YouSaid · the spoken record

Emmett Shear

lines on the record: 117
first: 2022-07-18
most recent: 2022-07-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“What should we focus on? What is the next thing we should do? I think we all said, well, it's pretty clear that the biggest thing in live video, based on what we've built so far and looking around, is actually corporate webinars and video conferences.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'd been adding advertising, which makes it a worse experience We've been adding paywalls in a bunch of places. And more to the point, I think we'd kind of hit the natural size of the people using the thing we were doing without improving the product further. And so... We kind of had this moment, the founding team of basically like he's right. We got to have a second act. What are we going to do? And we started having these conversations.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had succeeded at getting profitable, but then in doing so, we'd entirely killed our growth and we were no longer growing. And we started trying to reignite growth and we had all these ideas for these products we'd build and they pretty much all failed in a variety of different ways. And so we were kind of bumbling around. And God, who was it? This guy who'd been at YouTube, like a VC, he came by and he told us, like, you're doomed. Reigniting growth is almost impossible once it stops. And if you're not growing on the internet, you're dying.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those are the tactics, but like the underlying thing we did was sit down every month and ask ourselves, like go through the whole P&L, every cost, every revenue line I'd have been ask, how could we make this bigger? What else could we do? What else could we cut? It's just relentless focus on those lists.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Of profit. Once we got going, it was fun. We were good at it. And we said we take the whole company to Hawaii if we got to a million dollars in profit, which at the time we were making like $10,000 of profit. We thought it was impossible. And six months later, we'd gotten to a million dollars a year run rate, $100,000 a month of profit.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We set a goal for the company that we wanted to make a million dollar, we wanted to run rate of a million dollars a year of profit.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we were 10 weeks from running out of money, and then we were 20 weeks from running out of money, and then we were, we'd hit profitability.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then as we started to bring monetization online, we started to pull out of the dive. And the worst all hands was, we are eight weeks from running out of money.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, over the course of the year, by relentlessly cutting every cost we could cut, putting advertising everywhere we could think to put an ad, and charging money for the mobile apps. And I can't remember. There's probably other list of other things we did too that I'm forgetting now. We got to profitability. We had a doomsday clock on the wall where we had a weekly all hands with the employees. And every all hands were like, we are eight months from bankruptcy. We are seven months from bankruptcy. We are six months. And at first, it was falling at like, you know, we're at 14. And then the next month we'd be at 12. It was like accelerating because as we grew, it was costing more money every month.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first thing we did was we just threw Google AdWords on the site because that was the fastest way to get some money immediately. We made our mobile apps cost money. It's funny that sounds so ridiculous now. Of course, the Twitch app is free, but we were just pulling every lever we could to try to make money.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially not for a money losing business that's like, don't worry, we'll figure out monetization later. And so immediately after the crash, we're kind of like, oh, man, we... We've got to get profitable.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they did actually eventually launch YouTube Live five years later, but it took them a while. And so then we raise... We raised, we raise an additional, I think, $4 million, $6 million plus Two million inventor debt, something like that. And then the 2008 crash happened. And thank God we raised that money when we did because”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's literally just like YouTube. The idea had been we'll sell ads eventually. And I think everyone else looks at us and they're like, you're going to get crushed by YouTube, more or less. What they thought.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We went and we raised more money. So about six months later, I'm trying to remember exactly when we raised our Series A, we raised $2 million. Two million dollars is enough for us to continue. We could hire some employees. We could continue paying our bandwidth bills. And then we were running out of money again. At this point, we'd grown quite a bit, which was great, except we had still made no money. We had not turned on any monetization.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rent 500 bucks a month each in spending money, and then infinite bandwidth bills forever that were constantly crushing us. It was so expensive. They're just delivering the video was really expensive.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All kinds of stuff, someone guided street art and streamed himself doing sidewalk art and stuff like that. I justine had a show. We had talk shows. We had some gaming. We did some of the very early gaming streams. We hooked up our Xbox and we streamed ourselves playing Call of Duty.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a pretty long beta list. A few hundred people signed up for the beta. In the first month of the beta, we had probably 80 people streaming. And then as we opened it up, we had hundreds, thousands of people stream, eventually tens of thousands.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We discovered actually very early on, although I don't think we fully realized it at the time, people found community hanging out watching Justin. And I think that was a really big insight. And we did a lot of things right leaning into that, making chat good, making moderation good.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, this was a terrible idea. Fundamentally, terrible. A 24-7 live stream is a gimmick. It was a good gimmick. It got us a lot of attention. And then the other people who were streaming on Justin TV using the technology didn't do 24-7 streams. They did three-hour streams of something interesting. And I think Justin TV worked to some degree because our actual customer was the streamer and because we were trying to build something that worked for us as a streamer, we built something that actually worked because we deeply understood the needs of our customers because we were the customer.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone sleeps like eight hours a day, roughly, right? Like that's definitionally one third of the time if you are the most interesting possible human, you're still not interested.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What the response was? I think it was more like, how is this going to get 10 times bigger? What's the pathway for this to get really big? But some number of investors believed. We raised, I think, from like five investors, we raised maybe $350,000 total. Which is enough to par bandwidth bills for a little bit and keep us going. And once we launched Let Anyone stream, that started driving more growth for us”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interest now. No. About 100,000 people watched it in the first month. And our CDN bills just started piling up. CDN is like for the content delivery network for the video. Yeah. We want to put just these huge bandwidth bills, and we were like, oh crap, we have to raise money. So then we went out hat in hand trying to raise money and really struggled.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the harassment that streamers deal with today, we got in spades because we were the one target. I had a gun pulled on me. They reported a stabbing in our apartment, and the police came in, weapons drawn. And I had a pistol pulled on me by the police. They pretty quickly realized, wait, there's a bunch of engineers in their underwear programming. This is not a stabbing. That was a really scary moment. We had the fire trucks called, and even if the fire trucks had showed up, we would deal with it off camera so that there wasn't a reward for the person doing it. And it definitely over time cut down on the amount of harassment we experienced.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was an incredible experience after he went on one of the dates where it just felt like it went well. And he was walking home and people start streaming out of the buildings. All of our friends lived around there and they ever start streaming out of the building and coming up to him and congratulating him on having had a good date. And you watch the date and then you're watching that. And that was a really interesting. You could see this glimmer of something happening there that was kind of dynamic and interesting.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could hear it going P. That's right. There was a whole thing. One time AFP neglected to wash his hands and there became this whole meme and chat of them people making fun of him and reminding him to wash his hands every time he went to the bathroom from that point forward”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting, right? It was a stunt. I think we learned something from the eBay experience, which was if you do something that's a little bit provocative and crazy that people want to talk about, people will talk about you. So that definitely worked. When we were walking around San Francisco, people might not have understood that they were on a live stream, but they definitely understood there was a camera. It was novel. I think now everyone, well, first of all, everyone's been recorded all the time because of smartphones. But there's a whole culture around it at the time. It was like, oh, cool, am I on camera? Like, what are you filming? What's going on?”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mostly it was just from his perspective all the time. And sometimes he'd take the camera off and point it at himself while he was doing something. But it was his perspective most of the time walking around. Actually, one of the big things we discovered was almost immediately people liked him taking off the camera and talking to them. more than they liked almost anything he could be doing. If he was doing something really interesting, like he's taking a trapeze lesson or something, then the point of view camera could be interesting. But 98% of the time, you actually would rather have him just be sitting at the computer talking to chat, which is in fact how everyone does it today, because that was actually just more compelling as content.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Become a little famous in a minor way And also a guinea pig for the system we wanted to build at the same time. So it was a good fit.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say it's a little bit of both. Exhibitionists isn't maybe quite the word I'd use. Justin's always wanted a little bit to be famous. There's a reason why he runs a Snapchat channel and he has a YouTube channel now. He has all these Twitter followers. He's always wanted to be famous. And so I think it was both an opportunity for him to go.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because if you're going to start a tech company, San Francisco is like the place to do it. I mean, still now, but especially then. Silicon Valley. And so we piled all of our stuff into my Honda Civic, all of our worldly positions. Me, Justin, Michael, and all of our stuff. And we drove across the country at a sprint pace, took us four days from New York to San Francisco, because we were convinced that taking two extra days to go stop along the way was too much time. We needed to get started right away. And in retrospect, that was crazy. Like, of course, we could have taken a data stop. But I think the sense of urgency was important. It was silly for us not to stop driving across the country. And if we'd been the kind of people who would have stopped driving across the country, maybe we wouldn't have succeeded. Because you kind of have to have this feeling like it's really important. And we got to go. We had to go fast.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Justin reflected and noticed correctly that we kind of had a highly distractable way of engaging with our startup where we wouldn't stay on target and we wouldn't jump at the new shiny thing. We got overly inspired too quickly. And he basically thought we needed adult supervision, not like an older person, but someone who would like be a little more reasonable and steady. And Michael's a very steady, calm, also very smart person. And Jess was like, I think we need Michael on the team. And retrospective, he was totally right. Michael was an incredible addition.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, we couldn't afford a videographer to follow him around 24-7. That's expensive. So he's just going to have to wear the webcam and be the cameraman also, which in retrospect, having someone be the cameraman and also the talent doesn't make any sense, but we couldn't afford to do it expensive. So that was the solution.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first idea was just we should do a live stream of Justin's life. EVDO modem cards, which were the very first generation of sort of on-the-go internet, had just become available. So you could get broadband video streaming capable internet anywhere there was cell coverage, like literally six months before that. So it had just become technically possible.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is actually just how I would say a lot of angel investing in Silicon Valley, or in this case in Cambridge, but like tech angel investing works. In the beginning, the investable asset is not the idea and it's not the execution and it's not the research or whatever. The investable asset is the founders And you're much better off investing in a good team that has no idea what they're doing, or with a bad idea than a bad team with a good idea, or even an okay team with a good idea. And Paul thought we were a good team, which I think in retrospect he was right. We were a good team. And so on the strength of the team, we got 50 grand to start our next thing.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do this. That could be a new form of entertainment. And we were like, yeah, totally, we could let anybody do this. And he's like, great. And we got a $50,000 check to go start our next thing.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, our conversations are really interesting. People would love to listen to us talk, which I don't know if that was true, but we had the delusion. We should just record all of our conversations and then upload them. Oh, well, that's too much work. We should just record all of our conversations and stream them live all the time because we're not going to bother to cut them and upload them. Okay, well, if we're just going to stream our audio live all the time, why don't we just stream everything, audio and video live all the time? And we're like sort of thought that was funny and then left it there. And then we started telling people like that was our startup idea. And I remember Chuck Foreman at a YC, a little YC after Happy Hour thing told Justin, like, you're full of shit. You're never going to work on that. I honestly think in some ways that was the deciding moment where like, yeah, we will. We'll show you. But Paul saw that this was bigger than we thought it was. It wasn't just us screaming. He was like, oh, you could let any...”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was a terrible idea. And he was like, that's not a good idea, basically. What else do you have? Maybe you have a second idea that's better than that one. You're like, okay, well, we do have this other idea. We had this idea.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Paul was super encouraging. Paul's superpower is you talk to him about what you're working on or what you might work on, and you walk away feeling like you could, you're not only could you take over the world, but like you're onto something and you're going to. This is bigger than you think. And I really, really appreciated that. And so basically what happened was... We were like, okay, Paul, we figured it out. We want to go do this company. And he's like, all right, hit me with the idea. And the idea we brought to him was we were going to make a service let you print a blog or a Flickr website as a coffee table book.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We took like six shots on goal on having something that would But through that process, we learned so much about how to build things, how people react when you launch something, and it was this real building a software company.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the other thing we did during Kiko that's super important to remember is every two or three weeks we'd get, I don't know, bored, dispirited, it wasn't taking off, and we'd have some other great idea. Like we had this idea we were going to build a social network for families, or we were going to build YouTube, but for audio. And we would then go build and launch these products in like a, we'd like spend three weeks and we do a sprint and we just build this product from scratch and we'd launch it. And then it wouldn't take off immediately and we get the spirited and we'd go back to working on Keco Calendar. And so we probably built six startups in 18 months. I think we had this mental model that the way you had success in startups is you have this great idea and you build it and then you launch it and feel like, wow, this is amazing. And they just like immediately it starts working. That was our mental model for like what success looked like. And so we just, you know, we'll just take more shots.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't even talk about it. It was just assumed. I can't remember, I don't remember a conversation. I don't think we're like, oh, should we start another startup together? It was like, what startup will we start together? What's next was the only question.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Right. And so it was a very clever way to basically generate a bunch of publicity, which I think was a lesson that really we took with us to Justin TV.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally. Which is why it was genius because it meant we got all this press coverage, which meant that everyone heard about it. Like the biggest part about selling an asset like this is getting the buyers to hear it's even happening.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was on eBay, I believe, $265,000 was the winning bid. Wow. 13 bidders. And once you, it was an asset sales, once you paid taxes on it, paid off the investors and you dividended out all the money, Justin and I walked away each with, I think, about 65 grand.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, our thought process was well, we don't want to do this anymore. We've built this thing and the code's fine. It works. It is a calendar. It's a web calendar that exists. Someone must want this. Where can we sell our startup? And we decided, well, the obvious place to sell it would be on eBay because eBay is famous for hosting, selling weird stuff at the time. Still today, I guess it is. And so we created an eBay auction to sell our startup. We just made a listing that said, you know, for sale, Kiko calendar, asset sale, all of the assets of the startup, including the domain name, the logo, all the software, all the customer relationships. We will sell you the whole thing.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we don't even have any ideas for how to make our thing better. And we're way behind and we should give up. And we were faced with them with like, well, okay, what do we do with it?”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About two months after Google Calendar came out, we finally admitted to ourselves we have no ideas for how to make our calendar better than Google Calendar. And Google has a massive, massive engineering distribution resource, everything, brand advantage over us.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say even yes, we kind of imagined what we thought people who use calendars were like and then tried to solve that imaginary person's problem But at no point did we go talk to actual calendar users. But fundamentally, we were completely right. Gmail should have a calendar. Well, it turns out Google did the falling off a log obvious thing and created Google Calendar. Of course, they were going to create Google Calendar.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got coverage on TechCrunch. Which was sort of getting started around that time. It was basically known for doing startup coverage. We'd try to get other press sometimes, but honestly, that's a really good question that the answer is mostly we didn't. Mostly we didn't get very many users. I think in the year and a half we used it, we had 90,000 people sign up for an account. Which isn't tiny, but over a year and a half on the internet, it's actually not that many, and most of them obviously didn't keep using it. And I think we had some good core instincts on how to design a calendar that worked. The problem was we didn't have any instincts about... Finding an actual customer who might want it”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started working on it during college sort of at the early part of 2005. We didn't really start working until we graduated and could do it full time. We probably launched it three or four months later, something like that.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT