This article contains wording that promotes the subject through exaggeration of unnoteworthy facts .(November 2021) |
Born | |||||||||||
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Nationality | American | ||||||||||
Alma mater | Yale University | ||||||||||
Occupation | Investor | ||||||||||
Known for | Co-founding Twitch | ||||||||||
YouTube information | |||||||||||
Channel | |||||||||||
Subscribers | 159,000 [1] | ||||||||||
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Chinese name | |||||||||||
Traditional Chinese | 簡 彥 豪 | ||||||||||
Simplified Chinese | 简 彦 豪 | ||||||||||
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Last updated: June 18, 2021 | |||||||||||
Website | justinkan |
Justin Kan (born July 16, 1983) is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of live video platforms Justin.tv and Twitch, as well as the mobile social video application Socialcam. [2] He is also the cofounder and former CEO of law-tech company Atrium. [3] [4] In 2024, Kan announced that he had founded Stash, a payment and e-commerce platform for video game developers. [5]
He was formerly a partner at Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator. [6] His attempt to broadcast his entire life at Justin.tv, which he named after himself, popularized the term "lifecasting". Kan also started a Reddit-style electronic music discovery platform, The Drop.[ citation needed ]
In March 2019, along with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen he became advisor to Theta, a peer-to-peer video streaming platform that uses blockchain technology. [7]
In 2007, Justin Kan and partners Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel and Kyle Vogt started Justin.tv, a 24–7 live video feed of Kan's life, broadcast via a webcam attached to his head. [8] Kan was 23 years old at the time.
Kan's "lifecasting" lasted about eight months. Kan's concept attracted media attention, and resulting interviews with him included one by Ann Curry on the Today Show . Viewers accompanied Kan as he walked the streets of San Francisco, sometimes involved in both pre-planned events (trapeze lesson, dance lesson) and spontaneous situations (being invited into the local Scientology center by a sidewalk recruiter).
Afterward, the company transitioned to providing a live video platform so anyone could publish a live video stream. Justin.tv, the platform, launched in 2007 [9] [10] and was one of the largest live video platforms in the world with more than 30 million unique users every month.
Justin.tv was closed on August 5, 2014, in an effort to focus further on Justin.tv's parent company, Twitch. [11] [12] [13]
After Justin.tv launched in 2007, the site quickly began building subject-specific content categories like Social, Tech, Sports, Entertainment, News & Events, Gaming and others. Gaming, in particular, grew very fast and became the most popular content on the site. [14]
The company then decided to spin off the gaming content under a separate brand at a separate site. They named it TwitchTV, inspired by the term twitch gameplay. It launched officially in public beta on June 6, 2011.
Twitch was acquired by Amazon.com in August 2014 for $970 million. [15] [16]
Socialcam launched March 7, 2011, was bought by Autodesk July 17, 2012 for $60 million and was ended by Autodesk October 28, 2015. [17] [18] [19] Socialcam was a mobile social video application for iPhone and Android that allowed users to capture and share video online and on mobile, as well as via Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.
At one point, the application eclipsed 2 million downloads and continued to add to its features list, most notably with the addition of video filters. [20]
Justin Kan launched Exec on February 29, 2012, a new service to allow anyone to outsource anything they want for $25/hour. Exec was co-founded with his brother Daniel Kan, former head of UserVoice business development, and Stanford graduate Amir Ghazvinian. [21]
Exec was purchased by Handybook, a company founded by Oisin Hanrahan, Umang Dua, Ignacio Leonhardt, and Weina Scott, in an all-stock transaction in January 2014. [22]
Kan was a member of the first batch of YC-funded startups in 2005 for Kiko Calendar, and was funded by YC again for Justin.tv [6] and Exec. [23] Kan became a partner at Y Combinator in March 2014, where he offered advice to the new startups in each batch. [24] In March 2017, Kan left Y Combinator to start his own incubator, Zero-F. [25]
The Drop is a Reddit-style electronic music discovery platform that launched early 2015. Users can post and up-vote community-curated and sourced tracks. It was founded by Kan and his college friend Ranidu Lankage. [26]
Kan publicly launched Atrium in 2017. [27] Kan raised $10.5 million in an initial "party" round of investment led by General Catalyst. [28] In September 2018, Kan raised a $65 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. At that time, Andrew Chen, Marc Andreessen and Michael Seibel joined the Atrium board of directors. [29] Atrium closed operations in March 2020. [30]
Justin Kan started a YouTube channel in 2021. [31] In February 2021 he announced that one can collect his YouTube videos as non-fungible tokens on OpenSea. [32] [33]
Justin Kan started Fractal.is in December 2021 as a marketplace for players to buy Solana-based NFTs directly from game companies as well as a secondary marketplace for peer-to-peer trading. In April 2022 Fractal has raised $35 million in a seed round led by Paradigm and Multicoin Capital. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Solana Labs, Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures and Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon, among others.
Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.
Loopt, Inc. was an American company based in Mountain View, California, which provided a service for smartphone users to share their location selectively with other people. The service supported all the major mobile operating systems. Loopt's services had more than five million registered users and partnerships with every major U.S. mobile phone carrier. Their applications offered a variety of privacy controls. In addition to its core features, users also had the ability to integrate Loopt with other social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.
Justin.tv was a website created by Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt in 2007 to allow anyone to broadcast video online. Justin.tv user accounts were called "channels", like those on YouTube, and users were encouraged to broadcast a wide variety of user-generated live video content, called "broadcasts".
Lifestreaming is an act of documenting and sharing aspects of one's daily experiences online, via a lifestream website that publishes things of a person's choosing.
Livestreaming, live-streaming, or live streaming is the streaming of video or audio in real time or near real time. While often referred to simply as streaming, the real time nature of livestreaming differentiates it from other forms of streamed media, such as video-on-demand, vlogs, and YouTube videos.
Dalton Caldwell is an American technologist and digital music entrepreneur. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Mixed Media Labs. He currently works as a partner at Y Combinator.
Listia is a free online marketplace and mobile app for trading goods between individuals without using money. The platform has a system known as Listia credits to facilitate the trades. Users earn credits for giving away items they no longer need and can then use credits to get items that other users have listed. The marketplace uses an auction system where users bid on each other's items until the auction ends and the highest bidder wins. The user who listed the item then arranges for a pickup or ships the item directly to the winner.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management, with $35 billion as of March 2022.
Twitch is an American video live-streaming service that focuses on video game live streaming, including broadcasts of esports competitions, in addition to offering music broadcasts, creative content, and "in real life" streams. Twitch is operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon It was introduced in June 2011 as a spin-off of the general-interest streaming platform Justin.tv. Content on the site can be viewed either live or via video on demand. The games shown on Twitch's current homepage are listed according to audience preference and include genres such as real-time strategy games (RTS), fighting games, racing games, and first-person shooters.
Emmett Shear is an American Internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of live video platform Justin.tv. He served as the chief executive officer of Twitch when it was spun off from Justin.tv until March 2023. In 2011, Shear was appointed as a part-time partner at venture capital firm Y Combinator. In November 2023, he briefly served as interim CEO of OpenAI.
9gag is an online platform and social media website based in Hong Kong, which allows its users to upload and share user-generated content or other content from external social media websites. Since the platform for collections of Internet memes was launched on April 11, 2008, it has grown in popularity across social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
PlanGrid is a construction productivity software designed for onsite construction workers. PlanGrid digitises blueprints. It features version control and collaboration tools such as field markups, progress photos and issues tracking.
Exec was a company based in San Francisco, United States, that provided companies and individuals access to on-demand personal assistants and cleaning services. Started by Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv, in February 2012 with co-founders Daniel Kan, his brother, and Amir Ghazvinian, Exec was backed by Y Combinator and other prominent investors. The company was acquired by Handy in January 2014.
Tilt.com, Inc. was a crowdfunding company founded in 2012 that allowed for groups and communities to collect, fundraise, or pool money online. James Beshara and Khaled Hussein launched the platform under the name Crowdtilt out of Y Combinator.
Namo Media was a technology startup providing in-stream advertisements for mobile applications. It was acquired by Twitter in June 2014 for between $50M and $100M.
Gigster provides a service that allows users to get tech projects built on demand. It was co-founded by Roger Dickey and Debo Olaosebikan and based in San Francisco, California. They received seed funding from Greylock Partners, Bloomberg Beta, as well as notable angel investors and founders Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Justin Waldron of Zynga, and Emmett Shear of Twitch, among others. They were a part of Y-Combinator's Summer 2015 class.
Michael Seibel is a partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam. He first joined Y Combinator in 2013, advising hundreds of startups, and has been active in promoting diversity efforts among startup founders.
Kyle Vogt is an American businessman. In 2013, Vogt founded Cruise Automation, where he served as the company's President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer until resigning on November 19, 2023. Cruise develops self-driving car technology and, since being acquired in May 2016, operates as an independent subsidiary of General Motors.
Daniel Kan is an American entrepreneur and technology executive. He is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Cruise Automation. Kan and Cruise Senior Director Kyle Vogt are listed as number 7 on Fortune's 2016 40 Under 40 List.