Doug Petkanics

A founder who refuses to rent his foundation

Doug Petkanics runs Livepeer, a network that does something quietly radical: it takes graphics cards sitting idle in basements, data centers and home rigs around the world and stitches them into open infrastructure for video. No single company owns it. No gatekeeper can switch it off. In 2025 he sharpened the whole operation around one obsession - real-time AI video - and told the world Livepeer would stop chasing everything else to chase that.

It is the most recent move in a career-long argument. Petkanics has co-founded three companies, and every one of them circles the same conviction: don't build your house on land somebody else can repossess. He learned that lesson the hard way, which is the only way anyone really learns it.

The pivot that started with a slammed door

Before Livepeer, Petkanics and his co-founder Eric Tang were running a company that leaned on the big platforms - Facebook, Google, the Apple App Store. Then the access tightened. APIs got restricted. App approvals dragged. The rug, it turned out, belonged to someone else. So they went looking for a foundation nobody could pull, and found it in Ethereum. Out of that frustration came the thesis that streaming video - which by Petkanics' own reckoning accounts for as much as 80% of all internet traffic - was too important and too expensive to leave in the hands of a few clouds.

Livepeer's answer was an open marketplace for video work. Anyone with spare GPU capacity can plug in, do the heavy lifting of transcoding and processing video, and get paid in the network's token. The buyers get infrastructure that is, in his words, meant to be infinitely scalable, optimally cost-effective and maximally reliable. The sellers monetize hardware that would otherwise hum along doing nothing.

Crypto before it had a costume

Petkanics didn't arrive at Livepeer cold. On his way there he wrote two Ethereum protocols: Auction House, for selling non-fungible assets - this was before "NFT" was a word anyone said out loud - and TAP, aimed at making Ethereum transactions safer. He is, by his own description, an entrepreneurial software engineer first. The blockchain was never the point. It was the tool that let him build something no one could take away.

2025: incorporate, focus, ship

On July 31, 2025, Petkanics announced two things at once. Livepeer Inc had formally incorporated and was pointing its entire go-to-market at real-time AI video. And a separate Livepeer Foundation had launched to steward more than ten ecosystem entities and fund public goods through community governance. The split is deliberate: the company chases product-market fit and demand; the foundation tends the commons. Network fees and usage, he noted, had been climbing as the AI focus sharpened.

The bet is that the coming wave of AI video - generative tools, live avatars, the Sora-class models - will need somewhere to run that isn't a single hyperscaler's billing dashboard. Petkanics wants that somewhere to be a network nobody owns. It is the same idea he has been chasing since the door first slammed: the foundational layer of an open internet, assembled out of the hardware the world already has.

In his own words

There is a tidy symmetry to it. The man who once won Apple's blessing now builds the thing that needs no one's blessing at all. Three companies, two acquisitions' worth of hard lessons, and one stubborn refusal to depend on an API he doesn't control.