Justin.tv / Twitch.tv / Socialcam - Emmett Shear, Justin Kan, Michael Seibel, & Kyle Vogt

I don't have all the details as an outsider, but Emmett Shear (CEO of Twitch.tv and original cofounder, CTO of Justin.tv) just shared publicly about this today on Hacker News [1]:

Actually Twitch is a 100% pivot of Justin.tv. We took the entire team working on JTV, the platform, the cap table, etc. and pivoted to a specific vertical that had been promising on JTV. (I'm the CEO) [Nathan: This is exactly what PayPal and X.com did]

So Twitch is a pivot of the original Justin.tv, with the same cap table, i.e. people and investors.

And Justin.tv had a stake in Socialcam ever since it was spun-out with the original Justin.tv CEO and engineers who worked on it [2]:

Justin.tv cofounder and long-time CEO Michael Seibel will become CEO of Socialcam, bringing a small team of Socialcam’s original engineers with him. Justin.tv cofounder and current CTO Emmett Shear will be taking the helm as CEO at Justin.tv. And Justin.tv will have a stake in Socialcam, which is currently in the process of raising additional funding.

Vogt could have easily raised funding independently, forgoing the roughly 7% equity stake YC takes in its portfolio companies, but he chose to reenter YC in early 2014. Though loyalty to his old friends almost certainly played a role, Vogt says the decision made business sense for Cruise because YC alums tend to raise venture capital at higher valuations and because the weekly dinners foster a competitive environment that pushes companies to move faster. "When you have all these hyper-intelligent people showing their progress, you're able to achieve far more than you'd ever be able to on your own," says Vogt, adding that the decision to reenter YC was not really a decision at all. "It was a no-brainer," he says.

[...]

The four founders went through the Y Combinator program in 2007, during which they set the culture of the company. That culture remains unique in my now-16 years of experience as a venture capitalist: The four co-founders each owned exactly the same number of shares and for the next four years did not make a single decision without gaining the approval of all four founders, including the ultimate decision to break the group into separate companies during 2011.

[...]

Emmett Shear, VP Engineering: Emmett was the only one of the Yale graduates who actually had a degree in computer science and was trained to write code. (Justin and Kyle also did a lot of the programming as time went along.) It turned out that he’s really good and fast at coding, as well as hiring outstanding programmers and designing distributed systems and – playing video games.

[...]

Kyle Vogt, CTO: Kyle was recruited by the Yalies out of MIT to be the “hardware guy”, the one who could figure out how to make the laptop work with cellular networks and build the backend systems that would allow the video to be delivered on a scalable basis. Being a “real” geek (since no one who graduates from Yale can be considered a real geek…), Kyle was the guy who figured out how to build Justin.tv into a scalable system that could distribute petabytes of real-time video to hundreds of millions of simultaneous users at a competitively significant cost.

We were the only VC firm crazy enough in 2007 to invest in four kids (age ~22) with a really crazy business – promoting video broadcast 24 hours and 7 days a week by an individual, after whom the company was named: Justin.tv Inc. Indeed we were the only VC firm (joined by Draper Associates, Tim Draper’s eponymous personal investment vehicle) to re-invest in the company in 2008 in a second financing on the way to the company becoming profitable and self-sustaining. That company has now morphed into four separate companies, in every one of which Alsop Louie Partners is a shareholder and from every one of which we have or expect to make a profit.