Twitch's Early Marketplace Win

Shaan Puri shares his insider perspective on Twitch's success despite internal organizational challenges.

"Twitch could get 100 things wrong internally but it didn't matter because they had a network effect and a moat. Once you build a marketplace and get it to work, you can screw up many things. I would see just wasted efforts internally, bad strategy here and there, and then COVID happens and everybody's at home playing video games online - boom, business takes off.

We're trying different things to create growth, nothing is working, nobody has any clue how to grow this thing. Then Fortnite becomes the biggest game in the world and Twitch grows like crazy because what Emmett and the team had done early on - they got the core thing right. They created the biggest marketplace of supply and demand of content creators for video gaming content and consumers.

The analogy we used internally was we don't create the waves. All the things that caused growth were exogenous factors - not features we created. It was the popularity of specific games, new devices getting released, or graphics cards getting better. We were the surfer - we were out there paddling waiting for waves. When the wave comes, it's our job to be ready to surf it and not wipe out. But let's be clear - we don't create the waves."