We saw Twitch streamers using Discord, which helped it spread quickly into different aspects of their lives.

I used various encoding techniques to compress data for my Doom project, reducing gigabytes of data to kilobytes for efficient transmission.

I learned how to effectively talk to users, which is a crucial skill for startup founders, and realized that I hadn't truly understood this before launching Twitch.

We initially planned to build a chat app for gaming, but we thought we could bootstrap it through a game. When the game failed, we realized we could launch the chat app directly instead.

We realized that existing communication tools like TeamSpeak and Skype were not effectively serving the gaming market, which created an opportunity for Discord.

I invested in Justin.tv, which aimed to livestream everything, and while it struggled initially, it eventually pivoted to Twitch, focusing on video game streaming, which became a huge success.

I started creating my own video games.

Some hijack users can actually lead to valuable insights; for instance, video gamers on Justin.tv prompted the idea for Twitch, which became a significant community.

Twitch started as Justin.tv, an online reality TV show, showing that initial concepts can evolve significantly over time.