 everyone. How are we doing? It's getting late, it's getting late. But there's an after party later on, so hopefully energised later on in the evening. Emmett, how are you doing? Doing great. Having a very nice time coming here. Awesome. Yeah, loving the energy at Slash. It's definitely such a kind of huge conference, and there's loads going on. And in the sort of theme that's been happening at Slash, it's obviously all about a new dawn and innovative entrepreneurs going out and starting new things at a pretty rough time for tech and for startups generally. So just in that vein, Emmett, I want to kick things off by getting into your entrepreneurial background. Obviously, you're the CEO of Twitch today, a company that was acquired for nearly a billion dollars by Amazon. But when you started this platform with your co-founders, back then, the real origins, it was just in TV, right? And it looked very different, I guess, to what it is today. I mean, just run me through the experience that you went through there. Yeah. So Justin and I are childhood friends, and we started our first company together right out of college. It was sort of a knockoff Google Calendar, except that Google Calendar didn't exist yet. So I guess Google Calendar was a knockoff of ours, technically. And we sold that on eBay because we had sort of run out of faith in the project, which worked out pretty well, actually. Made a very small amount of money, you know, a couple of tens of thousands of dollars each. And then we were trying to figure out what to do next. And we were having a conversation. I'm pretty sure it was about, like, what should Yahoo strategy be? Like, how do they stop, you know, the bleeding, which I think was a perennial question in tech for about 10 years. And we're like, our conversation is really interesting. We're really interesting, which is a, I mean, it was a little bit arrogant, I guess. But we felt that what we were talking about, the conversation was interesting. And we thought we should record this and share it. But rather than, like, normal people just, like, starting a podcast, we took it further and we said, well, we should just record all of our conversations 24-7 and then, like, use that as the basis. And then we thought, oh, we should just actually just stream it all live. And what if we added video? Oh, we could put, like, someone's life 24-7 onto the Internet. And that was the genesis of we were like, oh, what if we put Justin's life on the Internet? It was clearly going to be Justin and not me because I'm, Justin wanted to be on camera in that way. And I had no interest in that. But we went and started Justin TV, which was originally supposed to be a reality show about Justin's life. We were not good at reality television show production. We were not, it turns out, entertainment's hard. TV is hard to produce. Good Internet reality TV shows are hard to produce. But the tech we had made for that turned out to be good for other people. And we pivoted the company to let other people produce their own shows. And that was much more successful. Other people were much better at producing the video than we were. And we grew it for a long time. We made it through the 2008 crash. We sprinted to profitability. With the instant we saw it sort of go bad, our priority shifted towards profitability. I think that's actually really good advice for anyone who right now in startups, if you have a running startup and you're not profitable, you might want to spend a good amount of your effort trying to either get profitable or at least don't lose too much money. And then we sort of had stopped growing or trying to figure out what to do next. And the Starcraft 2 beta had come out. And I was playing a lot of Starcraft 2. And that game was amazing, still is. And I wanted to get better. And I started watching people play Starcraft on Justin TV. And it was the first time that I had really enjoyed my own product. It was the first time I really liked Justin TV. I was like, this is fun. I really enjoy watching this. And so I proposed that we pivot the company to focus on gaming. And my co-founders did kind of thought it was an okay idea. Didn't really agree. And we kind of, we did. We pivoted a big part of the company to do that. We also spun off social cam, which was a mobile streaming service that we built at the same time. And then I started working on Twitch. And the big difference with Twitch was the focus on gaming. And then I think more importantly, I came to understand our most important creators were streamers, not viewers. We started focusing on the streamers. And I think that was really the big, major change, the big change that made Twitch more successful than Justin TV. And yeah, the focus on gaming, and by the way, completely sympathized with, you know, looking at YouTube videos to work out where you wanted a game. I've played Resident Evil several of the games and constantly getting stuck on all the puzzles. So really understand where you're coming from there. But that was a huge focus for Twitch to this day. How did you kind of figure out what would be your bread and butter at Twitch? And what would be your advice to other founders trying to figure that out? Yeah. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the space and strategic, where the strategic value was. What was the most important thing to get right? And what I realized was there were about 200 at the time people streaming video games who mattered, who had some kind of following or audience. And my realization was, wow, I could talk to all 200 of these people. Like, there's nothing stopping me from going one by one and figuring out what they need and winning them over. And so that's what we did. I went and I talked to, I probably, I don't know if I talked to all 200, but I at least talked to 100 of them. And I came away with sort of a, after sorting through everything I heard from them, I came away with this sort of a, this, well, first core belief that we had to make the video quality really good. If the video didn't work, if the live video streaming didn't work well, that was it. But once we had the actual product working, the three things they wanted were, they wanted fame. They wanted to grow an audience. They wanted what we called love. They wanted to feel positive feedback from Twitch, from the chat room, that things were going well, and that they were appreciated. And they wanted to make money. Not necessarily lots of money. They liked the idea. They really wanted to make some amount of money streaming. That was really important to them. And so we focused on those three things. And we focused on delivering those three things over and over again. There's a YouTube video I produced, how to conduct a user interview. If you just Google emit your user interview, that sort of goes through the technique I used in terms of interviewing people to figure that out. Because I do think that's one of the most important steps in an entrepreneur's journey when you're trying to build something is to figure out what your customers actually want. But yeah, I talked to the streamers and then we started building stuff they wanted. And then we'd go back to them and say, hey, that thing you said you wanted, we built it. It turns out that's a really powerful sales technique. They really liked that. And how kind of hands on do you get as a founder? I mean, even to this day, do you still find yourself kind of trying to make sure you're addressing what your users want? I mean, in the early days, I talked to all the customers directly myself. I even helped build. I was an engineer programmer for about five years in the Injustice TV where I wrote a lot of code. And so I was still writing some amount of code when we started Twitch. So I was very hands on in design and product and engineering in talking to customers. I did delegate a lot of the business development work to my co-founder Kevin, who is just an incredible beauty person and generally just an incredible leader. And he was really instrumental in us doing a lot of the deals. But I was super hands on in pretty much everything else. And I really stand behind that. I think that's very important. Obviously, as the company's gotten bigger, I'm no longer nearly as hands on today as I was. But I still try to talk to customers every week. I think one of the biggest dangers as your company grows is losing touch with what's actually going on. And you have to kind of triangulate that by talking to customers, by looking at the data, by reading reports, by getting summaries of what's happening, by checking out with social media. You want to have a lot of data sources, not just one. And I want to address the way that Twitch does address its users versus some of its competitors. One of the things that Twitch did this year was shift the revenue stream away from reducing some of the income that some of its streamers earned. At the same time, you had YouTube trying to kind of up the ante and bring more sort of creators in with YouTube shorts and giving away more revenue share to some of its creators. I mean, how do you sort of stay abreast of the competition and stay on your feet? So in terms of revenue, we look at it in terms of how do we make sure streamers make more money every year than they were the last year? That's our goal. And I think we did a bad job in the communications for that change, because actually very few streamers were actually impacted by the change we announced. Almost all streamers, the deal is completely unchanged. I do think it's incumbent on us to provide people a pathway and a vision towards making more money. And I think that there's two competing values. One is literally how do you put more money into streamers' pockets, which I think is one of the critical goals we have every day at Twitch. But the other question that we spend a lot of time thinking about is how do we make it feel fair? Because people both care how much money they make, but also that they're paid fairly and that it feels right. And I think we have a lot of work to do on that front. And convincing creators to stay on your platform must be a hard task. Having to provide all the perks that make sure that founders, creators are kind of willing to stay on board with you. And I mean, we were just talking backstage about some of the kind of burnout issues that creators do go through. How do you make sure that you're addressing those? Because again, the competition is tough. You've had some big Twitch streamers this year, Ludwig, a few others Valkyrie who have moved over to YouTube in those kind of deals. How do you kind of stop that kind of leakage from happening? Yeah. I think fundamentally, Twitch focuses on how do we deliver more money, fame and love? How do we make the product better? How do we make streaming on Twitch better? How do we give good support? How do we make sure that it takes less effort to use? And then at the end of the day, we hope that people choose us. We hope that we earn their business, but not everyone will. And that's okay. I don't think our job is to be some perfect monopoly that always has 100% of every streamer. Our job is to build the very best place to stream. And I think the numbers suggest that people continue to choose us, despite the fact they obviously could choose some other service. And I'm really proud of that. I think that's what's great about capitalism. You have real competition, and whoever builds the best product should win. And I think that that's, I really support creating an environment where there is pressure to build the very best thing and serve your customers the best way. And then to the victory of the spoils, hopefully. And the creator economy, I guess, started in Silicon Valley, but is international. And I mean, obviously, we're here in Helsinki in Finland. I'm sure there might be some maybe creators out in the audience listening to you speak today. And I'm sure they'll want to know how do I get involved? One of the sort of business opportunities here. What is the landscape like in Europe for Twitch? Are you kind of expanding here? Where do you sort of see the opportunities? Europe is the biggest region for Twitch. By a pretty reasonably large margin. We have more traffic from Europe than anywhere else. And so we put a lot of effort into that. We have big teams in Europe. We've spun up ad sales teams across most of the countries. We obviously localized the product for everywhere. And I think we view it as our job to make sure our product works as well here as it does in the United States. I think more broadly, the opportunity in the creator economy today, as a creator, the opportunity has never been better. There's just so many more services, so many more platforms, so many more tools. And I think Twitch is a great place to be part of the creator economy if you want to be a live streamer, but there's so many choices out there. In terms of, from a founder perspective, from a startup perspective, I think the opportunity in the creator economy is to identify some new format, something, some new thing that someone might want to start effectively a little small business building online and sharing with people that doesn't have a good support for it today. And to build support for that, to help new people be creators who could never be creators before. Because as big as the creator economy is today, I think it can and will be 10 times bigger. And that means there's a huge opportunity to onboard the next 10x of creators that are coming. Yeah, because I think that's a problem, isn't it? Many of the sort of top creators are the top creators, and they've got millions of followers. Some of them are millionaires themselves as well. They've made businesses out of this. But breaking the mold and becoming viral in today's age, when it seems like they're all so established, it's quite a tough thing to achieve, isn't it? That's my favorite thing about Twitch, actually. You can't really go viral on Twitch. It's just not possible. There's no pathway for your stream to go from having no viewers to suddenly having 10,000 viewers every day or even for a short period of time. It's very hard. Because you really grow your audience by consistency, by showing up over and over again. And one of the things I'm proudest about on Twitch is, obviously, there's millions and millions of people who try streaming a little bit. But if you just look at the people who come and they stream regularly and they really committed to it and they're streaming every day, the middle class is bigger than the top. There's more total money and more total revenue, more total viewership flowing through medium-sized streamers every day. You know, the people who have 50 viewers or 100 viewers, then there is through people who have thousands. And I think that's a really positive and hopeful sign to me that maybe there is a future where it's not totally dominated by the very top biggest people and there's room for people to be successful creators in the middle. And I think that that's true on Twitch because a big part of using it is the human connection. You're not just watching for entertainment. You're watching to be part of it, to communicate with the streamer, to communicate with the other people in the chat room. And that kind of optimizes for a medium size rather than a maximum size. And I think it's worth looking at other products like that. I think there are a lot of opportunities to build things that connect people, that bring them together into community. And creator products that have community tend to be more middle class. Which I think is pretty cool. And in today's environment, you know, the creator economy, I guess, faces the same challenges that many other parts of tech and just the broader economy at whole are facing. We've heard from Doug Leone at Sequoia, some very big VCs at Slush about the macro environment and how, as a founder, now is the time to kind of control your costs and, like you said earlier, reach profitability. How is the creator economy sort of being affected by this? Because one of the big things that we've seen is, you know, subscription platforms like Netflix and others seeing a slowdown in their sales. Is that also the case with Twitch? I think that we have not seen, the macro economy always has an impact on on every service, right? And we see, you know, the same, we see the same things out there that everybody else does. But there's the underlying strength of more people joining, more people showing up wanting to be part of it that kind of counteracts that. Certainly, you know, coming out of COVID, we have seen some number of people stop watching Twitch, particularly people who started watching during the pandemic. And I think that's good news, actually. It means they're getting out into the world. They're touching grass, so to speak, and they're not necessarily online all the time. I think it's very healthy. I really support it. We also see some of those people now starting to come back because they did enjoy the Twitch experience. Maybe have a little more balanced approach to it. I would say, you know, yes, if you're currently running a startup, you should be very aware of the fact that the fundraising environment will not be as friendly. And so there's a real premium on being efficient, making good use of your capital and spending as little as possible, making as much as possible, and trying to run lean and not burn a lot of money to scale. But there's never been a better time to start a company. I mean, really, it was the 2008 crisis that caused Twitch to come into existence. I don't know if we would have made that pivot or had that success if we hadn't gotten really disciplined through that period and really focused on, it was great, every month we were just like, what do we do to cut costs? What do we do to drive revenue? And we became disciplined business operators in a way we had not been before. I think it was really healthy for us as a business. And if you're considering starting a company, like right now is a great time to do it because you're going to have a tailwind for the next, you know, some number of years, we're going to hit the bottom at some point and then it's going to be up. And so I actually think it's a great time to start a company. The time that's actually the hardest to start a company is if you started it like 18 months ago, that would be the most challenging time to do it. But actually, no one wants a downturn. It sucks when people lose their jobs. It sucks when you don't have the same level of growth you might be looking for. But it's good actually, it's not as good as our threat word. It's a part of the cycle of life. Things can't grow indefinitely in one direction forever. You have times where it goes up, you have times where it goes down, and it's about playing the long-term game and not getting over-focused on what's happening in any given year. I can't not address the elephant in the room, which this week, Amazon has had to do some job cuts, thousands of people in divisions from Alexa to Luna, the cloud gaming division. Could you just comment quickly on how much Twitch was affected by that, and where does that whole kind of layoff story play out? The broader Amazon layoff story that hit, Twitch wasn't really deeply part of that. We are run as a pretty independent subsidiary. That's one of the things I've liked about working for Amazon is, the reason I'm still there, six years after they acquired us, no, seven now, actually, because we do get to run independently, but as a result, I don't actually have much of an insight for you there. We run our own independent approach to things. And do you have any advice then for founders about exit strategy? Because obviously, a big exit from Twitch, two Amazon, nearly a billion dollars, I'm sure a lot of founders would like to know what is the way to go about that and not be tied into something that's Well, I definitely think if you like working on your startup and you want to keep running it, selling it's a very dangerous game. You have to really make sure you are fully connected and see the world in an aligned way with the acquirer or you will probably not want to say. In terms of exit strategy, our exit strategy was every time someone asked us whether we were interested in being acquired, I said no. And then our exit strategy was ignore the question entirely until when we weren't interested in being acquired and focused on growing. And then eventually I got a big enough offer that I was like, okay, fine, yes, at that price, maybe I am interested in being acquired. But I think if you're thinking about being acquired, you won't be. You should be focused on growing your company, serving your customers. I just had a look at the time. My god, where has the time gone? Okay, I'm going to ask you now about getting back onto the creator economy, the evolution of the creator economy. How do we see this evolve in one of the business opportunities? It's hard not to talk about other things going on at the moment. Elon Musk is trying to turn Twitter into a creator economy platform. I'm not sure if Twitter will be around by the end of the day, at the rate things are going. But where do you see this going? Do you have any advice for Elon? I mean, the creator economy is just going to be the entertainment economy at some level. Increasingly, you don't need a media company package to produce things. And I think you're going to see a really pretty strong unbundling over time as individuals or small teams become the dominant way that media gets produced. That's really what the creator economy is currently about at some level. It's the fact that software tools have arrived for media, even for crafts, things like Etsy. You have the craft creator economy. And so as these software tools make it possible for anyone to get distribution and to produce things on their own, you just get to go direct to consumer. And that's amazing. And so I actually think any company that has a lot of customers, like whether it's Twitter or any other large company that has a lot of users on the internet, can and should become a creator economy company. You could argue that like app stores on your phone could be creator economy opportunities. I actually think there's the fact that it's so hard for a small team to build an app these days because of the very high bars to entry there is a real shame. And it would be cool if you could build apps that were used by a few thousand people. And that was considered a success. And the the app stores were built to make that a success. And I think that that will happen. And so I think over time, we're going to see the creator economy. We'll stop talking about the creator economy the same way that people don't really talk about like the internet economy quite the same way anymore. Like it's just the economy. And I think you're going to see the same thing happen with creators. And something that's quite big in China, for instance, with live streaming particularly is commerce and people shop for things on live streaming platforms. Is that something that Twitch could sort of think about in the future? Or is that something you had advice for founders here? It's so funny. We looked at the live streaming in China thing. And that's actually an example where you can't just go translate things one to one. In China, a big part of the live streaming issue is I don't necessarily trust the person who's making my thing is like a trustworthy salesperson. And so seeing them on live video helps me trust I can buy something from them. But in Europe and the U.S., less of a big deal. I think it's a slightly higher trust society where people don't require the same amount of anti-fraud protection from their vendors. And so we've not seen it working quite the same way in the U.S. It's been different in Europe. But I think generally there will be those kinds of opportunities. It's going to be a big thing. And I look forward to seeing a world where anyone anywhere in the world who has something to contribute, whether it's craft or media, writing, comedy, news, whatever, they can go direct to the people who love it. And they can earn a living running their small internet business. I think that's a beautiful world in the future because small businesses are the backbone of a community and the backbone of our society in a lot of ways. And we're now bringing those to the internet too. Cool. I am so sorry that that's what we've got time for. I could have gone way longer than that, but it's a really nice chatting to you. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for watching and enjoy the rest of Slush. Thank you.