Kyle Vogt

Kyle Vogt: built Twitch as a detour, then sold Cruise to GM for $1B

Emmett Shear's point that for technical products domain experts (not naive outsiders) disrupt best: Kyle Vogt had wanted to build self-driving cars since high school, treated Twitch as a detour, then started Cruise and sold it to GM for $1 billion roughly two years in, before self-driving cars were on the road.

“He goes, Kyle had been trying to build self-driving cars since he was in high school. Like, Twitch was like a detour for him. And he's like, you know, the timing wasn't right back then, but he had been thinking about this and working on this, fiddling with this for a long time. He was probably one of the 5 people on Earth who should have started a self-driving car company was Kyle. And so he starts Cruise, sells Cruise for $1 billion to GM”

Take technical risk, not market risk: definitely valuable, questionably possible

Shaan shares Twitch CEO Emmett Shear's framing: most founders chase low-technical-risk, questionably-valuable ideas, but the better bet is 'definitely valuable, questionably possible.' If you can build a self-driving car, demand is certain; the only risk is whether it can be done.

“He goes, there's, you know, for every one entrepreneur that's doing what Kyle did, there's probably 999, um, that are doing like the opposite risk profile. So it's like low technical risk, you could definitely, it's like definitely possible, questionably valuable. And he's like, I think more people should be doing the opposite, which is definitely valuable, questionably possible.”

Steal thisChoose problems where demand is certain and only the technical execution is in question.