At Twitch, we made a clear decision to prioritize the needs of streamers over viewers, focusing on streamers because they were the key to our platform's success, especially in the early days when there were only about 200 gaming streamers who mattered.

We didn't put in as much work for Twitch as we did for Justin TV, but we applied our efforts more effectively because we finally understood what we were doing.

Twitch faced significant traffic spikes, sometimes 20 times higher than normal, which required them to implement hacks like turning dynamic pages into static ones to handle the load during popular streams.

Engaging with product teams helped clarify system constraints and prioritize features necessary for deployment, such as streaming support.

The infrastructure behind services like YouTube, Netflix, and Twitch is incredibly complex, requiring immense engineering efforts to deliver content efficiently.

Within two months of launching Twitch, we realized we had product-market fit, experiencing growth rates of 30-40% per month, which was a clear indicator of our success.

When we pivoted from Justin.tv to Twitch, we had about 400,000 monthly active users, which was only 2% of Justin.tv's total user base, but it was the only content I was genuinely interested in running.

The biggest decision we made at Twitch was to be generous with revenue share, which was painful for us but crucial for attracting and retaining streamers.

At Twitch, we learned that the video system doesn't know how many viewers are waiting before a stream starts, but the website does. By communicating this information, we could pre-populate the stream to the necessary video servers before going live.