The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
by
Randall Stross
Published 4 Sep 2013
“Peter Thiel to Teach Stanford Class on Startups,” Tech Chronicles blog, San Francisco Chronicle, March 12, 2012, http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2012/03/12/peter-thiel-to-teach-stanford-class-on-startups/. 2. Justin Kan, “Drop Out. Or Don’t,” A Really Bad Idea blog, February 27, 2011, http://areallybadidea.com/drop-out-or-dont. 3. Justin Kan, “Selling Kiko,” A Really Bad Idea blog, February 21, 2011, http://areallybadidea.com/selling-kiko. 4. Justin Kan, “Why Starting Justin.tv Was a Really Bad Idea, but I’m Glad We Did It Anyway,” TC, February 12, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/12/starting-justin-tv/. This account of Justin.tv’s history and its double pivot is also based on the author’s interview with Kan and Shear, December 29, 2011. 5.
…
And joining him as a cofounder is big brother Justin. Graham announces, “Part-time partner Justin Kan is in this batch with you! He has decided to do another startup.” They and a third cofounder have launched Exec in San Francisco, which offers to dispatch, within ten minutes of a request, someone who will do most anything. “We are delighted beyond words,” says Graham. “And we’ll now be able to witness, for the first time, the spectacle of someone having office hours with himself.” This gets a good laugh. This will effectively be Justin Kan’s third YC batch. Also in the winter batch is Michael Seibel, who has brought Socialcam to YC; this will count as his second time in YC.
…
Failing at forty, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at twenty-two, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you’ll end up at twenty-three broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program.6 In the spring of 2005, Justin Kan was a twenty-one-year-old senior at Yale. He and his near lifelong friend Emmett Shear, also twenty-one, were working on a Web-based calendar site, called Kiko, in their free time. The largest expense to date was the $250 spent to obtain the Kiko.com domain name. When Graham sent out his invitation, about six weeks before graduation, Kan had not heard of Graham but Shear had, having read Graham’s online essays about programming languages and startups.
We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by
Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018
They’d been casually enlisted through Tuesday dinners and over AIM chat, though Graham’s primary account, u/bugbear, usually trumped them all in activity. As other founders tinkered with their prototypes and rewrote code, Reddit was another browser window on their screen, one that refreshed regularly with new, interesting links. “Reddit changed every day, so you could see it improving over the summer,” said Justin Kan, one of the founders of Kiko. To say they were the first users is not entirely true. They were the first users aside from Huffman and Ohanian, whose initial, primary—and now long-standing—usernames, respectively, were spez and kn0thing (spez being an abbreviation of another username Huffman favored online, Spengler, as in Egon Spengler, the character who provided the brains of the Ghostbusters operation; kn0thing being Ohanian’s high school gaming handle, an abbreviation of the title of his favorite song, Metallica’s “King Nothing”).
…
Lee had accompanied Stone to this Halloween party on a whim, and found it impressive that it didn’t have a keg; it had a table with a bar setup, and even snacks. Classy, she thought, by student-housing-in-Cambridge standards. Despite her eagle eye for the interesting, Lee had no way of knowing that among these lanky, awkward young men were several who within the decade would change the world—or at least the Internet. In the mix was Justin Kan, the cofounder of Kiko, who would go on to found a live-streaming company that transformed into Twitch, which more than one hundred million people watch per month (Amazon acquired the company in 2014 for nearly $1 billion). There was Trip Adler, the founder of Scribd, an online library and document-sharing platform with more than three hundred thousand titles.
…
He explained to Slowe that the previous night, he’d opened his laptop, checked to make sure the Reddit servers were still functioning after a record-breaking traffic day, and then searched for plane tickets. He was done with this place. Done with being so cramped in living quarters, and yet so lonely. If he couldn’t be with Katie while she was finishing school, he could at least be with his friends. He missed fellow entrepreneurs Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, who’d moved west in September, and wanted to start right away on his new job of shepherding Reddit into its new life. He had emptied a laundry bin of clothes into his suitcase, and cushioned his Xbox into the middle. He bought a ticket for the next morning to SFO. Now he’d landed.
How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
by
Billy Gallagher
Published 13 Feb 2018
See YesJulz (Julieanna Goddard) Goldroom Goldwyn, Emily Good Luck America (election show) Google app revenue Googleplex IPO Los Angeles office privacy and Snapchat compared with user activity and See also Schmidt, Eric Google AdWords Google Circles Google Glass Google Maps Google Ventures Grande, Greg Green, Diane Greylock Partners group messaging Hamburger, Ellis Hamby, Peter Hastings, Reed Hatmaker, Taylor Hawkins, Billy Hazelbaker, Jill Hewlett-Packard Honan, Mat Hurley, Chad Hwang, Sharon Hwang, Steve Hyland, Sarah Hyperloop Technologies IBM Innovator’s Dilemma, The (Christensen) Instagram Arsenic and demographics of users Facebook purchase of Instagram Stories investors and funding launch of Snapchat compared with Snapcodes and Institutional Venture Partners Intel Interview, The (film) Intuit iOS James, Nicole Jenner, Kylie Jobs, Steve Jordan, David Starr Joss, Bob Jurgenson, Nathan Justin.tv (Justin Kan) Kan, Justin. See Justin.tv (Justin Kan) Kerr, Miranda Khan, Imran Kinney, Abbott Knight, Phil Kravitz, David Krishnan, Sriram Kundera, Milan Land, Edwin Landrieu, Mitch Lane, Randall Lasky, Mitch Lee, James Lee Tran & Liang Leica camera Li, Frank Lieberman, Tressie Liew, Jeremy Life Time Value (LTV) Lightspeed Venture Partners Line (messaging app) LinkedIn Looksery Luck, Andrew Lynton, Jamie Lynton, Michael Madonna Madrigal, Alexis Magnusson, Peter Mailbox (app) Malik, Om Major League Baseball Mandela, Nelson Markowitz, Harris Masters, Blake Matas, Mike Mayer, Marissa McBride, Shaun.
…
Stith believes people don’t talk about anxiety enough and felt early on like she was the only person on Earth who got panic attacks, so she finds her time on Snapchat deeply meaningful. She gets letters all the time from followers thanking her for helping them with their anxiety. One Snapchat star found the platform years after attempting stories on his own. In 2007, entrepreneur Justin Kan launched Justin.tv, a 24/7 show of his life, broadcast from a webcam on his head. He thought it was a cool, crazy idea that he could maybe turn into a business one day through advertising or sponsorships. He eventually shut down the show, but kept developing the video streaming platform, which eventually became Twitch, a place to watch people play video games; Kan and his partners sold Twitch to Amazon for $970 million in August 2014.
…
A month later, Candace Payne bought herself a Star Wars Chewbacca mask that roared when she opened her mouth. Payne filmed herself on Facebook Live trying it on and laughing hysterically. Her video has been viewed almost 160 million times. Live video was great for celebrities and interesting events, but, as we saw with Justin Kan’s Justin.tv experiment, most people rarely have interesting enough lives to broadcast live video. Neither Facebook nor Snapchat had fully figured out their content strategy yet. Both tried to win over media companies and experimented with producing original content. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg personally visited talent agencies in Los Angeles to pitch them on Facebook Live.
Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed
by
Alexis Ohanian
Published 30 Sep 2013
Steve thought he’d found a solution to one of modern life’s most vexing problems, but most people didn’t agree.1 So we had to find another problem to solve. What we settled on was our desire to know what was going on in the world at all times, and our frustration at the lack of a single, always fresh front page for the Internet. Then, as you know by now, we found our audience. Our friends from the Y Combinator summer class of 2005, Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, sold their company, Kiko.com, for $258,100 (on eBay, of all places) when Google launched their web-based calendar. The Google calendar’s integration was so tight with Gmail that the writing was on the wall for Kiko. The Kiko team, ever the intrepid founders, used the sale as an opportunity to pivot.
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
by
Gabriel Weinberg
and
Justin Mares
Published 5 Oct 2015
Without you this book would not be possible: Jimmy Wales, Cofounder of Wikipedia Alexis Ohanian, Cofounder of reddit Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup Rand Fishkin, Founder of Moz Noah Kagan, Founder of AppSumo Patrick McKenzie, CEO of Bingo Card Creator Sam Yagan, Cofounder of OkCupid Andrew Chen, Investor in 500 Startups Dharmesh Shah, Founder of HubSpot Justin Kan, Founder of Justin.tv Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon Colin Nederkoorn, CEO of Customer.io Jason Cohen, Founder of WP Engine Chris Fralic, Partner at First Round Capital Paul English, CEO of Kayak Rob Walling, Founder of MicroConf Brian Riley, Cofounder of SureStop Steve Welch, Cofounder of DreamIt Jason Kincaid, Blogger at TechCrunch Nikhil Sethi, Founder of Adaptly Rick Perreault, CEO of Unbounce Alex Pachikov, Evernote Founding Team David Skok, Partner at Matrix Ashish Kundra, CEO of myZamana David Hauser, Founder of Grasshopper Matt Monahan, CEO of Inflection Jeff Atwood, Cofounder of Discourse Dan Martell, CEO of Clarity Chris McCann, Founder of Startup Digest Ryan Holiday, Exec at American Apparel Todd Vollmer, Enterprise Sales Veteran Sandi MacPherson, Founder of Quibb Andrew Warner, Founder of Mixergy Sean Murphy, Founder of SKMurphy Satish Dharmaraj, Partner at Redpoint Ventures Garry Tan, Partner at Y Combinator Steve Barsh, CEO of PackLate Michael Bodekaer, Cofounder of Smartlaunch Each of you played a critical role in shaping this book and making it a useful resource.
How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by
Guy Raz
Published 14 Sep 2020
Their pivot from pita sandwiches to Stacy’s Pita Chips is a textbook example of a response to that change in the market, made both out of necessity and with an eye toward opportunity. That seems to be the recipe for every successful pivot—not just the recognition that you can’t keep doing what you’re doing if you want to grow or survive, but also identifying something else to do and/or some other place to do it. That’s how it was for Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, and Twitch, the livestreaming video platform that got its start in March 2007 as Justin.tv, a single 24-7 live feed of its creators’ lives. Like Stacy’s D’Lites, Justin.tv found success right away, but on a much larger scale. The creators got a ton of national press for starting the “lifecasting” revolution, which quickly drew hundreds of thousands, then millions of unique monthly users.
The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by
Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017
There was a search box that asked travelers where they were going, a large green book-it button, and sizable photographs of the hosts and their residences. Every Friday that spring, Gebbia and Chesky brought mock-ups of the new design to Michael Seibel at Justin.tv. Seibel and his Justin.tv co-founder, Justin Kan, observed their progress, identified problems, and sent them away to make improvements (the early payment mechanism, they recalled, was a particular mess). Seibel and Kan weren’t paid for this and received no equity in the fledgling startup. It was simply how things worked in Silicon Valley’s cliquish network of founders.
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by
Jessica Livingston
Published 14 Aug 2008
He wound up winning on Saturday and he took the red-eye to Boston that night and arrived for his interview—just him—on Sunday. We met with him for 25 minutes or so and I remember thinking in the first 5 minutes, “This guy is amazing.” All of us were just blown away by Sam. His poise and intelligence, and just the way he was. We knew that there was something special about him. We also had Justin Kan and Emmett Shear of Justin.tv. We originally funded them to make an online calendar called Kiko. They built it that summer and got a little bit of angel funding, but Google Calendar came out soon after and crushed them. So they came to us later on and said, “I think we’re gonna move on from Kiko,” and they started talking to Paul and Robert about new ideas.