Twitch Gaming Pivot

A story about how Emmett Shear made the crucial decision to pivot Justin.tv into Twitch, going against the majority opinion.

"What people don't know is that before Twitch, Emmett, Justin Kan, Michael Siebel - they were working on Justin.tv. Justin Kan was wearing a webcam on his head, it was like a reality show of his life. Then it became anybody can broadcast anything, which was mostly people broadcasting illegal sporting events.

The site was popular but wasn't going to be successful because most of their best content was illegal. They had a decision to pivot. At the time, Instagram had come out and was hot, but Instagram only did photos. The majority of the company, including Justin and Michael, wanted to do Instagram for video - they called it Social Cam.

Emmett had a different view. On Justin.tv, he really liked watching these video game streams. It only made up 2% of all the watch time, but he thought 'I like that content the best, it's not illegal to do, it's the only good content that's not illegal. I wonder what would happen if we just went all in and made a video game streaming platform.'

Emmett was kind of alone in that decision. He went that way while Justin and the others went to Social Cam. Social Cam went way up and then way down, had this crazy spike in virality, then crashed and ended up selling for $60 million. But Twitch was a slow burn, just brick by brick by brick all the way into a multi-billion dollar company."