Justin Kan (Twitch) - Finding Fulfillment in Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
Stanford eCorner
4.5 • 740 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2021
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Justin Kan is an entrepreneur and investor best known as the co-founder of Twitch. In 2006, Kan launched the live video service Justin.tv, a company that started when he strapped a camera to his head and streamed his life to the internet 24/7. Over the next 8 years, he and his co-founders turned the business into Twitch, which ultimately sold to Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. Kan has also founded half a dozen other companies, raising more than $500 million in venture capital, and invested in numerous startups, including Reddit, Cruise Automation, Bird, and Rippling. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Kan discusses the highs and lows of his life in startups, and explores what both success and failure have taught him about building entrepreneurial resilience and finding satisfaction.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Who you are defines how you build. |
| 0:06.7 | This is the entrepreneurial thought leader series. |
| 0:10.7 | Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner. |
| 0:14.3 | Welcome YouTube communities and Stanford communities to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar. |
| 0:19.9 | I am Ravi Balani, a lecturer in |
| 0:22.4 | the management science and engineering department at Stanford University and the director of |
| 0:26.4 | Alchemist and accelerator for enterprise startups. This is the kickoff for the new year for ETL, |
| 0:32.6 | and ETL is brought to you by STVP, the Entrepreneurship Center in Stanford's School of Engineering and |
| 0:38.7 | Basis, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. I can think of no better |
| 0:45.8 | guests to kick off a new start to a new year than Justin Kahn. Justin has jumped head first into entrepreneurship without having a filter |
| 0:57.4 | like few people I know. So when it comes to starting something new, we are blessed to have |
| 1:02.6 | the master of starting bold endeavors, Justin Kahn. Justin is a serial entrepreneur. |
| 1:07.7 | A few people, frankly, have experienced peaks as high as Justin has on the |
| 1:12.9 | entrepreneurial journey and depths as low as Justin has. And few, if anybody, is as honest and unfiltered |
| 1:21.2 | about the experience. If you don't follow Justin, I highly encourage you to follow him on a variety |
| 1:27.0 | of different social media |
| 1:28.0 | outlets. You will have a better and more interesting and informed life if you do. But let me give |
| 1:34.3 | you the formal introduction for Justin. So Justin is a graduate from Yale where he studied |
| 1:40.3 | physics and philosophy as an undergrad at Yale. Then at age 23, he started with fellow |
| 1:46.2 | Yaleies Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel and Kyle Voight, Justin TV, which was famous for being |
| 1:53.3 | one of the first and anchor lifecaster platforms where a lot was centered around Justin, a lot of it |
| 1:59.6 | was centered around Justin's 24-7 streaming |
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