Emmett Shear on pivoting from JustinTV and 20+ million MAUs to build Twitch “We had gotten up to 24 [employees] when we realized we were going to sail our company off a cliff,” Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear begins. “A VC came to our office. He talked to us for like half an hour. I doubt he even remembers the conversation. And he’s basically like, ‘You guys aren’t growing, and on the Internet, not growing is dying. So your business is totally f***ed. Good luck.’ And then he left. Then we kind of looked around and realized he was right.” At the time, their company JustinTV was at 20-30 million MAU. Emmett continues: “We were in denial about the fact that our business was making some money and kind of okay but not really growing and heading for a cliff. Then we realized we had to make some really big changes.” The founders cut headcount to 9 people and split JustinTV up into three independent companies: JustinTV, SocialCam, and Twitch. Emmett took over as CEO of Twitch: “Twitch was roughly 2% of [JustinTV’s 20 million MAU], so let’s say 400,000 MAU. It wasn’t called Twitch yet, it was just the gaming section . . . and it was the only content that I liked. It wasn’t obvious that it was a good business, but it was the only business I was actually interested in running. I was tired of working on a business where I didn’t actually like my own product. I didn’t enjoy most of the JustinTV content. I thought it was kind of boring. But I really liked the StarCraft II content. So I was finally an enthusiastic user of my own product.” They had spent five years building JustinTV before the split. Two months after, Twitch hit product/market fit. Emmett recalls: “We started in October 2010, and by January or February, it was obvious that we had something big because we were growing at 30-40% a month. Product/market fit is a little like falling in love. If you have to ask, don’t worry, it will be clear. It’s not subtle when it happens. It’s very obvious.” In 2014, Amazon bought Twitch for $1 billion. Video source: @speedrun (2025)