Justin Kan of Twitch and Atrium: From Builder to Entrepreneur

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview serial entrepreneur Justin Kan. In 2007, he co-founded Justin.TV, a website that allowed anyone to broadcast video online. In 2011, Justin.tv spinned off its gaming division as Twitch, which went on to become the leading live streaming platform for video games in the US. Twitch was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for almost a billion dollars. More recently, Justin co-founded Atrium LTS—the “LTS” stands for “Legal Technology Services” - a startup that’s building technology to revolutionize the legal industry. GGV is an investor in Atrium.

Justin is a true startup veteran—in addition to starting multiple companies of his own, he has worked with hundreds of startups as a partner at Y Combinator, and has also personally angel invested in over 65 companies. Justin grew up in Seattle as a second-generation Chinese American, and graduated from Yale in 2005 with degrees in physics and philosophy.

In this episode, Justin recounted the story of how he started to live streaming his life before streaming became cool, the pitfalls he has gone through during his startup journey, whether it was the right decision to sell Twitch to Amazon in 2014, and what gets him excited about his new venture Atrium.

Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. GGV Capital also produces a biweekly email newsletter in English, also called “996,” which has a roundup of the week’s most important happenings in tech in China. Subscribe at 996.ggvc.com.

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the past 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in consumer internet, e-commerce, frontier tech, and enterprise. GGV has invested in over 280 companies, with 30 companies valued at over $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Bytedance (Toutiao), Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, DOMO, Hashicorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Musical.ly, Slack, Square, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY, and others. Find out more at ggvc.com.

Tweets:

"I always thought that 'management' was a dirty word. But we could have been much more effective if we had implemented actual management in the early days." - @JustinKan of @Twitch on the 996 Podcast with @hanstung & @zarazhangrui https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/996-podcast-with-ggv-capital/id1336107529?mt=2

"I think we [the US] take immigration of skilled labor for granted. We should be trying to get every single engineer from around the world to live here, to stay here." - @JustinKan of @Twitch on the 996 Podcast with @hanstung & @zarazhangrui https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/996-podcast-with-ggv-capital/id1336107529?mt=2 @GGVCapital

 

"The most common mistake I see in founders is that they are not focused enough." - @JustinKan of @Twitch on the 996 Podcast with @hanstung & @zarazhangrui https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/996-podcast-with-ggv-capital/id1336107529?mt=2 @GGVCapital