different, Every day is different, and the way
(47:35):
that I'm working with the community isn't directly portrayed out
to the public on a day to day, but more
so in terms of events like E three, like packs
being at those events. There's a lot of things that
my team does not only from like a product standpoint,
but also just like a from an interaction standpoint, and
there's a lot that we do. We have usually parties
at these events. That gives us a big operatorny to
(47:57):
like communicate and reach out to partners so we've otherwise
not been able to talk to in the past and
really build up like a personal relationship and really forged
that bond between the partnership team and the individual crewers
because ultimately, the way I look at things, the partnership
seems like Tron and the partners are really the users
were fighting for them. What was the moment that you
realized you had real influence? Oh, I went to a
(48:19):
League of Legends finals kind of tournament. That was like
the first time that I was really like overwhelmed by
the amount of fans, Like there were people taking photos
of the fact that it was like me and then
like a bunch of fans and it became like a
fire hazard level. And I think I was really touched
by that because I woul't lie. The League of Legends
(48:40):
community excuse a bit more toxic than most other gaming communities,
and sometimes that's like mostly what you hear, just like
the toxicity and the rude comments and you're like, oh,
like I mustn't be like that loved or enjoyed, but
like showing up to an event and having like an
insane amount of people like around me or want to
take photo of say hi. I guess that's when I realized, like, wow,
(49:03):
we did a thing when when I like me, they
really like me. But hopefully everyone who listened got to
understand the world of Twitch a little bit more, and
also the partnership program and streaming and you've got a
lot on your plate. I'm happy to have it. Yeah,
it sounds for having me. It sounds like a really
fun job. It is. It's a dream come true. And
(49:24):
again like I'm humbled every day to be doing what
I'm doing. So you're not leaving Twitch anytime soon, like ever?
I know I want a job there too, now hiring
are Well, let's talk off air. Thanks for stopping by.
I am so excited for everyone to hear this interview.
And I'm sure you'll be back because something tells me
(49:44):
you have your your hands and a couple of pots
that I'm gonna want to learn about. I don't know,
I'm just guessing. Alright, guys, Well, I hope you enjoyed
the last ever podcast because I'm becoming a streamer out.
It was a nice having yet, but yeah, we will
let you go. Thank you for coming. We loved having you.
This was so much fun. We hope you know. I'm like,
thank you again, bye again, see you later again. Bye.
(50:12):
All right, folks, that's all she wrote. I hope you
guys enjoyed hearing from Kevin Lynn, co founder of Twitch,
Pokemon number one most followed female streamer, and of course
A Neil, the director of Partnerships at Twitch. I hope
you guys are having a lovely Wednesday. I am looking
forward to hearing feedback from you guys, and I will listen.
If you never want to hear this again, no problem.
(50:34):
In the meantime to Loup Behind the Influences, a production
of I Heart Radio and t DC Media
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!