BREAKING: Twitch Founder/CEO Resigns - What I Learned From Him

what's up y'all all sean here i wanna do a special episode because the ceo of twitch resigned today and this is a guy i got to know well because twitch acquired my last startup up and i worked with emmett for a while he's been there for sixteen years he was the founder the creator of twitch which is basically a you know one of the biggest platforms in the world the biggest social networks in the world millions and millions and millions of users i think they have eight million streamers let alone viewers that they that they talk about and it's a multi billion dollar company so start probably somewhere between five and ten billion dollars in terms of what he's built and i got to sit in the room with this guy you know every week for a few hours at least interacting with them and over time you observe what is it about these people i've always wondered like what would it be like to work with mark zuckerberg what do they actually like how do they actually work are they any different do they just get lucky are they just though am i looking at a lottery of re ticket winner or is there something different about this individual that led them to do this and you know no surprise i think there are some differences some amazing things so i wanna share with you some stories because at twitch office there was nine floors and so at the ninth floor the top floor there's just boardroom it's got like twenty chairs and emmett it would just sit at the head of the boardroom at the table like you know some emperor or something like that and he would a team after team would come in and they would present whatever's is going on in that division of the company ads or marketing or whatever it may be and what he would do is he would sit there he would talk to that team for forty five minutes to one hour and then boom on the next and so this guy operated at a extremely high pace and i wanna share with you eight or nine things that i think were different or special or at least a stories i remember for have a work with the guy so the first story i'm gonna call the birds fly story okay so i remember we're sitting in a meeting with emmett and this team walked in and there was not i think of the partnership team or marketing team or whatever and they were super excited because they had just you they were like hey we had this great meeting with this company they said they wanted a pre install twitch on all these phones and you know this is gonna get twitch you know a big head start in this market and it's gonna be great we're gonna we're projecting this much growth there's much revenue blah and they were you know they were so excited they thought they were bringing in you know this trophy and and they were gonna just hold it up and get applause from everybody and and and hey it was it it was a good deal but emmett it sat quietly for a bit he asked questions and then he he kinda reminded them something he said you know i learned this phrase from paul graham at y comb birds fly fish swim and deals fall through like that's what they do deals fall through that's just a thing that happens and sure enough over the course of that year i saw so many teams come in and present deals that were on the table verbally agreed being discussed maybe even signed and then this is exactly even to say this line and more often than that person was willing to admit the deals fell through and so this is something i took with me which is never to get too high or too low when it comes to deals m and a partnerships anything like that just remember this is what deals do they fall through birds fly fish swim deals fall through alright give you second story after we got acquired my first day i go up to his office and i'm i'm gonna have my first one on along with him and anything i don't really know what to do i've never been an employee really like this in my life so i don't really know i've only been in the guy on the other side the table so i go in and i start to tell him you know about what i'm working on and he just kinda like stops me he's like hey what's what what's your question and i'm like what do you mean was i haven't gotten today yet i'm giving you the context he goes he goes he goes i think this will help and i wanna zero ones there's probably you gave me almost like an instruction manual of here's how you work with me which is really here's how you work with any leader any ceo there's four ways you could frame anything you're gonna tell me number one is hey i'm doing this fyi just i'm doing this i just want you to be in the loop number two is i'm doing this but i want your approval or i need your approval so i plan to do this do you approve number three is i'm trying to decide between a and b or a b and c can you help me think that through and then the last one number four the last way we interface with him is to say remember that thing we agreed on here's what happened it's the status update of the closing the loop on what we had talked about and basically anytime interact with him that was the the sort of like the the base frame that i needed to have which was i'm doing this fyi i'm doing this do you approve can you help me think through which way to go i'm not sure which way what which one i wanna do or lastly here's what happened here here's the learning that we had from it that just simplified so much and it made our communication so much tighter in a very short amount of time we could immediately sync up we could get through that and then we would spend the rest of the time just sharing interesting things or talking about what's going on in our lives because we weren't wandering around and he's sitting there waiting to find out like what does this guy want for me and i'm sitting there trying to tell him a full story before i finally get to my point or my question so that was a one great framework you sent me the second one was i wrote an update once there's a point number three i wrote an update and he just took a pen and he just drew circles and rearrange things and he basically said here's how want you to write this what why so what so that's a format of communication you tell me what happened why it happened and so what are we gonna do about it or if we're planning something what are we gonna do why are we gonna do it and so what do you need for me in order to make that happen and that what why so what framework again tightened up my communication it took away so much wasted energy of trying to sit down with a blank piece paper and figure out how i'm gonna communicate something now i sit down with a paper and it's write what lies so what and then i fill in the details underneath so that was a great little communication framework that that i got from him okay number four he is a fierce nerd so this is a phrase that i took from paul graham paul graham wrote this essay talking about fierce nerds which is basically his observation of the best yc founders so the most successful yc founders he he felt he felt fall into this bucket and he talks about fierce nerds is people who are competitive in fact they're often more competitive than non nerds right like typically if you think competitive if you think of a jo in this case he's saying almost a fierce nerds is almost more competitive because they are all in on this they don't have a bunch of other you know social things to fall back on they don't have the emotional maturity to separate themselves from the competition it is deeply personal to them and they are fully obsessed he he talks about how they tend to be over confident sometimes especially when they're young because they feel like they can get to the right answer to the fastest and he talks about how big a fierce notice is so advantageous in the world of business today and you know so so emmett it falls in this category when i asked him what he does on on friday night for the weekend you know it was like i'm gonna play settlers of with the pat you know with the call brothers from stripe and the founders of reddit and this is what they would do they would get together drink beer play i play a competitive board game or during our first m and a conversation i asked the corp to dev guy after we got out of the meeting i said how how how'd you think that way when i thought it was pretty good what what'd you think you know is he always like that he no he goes half of these meetings he's just playing heart stone on his phone and he's talking but he's playing hearts down he goes he put down his he wasn't playing hearts stunt so that was a good sign for you guys and this guy competes like a beast in fact i one time asked him i said can you send me something from the archives can you send me an old fossil so basically when you started twitch did you ever make any plans or or pitch decks or anything like that i'd love to see it because i i'm just like a i'm a nerd about that sort thing i i like seeing what people were thinking at the start but because we all know it what looks like today but what were you thinking at the start and he sent me a pit a a deck that he had made an investor update that he had made right when they pivoted into to twitch and there was this it was a white it was no design it was white slides black text times roman and he just he was saying here's what we're doing you know here's why we're doing it and here's here's what's coming next and then on one slide he he filled up the entire slide to almost a make a point with every product thing they had shipped and improved that month it was just full like there was no white space on that slide and then on the next slide he wrote we are a we are a steam roller plowing through a field of flowers i thought it was awesome because today he's older he's wiser he's more mature he wouldn't talk like that he's not like pounding his chest or whatever but at the time you could tell like that was that young bra robot energy of feeling the momentum of hey look nobody on the honor earth at that point knew really what twitch was it wasn't a big deal but he knew he knew they were on something he knew that they were making tons of progress i always remember that we were a steam roller plowing through a field of flowers like what what a picture and and i love that and i i've i since now write that in my startups i'm like this month i'm gonna be a steam roller and plowing through field of flowers what would that mean what would i need to get done in order for that to be true and i just work backwards from that i'll give you maybe i think this is number five maybe the most remarkable thing of the whole thing i talked about the early pivot so what people don't know is that twitch before twitch him emmett justin khan michael si they were working on something called justin tv a lot of people know this story it was like a justin khan was wearing a webcam on his head and he was walking around was like a reality show of his life then it became anybody can broadcast anything which was like mostly people broadcasting illegal sporting events and stuff like that like just boot like streaming and so the site was kinda popular but it really wasn't gonna be successful because most of their best content was illegal and they had a decision to pivot at the time instagram had come out instagram was hot but instagram only did photos and so the majority of the company including justin and michael and kyle they all wanted to do instagram for video and they called it social cam and they pivoted to that and they wanted to do that and they you know all the top talent in the company wanted to go do that and emma had a different one of you he's like you know on justin tv i really like watching these video game streams it only made up two percent at the time of of all the content or all the watch time that was happening on the network but he's like i like that content the best it's not illegal to do so it's the only good content that's not illegal i kinda wonder what would happen if we just went all in and made a video game streaming platform and he was kind of alone in that so emmett went that way justin and the others went the other way and maybe the reject sort of you know got got put on emmett team to do that now social cam went way up and then way down and i had this crazy spike in viral vitality and it crashed and ended up selling for like sixty million dollars but twitch was a slow just brick by brick by brick all the way into a multi billion dollar company and so the reason i'm bring this up is because to this day justin khan is often referenced as the c cofounder of twitch or the founder of twitch and i don't from what i understand i might be wrong front i understand that wasn't actually true he started justin tv which and then he went to social cam but like emmett and his crew built twitch up from there i don't think justin really they were the same office but i i don't think he was working on twitch actively the time i don't think he ever was an employee of twitch i think he was helpful on emmett and justin our best friends growing up and you never hear emmett try to take credit away from justin or more towards himself i've never once heard him to do that which is kind of incredible and so i give a lot of props to that because a lesser man aka me would have been trying to set the record straight and and and say you know no actually it was more me than it was this other guy who's more popular than me but emmett couldn't care less that's his best friend and i think that us a lot about somebody so okay that's that's five let me go do a couple more so okay if you go into a meeting with them you're gonna notice two things the first is that this guy's really really really smart he's smarter than you and i always wondered this because i think people like to think that it's actually hard work that separates people or it's luck or it's one of these other factors but it's it not all not everybody's equally intelligent his oven burns hotter like twitch uses the amazon method of six minute sorry six page memos before meetings so basically you write a memo about what's going on you're right you basically write down everything you come into the beginning you hand out the printed out copy of that to everybody at the table everybody silently reads for fifteen twenty minutes and then everybody has all the same information and now they discuss i it's an amazing way to it took build a a a very good culture in your company of writing thinking and talking so it's a great way to run meetings but the first thing you notice is that seven minutes in and pens down he's on heart stone because he's read the whole thing faster than everybody else and of course when the discussion starts he lets other people talk but then when he finally raises his hand and it says you know here was my question it would always be the most on point thing that would cut to the heart of the matter and it's like oh why we've been wasting our time talking about these other things he's right you know he he made it he simplified the six page memo into a really simple question and conversation and so his his oven just burns hotter he gets to the right answer faster than most people he retains more info than most people he's able to connect dots and is more widely red i remember sitting in a meeting where we were talking about some policy you know how do we handle this situation streamers are doing this should we enforce it should we not enforce how how should we change the policy how should we decide what how do we take into account what the community wants and he would you be like well you know we could do it like you know the feudal system in northern ireland back in the fourteen hundreds like you know you'd say some shit like that and you'd be like emmett man we don't none of us know what you're talking about no nobody knows how the fuel system ran you can you can you explain and then he would explain how their court system worked and then he'd be like why don't we do that and he connect these dots and all i could think about was like i can't believe this guy even reads about that i can't believe he even knows about that he's he is he's just like sort of ins impatient curious very widely red and then you know his brain has this ability to connect data points you know in in a way that i haven't really seen since then so his oven burns hotter i think the people that run these platforms are smarter and hardworking and blah blah right they're the they're the olympic athletes of of business and and i think he's no different having said that he's got flaws so my next point let's call it point seven he's flawed and he knows it so when i got there a lot of people would joke almost behind his back like well you know and it's all i iq he's no e iq for me it was honestly further you know could be further from the truth but i also met him i don't know fourteen years into running this company i bet if i met him at year three or four he probably didn't have the same managerial skills or social skills or e use skills that he has today but he knows what's flawed and he works on it so his favorite book i think was non nonviolent communication because that had helped him so much of how can he communicate with people in a way that doesn't put them on the defensive but still gets you know gets things done he only cared about getting things right not being right so he would use what i call this the soc ceramic method of of leadership where when you would come in you would say something then he would start to ask you question then he would break up your whole argument piece by piece assumption by assumption why is this true how do we know that if that's true then what does that imply next and he would just go one by one until we would get to the right answer most it was exhausting and they took it as almost a personal attack like he's questioning everything i say he doesn't just take it at face value but the reality was i thought it was a tremendous like approach to getting to the truth and the truth is all he cared about he didn't care if he came up it or you came up with it he just wanted it to be closer to the truth to the actual answer he also hired this coach this executive coach a woman named flo who's amazing i think she's like eighty years old so she's like you know doesn't know the first thing about gaming or streaming or twitch or any of that stuff but she knew about people and i remember sitting in a neck in one of the exact off sites and emmett has this nervous tick which is that when he's really thinking about something he would grab his neck like where his neck beard was and he would start to like twist it and he was like to anyone who's talking to it's like so obvious you could see this and it's not like a normal manner of people do but that was his t that was his tech he would do that anytime he was thinking hard he wasn't sure about something or he was trying to figure out how to say something to you he would do that and i loved that and i'd i'd worked there for maybe nine months at this point he did it all the time you know i'm never gonna point that out what am gonna say like you know then the it's just something he did and everybody just sat there quietly all of his leaders all of his peers sat there quietly letting that happen and flow walked in and she was like emma what do you do with your neck put your hand down you know sit up straight say that like a leader and she just told it to him like it is it was amazing she's amazing but also his reaction had zero percent defensive he was like oh yeah thanks like thank you that's a gift thank you for reminding me about that yeah know i'm i'm working on that and i thought that that was you know a good sign as to how do how do you get better right this guy was there for sixteen years how do you get better every year well you're surrounded by people that are kind of afraid to tell you the truth because you're their boss and you're the ceo and you're this smartest guy in the room so i think he did a good job of identifying his weaknesses and hiring people that would literally tell him the truth so those are some of the things that i picked up from ami you know emmett you had a great run i hope you i you know you don't listen to the pod but i hope you listen to this one because yeah working with you was a lot of fun you know i really found it fun because it pushed me to be better i could not walk into a meeting or do my job and be able to get away with it just on talent or charisma or some hand wavy bullshit that you can say in a meeting that if it wasn't for him pretty much anyone else in the company if i went to to the meeting i could kinda just say whatever and i could talk my way out of any situation or into any situation or whatever i wanted to do but with them you know i i kinda felt like a higher bar was there where i really needed to have the right answer i needed to have the truth because he would not his standard was there and so yep he made me better i appreciate that and it was a it was kind of cool to be able to be in the room with somebody who is you know one of these these rare individuals who has built one of these mega mega companies and i don't know what he's gonna do next i think he's just had a kid so you know maybe he's gonna go full dad mode i'm not sure what he's gonna do but i will i will watch it eagerly to see because i know it's not gonna be it's not gonna be average whatever it is not there's there's nothing nothing just mediocre average coming from this guy so anyways i hope you enjoyed that those are some of the lessons i learned working with emmett twitch and alright that's it that's the fine