askjigga

Stand next to people smarter than you are.

We've created a monster!

It was all my partner Emmett. We had been building Justin.tv for a few years, which started off as a reality tv show and turned into a general platform for live streaming ("youtube for live video"). Around the end of 2010, we were a small company (around 25 people) that reached a large audience (30m uniques a month) but we weren't growing any longer.

My cofounders Emmett, Kyle, Michael and I got together and brainstormed ideas for things to work on to continue to grow. Emmett's idea was the gaming section of Justin.tv -- Starcraft 2 had just come out and SC2 videos were the only things he wanted to watch. Honestly he had to fight an uphill battle to convince the rest of us. Luckily, he did, and we had a small team led by Emmett and Kevin Lin (our COO) start working on gaming, which in 6 months became a separate site they named Twitch.

After we started working on gaming, I started watching to try to understand what people liked about watching gaming. I am now addicted and watch 2-4 hours of hearthstone a day.

More people making a living streaming. I think Twitch is just the start, you'll see other sites pop up serving different categories.

I've literally wanted to quit my startups every year I was working on them. Every year for 9 years.

This would usually happen during the summer, when most of my friends would be posting the awesome trips they were taking, BBQs they were having, and other fun shit they were doing on Facebook. I remember sitting at my computer in the dark thinking "wtf am I working so hard on this thing that is only kind of working?!"

Life is a trade off and there is no right answer. Lots of people are happy working at a job and living stress-free, and startups are absolutely the opposite of that. If you want to have a successful startup, you have to be willing to grind it out. But you should know that everyone goes through those moments of doubt. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.