Unpacking The Amazon-Twitch Acquisition

A few brief nuggets of interest re: today’s outlier outcome, which is Amazon’s nearly $1bn all cash acquisition of Twitch:

• Seven Years Post-YC: Justin.tv (the original) company went through Y Combinator in 2007 and then made a hard pivot. You know, a 7-year over night success. (This is also the largest acquisition of a YC company to date.)
• Concentrated, Risky Bets @ Series A: Alsop Louie invested close to $8m to help Justin and his team handle video server and storage costs, and because there was electricity in the house that they were building it. He had to visit the company’s office to find that out, he told me over lunch last year. It was a concentrated, highly risky bet — exactly what a proper Series A should look like.
• Gaming = Media = Attention: The act of playing games, and the act of watching games, are media. Building Minecraft servers are the new legos. This is just the beginning of this wave.
• Low-Key Founders: I’ve come in contact with various Twitch founders here and there, and they were all very quiet in their own way. Limited social media presence, quite reserved in the settings I saw them. Maybe their minds were on something else 😉
• Amazon’s Motives: Amazon paid an all cash sum amounting to a seriously non-trivial percentage of their total cash on hand (especially relative to what Google may have wanted to pay). In this light, we could view Twitch as a gaming portal, a streaming base for other media, and/or even a social network. They probably also had all sorts of inside data on how Twitch was scaling their cloud services. Let the theories fly around! Either way, we have to believe there is something deep in this for Amazon, perhaps across all three areas, which made this deal vital.