Cruz, a successful hard tech company, was co-founded by Kyle, who previously worked on the MIT autonomous car team and aimed to create a commercial version of that technology.

When I was at Twitch, we often copied features from competitors, but sometimes we realized that those features had no real value, highlighting the pitfalls of blindly following competitors. The company only started working when Emmett and Kevin began talking to users to understand their needs, rather than just copying competitors' features.

Before Twitch became a billion-dollar empire, it started as Justin.tv, a 24/7 live stream of one person's life without any script or plan, created by founders who were just trying to survive after selling a calendar app on eBay.

The founder of Can of Soup, who previously worked at Substack, experienced a period of uncertainty before pivoting to a new idea that excited him, highlighting the challenges of finding the right startup direction. Chris, the CEO of Substack, advised Gabriel to work on something that captures the human imagination instead of just another SaaS idea, prompting him to pursue a more ambitious project like Can of Soup, a new kind of social network.

I co-founded and was the CEO of three startups, starting with V-Extreme in 1995, where we developed low bandwidth streaming video technology that was sold to Microsoft for $75 million in 1997.

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.

We eventually opened the Justin TV platform to everyone, allowing anyone to broadcast live video, which was a shift back to our technological roots. We had a failed project and startup, but instead of giving up, we decided to repurpose our efforts and keep going.

The launch of Twitch TV was a culmination of six years of experience and learning from previous failures in startups.

The success of companies like DoorDash and Airbnb depended on their ability to rapidly ship software, which would not have been possible without strong technical leadership.