Emmett Shear on pivoting from JustinTV and 20+ million MAUs to build Twitch “We had gotten up to 24 [employees] when we realized we were going to sail our company off a cliff,” Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear begins. “A VC came to our office. He talked to us for like half an hour. I doubt he even remembers the conversation. And he’s basically like, ‘You guys aren’t growing, and on the Internet, not growing is dying. So your business is totally f***ed. Good luck.’ And then he left. Then we kind of looked around and realized he was right.” At the time, their company JustinTV was at 20-30 million MAU. Emmett continues: “We were in denial about the fact that our business was making some money and kind of okay but not really growing and heading for a cliff. Then we realized we had to make some really big changes.” The founders cut headcount to 9 people and split JustinTV up into three independent companies: JustinTV, SocialCam, and Twitch. Emmett took over as CEO of Twitch: “Twitch was roughly 2% of [JustinTV’s 20 million MAU], so let’s say 400,000 MAU. It wasn’t called Twitch yet, it was just the gaming section . . . and it was the only content that I liked. It wasn’t obvious that it was a good business, but it was the only business I was actually interested in running. I was tired of working on a business where I didn’t actually like my own product. I didn’t enjoy most of the JustinTV content. I thought it was kind of boring. But I really liked the StarCraft II content. So I was finally an enthusiastic user of my own product.” They had spent five years building JustinTV before the split. Two months after, Twitch hit product/market fit. Emmett recalls: “We started in October 2010, and by January or February, it was obvious that we had something big because we were growing at 30-40% a month. Product/market fit is a little like falling in love. If you have to ask, don’t worry, it will be clear. It’s not subtle when it happens. It’s very obvious.” In 2014, Amazon bought Twitch for $1 billion. Video source: @speedrun (2025)

YC Partner Kevin Hale: Marketing is a tax you pay for not making your product remarkable YC Partner and former Wufoo founder (acquired by SurveyMonkey) Kevin Hale is asked how founders should balance working on product with other company priorities like marketing. He gives the following response: “My feeling is you having to spend money on marketing and advertising is usually a tax you pay because you haven’t made your product remarkable. Word of mouth growth is the easiest kind of growth, and it’s how a lot of the great companies grow.” He advises companies: “Figure out how to have a story that people want to tell about your product where they’re the most interesting person at the dinner table. And then that person is your sales force.” Video source: @ycombinator (2014)

Steve Jobs on why he paid $100,000 for the NeXT logo In 1986, Steve Jobs paid designer Paul Rand $100,000 to design the logo for NeXT Computers. Paul Rand was a celebrated designer who had created logos for Esquire, IBM, UPS, and ABC. He accepted Jobs’s offer on one condition: there would be no revisions. Rand would design the logo, and Jobs would pay. If Jobs didn’t like the logo, he didn’t have to use it. “When we were starting our quest for what our corporate identity was going to be, a person that we had in house gave me a few of [Paul Rand’s] books and articles to read,” Jobs explains. “I got up to speed on who he was and the immense body of his work . . . He was the only one we approached, and he said he’d love to do it.” Jobs elaborates on what made Rand great and why logos are important for companies to get right: “He solved a very difficult problem for us. The problem that he solved was that most company logos are just logotype. And every once in a while, a company has a logo that’s sort of a little jewel — a symbol — that can be used independently of the logotype. At Apple we had such a symbol. In fact, at Apple it was very rare because the symbol was a thing that had the same name as a company.” He continues: “It usually takes 10 years and $100 million to associate a symbol with the name of a company. Our challenge was, How could we have a little jewel that we could use without the name to put on the product? . . . And Paul solved that by making us a little jewel that had contained in it the name of the company. He really approached it as a problem that had to be solved, not an artistic challenge for its own sake.”