This Week in Startups - E1107 The Next Unicorns E17: Caffeine CEO Ben Keighran on reimagining live TV for younger generations, what makes Apple’s design team so special, remembering Steve Jobs & more

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

Check out Caffeine: https://caffeine.tv FOLLOW Ben: https://twitter.com/benkeighran FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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The Embroker Startup Insurance Program helps startups secure the most important lines of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Go to enbroker.com slash Angel and get 10% off by using code Angel 10. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of this week in startups. It's your boy, J-Cal here. We're doing our next Unicorn series.

I think it's the second or third one we've done. And it's been a great series because we find companies that you may or may not have heard of depending on how deep in the industry you are. These are not companies that have hit that billion dollar mark yet, but that are expected to. And you can tell they're going to do that because of the scale of the company, whether it's the number of people or the investors, how much they've raised, or candidly, the vision of the product and how it's growing.

And this has been an incredible season. We've had some of the best guests we've ever had on the podcast. People were freaking out about Cody Friesen's Zero Mass Water, episode six. And David Blake from DeGreed, did great on the pod. Everybody loved that episode. Number six in The Next Unicorns at Daphne Kohler, of course, just tons of great people on the podcast. And today will be no different. Our guest today spent five years at Apple and 150 days in World Warcraft.

I kid you not, if you had to pull the mittens. It may even be more now. We'll find out. and he worked in visual design at Apple, worked a little bit on the M&A team and led the design team for Apple TV, actually, so we hear a little bit about that. And his company is Caffeine.TV.

He's a lifelong hacker from Down Under. Welcome to the podcast, Ben Kieran. Thank you, Jason. I'm really excited to chat with you today. Really appreciate it. Yeah, it's great to talk and make a new friend from Down Under. I'm obviously obsessed with Australia. It's been a lot of time there.

I've been there now four times, I think, and just love my time there. But you had a dream growing up as a coder slash nerd, Sanch BBS, SISOP, which nobody even knows what a SISOP is, but you started as basically a hacker in the 90s or so. When did you first get introduced to technology and how did that lead you to the United States and fulfilling your dream of coming to the Bay Area? Yeah, so early 90s, around 91, 92 when I was roughly 10 years old, a family friend gave me a programming book and I started teaching myself C++ plus and I got into BBSs and I just, I don't know, I love at first sight, just loved building things on computers and just have just stuck with that

passion and it just followed the journey. Fantastic. And what actually got you to make the flight? Tell me about that first flight and coming to the United States. Well, do you remember it well? I actually, I think the thing that prompted me, the thing that got me over here initially was, if you remember the O'Reilly conferences that used to be at the airport area. So they invited me to speak and it was sort of like an opportunity to come over here, basically. It was your coming out party. You literally came over for an O'Reilly conference.

People forget about those O'Reilly books. And a lot of people around the world had their introduction from those books because pre that, the information wasn't on YouTube. YouTube didn't exist. And I just met somebody this weekend socially. And he said, you don't remember where we first met. And I said, no, remind me. And he said, we were both at Foo Camp, friends of O'Reilly, the second one, which was maybe

15, 16, 17 years ago. It was probably 2004-ish. But what was the conference you came and spoke at? And what did you speak about? Well, it was about the first company I was working on, which was a social messaging service, kind of like WhatsApp, but from almost like 20 years ago.

Wow. Yeah. And what platform was it built on? It was a Java app that people could download. It supported mid-P1 and mid-P2. It was a 63-kilabyte, almost X-Html browser that worked on like 250 different phones because of how I designed it.

And it allowed people to have very rich messaging functionality on these very early feature phones. We're talking about like the Nokia's and the sidekicks of the world that had like really crummy browsers that were, you know, sipping data at a very low rate. Yeah, I mean, I started on like, well, I started messing around with the Erickson T-39, which didn't have a Java footprint. But then the Erickson, I think, T60 and beyond T-65. And then there was a lot of Nokia phones and Motorola handsets that started to run the, epoch operating system and supported Java. Yeah, that was what I was sort of playing around with.

It's mind-blowing. Like, I just remember those times when people take out their flip phone and you could actually like send an SMS, which America weirdly was far behind Europe and Asia on SMS messaging. And when it came to America, people were like, wow, this is a world of possibilities, isn't it? Totally. I mean, I, you know, in high school, in Australia, people were like in the late 90s, you know,

playing snake and texting and doing. all of that. And then when I came over with blue poles, people were like really surprised to hear about messaging on mobile phones in the early 2000s. It's sort of blew people away, which is I think why they asked me to come talk about it. Yeah. And you worked on that for a couple of years. You got some backing for it. And then you were ousted, if I remember correctly, if I heard on another podcast. I was. Tell us that story. Well, that's always a great story to have on your, great, you know, thing to happen on your first startup. Yeah. I mean, look, I, um, I dropped out of out of university and moved to the states and, you know, it was my passion and it was my identity.

It was everything to me building the company. It got to a certain point where the investors didn't or they really wanted me to monetize it and we didn't have sort of a common vision around that. And so in a fairly nice way, although it's never that nice, I was, you know, asked to get out of the company. So it was a hard, it was a hard moment. It was a very hard moment. But When they do that, how do the VCs do it? They call you on the phone or they say, let's go for a walk and then you get whacked, like in Goodfellas, how does it go down? Well, for me, it was a bit of a, a bit of a multi-step process.

So it started off as, hey, let's have dinner. Look out. And so have dinner and then sort of talk through. No agenda. No agenda. Let's just talk through things. And then, you know, a couple more conversations on. You're like, okay, I see where you guys want to.

go and why that might be better for the company. Yeah. Was it ultimately better for the company? Well, the company ended up not working out. And so, you know, I'm not going to say, hey, it would have all been perfect if I stayed around or anything, but it didn't work out a couple years later after me. And it was painful, but it's all part of the scar tissue and who you become, I think. Yeah, absolutely.

And you, I remember, went to work on that company, you'll remind me of the name that was doing app search because the biggest problem with app search when the app search, when the App Store came out was nobody could find apps. The only way you found an app was like if somebody were to blog post about it, if Engadget wrote a blog post. So you joined, I don't know if you founded that company or joined it, but tell the story of how that app store search got started and what your contribution was and then the ultimate outcome. Yeah. So I, before I was founder and CEO of C-E-O-M-C-E-O-N-P, I was the founder and CEO of an app search company called Chump, C-H-O-M-P, and that's the company that Apple acquired. But what sort of taught me a lot about the

anatomy of search technology and how to even step into building something like that. I'm more of a, even though I have an engineering background, people think it would be more as a designer, a UIUX person. And so app search is definitely not for the faint-hearted. There's a lot there. But what sort of taught me a lot about the space was between the first company and the second company, I did some consulting and advisory work for Ardvark, a social search company that Google acquired.

And I built their iPhone app for them with a team. but I led the effort for building their iPhone app for them. It just taught me a lot about... To find what social search was at that time, because I had Mahalo at the time, and we were both in the same sort of vertical, which was trying to create a search engine, kind of based on humans, right?

Yeah, yeah. So their thesis was that humans just have a lot more knowledge than what is on the internet, and they wanted to make that searchable. And so they were using instant messenger to connect people up that could answer a question, that you might have. And so rather than typing in keywords, you could sort of issue a question you had and it would use natural language processing to figure out like who in your social network

and their social network might have a good answer for you and connect you up really quickly. Yeah, and that got bought by Google and then it just kind of disappeared, I guess. That was like one of those acquisites. What did it get blended into? Like Google Keep or something? I think it might have been Google Plus. Ah, yes. So they put it. a lot of work into building out, you know, Google Plus and on social and all of that. And I think there was a few different companies that got sort of brought into that fold. And so then you go work on CHOMP. They ask you to be CEO, the founders of that company, or they bring you in,

or you co-founded it? I co-founded it. So me and another Australian, I was the CEO and co-founder. And so I, you know, came into that thinking that now that I had sort of of a deeper understanding of search engines and how to build something like that. I sort of looked at the app space, HTML5 apps as well as the App Store apps. And it was really clear to me that was a big technology problem on how we were going to make it so you could do like thematical searches and more generic searches given sort of the technology problems at that time. And so that was something I was really interested in and started a company about that.

So when we get back from this quick break, I want to know how Apple wound up. acquiring chomp what you learned at apple uh working with eddie q and you know working on the apple tv even a little stint in m&A i understand we'll hear a little bit about that what you can say i know that apple's kind of secretive but there are some broad strokes i think you can give us and then we'll get into caffeine dot tv and how you came up the idea and how that's going we get back on this week's let's get down to brass hacks linked in jobs is going to give you 50 bucks right now because you listen to this podcast that's $50 off your first job post terms and conditions of course because they're giving you the $50.

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And you get the 50 bucks. That easy. All right. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this weekend startups. It's our next unicorn series. This is the seventh of ten episodes we're doing. Thanks to our sponsors for allowing this week in startups to grow and hit three times a week. It's incredible. The podcast is growing massively. And we're getting incredible guests.

Today is no different with Ben Kieran on, who is the CEO and co-founder of Caffeine.TV, which we're about to hear about as his story leads us to Chomp being acquired by Apple. So Apple was fascinated with your search engine doing app search because, let's face it, the app stores, and Apple wasn't very good at search. There was a rumor they were going to get into search engines at some point. They were dancing around. I had actually shown Steve Jobs Mahalo.com early on. And he was fascinated by search. but they just went with the Google deal

and they had a great partnership for some period of time until Android came out and Steve Jobs wasn't too happy about that. But they acquired your company. What is the process of Apple acquiring your company like? Because it's very rare. They very much have a not builtier culture.

They like to build their own stuff, not buy companies. Sometimes they buy an enabling technology, which I think is how they looked at yours, Ben. But tell me about that process. How does Apple, we heard how you get locked as CEO, they invite you to dinner, what's the equivalent when Apple, you know, cut you the check and says come join the team because they're, I don't want to say they're snobby, but they have a very high standard

would be, I think we both agree, correct? Absolutely. I think it was, when Steve was there, it was even harder probably to get a quiet. Or at least you didn't hear about it very often when they happened. But for us, you know, we really did and had a measurable way of just showing how much better. our search was than all of the existing apps stores, even Google's Google Play. We had very measurable like PhDs with statisticians, like very measurable ways of looking at how much better our click-through rates would be and our search quality. And so what we found was that by partnering

with companies, we had a partnership with Yahoo at one point. We had a partnership with Sony Erickson to power search, app search for them. And so we were talking while we did have a way to just use the service through a website or through our own app, we were trying to partner with Apple to power search for them and show them just how much better the search would be if they included our technology and sort of through those discussions, that's how they ended up saying, we don't want to partner with you. We'd like to buy the company. What's it like when you're sitting there in that meeting and who says that to you? Is like Eddie Q says it to you or some like M&A type person, a business development person says, we'd like to acquire your company? And they say,

would you consider selling your company? What is the exact words they say? And how do they even put that on the table? What's the, what's the moment like? Well, all of the sort of partnership conversations were happening with an Apple engineering team and our team, which was pretty much all engineering. And so there was probably like six months of conversation on and off and they'd come up and visit our office and we'd go down to Cupertino and everybody got to know everybody.

And then just at some point, the engineering boss, who I won't say his name. want to respect Apple's privacy, but one of the engineering bosses said to us, hey, like, have you ever thought about selling the company? Like, would you consider that? And if you'd like to have that discussion, you know, why don't you come in Eddie and some of the other guys? And so that's kind of how it sort of began the conversations around that. And it's, I don't know, for me, like, my dream's always been to build something

standalone. Like, I didn't ever really want to get purchased. But I also have always kept in mind when building, this is my third venture back startup caffeine. I've always kept in mind that, hey, there's a lot of partners, there's a lot of investors, there's a whole lot of people you've got to think about and do what's best for the company. And for Chomp, I do think it made a lot of sense to reach the maximum number of people to get included in Apple's App Store and other services.

And also, you know, it's very interesting when you think about it. The first one, they booted you. So that's like a strikeout. The second one, I think getting bought by Apple is a big deal, right? Like they have the highest standard in the industry, but it probably would amount to a double or triple in terms of financially for the investors. It wouldn't be like the massive home run, but it was decent for them and for you?

Yeah, I think it was. I think that's a good way of putting it. I think it was a, you know, it was good. What did you learn inside of Apple? What makes that company, when you look back on your five years there, because I know you were there for four years and they actually gave you credit for that year

of when you started CHomp, which I thought was interesting. To make it to the five-year mark is pretty special to give you that nice certificate signed by Steve Jobs, or I don't know if you could get it by Steve Jobs because I think it would have passed on at that time. Yeah, he passed him. He had passed, unfortunately. So yeah, mine's from Tim. Yeah. Ah, were you there when he passed?

Or right after? Just right after. Yeah. Yeah. Did you remember where you were when you heard the news? I do, actually. I was, so Chomp was operating out of it. It was almost a garage. It wasn't a garage, but almost a garage in San Francisco, just down the road from where Twitter is today. And I got the news. I'd actually bursted to tears. I was physically, you know, I was really upset about, as I'm sure many, many, many people were.

Yeah. What was it that for you as a kid from Australia who got into coding that what did he mean to you? Like, what did his life's work mean to you? I think that he was somebody that really stood for building something really, really, really, really, really great that he and the team, believed in. Like, you know, we're not going to just sort of copy or do the status quo, but like really just hyper passionate and hyper believed that they were going to do something just beyond what we've seen in the past.

And there's, you know, guys like Walt Disney, there's, there's like a few people like that that are real heroes to me for sure. And, and I, you know, I love that. I find it super inspiring and there's just a lot to learn. and yeah, that's kind of what it meant to me. Yeah, the conviction level and the extreme pursuit of excellence, you know, like we're going to paint the back of the fence, you know, kind of that they talked about like the inside that you don't see is going to be as good as

the outside. It was a level of determination for excellence that you just don't see, right? Everybody's trying to compromise. He was just a non-compromising individual. You never got to meet him in person, I take it. No, I didn't. Yeah, super intense. Like, when you were in his aura, you know, like he just walked up to me at a conference,

the DeConverse at one point. He just looked at me and he saw my badge and he goes, I read Engadgett every day. It's my favorite blog. And it was just like, he had a certain intensity to him. And then one time I said to him, you know, Steve, I have a question for you. Why doesn't the iPad play, the iPod play like short videos? Like you could put like the Chappelle show or like SNL videos on it. And he looked me directly in the eyes.

And he said, Jason, nobody wants to look at a postage size stamp video. And I said, you know, Steve, I kind of would, like if it was just like a short skit of like an S&L thing, I think people would watch a music video. And he's like, Jason, nobody wants to watch a postagee stamp video. And I just said, you know what? You know what happened too much later? He launched a video iPod. It's just like, it's not the guy you want to play poker with because I was so convinced I was an idiot. at that moment.

I was so young, and I just said to myself, my God, I'm an idiot. I just said something stupid to Steve Jobs. He's going to think I'm an idiot. And like, I'm a confident guy, but he kind of like made me question my own North Star. And then I started to come out and I was like, oh, I get it. He wanted to keep that so close to the vest. But you got to work on Apple TV and you got to watch Eddie Q do his work. And they even had you like run a design team.

So what's the magic at Apple around design? Like, as somebody who was good at design already, did they make you a better designer? And if so, how? And what is it about their philosophy that results in such extraordinary products, products that you instantly know are Apple products? Yeah. So I think that, you know, there's a very, very strong culture there of everybody wanting to be in the details and everybody.

wanting to make it simple and everybody wanting to make it clear and everybody wanting to make it understandable and very human and ultimately something just really special for customers. And so when you've got like a whole culture and company and everybody's kind of in that mindset and turning up whatever they're working on, the design team plays a really special role in all of that. They're the ones that are actually showing the pixels that are working on the pixels that are really getting into that user experience. And the expectation is that everybody's going to talk and discuss and be involved at such

fidelity and such a level that I've never seen it like that anywhere else. It was phenomenal. It was absolutely phenomenal. How do they keep things underwrapped so well? Like, what is the conversation they have with you of like, hey, secrecy is important? Because it seems like everybody buys into it. And when I was adding gadget, we would get leaks from Motorola or, you know, just basically every company was like leak central and Apple was like Fort Knox.

Like you just nobody gave it up. The only way anything ever came out was like somebody in the supply chain would give us something once in a while like a leak. But how do they maintain that culture do you think? Well, I think that the way in which Apple TV was done and I can't speak for all of the different products there, but not everybody knows about everything that's going on. They silo things. And so the teams that have ownership over particular aspects of it,

they really want to keep it close. It's a secret and they're excited about it. And they can't wait to tell you. In fact, one of the things that I believe somebody at Apple said to me early on when joining the company was that when Apple ships a new product, it's like Christmas. People are so excited to open the surprise. And then somebody looked at me of us just like,

so you don't want to ruin Christmas. Christmas, do you? Ha! So, you want to rent Christmas for everybody. It's so great. It's so great. That makes sense. Yeah.

And so when everybody's thinking that way, you know, they're just super excited to keep things a secret and enjoy the process to ultimately figure out what is the absolute coolest, most amazing thing we could do for a customer. And that's kind of in the, you know, there's a lot that goes into making that happen, a lot of things that have to happen and come together to deliver on that, to really execute it. But that's the culture. It's really in the DNA there. That's super special.

Hey, when we get back from this break, you launched your company on April 1st on the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apple itself, which is an incredible tribute. And I want to understand how you came up with the idea for caffeine. Dot TV. And do you call caffeine or just caffeine or caffeine TV? I know the URL is caffeine. It's just caffeine. It's just caffeine.

So when we get back, I want to know what was the inspiration for caffeine and how it's going. When we get back on the sweet starters. All right. This deal from Vanta is so good. I want to start my ad read with it. Vanta is giving our twist listeners. Think about this. $1,000 off their first sock two by going to vanta.com slash twist.

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I don't know how long they're going to keep this going, so I want you to take advantage of it right now. Vanta.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Ben Kieran is with us. And he is a CEO and co-founder of caffeine. Thanks for taking us down. memory lane, Ben, that was just awesome. And so tell me, what is caffeine and how is it going?

What's the vision there? Caffeine is a website. It's an app that users can come to and watch a whole new world of live, it's all live streams and broadcast. So it has everything from gaming to live battle wrap to live sports content and people can watch it in a social interactive way. And it's a whole new experience, you know, for creating and watching all of that. And so you've raised $250 million. So something is going on here that's very special and something is scaling. And I think it's really e-sports. At the end of the day, is that 80, 90% of what you're doing is just e-sports has exploded

in the last five years. And you started this exactly at that moment? You know, no, that's not actually the case. Oh, okay. Great. Yeah, in fact, our most popular content is non-gaming content. Really? Yeah, yeah.

So we have all new streaming technology and all new chat system and all new business model, a totally different take on what I think can become the future of live television, actually. Really? Yeah, and it's something that I was really dreaming and thinking about when I was at Apple, and I ultimately left Apple to go and pursue. And so what is that vision? what do you think TV is morphing into? And what is at the core of this interaction and, you know,

modal change or mode change from passive, you know, channel surfing or telling Siri what you want to watch to doing it with a keyboard in front of you or on an iPhone? For sure. So I think that over the next 10 years, live broadcasting or live broadcasting, a lot of people, particularly if you're sort of a gen. or Gen Y person predominantly think of live streaming as just video gaming. But I think it's going to be so much broader than that.

It's going to be really inclusive of all of your sports and entertainment and some of the things that you might have watched on linear TV, but also a lot of things that don't really have a place to live stream or a home right now. So this could be like DJ battles. It could be drone racing. It could be, you know, comedies, fashion, lifestyle, skateboarding, you know, gaming is another thing. But like, I think that watching that experience is not just going to be a passive experience like what we had on linear TV. It's going to be an interactive and social experience. And you can

see a lot of what that feels like in gaming, but I think it's going to extend way beyond gaming and start to create a whole new place, a whole new home for all of your live broadcasting. How is what you're doing different than, say, Twitch, right? Twitch has gotten very big. There seem to have a big foothold in streaming of games. Microsoft has some competitor. I forgot the name of it. It's the Microsoft competitor. Yeah, Microsoft had a company called Mixer, which they switched off just recently and Oh, really? And started to push the traffic towards Facebook gaming, actually. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, wow, that's weird. I thought they had signed some, like, huge deals with gamers for mixer, and then they just gave up. That's so weird. Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know all the details of it, but that's how it seems, you know, from the outset. Yeah. And so how does chat enhance what people are doing and watching it? And then what's the monetization? Because I know you've taken a different route there.

I know Twitch is mostly, I think, subscription is sort of like Patreon is the model, but yours is slightly different. Yeah, I mean, look, they predominantly, they have lots of different ways of monetizing, but they predominantly have advertising and subscription. And then they have a lot of other ways in which, you know, streamers can make money. And I think the way most people sort of think of them is, is something that's very much embedded in gaming and gaming culture. And I think they'd love to,

you know, expand on that. But I think there's a lot of reasons why it's hard to sort of expand from where they are and why I really think you need a complete reset and to sort of really reimagine the space. And that's what we're about is where the, you know, the alternative that's coming in with something that's almost more popular. culture. It's much broader than gaming is just a part of it. And is the monetization strategy people having in-chat, like buying in-chat items? You know, like there's in-game items, but people are doing things in chat rooms where they give like gold or hearts or something like that or super hearts. I know that's the big model in China and Japan and those kind of places.

I think that was part of the inspiration, yes? Yeah, that's sort of gamification in-app purchase. stuff that you're talking about has been really successful in Asian streaming platforms, but no one has really sort of successfully translated as like the primary form of monetization in the West. We've also seen in the gaming space, you know, companies like Fortnite make as much as I think three, four billion dollars annually through these in-app purchases. Yeah. And so thinking about how do you bring that model to North America where people are watching,

as I say, some gaming, but a lot of non-live gaming content together. with friends and how do we use that as a primary monetization engine? I definitely think there's a role and there's a place for subscription and advertising, but our model is all in-app purchase. We have new low-latency streaming technology and new audience experience. We have a studio for producing really premium series of content with different communities, as well as all the user-generated tools for the community come in and create their own content and get discovered. Is anybody making a lot of money doing this in-app chat stuff yet. And then how does that break down in terms of if somebody buys a $1, you know, heart and they give it to me for, I'm hosting my podcast on it or I'm hosting

a comedy show or a rap battle and they give that dollar. Do you get 70 cents to that dollar and they get 30 cents or they get 70 cents and you get 30 cents? How does it work? Yeah, so we, we break, so if you were streaming on Twitch or YouTube, you would get roughly 50% if you were partnered with them of the revenue and the platform would receive the other 50%. And so we have the same model in our world too. So if you came on and streamed today and people were buying in-app purchases in your stream, you would get 50% of the revenue as well. For us, we'll see people spend as much as $600 in a night on these in-app purchases.

What? When I'm talking about OnlyFans content, we're talking about non-adult content spending $600 in a night. It's, yeah, I mean, it's not, we have no adult content. In fact, we pride ourselves on creating a really safe and non-toxic place for people to watch, you know, live television together, live TV. Who did they get, who did a customer give $600 do? Wait, you're saying one customer he gave $600 or in aggregate? They made $600 a night?

A single customer, a single viewer will spend as much as that. And that's, that's a regular, that's a regular thing. That's a wow, wow. What's the most somebody spent in a month then? Well, the average every, so we compare ourselves to YWai, which is the live Chinese streaming platform that's probably the most successful in the world. And their revenue predominantly comes from this in-app purchase model. They have ads and subscription too, but it's predominantly in-app purchase.

And so they make on average $78 every 90 days, US dollars, and we make on average $78 per customer every 90 days as well. Wow. Then it gets split two ways. Or is that your split? Then it gets split two ways. No, then it gets split two ways. And then if we're using somebody's content rights,

if we're using like Fox Sports or we're using Red Bull or we're using the battle rap rights or something, then they would get a portion out of the caffeine platform fee as well. Yeah. That's cool. How do rights work in video games? So if I wanted to play StarCraft 2 on Twitch or on your platform, Do you have to have permission from StarCraft to do that?

Or do those video game providers just see that as free marketing and getting more people to buy their games? How is that looked at? I think they really see it as sort of free marketing and getting a way to sort of, yeah, promote the games, provide a window into what the best gamers are doing with their content. That said, for different gaming companies that we have a partnership, you know, with, we're happy to give them money when we make money too.

And it's just a matter of us getting out there and just forging more partnerships. We're not, it's not like some special process to come and get a partnership with us. It's just we need to have something in place that we can give them a revenue share. And I think they should get paid when their content streamed. Feels like that could be a huge game changer. If you were to say to a gaming company like Fortnite or, you know, I don't know, StarCraft 2, hey, let's do a three-way split. We'll take a third.

You take a third. And the streamer gets a third. And we want an exclusive. And then they could just stay to Twitch like, hey, listen, and you can't stream. We're giving the exclusive to caffeine. Has that happened in your industry yet? The Joe Rogan exclusive, you know, that Spotify did, has the equivalent happened yet?

And does Fortnite allow people to stream Fortnite? Or are they more keeping it close to the vest and you have to be on Fortnite to stream Fortnite? They, you know, I think every gaming company is different. But as far as I know, each of the gaming companies, including Epic and Fortnite, allow everybody to stream, stream their content. And, you know, we have started to talk to gaming companies like, hey, we could do a revenue share with you the same way that we'll do a revenue share with Fox Sports and other content providers and really start to make a more fair opportunity for everybody to participate in the revenue. All right. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know about traditional content and if that will ever play a role here, i.e., would an HBO give you Game of Thrones or might the NBA let you stream the playoffs if you could guarantee a certain amount of revenue?

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inbroker.com slash angel. Thanks to the broker team. Make sure you use that promo code Angel 10. And let's get back to this amazing episode. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this weekend. Startups. Our guest today is Ben, Kieran, and we are talking about caffeine, which you can visit atcafine. TV. How many people you got at the company now, Ben? What's the footprint like? We have a little over 100 people. Wow. So efficient. And then what's the usage like? What's the monthly, you know, unique users or yearly or daily? What's the footprint like there? So we haven't released very many numbers yet. But since launching in November last year, we are talking quite a few million users that are all actively using the product and super engaged. And we're really excited about how it's taking off. You know, we'll have a single. live stream on the weekend, Battlewrap as an example, that can have hundreds of thousands of

people concurrently on just a single stream. So you should think of the community as growing as fast as I've ever seen, I think consumer companies grow and I've been in the SF Bay area for about 15 years and looked at a lot of companies and very, very engaged. And I think it's the quality and the interactivity and the engagement that we see that I'm most excited about. I think that's the, that I'm most excited about. I think that's what's driving that growth. And so it'd be the equivalent for this rap battle of like being on cable TV or something, hundreds of thousands of concurrence, which is like a cable TV channel, maybe not broadcast yet. That's millions. But this would be hundreds of thousands and would be like a good

size cable channel. And that's happening every week, like all the time. That's just a single channel. That's before all the other channels. So what would these rappers who are doing the rap battle or the production company, what, look, you know, one of the top five people, you don't have to say specifically them,

I know obviously it's confidential, but a top five person who was getting hundreds of thousands of people, what would they expect to make from a session? If they were doing it weekly, would they make $10,000 a week, $100,000 a week? What could they expect in terms of monetization

at that level today? I don't have a good, quick answer for you on that. It does vary based on the different providers. But it's certainly worth their while taking it from, you know, the app or the website or YouTube or wherever where they were previously distributing it or maybe even linear television and starting to bring it here. So thousands of dollars, tens of thousands, something in that range? You could make a lot more than that.

But that's not the common case. I say it's building and it really does vary pretty widely, widely, yes. What happens in the stream that causes the cash register to ring? Like, has that playbook been made where people say, hey, if you want us to go another half hour, like the DJ saying, hey, I'll play another set. If you guys, you know, if I get 100 hearts, I'll play another set or, you know, cam girls might do certain things if, you know, to hit another set or, you know, gamers might do something to keep going, you know, hey, what are those key moments that get people to actually drop money

like that you've seen? Is there a moment that dropped the most cash? You must be the top 10 moments in the history of caffeine of people just dropping huge amounts of money. What were those moments? Yeah, I've got to say, we definitely don't do the cam girl thing. No cam girl, yes, it's 100% save. We have like 24-7 moderation, all sorts of things going on to really keep the content

fresh and exciting and right on point for what we're trying to build. But, you know, what makes it happen is the CDN is, you know, made out of WebRTC. And so... The content delivery network is made of RTC, which is real time. So you're, when I say something in this conversation,

there's no lag. Like on Twitch, it could be a minute or two minutes behind, depending when you jump on the stream. It can be. It can be. And then we've designed it so that when you sort of purchase these 3D items, which are these like beautifully crafted,

culturally relevant, 3D items that people just love playing with and using, the broadcaster can invite the audience to buy them and influence the show in a number of different ways. So, you know, a really simple example, yeah. Yeah, simple example is if you're watching a battle this Saturday, you know, you would be able to vote, right? So it's sort of like everybody can vote,

but you can like really pay to make some noise and make sure you're a vote. Everybody's, everybody could see who you think just won that last battle. Got it. Okay. So I could drop 10 bucks or 20 bucks on a digital item that at the end of the battle, I'm like, he's on fire. Like in NBA jam or whatever.

I could say this person's on fire and do like a fireball or something. Exactly. And people would pay 20 bucks, just like people would pay, I guess when they used to have American Idol, you could call on the phone to vote. And millions of people would call and it would cost a dollar to do it. So they were actually, it was actually like a revenue stream that was like they were making advertising. And is that like part of the inspiration too is those dialing?

television shows used to do that? Yeah, I think that that's a use case for sure. Like another use case is just people wanting to support the content, being like a Patreon. Another one is the possibility of getting like a shout out, like particularly if you have someone really influential behind the camera and they might, you're like, hey Jason, thanks so much for the props. Oh, so that's like a cameo. So you got like this cameo dynamic where somebody famous might say, you know, thanks Jason

for the, you know, the rose or whatever. then you have the dynamic and the device of voting. So you have voting, you have shoutouts, and then some people just may want to like brag, like that they could afford the $100 item, right? So there's like a, you know, showing off that you could afford it. Yeah, I think of it. The way I conceptually thought of it when we were designing it

was almost like concessions at a real world sporting event, right? So you have a foam finger and maybe they'll put the camera on you because you've bought a foam finger and like you're now on the Jumbotron or something or maybe you just wanted to buy the jersey to show support for your team or maybe you bought like the popcorn or whatever because it enhanced your own enjoyment. And so I was really thinking about those kinds of use cases and how to bring that to live television. That's fascinating. I never thought that they show, I never thought I never put that together that when they show somebody at the Jumbotron who's wearing all of the gear, they're subtly telling everybody to go visit the gear store and buy, like, go buy your San Francisco

49ers gear because we just put somebody on who's wearing a 49 jersey hat, necklace, and finger. They're just trying to inspire you to do that. And then, of course, supporting the artist is one. Have you ever done like a telethon or something like that where 100% goes to charity? Because that, to me, also seems like something that could work really well is if you did something for, you know, some, you know, I don't know, pandemic support or the forest fire, some tragedy happens in the world and it would seem natural for a telethon. Yeah, I mean, we, people like the user-generated aspect, the non-studio stuff that we

produce and make with people with content riots, the user-generated community does those kinds of things, I think, often. Like, you probably see them once every few weeks, but we've also partnered up with companies like IHeart Radio, which we did earlier this year and definitely raised money and done exactly that. Yeah. And what about live sports? What happens there because they're very protective of their rights.

I've been pitched a million times on businesses that will rack that content and allow other people to do their own play-by-play, which is completely illegal, from what I understand. Like, you can't do play-by-play on an NBA game or an MLB game. That would be, I think, against the rules, if I monetized it or not, I guess could be a mitigating factor. But I've never invested in those businesses. But are those leagues open to that? Like somebody, because it would be very interesting if, you know, some Boston Celtic fans, you know, who are just completely, you know, off the rows were, you know, doing their own commentary on the game, picture and a picture and people were donating to them. But then you'd have to figure out how to get the NBA to give you the rights to it. What do you think about sports and, you know, like live sports, those big leagues or even the mid-tier leagues?

Yeah. So a lot of people don't know, but Fox is a big investor in caffeine. and we actually have a joint venture studio with Fox, which allows us to get access to different content rights that Fox Sports has. And then we have another arrangement in place with Disney ESPN as well. So we've tried X games. We've had some WWE stuff on before. We did some stuff with the Super Bowl last year.

There's all sorts of different content opportunities that we've got access to through those strategic investments that you wouldn't otherwise get unless you probably pay to fortune for and also they have to become available those rights too because they get stitched up for a very long time. Yeah, that's the problem is that the Super Bowl and the NBA finals and all that stuff is locked up for five years at a clip. So getting them to actually do that is kind of hard. But you can do the pregame or the post game or stuff like that, yeah? Yeah, you can. I mean, we do have some like streamed live matches going on. Look, I mean, where the real traction has come from, though, is finding things that we can broadcast that youth, basically youth culture is really interested in, where between our studio and our technology distribution platform, we could provide something of real quality, really authentic to that community.

And so you take battle wrap and, like, that didn't sort of feel like it had a home on linear television. it's certainly something that Gen Z, Gen Y and North America really interested in. And we've been able to come in and really elevate it, not be like vulture culture, like diluted and water it down, but really have the right design sensitivities to bring it to the audience in just a much, much, much better way than what they had previously. And that's sort of inspiring a lot of UGC content to get created behind it. And we're sort of doing that over and over again with different properties that we can work with. Yeah, that seems to be like it could be more fun to watch it on caffeine than to watch it on

real TV because you get to actually do something. And that's like a bit a friend of mine told me his test now is if he, he'd tell if content's really good, if he's not looking at a smartphone while he's watching the series. So if the series is so good that he doesn't take his phone out, that is his test of how quality of the content is. But this allows you to sort of talk, to do that while you're watching it. I think. the other one that could be a very interesting category is, you know, like they have that show Talking Dead, where they talk about the Walking Dead afterwards. Like, people doing the post game would be amazing. Like, there's a kid worldwide Wob who Fandu just hired. And every time an NBA game ends, he just goes on Periscope and talks about it against thousands of people.

And they're all in the Periscope chat, but Periscope, I think the Periscope has like super hearts. It's very one-dimensional. But you're creating like a library that's specific to that vertical, correct? Yeah, so we have a library that are, you know, culturally sensitive, feel really authentic to, you know, the community that we're working with. We have that real-time feedback with the real-time stream. We have a different chat experience. As I say, we can provide that professional production to these live streams that have never been available to some of these communities before. And that is creating a new place for live broadcasting. It has a lot of gaming on there, but it's, you know, the stuff that people are, watching, it has drama, it has emotion. It's, uh, it feels very authentic to the, you know, the cultural community that's watching and, um, and, um, buying these items in it. I just had the best idea ever. Our biggest traffic days that Engadget were, um, when we had, uh, the Steve Jobs keynote. When we did the Apple Keynotes, we would live blog them. The term live

blogging was coined by Peter Rojas and Ryan Block adding gadget. And we actually built software them for them to live blog. So they would literally do sentence by sentence. And if there was no Wi-Fi at the original ones, they would be sending out on their BlackBerry's one-liners. And then we'd be posting them into the live blog, cutting and pasting them to let the world know what was happening. People would just hit refresh like a thousand times on the webpage.

We'd have huge traffic days. But boy, would this be perfect to do a live stream of the next Apple keynote? And you could live stream the reaction to the next iPhone or the next iPad or when the glasses come out. So tell us about the AR glasses. Obviously, you worked on those. What are they all about then? They weren't going on when you were there. But what do you think the, what do you think about AR in general in terms of this experience? Because it is very related to what you're doing. And certainly, you've seen Magic Leap or, you know, the, the Microsoft glasses by this point. And certainly that's on your roadmap. How does this translate into AR and VR and VR? And is

you know, how far away are you from doing that? We're a very long way from doing something like that. I, you know, we're really focused on the community that we're building to watch, you know, live broadcasting together and certainly extending it, you know, like I said, we just want gaming to be a part of it, like really creating a home for youth culture and live broadcasting and all of the things, all the topics that you can imagine and young people being interested in wanting to see live and talk about and be together and consume together.

Something like AR and even VR, even VR, if you want to come back and talk about that, all of those things I think do provide new content experiences for that kind of new social graph, that new social network that's starting to, I think, form around people that want to watch things live together based on different interests and different topics. You know, you mentioned at the beginning my obsession with World of Warcraft and it is way more than 150 days, unfortunately. How many days have you been in there? I mean, I've got like...

Because it tells you of you how many hours you played and then how many days that equals. So in this game came out 20 years ago, 25? Came out about 16 years ago. 16 years ago, okay. So 2004. And you were on the beta. I know that. I was on the beta.

And like my original character that started then has about 178 real world days. So that's just the character I started then. But I have many other characters and I'm back playing classic. wow right now, which only came out middle of last year, and that already has about 30 days on it or something. Wow. And wow, World of Warcraft is 15 bucks a month? It's roughly that, yeah. Yeah. So you've been playing for 15 years. So you've spent $3,000 on World Warcraft just for the fees. Which isn't when you think about the number of hours, actually, if you've been in it. It's actually, yeah. I mean, it probably equals less than a dollar an hour. I'm trying to just do the math here. But what is it

about that game that you found so amazing. And is it true that you met your spouse in World of Warcraft? No, no, no. I didn't meet her in World of Warcraft, but we will play World of Warcraft together. But the thing that I just love about it is that it's this sort of shared topic, this sort of fantasy, this thing that you, this community that you can join into online. and everybody's got the same interest and everybody's on at the same time

and everybody can interact together and make friends together and complete quests and play the video game together and it's just a huge online world for doing that and so I think the same thing that happens around this kind of fantasy of World of Warcraft should happen around the next generation of sports and entertainment and news

and all of the live broadcasting that's out there but to build that you can't just shoehorned into an existing gaming community like Twitch, you really have to think about how are you going to go and approach these different communities like battle rap and whatever the next thing is that we want to do and really make sure that it's authentic to that culture and community and has the right sensitivities to bring it to life

in a way that doesn't water it down. I just had the best idea, Ben. You should hire like a bunch of crazy, like, left wing and right ring people to do the debates. Can you imagine what people would be doing during the presidential and vice presidential debates in terms of voting for who won the debate and throwing tomatoes at each other or just going crazy in virtual currency. I mean, do you create an editorial calendar like that?

And is there somebody on the team doing that? Or is it too toxic? It's, you know, we're really focused on things that we think that youth culture in North America would be super interested in. I think they're interested in the debate. Millennials and Gen Z care about that, right? They might be, I don't know, but like the, based on sort of the people why I'm talking to and interacting with and the work that we're doing, you know, I'm finding success in music and entertainment and, you know, hip hop and battle rap and video gaming and things like that. That's where we're going to start. I actually, I think it extends into all these things, Apple keynotes and news and politics and all that stuff, but you've really got to get that core really right, as you know, building a company and make sure that you expand from something that has, you know, some real value. using some real core.

You must have seen Instagram live go crazy during the pandemic with those kind of like rap battles. That's, that's been a huge thing, but they don't, they can't monetize on Instagram. There's no monetization, right?

You know, there's, there's no monetization. There's no sort of studio that's helping them produce. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of things missing from sort of creating a home out of, out of that sort of formal content.

But yeah, I mean, it's, it's definitely a popular thing, like battles. live streaming. You know, you're seeing it pop up more than ever right now in the middle of this pandemic, for sure. It's so dumb.

Like, Facebook has never shared revenue with any content producers, and they have the biggest platform. They're so dumb. Like, YouTube has created so many millionaires, tens of millionaires, you know, people who are just worth a fortune by giving 55 percent. And Zuckerberg is just so cheap. He's never done it. Tell us about the Drake partnership.

How did that come out? And we'll end on that. What is the Drake partnership? How did you get the Drake partnership? And how is the Drake partnership going? It's going great. He was put in touch with me through Ben Horowitz, which is one of our board members from Andreessen Horowitz.

I'm sure you know him. He's a cool cat. He's super cool. He loves, he's a huge hip-hop. Yeah, good friends with Nas. He's a big friends with Nas. He knows a lot of the people very, very well. And I was really interested in connecting with Drake because I knew that

he had some interest in gaming, but I thought that he might be interested in developing content, like non-gaming live content for the next generation. And he is, he's very interested in that. And so I was put in touch with him and battle rap is the first thing that we've sort of brought out with him. And he's a guy that just really understands his fans, their values, the sort of mythology, the legends behind things, like really can go deep on the unquantifiable things that are hard to see. Like, who would, who would have thought the, like, our first battle wrap, sorry,

second major battle wrap that we did earlier this year was like trending number one on Twitter, above UFC fighting. Like, like, they, they, they, they blow up, my friend. Like, like, Twitch has never seen with gaming. Like, it just, they are fire. Like, they blow up. And so, we've got more of that coming and more of that premium stuff coming, as well as, more great tools for people to make their own content on caffeine and get discovered and see what else they can make on the platform. Amazing. All right, listen, I've taken an hour of your time. You've been an amazing guest. Congratulations on your success. First company. You get kicked out. Second company. You get that nice single double. Get that experience of five, four years inside Apple, the mothership, learn a lot. And then here you are. Caffeine raised in a quarter of a billion dollars getting hundreds of thousands of people onto live streams and an incredible bright future. It's been great to talk with you and great to get to know you for this hour. Continued success. I know you're hiring, yes? What positions you're hiring for? And now you're all virtual.

So wait, what happened? You guys were all in an office somewhere in San Francisco in the Bay Area? We were all in Redwood City and then we have a couple studios down in LA as well. Beautiful in Redwood City, huh? It is beautiful, but we are all working from home. It's amazing how Redwood City was like, of all the areas in the Bay Area, they were just like, yeah, you can develop apartments here, you can build buildings. And they were the one pro development place.

Are you in the box building or whatever that building was that box was in? We were near there, a couple of blocks away from there. But yeah, it's a great area. It's such a great place to be. You get five guys. You get the movie theater, all these great restaurants. But what's it been like running the company in the pandemic and work from home? Is it come natural to you or has it been challenging?

Are people more productive, less productive? What's it been like? I think it's been challenging. We're mainly a product and engineering company. And I like to design and build things in some ways similar to how I was doing it at Apple. So it's a very creative space where we come together and we really benefit a lot from being in the same place together. So it's been a bit of a challenge to figure out how to do that remotely.

But I do think we're starting to become more productive in some ways than what we were before. So we're sort of come out with new ways to work and seeing new opportunity there. And I think that's what you get when you have a really innovative culture and company. vaccine happens tomorrow. Yeah. And everybody is 100% certain that they're not going to get it. The vaccine's 100% effective and freely available. January 1st rolls around.

Everybody comes back to the office or do you feel like you're going to need to allow people to work from home? Because they've gotten used to it. How do you think about it as a CEO and running the company? If it is in fact totally safe and we have like $5 free testing everywhere and we have five different vaccines available and no. Nobody has it. There's zero debts in the United States for three months. January 1st rolls around. You just tell everybody we're going back to the office?

No. I think that for us, we're going to take a step back and really think about new ways of working and sort of use this as an opportunity to sort of redesign and really reauthor, re-create how we work together. And I think it's, you know, for me, I've stopped sort of grieving the past and wanting to get back to the office because I'm a bit like that. But I'm letting go with that for sure. and started to really dream and think about, you know, how could we be an even better and stronger team and really rethink how we work together,

which may make an example of that. You think you're going to have people come in for a four-day work week, three-day work week, or what? How do you see it going down? I don't know if you saw Reed Hastings was like, I think this is bullshit. Like, we're all going to come back to work. We've lost all the creativity. We've lost all the drive.

He's totally anti-work from home. And he's old school, obviously, you know, he's been around for a while. Yeah. What's your best guest as to what the grand compromise will be? between employees and CEOs? I think that we've got to sort of figure out based on the different functions when we need to get people physically together and when we don't. And what are the strengths and weaknesses around that?

So if you're operating in a studio in LA, we're going to have to get you to come in still. Studio director has to come in, yes. If you're on our engineering or design team, which is most of the company right now, there's going to be times where we're going to want to get together and have those relationships and really work on stuff together, but for the most part, they could probably do that from anywhere. And as a result, like, I'm a big fan of people. I think we get their best work when their lifestyle and is great. They're getting sleep.

Like, they're able to be their most creative when they're just really vibing with their life. And if people could do that remotely and we could get more out of them from that standpoint, we could ultimately build something better together. It'd just be exciting to explore those opportunities and think about it. we might Jason, we still may go back just as just as it was. I'm not taking that off the table, but I'm using it as a moment to really rethink and ask a ton of questions and see what's possible there. I mean, it is a dicey subject too.

As CEOs, I have my own companies and like one of them's not remote. And to think about like asking everybody, okay, now we got to go back to this. Some people might just say, you know what, I don't want to. I'm going to go work at a, and so now we're in a competition with other companies that are saying, hey, we're going to stay fully remote. We're going to be half remote. And so there's going to be this grand negotiation, I think, because sometimes people have moved away. They're not in Redwood City anymore.

They're not living in San Francisco or Oakland anymore. Now they're in Napa or, you know, they're in Austin. And you can't ask them to come to the office because asking them to come to the office might mean they just quit. And then I'm concerned, I don't know if you are about a two-tiered culture where, you know, this group of people's in the office four days a week with the CEO and the president and the C-O and the CTO. and then this other group of people aren't, and you wind up having these two classes of people, the people who are close to power and the people who are further away from power,

and I would be very concerned as a person who's further away from power of, hey, maybe I'm not going to have the same opportunities or voice, because when we're all on Zoom, it's a level playing field. But when you know how this goes. If half the people are on Zoom and half the people are in the room,

the people in the room are going to be dictating a lot of the conversation. I don't know how that gets resolved. Do you have any thoughts on that? Or does that worry you at it? all? No, I mean, I'm thinking about the same kinds of things. In fact, in our board meeting just recently, we were talking about exactly this and not making second class citizens and figuring out like if you have a conference room in a physical location, how do you set it up with the virtual

conference room so that people do can feel connected and included. And it's, it's a tough topic. I mean, I've said to our company that, look, we're not going back this year. So we'll come back with an update in December, but know that we'll do what's best for caffeine because that's what we always do here. And what's best for caffeine is thinking about how to continue to have a super creative, innovative team that wants to push the limits and bring something new out in the world of broadcasting. And, you know, thinking about where we do that from and how we do that is a big question and now's a great, great time to explore it. And it's a hard one for sure. And I want to take the time to really think that through for sure. Yeah, you know, it's like every every crisis,

there's some opportunity or creativity that comes out of it, this pressure that we've all been under to stay safe and keep our family safe and not get COVID and protect our companies and keep operating because we're very privileged to work behind a keyboard. It's a very interesting moment in time because then when we do go back, you know, we don't want to leave people behind, right? But people may not want to come to the office. So I'm super interested to see how this plays out. And I do think we actually like, it seems kind of trivial or silly like, oh, those people are on Zoom, but maybe there is like technology of like, literally having a giant, you know, projector with them in life size in the room.

And then that kind of call with them projected in a major way. If we actually think about those technologies and take them seriously, maybe it does bridge the gap. I'm not sure. I have been thinking about that as well. Well, listen, it's been amazing to have you on the pod. Thanks for the honesty and the candidness. And continued success and you're hiring.

So if you're interested, where can they go to find out about jobs? Is it caffeine. TV slash jobs? Yeah, if they go to caffeine. com. There's a link on the page there for careers. And they can check that out. See what work you at caffeine.

A lot of engineering, a lot of design positions. What position is the hardest to fill that you need to fill right now? Like what's the pressing issue? Because let's get that job fill right now. Yeah, I think that the WebRTC scaling and architects that have a lot of knowledge around packet loss and web RTC. and fan out and that kind of stuff. Like someone... The latency issues, right?

Like keeping the chat action... You need to see as the host, you need to see the chat in real time to react to it. If I can't... If Periscope is always like four minutes behind now and I'm just like... I'm watching somebody on Periscope and they're responding to text I saw two minutes ago. It ruins the experience. That one's super difficult and we're pushing real limits that like people don't even even know how complicated that is. But then the other thing that might be easier to help

us find is we're looking for a great growth hacker right now to join the product team. Oh, growth hacking. Perfect. If someone wants to come in and help us with that, that'd be awesome. All right. WebRTC growth hackers, you know what to do. It's usually first name. And his first name is Ben. So I'm guessing if you email Ben at Caffeine.tv, it's not going to somebody in the mailroom. Continued success, Ben. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. We'll look forward to watching you grow this company and hit a grand slam after a third time's charm.

So continued success. Thank you so much.