YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Kan

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59
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2019-06-10
most recent
2019-06-10
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1
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  1. “Like the feedback cycle was fast enough also as an investor. And I didn't really feel ultimately like after the first couple years that I was continuing to learn and grow. And I'm still in my 30s. I was like, I need to do something where I'm going to be forced to grow. And really the number one vehicle for personal growth that I've ever experienced in my life has been startups. So I went back to what I knew and I really decided that in order to grow as a founder, we had a pretty big outcome with Twitch. And I'd seen a lot of different things in order to really grow to the next level, I would have to do something that potentially could be even bigger. And so I really felt like that deserved my full attention. And so that's kind of how I decided. I don't necessarily think it's the right answer for everyone because what I didn't mention was that I had selective memory at the time and I forgot just how painful starting a startup could be.”

    2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, that's a great question. So once you become successful in some way in Silicon Valley, whether that's you've been executive at a company that's rocket ship unicorn or you've started a company, the world opens up, right? People want you to be a VC. They want you to work on projects with them. You can start any company that you want, which is great, right? But there's this paradox of choice and focus can be a huge problem. I know for a lot of friends of mine, it has been as well. As an investor, as a partner Y communiator, there were some parts I really liked. I loved helping early stage founders out and really working with them on these problems that like I felt like for five to ten percent of them it was like life changing right like me helping them out in a way I came up with some great idea or helped them at a critical moment that was life changing but then there was a large majority of them that probably could have been listening to a YouTube video of me or this podcast and like get the same information right yeah and so I didn't”

    2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah. Well, you know, I think one place where I'm going to start on this is a lot of the advantages of being a repeat entrepreneur are that you can raise more money and there's more maybe easier to recruit talent and there's all these advantages that kind of come along with that. One of the disadvantages I find ends up being that there's so many distractions you could do. A lot of things pulling at your attention. I'm really fascinated by your movement from going from YC and an incubator where you can maybe kind of dip into a lot of little things versus kind of putting all your eggs in one basket and trying to start a company. To talk to us about that kind of decision.”

    2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And then more recently, I've been a partner, Y Combinator, for a couple years, and then incubated a few companies. One of those was this video Q&A app called Whale. And then just fast forwarding all the way up till the present day, decided I want to really put all my eggs back in one basket precariously thrown around basket. And so I decided I'd start a new company. That idea was Atrium, which is a technology-enabled law firm for startups really trying to solve all the problems that I had as an entrepreneur when dealing with legal to make legal faster, more price predictable, more transparent for me, the business owner, the business manager. And that's what we set out to do about two years ago. It's going pretty well with serving a bunch of startups here in Silicon Valley with all of their needs. And it's been great, but I'm sure we'll get to that.”

    2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Was a site that my co founder really thought of, which was the idea was let's focus on the video game related. Video on our site, and that became Twitch, which kind of grew and grew and grew. We eventually pivoted the entire company to Twitch. My co-founder Emmett was the CEO of the company and eventually sold it to Amazon for $970 million in 2014. About five years ago, along the way, started some other companies to start this company called Exec, which is in the errand running slash. Space. It's kind of like a handy or homejoy. Actually, ended up selling it to Handy, which through an act of God sold to Angie's list this year.”

    2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Started coming because they were like, What is this guy doing? This is crazy. They were like, you're very boring. I hate your show, but I want to create my own live video stream. So how are you doing it? And then the light bulb kind of went off and we said, aha, let's create a live video platform. And that became Justin TV the platform. And then after that, you know, we ran that for a couple years, condensed it because it's a very long story, but we raised a bunch of money, ran for a couple years, hit the nuclear winter of video startups where all the other video startups in Silicon Valley died. We were pretty scrappy and survived on like a ramen budget. Eventually, decided we needed to pivot to some new ideas, and from there we incubate a few ideas internally. One of them was a video app called SocialCam, which we spun off and eventually sold the Autodesk, and another one was a”

    2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, so this was 2007, so it was pre-iPhone, pre-good. Cellular internet. So we had this computer and a backpack with like multiple cell phone modem connections and we hooked it up to a camera so there was a camera. This computer virtualized the video was a webcam basically sent it over to this server and then we had this very hacky. Way of streaming it out to the millions of people watching, actually not millions, hundreds, but the people who are watching at home, they were following along. It was actually pretty fun. They could text, we put our number up there, they would text me, usually fairly offensive things, actually. But then eventually we launched this show.”

    2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “As talent in our own show, we're not very entertaining and not very popular. And so we launched this live streaming show we called it Justin TV I was the only one in our four founders who was stupid enough to put the camera on his head and be like, I'll make myself the subject of this show.”

    2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Sure. Yeah. So I've been an internet entrepreneur here for the last 14 years since 2005. Our very first company was called Kiko. It was kind of like Google Calendar, but it came out one month before Google Calendar came out and wasn't really that good when I'm honest about it. And so that company didn't work out super good. We ended up fire selling it on eBay after several failed acquisition attempts with the Silicon Valley players. And then after we did that, we started another company. This one was even less well thought out than Kiko was actually, which was The idea was we would create our own live video reality TV show on the internet. Think that tapped into several things that were in the zeitgeist that actually have become popular now, but unfortunately we.”

    2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source