I'm unaware of the timeline but I'm curious was he trying to sell shares in JTV or did twitch eventually spin off to a separate corporate entity from JTV. It makes a huge difference because JTV was a huge liability nightmare.
The 99% (of startups)
71–80 of 176 posts
Re: The 99% (of startups)
#72Tl Dr:
About Twitch.tv - “Watching people play video games is a niche” is now “I’m in charge of our consumer, marketplace and esports investing.”
Fuck them. Build your business.
Makes sense :)
Re: The 99% (of startups)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would that be depressing?
Well, for people upholding certain cultural values like me, which are not exactly too far-fetched, it's pretty obvious why an era where people watch live gaming in droves is depressing when contrasted with the decline of journalism. I'd rather there was a citizenry that read the Washington Post more than watching others play video games (or NFL or whatever) more. Maybe people would have a better handle of politics, a…
Maybe somebody will come up with an esport that incorporates current events that is also entertaining enough for a lot of people to watch.
Re: The 99% (of startups)
#74This gives an interesting glimpse into the prognostication abilities of supposedly brilliant VC's. It also shows the the near-impossibility of cashing in private company shares, at least through VC's. In addition to this story, the Sony hack revealed that Evan Spiegel of Snapchat wanted to cash in about $40 million worth of shares just after he spurned Facebook's $3 billion offer. He was also roundly rejected. Had so…
> This gives an interesting glimpse into the prognostication abilities of supposedly brilliant VC's. The question isn't whether VCs are brilliant according to some absolute metric. The question is whether they deploy capital better than random chance. The numbers show that top ten VCs consistently do.
> The question isn't whether VCs are brilliant according to some absolute metric. The question is whether they deploy capital better than random chance. The numbers show that top ten VCs consistently do.
Does it?
If you have enough gamblers in a high stake casino where the house hasn't stacked the deck, some of them will seem to consistently win in comparison to the other players.
Similarly, a very small percentage of VCs and other active investors consistently beat the market. A percentage so small I'm not sure anyone can statistically say they are doing so through skill.
Similarly, your argument is the top 10 are consistent. Yes. And the top 10 aren't a statistically significant sample in a market of thousands of investors.
Re: The 99% (of startups)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This gives an interesting glimpse into the prognostication abilities of supposedly brilliant VC's. The question isn't whether VCs are brilliant according to some absolute metric. The question is whether they deploy capital better than random chance. The numbers show that top ten VCs consistently do.
> The question isn't whether VCs are brilliant according to some absolute metric. The question is whether they deploy capital better than random chance. The numbers show that top ten VCs consistently do. Does it? If you have enough gamblers in a high stake casino where the house hasn't stacked the deck, some of them will seem to consistently win in comparison to the other players. Similarly, a very small percentage o…
This analysis breaks down if the top ten outperform the market after you've started watching them. If that's the case (which for top ten VCs it is), the math suggests it isn't a "million quarters" situation.
Re: The 99% (of startups)
#76[deleted]
Re: The 99% (of startups)
#77It's depressing that Amazon paid four times as much for this business as Bezos did for the Washington Post.
I would guess that the cost of running Twitch is much less than 1/4 of the cost of running Washington Post. You have a few servers and a handful of programmers vs. hundreds of reporters.
You have Kyle and Brody, just send them a pizza and they get the servers back up! Radical, brahhh, pizza ninja turtle programming! Make sure to send brody extra pepperoni for his sacrifices.
[EDIT] In case anyone doesn't get the reference: http://justinkan.com/three-stories
Re: The 99% (of startups)
#78It's depressing that Amazon paid four times as much for this business as Bezos did for the Washington Post.
I think its validation that the old ways of media are coming to an end.
Count how many TV News programs make reference to what they found on social media?
Re: The 99% (of startups)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Twitch succeeded because, as justin.tv, they were in a position to notice rising demand for gaming livestreams. So, for an alternative view: This is not an unfair advantage at all. I was in exactly the same position. We however thought that having game sessions streamed was terribly boring (none of the people in our office were gamers), and so, instead of catering to this niche (which I'm sure hit us well before it…
That's what I'm trying (and apparently failing) to get at: For Twitch, being gamers who also ran a video streaming site was a huge unfair advantage, because they were in a position to recognize a trend as it just started. There was no reason, if you look at statistics or data, to believe that this was a combination worth a billion dollars - that moment had never happened before in the history of business, and will pr…
> For Twitch, being gamers who also ran a video streaming site was a huge unfair advantage, because they were in a position to recognize a trend as it just started. There was no reason, if you look at statistics or data, to believe that this was a combination worth a billion dollars
There was no reason not to believe the opposite either.
I think I have a problem with your use of the word 'unfair'. Unfair to me means 'cheating', 'foul play'.
Having first spent the required time to create a video service put them in the position to realize that there was another trend brewing and they capitalized on that.
It's a classic pivot into a niche that was unproven, it could have been worth absolutely nothing (and it looked for quite a while that it wasn't going to be worth anything, even long after they already bet the company on it). At least, that's what it looked like to me from the outside. I was more than happy to be rid of the gamers.
> It never occurred to me that it could be a business, let alone a $300B one, because at the time I thought that software companies were things that sold high-performance databases to Fortune 500 companies for real money.
Well, that's just sour grapes. And I'm pretty sure that Mark Zuckerberg is just as surprised as you are at the $300B. That you failed to capitalize on the same opportunity as someone else because they realized something that you did not has very little to do with Mark Zuckerberg being a college sophomore at an elite institution, and even less with a music player, it has everything to do with recognizing an opportunity when one comes along (and whether he acted fairly towards others in that same project or not is not the subject).
If you want to argue 'unfair advantage' you will have to shift your viewpoint to the third world.
Notice how I could have written that Justin had an unfair advantage over our team because he was in Silicon Valley and we were not. But I did not write that because I know that it wouldn't have made a shred of a difference. What matters is that he took the chance and we did not.
> What other unfair advantages do Hacker News readers have that they don't realize are advantages?
Hacker News Readers' advantages are: a great channel to communicate with like minded individuals, access to some of the smartest people that I know, a collective experience that dwarfs even that of the most seasoned individuals in the industry, access to capital, access to YC if you want it and you pass muster, in general a good or even excellent education, not to have to worry about what they're going to eat tomorrow (well, probably not everybody, but most of us anyway) and so on. In short, all the privileges that we as an industry (the IT industry) take for granted and that other people have to fight for.
But between us there is no 'unfair advantage', you're looking at a minute difference between two sets of individuals already from one of the most privileged groups on the planet.
Re: The 99% (of startups)
#80This gives an interesting glimpse into the prognostication abilities of supposedly brilliant VC's. It also shows the the near-impossibility of cashing in private company shares, at least through VC's. In addition to this story, the Sony hack revealed that Evan Spiegel of Snapchat wanted to cash in about $40 million worth of shares just after he spurned Facebook's $3 billion offer. He was also roundly rejected. Had so…
> This gives an interesting glimpse into the prognostication abilities of supposedly brilliant VC's. The question isn't whether VCs are brilliant according to some absolute metric. The question is whether they deploy capital better than random chance. The numbers show that top ten VCs consistently do.
Take 1000 people, have each predict a coin flip 10 times. The top 10 players will have predicted way better than random chance would have you believe. Why several of them are even 10 for 10, they must have special prediction powers! ;)
Grow the player base, increase the number of predictions, you'll end up with some real super-stars who just go on winning. They'll probably write books and lecture about their techniques. Right up until the moment they lose. Kind of like hedge fund managers.