The Strange Origins of Live Streaming: Twitch's Michael Seibel & His Co-founder Justin Kan

He talked about wearing a camera on his head and broadcasting his life 24-7. I think there was clear consensus whenever you described that idea to somebody that it was a bad idea. But weirdly, that didn't stop it from happening, which I still don't know how to explain.

Welcome to Leap Forward, a show about founders and the people who believed in them before anyone else. I'm David Rosenko, and on today's show, Michael Seibel. Now, live streaming feels so inevitable today, but it wasn't that long ago that everyone thought it was a horrible idea. And the way it came about was just like this very strange and interesting story. Two friends on a college road trip decided to start this live reality TV show by strapping a camera to a baseball cap. And they tried to get Michael to join in.

I was like, you should stay and join this company. And he was like, no, thanks. Thanks, but no thanks. And then he flew back to the East Coast.

Michael quickly changed his mind and flew out to San Francisco to work on that startup, Justin TV. The show didn't last long, but it also kickstarted what would eventually turn into Twitch and invent the phenomenon of live streaming, a market that's now worth over a hundred billion dollars. Today on the show, how one bad idea with 10 years of persistence revolutionized entertainment. And now, Michael Seibel. So let's actually go all the way back. Let's start at the beginning. And just like, can you describe your childhood to us? Where'd you grow up? What was home like?

I grew up in Brooklyn, New Jersey for the first nine years of my life. And both my parents worked. My dad worked in IT for Merrill Lynch, and my mom worked in banking. She was an assistant manager at a bank branch called EAB.

Do you have any kind of memories of what your parents did for work? Kind of, you know, remembering as a as a kid, what that looked like from the outside.

For my dad, my core memories was he was a storage engineer at Merrill. Like he was the one who taught me the term like terabyte. He was a computer guy. We had a computer at home my whole life. And my mom, I remember her having like equally as challenging a career and like trying to work her way up to a bank. Neither of my parents graduated from college when I was born. My dad went back to school and did night school at NYU. But they were kind of two young people. I they were, I guess, 22 and 23 when I was born. So kind of two young people trying to be professionals, trying to make their way in the 80s in New York.

What kind of kid were you? Like what were you interested in?

I liked my Nintendo back then. Uh, I liked my Game Boy. My mom lied to my dad so I could get a pair of uh Reebok pumps. I don't know if anyone listening to this is like 45 years old, they'll understand what I'm talking about. Liked basketball. I was a big Michael Jordan fan growing up, and my mom and I would watch basketball a lot. Yeah, but otherwise, I don't know, unremarkable. Do you remember what you wanted to be growing up? Um, yes. In high school, I thought I wanted to be a constitutional lawyer and Supreme Court justice. I um was in a school that taught a special kind of class on constitutional law that I really liked. And uh that's what I thought I was gonna do. That's what I told my parents I was gonna do. And that's how, in their minds, they justified Yale, which I think cost $35,000 a year at the time, which sounded like crazy.

So you go to Yale, what was college Michael like? Were you doing a lot of studying? You know, do you actually manage to have some fun?

College Michael stopped working. High school Michael realized he had to work really hard to get into college. College Michael realized that the classes were kind of useless. And so, yeah, no, I think I almost completely opted out of school. I think the other thing that became clear was that law wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. I got more exposure to people who were actually lawyers and learned more about what their jobs were. And it did not seem as fun as debating constitutional law cases in front of the Supreme Court. I learned that uh that was a small, small subset of lawyers.

When did you realize that? What did you think you were gonna do once you realized that? I think I realized it freshman year and I had no idea what I was gonna do. Did you ever figure out, like, hey, I'm gonna go into X, or is it just I I I don't know.

What was interesting was Yale was much more about what I didn't want to do. It didn't seem like I wanted to be a banker or a consultant, which was kind of the dominant path. I think for a while I thought I wanted to do Peace Corps, but not really. I knew that I was interested in politics, so I knew that leaving school I wanted to work in a political campaign, but I didn't want that to be a career. I just wanted that to be experience. But it wasn't well thought out. Like I definitely 100% did not have a plan. And to be honest, I don't think I was exposed to anyone that I wanted to emulate. Like, you know, there wasn't, I didn't see anything around me that looked very exciting to do, which looking back is interesting. And so I also feel like during Yale, I kind of had to learn how to become an adult, you know? That was probably my biggest takeaway. And then my second biggest takeaway, which I did not realize at the time, was meeting my future co-founder, Justin Kahn. So looking back, becoming an adult and meeting Justin were probably the two biggest uh that's what made the money worth it.

What's up? I'm Justin Kahn, internet entrepreneur, your favorite founder's favorite founder. And I'm that's it. I met Michael back in college, I think it was 2003. He was a fun, motivated individual. We got along really well. We would just like hang out a lot, play World of Warcraft. Like we became pretty close friends, like uh pretty quickly after we met.

So do you remember the like the very first time that you met Justin?

I don't remember the very first time. I remember the first time he made a true impression on me, which was we were in the party suite in our college, this place called the God Quad. We hosted these parties my senior year, my first senior year, because I was on the Yale five-year plan. And we had enough alcohol to serve half the university, probably. But Justin was concerned that we might run out of alcohol. So when he showed up to our party, he was the only one I'd ever seen who brought alcohol to the party, which I thought was quite funny. But we didn't actually become close friends until I was asked to leave Yale at the end of my first semester of my senior year. And, you know, the quad quad now had a bunch of Yale 05 kids in it. And I was in a single, and he kind of embraced me and introduced me to the group, and I became friends with those guys. Those are still some of my closest friends till this day.

So we have a queued up thing from Justin. Lovely. So here's him telling the story of the first time that he remembers meeting you. Oh, Jesus.

He had this party one night that was like a dinner where they he made sushi. I think I met Michael then, yeah, crashing his sushi party. We'd go out together a lot. I would like get drunk and then like challenge him to like wrestling. And then, you know, Yale's cold, it's in the northeast. So I just remember getting thrown into snowbanks a lot. Yes. Yeah. But picture that. Yeah, me ripping my shirt off and being like, I'm gonna tackle you, and then like getting thrown in a snowbank. That was maybe our average night.

So I feel like Justin is mushing together a number of years. So one, I definitely did have a sushi party in my junior year. That would have been his sophomore year. He was not invited. I don't even remember him being there.

He said he said he crashed it.

He was not invited and he crashed it. We were not good friends at that point. And then those snowbanks, he was on the Yale rugby team, which is like interesting because like I wouldn't say Justin's a small person, but he's not a rugby-sized person. And so he would try to tackle me, and I'm like very big compared to you. It didn't work out well, but no, we uh we had great times together.

Yeah, we got to go with each other, like come over to my room, and and he was kind of watching as we worked on our first startup. And he was like interested in starting companies, so he he was kind of like watching as we were working on this company for about a year, ended up failing. So at that time, we were winding up our failing company, and uh, we had this idea for Justin TV, which is where I was gonna stream my life to the internet 24-7.

So I want to switch over to Justin TV and the idea behind Justin TV. Justin's recollection is that the first time he told you about the idea was in DC at a dinner that he was at with his dad and you. And he remembers as soon as he told you, you said, that's a really stupid idea. Yeah. Do you remember that dinner? I do.

So I was in DC because at that point I was a fundraiser for a US Senate campaign in Maryland.

He went and did this political campaign where he's like the head fundraiser, which is crazy because, like, now that you think about it, like making your fundraiser like a 23-year-old or 22-year-old is like, I mean, I think that campaign was destined for failure.

We were hosting a fundraiser in DC. And I actually asked Justin. So he came and actually helped me staff this fundraiser. And so after that event, we had this dinner, and you know, he talked about wearing a camera on his head and broadcasting his life 24-7. And that is a dumb idea. I think there was clear consensus whenever you described that idea to somebody that it was a bad idea. But weirdly, that didn't stop it from happening, which I still don't know how to explain. Like I feel like we just glossed over the this is definitely a bad idea, and this like acknowledged it and then moved on towards, okay, well, that's what we're doing. So let's how would we do it? But by that time, I couldn't imagine working in tech. I couldn't imagine living in the Bay Area. I couldn't imagine working with Justin.

He said that kind of the very start of it for you with Justin TV was that you'd never been out west and they were driving out west. Yep.

So this is after we lost our primary. I hadn't taken a vacation, and Justin and Emmett had told East Coast friend group that they were gonna be starting a new company and they were going to take a road trip out to California.

Months later, I'm like, okay, now I'm moving out to California to pursue my dream and start this company, Justin TV, with Emmett. So I emailed my friend group, like, hey, we're gonna go do this. And he responded back to this email, like, hey, can I come on this road trip? And so we're like, yeah, I guess so. You know, we're driving Emmett's Honda Civic, and the back was filled with our stuff, but we like end up throwing out like one person's, you know, worth of stuff, clearing out a car seat. And then he got in and we picked him up in New York, and then we he came out with us to the West Coast.

I still to this day have no idea why I invited myself on this road trip. Like, they weren't asking for like other people to come. It was more of like a notification to everyone of what they were doing. But I was like, oh, that sounds crazy. And like, you know, road trips, like when you're young, I guess that sounds cool. And so I asked them, hey, can I join? And they said yes. And then I asked, so what's the plan? Like, what, you know, it's gonna be my vacation, what we're gonna do. And you know, Justin was like, we're gonna get on Route 80 and drive straight for four and a half days. It was the first time I was west of, I don't even know, probably the first time I was west of Ohio. It was great. Do you remember what month that was? Oh, I do. That was very early October 2006. And I remember it because it was right before my birthday. My birthday is October 7th. So the first thing I saw in San Francisco was I was driving over um the Bay Bridge. We stopped in Treasure Island and we looked over at the city, and it was fleet week, and so the Blue Angels were actually flying over the city practicing for their event. And it was October, and it was probably 70 degrees. And I was like, it's sunny, it's 70 degrees, there's fighter jets flying over this. Like, this is like a magical place. I hadn't even stepped foot in it yet.

So at that point in time, you were just on for the road trip. Just a vacation. So then you fly back home.

Well, two things happened. So my birthday, I guess at some point I mentioned that I had always wanted an iPod, but I never bought one for myself, and I don't know why. I think it felt like an extravagance or something weird. I don't know. That that's uh sounds silly coming to math math. And so for my birthday, Justin bought me an iPod, which was weird. Because, like, we're, you know, like dudes don't really give gifts to each other in in their early 20s. And then he drove me to the airport. Remember, this is pre-Uber, and on the way to the airport, he asked if I wanted to join the company. And I guess a little side note, Justin and Emmett were starting to set the company up that second week that I was out there. And so I helped them open a bank account, helped them find an apartment. And um, I guess they found those things to be useful.

Yeah, he was like, You have no idea what you're doing, you have no like plan. And so he started like finding us an apartment and stuff like that. He was just trying to be helpful. And like after a while, we were like, Hey, you should just work with us. And then he said, No, absolutely not. And he was like, No, thanks. Thanks, but no, thanks. And then he he left and uh flew back to the East Coast.

I told him no, and he told me, just think about it. And so, with that in my mind, I fly back to Baltimore. Maybe about a week later, Justin sends me this PDF from this guy named Kyle Vote, which was the first design of the Justin TV video camera. And it was gonna be this camera that Justin could wear that could stream live video anywhere he was in San Francisco. And Justin was like, Look, we have a $50,000 investment from Y Combinator. We have this kid who's gonna build the camera. Me and Emmett are great software developers. How could this, how could this not go well? It seems baked, right? And um I remember thinking to myself, at that moment, every other thing I could do would be available for me to do later. And this is like, when is the next time your best friend's gonna ask you to start a company with him? Like, this is the once-in-a-lifetime.

More after the break. And now back to the interview.

And so I had to get out of my lease in Baltimore. And by November, I was sleeping in the living room of the apartment that I had helped them find in North Beach in San Francisco. Crystal Towers.

You know, at the time Michael was like sleeping on the balcony, actually. We were like, Emma and I were sharing a room. It was, you know, very, it was very scrappy.

Like two-bedroom, you know, maybe, maybe a thousand square feet at best. Maybe, maybe. So you're you're sleeping on the balcony. It's a madhouse, you know, you're trying to run this live show, you know, with Justin as the star. Like, what are your recollections from those early days?

You know, my first recollection was we didn't have anything. Like we didn't have a website, we didn't have chat, we didn't have a camera. We certainly didn't have much for me to do as the sole kind of quote unquote business guy. So I think I was probably adding negative value for the first three or four months. I would like help with cooking and cleaning and, you know, stupid shit. And as we were getting closer to actually launching, I remember I was responsible for negotiating some of our sponsorship deals. We got an energy drink to sponsor us. Um, but the entire sponsorship involved them giving us one case of energy drink and a poster to put on the wall. And then the show launches. And suddenly there's a lot to do. You know, the press was interested. He was on the front page of the chronicle. He was on the Today Show. Like it was just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So we had all these PR stories, and it was exciting. I would say that it was the feeling I didn't know I was looking for, which is hey, you're kind of master of your own fate here. You know, you're you're not waiting in line, you're not waiting in turn. This isn't like an East Coast if you work really hard and you kiss the right guy's ass, and 30 years you get to do stuff. It's like, you get to do everything right now. Good luck. Don't fail. Everyone fails, by the way. Um, and so it was great. And then also, it was just a community of people. Doing a startup in San Francisco wasn't weird. Everyone was supportive. You saw people ahead of you you wanted to emulate, you saw people behind you that you wanted to help inspire. It felt not only the right thing to be doing it, but the right place to be doing it. But yeah, like our apartment was a shit show. Like Kyle had these massive tables in the living room where he was soldering like the new camera build that he was doing, and the the camera would break every couple days, he'd have to repair it. And, you know, Emmett would be writing code, and Justin would be running around the city. And back then, my job was producer. So part of my job was to figure out interesting things for Justin to do. And like, you know, there was suddenly it was a thing that was happening.

Here's a little clip from Justin describing that sort of early show.

We like went and visited a bunch of French startups. We were invited to some events. I can't remember. I think I went and hung out with a personal shopper when we went shopping. As I recite this, this is not didn't sound that interesting. You know, this was like a really mid, like a D list reality show we're talking about.

Yeah, I think that we thought of ourselves as interesting and funny people. And maybe there was up to an hour of interesting content a day, but the show was a 24-hour show. And so I think pretty quickly, a couple of things were happening. The bills were piling up, money was running low, we were not growing, and we realized we weren't great at creating content.

It definitely got a lot of attention. We did a lot of media around it, and people were coming to check it out because they were like, what is going on? It's crazy. We got a lot of people were swatting us and like calling 911 all the time.

You know, so for context, it was we all lived in the Y scraper. When we were starting Weebly, I think we were maybe a few floors above you. There's a whole cohort of people, you know, the Reddit founders, Dropbox founders that were living there at the time. Maybe one of my biggest memories was the famous swatting incident where someone into the live show called in a stabbing into the apartment, SFPD, thinking someone had just gotten stabbed, barged in with guns blazing. I assume that's probably a memory that you won't forget easily. You know, what's really funny about that is that I wasn't there.

I saw it on Justin TV later as a clip, but I was in a different apartment at the time. And I probably only showed up about an hour later. So I was not a victim of the swatting. But uh coming into the room after that, everyone was quite freaked out. Um, and there were a number of pranks. I mean, I think six fire trucks got called because they said there was a fire in our building. There was the Y Combinator startup school conference where they said there was a stabbing and a bombing there. And so they that was an issue. Someone ordered a hundred pizzas. Yeah, it was uh it was interactive. It was uh it was an experience for sure.

Do you remember the the last day that you were streaming and what it felt like to turn that camera off?

Uh it was kind of like died with a whimper, not a bang, in that there was a lot of exciting stuff that happened in the beginning. You know, we planned like one week of content basically, and they like ran out of content. So eventually, like traffic slowed to a trickle. People, it was not retention, right? People like come, they'd log on, I'd be sleeping, or you know, sitting there on the computer and they'd be like, This is the most boring entertainment I've ever watched, and then they would move on with their lives. Right. So, yeah, it wasn't it wasn't great. And then six months in. Was when I was like, okay, I'm turning it off. But by that time, there was like almost no people watching. It's like people stopped pranking us because they were like bored. You know, the problem was like the content wasn't interesting enough to even fuck with. So that was, you know, we had our own like warning signs that wasn't working uh in other ways.

It's weird though, because even though that sounds like absolute disaster, because it was on us, thinking back, it felt fine. It was like, all right, well, we got to make some moves. And so a couple of things happened in rapid succession there. One was Justin Emmett had to actually lend the company some money, which I remember we wrote up a loan agreement on like a lined piece of like notebook paper, which uh we paid them back though. Two, Kyle came in full time, became a co-founder. Three, we got kicked out of that apartment. Four, we raised our first seed round with the idea that instead of just doing one show, we would have a platform where anyone could broadcast live video on the internet.

People were interested in like, how are you streaming? Because this didn't really exist before, and people didn't know how to stream things on the internet. And so, you know, the light bulb went off, and we're like, hey, we should make a platform that lets other people stream. Maybe hopefully people are more entertaining than we are.

And so if we kind of do the timeline here, you know, October 06 was the road trip. By November 06, I was working at Justin TV full-time as co-founder. By March 07, I think, March April, we had launched the show. What's hilarious is like this was such a big part of our life. But basically by June, we knew the show wasn't going to work. And we already had another plan, right? So it's like March, April to June was the entirety of the true Justin TV show. But by I think June, we had raised around a small seed round $2 million to build this platform. And by October 07, I believe, we were launching Justin TV as a platform where anyone could broadcast their life 24-7. And so Justin TV just became a life casting. We called it life casting, a life casting platform. And so by that point, things were just getting very busy. Very, very crazy. Yeah, that was quite a year.

Was it always pretty obvious that that the sort of platform was the next approach? I mean, did you guys ever think about like, hey, maybe we should just pack it in?

What's so funny, and all of the four founders have said this to me in different ways, and I felt the same way too. I can't say this is like the best for your mental health, but I think that for all of us, this was our adulthood. It was the only thing we had really done in our adult lives. And the way I put it to people was failing at this would be failing at our adult lives. And that just was something that was not acceptable. And so, no, like packing it in. So, one, no. Two, like what's weird about Justin TV is that even though the business was struggling, like interesting things were happening all the time. We had a lot of traffic. Sometimes I think startups can kind of crawl in the corner and die, but it's hard to do that when you have like thousands and thousands of people come to your website every day and like tens of thousands and soon millions. And so the default goes from like doing nothing to just like keep the thing running, keep it alive. And so I think a lot of that time was like keep it alive, we'll figure something out.

The platform started growing actually, and we went through this period of like pretty explosive growth over two years. It became like a pretty big website. It was like maybe a top 250 website in the world. And then growth stalled out for like a year and a half, two years, and we were like, oh no, what are we gonna do now?

And so the platform grew pretty quickly until at one point it didn't. Yeah. And you guys had another moment of having to figure things out.

So the platform opens up. I think 2008 and 2009 were just growing for at least 18, 24 months, somewhere in that zone. So you snap your fingers, you wake up, you know, we now have 20-something employees, we now have 30 million people coming to the website every month from all over the world. It became a thing, and the focus shift. So it was less about live casting, and it was more about anything that people wanted to stream. So we had people streaming pets, we had people streaming video games, we had people streaming The Simpsons, we had people streaming soccer, we had people doing all kinds of sports and copywritten content and non-copy content. Like it was just, it was a free-for-all. And um, we were getting sued and it was it was just crazy. But we were running low on money. And late summer 2010, we have maybe two months of money in the bank. And at this time, we are spending about a million dollars a month to keep the company going, and we're making about $750,000 a month, and we have about half a million dollars in the bank. This, I think, strangely, I mean, there were many times that Justin TV almost died, but this was kind of a big boy. And I remember we were transparent with all these numbers. So all of our employees knew, everyone knew. And I asked the founders and a number of the important employees to come into this very shitty conference room we had, like a closet basically, and was like, here's the deal. We can shut this company down, we can figure out how to get our burn to $100,000 a month, which would give us five months, we can figure out how to get to break even, or we can get profitable and never have to fundraise again. Well, that didn't be true, but I was like, what do y'all want to do? And I had no idea what people were gonna say. And everyone says, let's get this thing profitable, fuck VCs. And I was like, okay, we need to stop every current project that we're working on. And there was a whiteboard in the room. It was like, on one side of the whiteboard, I'm gonna write everything that we can do to save money. On the other side, I'm gonna write everything we can do to make money. And we're not leaving this room until both sides of the whiteboard are completely covered. And we just started throwing out ideas. We had a lot. Pre-roll video ads, we rolled out international subscriptions. So, like if you're in markets, we couldn't monetize with advertising. We were charging you $10 a month. We figured out how to reduce our streaming costs for storage costs. And in two months, the company was break-even. And by the end of 2010, we had generated about 1.2 million in profit. And I never would have believed it. I never would have believed it. I was there, I wasn't believing it.

And so from that point, right, you have this kind of near-death moment. You know, fast forward a little bit. I mean, what that became from that point was social cam, Twitch. You know, if you think about it, you know, that that little moment in a North Beach apartment turns into live streaming, right? Which is something you take for granted now is like a very ubiquitous thing, but but it didn't exist back then. I mean, do you like what's your do you ever think back to that?

Isn't that weird? We were kind of the first ones to popularize something that is now ubiquitous and taken for granted. Yeah. It's weird. And you didn't even want to do it eventually. I didn't know. This is the life of a startup, right? It only sounds like a good plan afterwards. But I would say that, like, for whatever reason, we had a good team and we didn't want to die. And I just feel like in every situation, we tried to figure out how to not die and we had really, really good people to rely on. And it just turns out you run that cycle enough times and you get lucky enough times and you do something cool. And I don't know that if you unpack most successful startups, there isn't a strain of that. As opposed to we had the plan from the beginning, we executed it according to plan, and we won and dominated. Like I've never heard a startup story like that. So, no, no, that was just our our our uh great team, a little bit of luck.

We'll be right back. And we're back.

Michael was like really good at kind of first principles thinking and understanding the empirical evidence. Like he wasn't attached to any of his like ideas, you know. If you we had built a certain product and it turned out it didn't work a certain way, like he was easily ready to change his mind about something with new data. He's actually like a really great product mind in that sense. Um he doesn't pull his punches, he's it gives people like real talk feedback, and I think it's very valuable. And then his personality is just really suited to being a teacher, you know. Like his I always say like his grandfather was a professor at Penn State, and um a little bit of a rubbed off on him where he like he loves teaching. And when people ask for advice in their careers, I'm I tell them like you should do what you would do if it made no money and no one ever found out about it. And I think for Michael, that was like advising startups because he was doing it for no money beforehand. Like, and he just uh I think he loved being helpful to other people.

I mean, what got you into, you know, kind of famously you you gave Airbnb some advice early on that was instrumental. Like, what was it about giving advice that you think, you know, you were drawn to?

I don't have a good idea. I think that there was a threat of it even going back to college where I would say I wasn't qualified to give advice. And probably with the Airbnb founders during the Justin TV story, it was the first time I was good enough at anything that I was even would have been helpful as an advisor. And I was just helping the Airbnb guys get the first thing launched. So it wasn't, you know, that was probably the only thing I was expert in, is getting anything live. Um and it was interesting because we had already done well. Twitch had sold to Amazon. So kind of to echo Justin's point, it wasn't about making money, it was kind of about giving back.

So I want to kind of talk just a little bit about what you're doing now. Now you're working with the city of San Francisco. What made you want to do that?

You know, my original plan was pretty weak sauce. I remember talking to Justin about it. I was like, uh, you know, I've done my kind of leadership time. I'm just gonna settle back and retire at 50. And I remember Justin being like, you've been financially independent since you were 30. That is the most boring and risk-free version of your life that you could ever think of. And I was like, Well, you know, you're definitely calling it like you're CNA, right? You're not you're not pulling any punches. And then I remember saying to my wife, Sarah, hey, you know, I want to retire from work at 50, but the kids are not gonna be out of the house until we're like 55, 56. I wonder what I'm gonna do during that period of time. And she said, Well, you spent all this time giving back to the startup community, but you've lived in San Francisco your whole adult life. Like, what have you done for the city? And that stuck with me. And then San Francisco had hired hired, elected, change the language now, a new mayor, uh guy named Daniel Leary. And this was an interesting moment in the city. It was a moment where a political leader was elected who really didn't owe anyone anything and had the ability to kind of do what was right for the city in an unencumbered way. And I got to meet the mayor pretty early on, and he just really impressed me. And so all of these things kind of hit me. And I was like, you know, this feels a little bit more like when Justin asked me if I want to start the company with him. This feels like the thing that's kind of unique. And so, you know, that's when I was like, I think I want this to be my new focus. And so for the past six months, I'd been learning about San Francisco. And needless to say, I mean, I've lived here for 20 years and I know nothing. Like, I'm embarrassed by how little I know about how the city operates, about how even organizations this big, it's a 35,000-person organization, how organizations these big work, how union jobs work, how just anything. And so what's been fun for me is I get to go to these meetings and people are basically doing office hours with me. And like they're teaching me. I try very, very hard. I'm probably not always successful. I try very, very hard to not be the tech bro in the room, to not be the person saying, you're doing something wrong, I know what's better, you should be doing it this way. The reason why is like this is a completely different environment. It's it's so different. I don't know the right way. And the more I've dug in, the more I realized like, if you were to take the best business leaders we have and give them the constraints that our political executives have, they would have a much harder time figuring out how to make progress. And the people who kind of judge our political executives do not have experience with the constraints that they have. It all sounds nice and good to run a city like a business. And it's like, sure, if the rules let you, we could even try that, but they don't. So that's fantasy land. In reality, the rules are like this. And so, how would you succeed in a system when you're a mayor and maybe you have the ability to hire fire 500 of the people in a 35,000-person government? Oh, that's that's a different set of constraints. And like that's one of a thousand constraints. And what's been really fun as well is that almost everyone I meet just wants to do a good job. Like, like they chose this job because they believed that this was a job that would give them impact. But on the flip side, I feel as though unfortunately, perhaps the politics has been that the city hasn't been able to leverage the truly smart people, the truly interesting technology that's basically being birthed right here. And I hope to inspire a lot more people who've had success in tech to take some time to try to make the city better. Like the city needs smart, dedicated people with good life experience. And man, we're producing those hand over fist in the tech industry. The city doesn't need people coming in and telling everyone what to do and making them feel bad, right? Nobody likes that. But smart, dedicated people want to make San Francisco better, like, line up. Like, we we need you. So that's been the work now, and we'll see how it goes. But it's fun.

He loves being useful and learning, you know, and he loves San Francisco. So he's tapping in to be helpful in San Francisco. He used to have this idea, I like really want to run for office, and I feel like you know, he has a lot of patriotism and civic duty and virtue. So hopefully that like still exists. But you know, I always still thought he should be governor of California, but you know, he doesn't want that, he doesn't want that pain in his life. But California needs you, Michael.

Do your duty. I mean, the analogy here is kind of like jumping into something, you know, signing up for that road trip. You know, you don't you don't totally know where it goes. I mean, where where do you think this goes over the next 10 years? What do you think is next for you? Are you just not thinking that far ahead?

Didn't think that far ahead in Justin TV, didn't think that far ahead of YC. I think what excites me is that San Francisco is going through a transformation right now. And if I can help in any little way, that's gonna feel very rewarding. And giving back to the place that, like, honestly, without San Francisco, no one know who I was, no one would care. Giving back is kind of an end and of itself. It's weird because sometimes people are like, oh, are you involved in politics? And it's like, no, I actually am not really excited about politics. What I like is kind of the governing, right? Like, how do we make streets safer? How do we hire more cops? How do we make streets cleaner? Like, how do we make the city function better for people? This is how do we make this place a great place to live? It's not much more comp it's hard, but it's not more complicated than that.

Dude, this has been this has been great.

Awesome.

This podcast is brought to you by Leap Forward Ventures, an investor in early stage startups. If you like the show, the number one thing you'll want to do is sign up to get notified when we release new episodes that includes key takeaways from each story. Head to leapforward.fm to sign up. I'd also love to hear your feedback on the episode and who you want to hear from next. Just shoot us a text at 415-915-3050 to get in touch. This episode was produced by Theo Balcomb and Kim Nederveen Pieterse. Craig Ely is our engineer. Reece Laudano made our cover art. Music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. I'm David Rusenko, and this is the Leaf Forward Podcast. We'll be back with season two this fall.

He is, yeah, it's rare to have friends who know you so well, you know. It's uh, yeah, we're still great friends.