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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Assuming this is all true (the article is sourced poorly): Justin and team very much congratulated, that was a long road from justin.tv to twitch.tv and now an exit of this magnitude.

Hard-won, very much deserved, also a case study for a successful pivot.

" We do know that Twitch investors who participated in past rounds are pleased that they will be getting significant returns that are multiple times the amount they originally invested. "

Suggests that it was one of the investors that leaked the story to venturebeat, pretty classless, and really not-done in those circles.

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This was leaked about a month ago. Maybe 2.

Twitch really is a phenomenon. There's such a diverse community of game streamers that I can't help but expect someone to enter this space to compete soon. There are millions of viewers, and some shows are super niche. Take for example TheMexicanRunner http://www.twitch.tv/themexicanrunner who is working his way through beating every North American NES game. Sounds impossible, but he's the guy that could do it. Elsewhere, people like Lirik and Sheever have become famous and make a living off of their broadcasting now. Quite an ecosystem!

I totally missed it, I was very much occupied at the time.

What made me especially interested in the whole twitch phenomenon is that we always threw out the gamers because it wasn't 'real' content, totally missing out on the opportunity :)

More power to them though for identifying the niche and running with it.

The rising interest on e-sports (the recent DOTA2 tournament had 11 millions prize pool) is another market that they were able to tap quite well.

Games are serious business.

I've heard lots of concern in the community about this acquisition since many of the streamers also have youtube channels that got hit during the recent overzealous copyright nonsense that happened on youtube. Since Twitch is basically "violating" copyright in the same way they got beat up for on youtube, it wouldn't make sense for Google not to do the same with twitch, but then of course it would gut the service.

> very much deserved

Does anyone actually deserve $1,000,000,000? (I know it's shared between investors but assuming he got a chunk of that)

Good question. Ask the billionaires. Then ask the rest of the world.

Some country in Scandinavia (Denmark?) at some point had a 100%+ tax rate, which meant that if you earned more than some ridiculous amount of money you lost more than you made.

I think any amount of money over and beyond what you need to live in whatever is considered luxury in the place where you live is probably wasted on you. But I guess for people at that level it's a way to keep score.

As far as Justin and Co having deserved this, they worked harder than most people ever will (especially in the early days), they have been diluted substantially and they'll be paying a fair amount of their take in taxes.

For the longest time it looked like the whole thing could still fold up and this deal is a gigantic pay-out compared to many other acquisitions. Even so, I think they really did build something of actual value, as opposed to some other recent acquisitions (far higher ones than this one) that I fail to see any value at all in. So as far as I'm concerned they deserve some kind of pay-out, and since we're living in a capitalist society that is defined as 'what the market will bear'. In this case that appears to be $1B. So good for them. Wished I had not banned those gamers ;).

> As far as Justin and Co having deserved this, they worked harder than most people ever will

When you say this, you mean harder than other people in western based office work?

Sorry not trying to pick on you, you seem reasonable and decent! I just think it's a shame that bestowing incomprehensible amounts of wealth on individuals should be celebrated as a deserved reward. Hard work = lots of rewards is not the reality for the majority of the world.

I agree they deserve a payout of course, that level of wealth just feels wrong to me, like everything feels a bit out of whack. And I know myself I would of course probably keep the majority of it as well.

I tend to compare this to my mom, which keeps me on the humble side of things. She worked really hard her whole life long and does not have much to show for it. She supported me and my siblings whenever we needed it. When I was 21 and sold my first company I realized I had just made more money in a year than my mom made in 10. That was a really weird feeling.

So I'm well aware of the fact that 'deserved' is a pretty elastic concept. But if you want to start that discussion then you should pick up the Forbes list of billionaires and start petitioning them to abandon the capitalist way, they are most likely as much or more 'not deserving' of their wealth as the people that put together twitch.

I've got a very healthy respect for people that do regular work, farmers, masoners, lathe operators, millwrights, mailmen and so on, if only because I tried my hand at all those professions at some point in my checkered past and have found that each and every one of those takes tremendous dedication and skill to perform with any amount of success. And yet, barring lucky accidents very few people in those professions will ever be wealthy.

It's an unfair world we live in, but that does not stop me from congratulating those that achieve a certain level of success if they played this particular game by the rules that they themselves did not set. That it is possible to envision a better world in which the wealth could be spread better does not detract from their achievement.

I agree they deserve a payout of course, that level of wealth just feels wrong to me, like everything feels a bit out of whack.

http://paulgraham.com/gap.html

In the 1970s, Sweden briefly had a glitch in the tax system where the self-employed paid 20% plus income taxes of up to 87%, for a net of 107% if you were self-employed, filthy rich and stupid enough to declare it in Sweden -- not a common combo (rest assured the IKEA or Tetra-Pak guys weren't paying 107%!). But this was not the intention, and it was long since fixed.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=304500

If your business has improved the lives of tens of millions of people, which Twitch has, I think you do deserve to become a billionaire or multi millionaire. I figure the rewards for a business are relative to the number of people it impacts.

Assuming founders were working on this for past 10 years straight, 16 hours every single day without taking any vacations or weekend days off whatsoever, their pay rate would have been $1,700 every hour assuming they receive only 10% of this pie each. Well deserved for all the "risks" they took to avoid regular jobs, eat ramen everyday or innovations they contributed to the advancement of mankind? Multi-Billionaires typically make equivalent of $100,000 every single hour. I often joke that Paul Allen charged Microsoft shareholders $10,000 per character for the code he wrote. Next time when you type if in your program, take a breath and think what if someone paid 20 grands just for doing that. That's how it feels like to get billion dollar payout.

> Assuming founders were working on this for past 10 years straight, 16 hours every single day without taking any vacations or weekend days off whatsoever, their pay rate would have been $1,700 every hour assuming they receive only 10% of this pie each

That's just made up.

> Well deserved for all the "risks" they took to avoid regular jobs, eat ramen everyday

The "risk" of avoiding a regular job is lost wages (I'm stripping away the experience that could get you into a better paying job after a failure here as well). If they could be earning $50k a year, and worked for 10 years on their startup, their risk is $500k. I'm also sure that most people wouldn't go more than a few years without any traction, so you're probably looking at about $150k risk. Deduct any earnings from that risk in that time frame as well ( they need to live) so the personal risk is actually perhaps nearer to ~$100k. I think you are overstating the risk factor here.

Eating ramen every day is something you've made up as well.

> innovations they contributed to the advancement of mankind?

Hyperbole, it's a website that lets you watch people playing computer games. You're vastly overstating it's contribution to the advancement of mankind.

Not too long ago I read a thing I ruminate on every now and then:

    I love getting paid, do whatever you can do to get paid, but do not 
    let the money whisper to you that you are worth it, it will be 
    lying and you will believe it.

But that's just wankery over "deserving". I can still say good on them for getting theirs in an f-you-I-got-mine world.

> Suggests that it was one of the investors that leaked the story to venturebeat, pretty classless, and really not-done in those circles.

Who normally leaks this sort of thing? Who would be upset by this? If anything it only makes the other investors look savvy for making a fat return.

> Who normally leaks this sort of thing?

Nobody. If you can't trust your investors to keep their mouth shut about a deal in progress or that is under wraps for reasons important enough to the acquirer and the acquiree then investors follow suit and happily count their money.

Such loose lips can sink deals in the worst cases. Very unprofessional.

Well, if Google wasn't the only one trying to buy Twitch, I'd imagine any losing bidders wouldn't have any problems with someone leaking what they know.

I'll save my congratulations until it becomes clear that they have not sold out the interests of their users. Making a lot of money is not inherently virtuous.

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