Emmett Shear - The New Language of the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.9]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode of Founders Field Guide is brought to you by Microsoft for Startups. Microsoft for Startups is a global program dedicated to helping enterprise-ready B2B startups successfully scale their companies.
The program has been around for a couple of years, but I recently became intrigued when former Invest Like the Best guest, Jeff Ma, took over. Microsoft for Startups provides companies access to technology, including Azure Cloud and GitHub, coupled with a streamlined path to selling alongside Microsoft and their global partner ecosystem. Microsoft for Startups has a very compelling approach to working with startups and driving their long-term business value. If you're a founder running a B2B company targeting the enterprise, you should definitely check them out at startups.microsoft.com. To hear more about the program, stay tuned at the end of the episode to hear from me, Jeff Ma, and Greylock partner, Sam Motamiti.
This episode is also brought to you by Solo Stove. There's simply no better way to create good moments this holiday season around a fire than with a Solo Stove bonfire. The Solo Stove bonfire's minimalist design is reinventing the backyard experience so you can get outside and have a roaring, smokeless fire in minutes. Complete with a 30-day return policy and lifetime warranty, the unit's made entirely of stainless steel, and at just 20 pounds, the Solo Stove bonfire is easy to transport for a perfect evening in the backyard, at the campground, or on the beach. Check out solostove.com for their range of fire pits and grills and use promo code PATRICK5 for $5 off your order. That's solostove.com and use code PATRICK5.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way, and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:54)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:19)
My guest today is Emmett Shear, the founder and CEO of Twitch. Twitch is the world's leading live streaming platform for gamers and was acquired by Amazon in 2014 We talk about how Twitch empowers streamers to monetize their audience, the necessity of picking a customer early in a business, and the lessons Emmett learned scaling Twitch from an online reality TV show to a global brand inside of Amazon.
We also discuss how Twitch has helped create a new language on the Internet with emotes, a topic I'm fascinated by. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Emmett Shear.
So, Emmett, thank you so much for doing this with me today. I know that you are a student of history, and so I thought an interesting place to begin would be the history of interactive entertainment and how Twitch sort of figures into all that. I love the perspective you bring on the long history of this topic, and so maybe you could frame that history for people before diving in to Twitch the business.

**Emmett Shear** (3:13)
Yeah, we started by we, I mean humanity, doing interactive entertainment, I think, about as soon as we could talk. What is singing songs around the campfire, but a form of interactive entertainment. And people making joy together, connection together, has always been a big part of our history. And there was this brief period in time where we invented broadcast media, and they weren't powerful enough yet to enable interactivity. And you got radio and television and newspapers that were very much one way non-interactive communication.
But that's very much the exception. If you look at the scope of history, most of history, most entertainment was interactive. It was people in the same place at the same time necessarily interacting with each other.
Twitch in many ways, I think, is just a return to that historical way of interacting. It'll be it online, which is a pretty different thing.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:10)
Can you say a bit about the, I think you've done a bit of research on these sort of clubs in Vienna and how people came together, again, sort of another form of interactivity that I find so interesting that preceded the broadcast model?

**Emmett Shear** (4:21)
Yes, you had newspapers in the past and it used to be that newspapers were very expensive, not the mental model today where everyone can have their own copy of the newspaper. But newspapers used to be very, very expensive and not everyone could afford to have a newspaper delivered. Newspaper would be delivered to the cafe or a few copies would be, and people would in Vienna at this time show up to the cafes to read the newspaper. But what wound up happening is as you read the newspaper, you discuss it with the other people who were there, and the cafes became this sort of intellectual gathering place for people who were interested in discussing the news of the day and whatever else came to their minds.