Twitch's Ninja Crisis

A story about how Shaan identified and pivoted to work on Twitch's biggest problem when their top streamer left the platform.

"When I was at Twitch, the top streamer was this guy named Ninja. He was the star, he was on TV all the time, and Fortnite was in its heyday. Then Microsoft came and paid Ninja $20 million to leave Twitch and go over there. We lost our biggest streamer overnight - it's like if somebody came and took Steph Curry off the Warriors.

It was an 'oh shit' moment. I dropped everything I was doing and started working on that. Nobody told me what to work on, but I wrote a memo saying 'Hey, it looks like he left, here's some data analysis on how big of a problem that is, here's my strategy recommendation on what we should do.'

I sent it to the CEO. He said 'this is great' and put me in 3 group chats right away with the exact teams working on that problem. People were like 'Why is he here? He's supposed to be doing this other thing.' And the CEO said 'He has good thoughts on this.' That's how I got to work on the A+ problem even though it wasn't my assigned role."