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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

If anyone here is looking for a startup idea: hire Scott at twice what he's making, clone HQ Trivia, and make him a cofounder instead of a contractor. The market has been validated, it's clear that the market cares about Scott as a person (they're dressing up as him for Halloween!), and it seems doubtful that he enjoys being a contractor given all of this.

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This is probably exactly what the founder is frightened of. They have miscalculated badly and made Scott their brand. And Scott is free to move on as he wishes.

Or equivalently, miscalculated badly in treating him as a disposable contractor instead of an employee.

Glad you mentioned it. Starts to make sense why he was freaking out. People have idolized this guy who turns out is just a contractor for the startup. It would have been avoided if they shuffled the person doing the trivia or whatever it is.

They've been trying it recently, there have been 3 other hosts (that I've seen) in the past 2 weeks. My own personal opinion is that they've only achieved at making Scott look better.

I hope someone does this. I've been playing HQ for a few weeks, and it is deeply clear to me that their success has much to do with his hosting. When someone else fills in for him, it's sometimes painful to watch. Scott has some "thing" that makes the game very enjoyable -- maybe it's wit or confidence or something, but I have not seen another host work as well as he does. If the founders are being this petty, then let them reap what they sow.

Presumably Scott will be finding an agent and signing a SAG contract sounds ideal for Amazon /Netfix v cheap to produce compare to GOT etc.

Dam you could use Alexa for the contestants mmm Time to talk to my Contacts at BECTU

This! They basically validated the market for any tech video entertainment giant to copy their idea and completely destroy them. Let's not forget that Amazon just released those echo buttons which are basically the IoT version of a trivia game. So they already have a declared intention to pursue ideas around this.

To not go that far, even Snapchat can add something like this to their app with no difficulty. They already have the right infrastructure and context to pull this off.

> Over 170,000 people waited in the game’s lobby to play the HQ on Sunday night.

It seems like no easy feat to build out an app that streams live video as well as trivia questions/answers to 170k concurrent users. Does anyone have a guess at how they went about architecting a product like this?

I feel like I'd buy that in the short term - that's what VC money is for. (And perhaps in the long term too.) The hard part is the live streaming; sending <1 kilobyte of data to 170k concurrent users every few seconds isn't a fundamentally challenging problem (it's on the order of 1Gbps outbound traffic). YouTube has a live-streaming API I'd be inclined to build a proof of concept with and see how far that gets me; if not, a couple minutes of Googling finds me Ustream, owned by IBM, charging $99-$999/month for their "professional" tier, and Livestream (.com) charging $799 for their "enterprise" tier, with both having a call-us-if-you-need-more tier. That's cheap enough that you can fund the tech side on this on even just the old-school YC $20K until you have enough traction to do a better job of it.

The livestreaming you just partner with a CDN who serves the content for you. Questions and answers for 170k concurrents users isn't super hard, just make sure your backing datastore is a horizontally scalable kv store. Any of the cloud providers can give you a datastore capable of this.

Side note: They have a lot of experience, as some of the co-founders also co-founded Vine.

They've had some technical issues, including some games that started ~60 minutes late.

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