Kyle Michelson and the art of changing the invitation

For nine months, the audience barely moved. Kyle Michelson had built a place for people to meet through video, and people had proved maddeningly capable of meeting elsewhere. Streamup needed another approach. The eventual adjustment was modest enough to offend anyone who prefers an invention story with thunder: describe the service as a place to broadcast, rather than a place to chat. Give the visitor a different part to play.

The early idea had a personal beginning. After studying in London, Michelson wanted to remain connected to people who shared his taste for British humor. Back in Los Angeles, he pursued a social product. By October 2014, after the change in positioning, he was reporting more than 100,000 users, up from 10,000. A different invitation had helped the same underlying idea find company.

“For nine months, our numbers were flat.”

Kyle Michelson, on Streamup’s early days · 2014

There is something pleasantly unceremonious about this beginning. The founder does not emerge holding a finished answer. He has an idea about how people might spend time together, puts it in front of them, and discovers that their interpretation matters. In a social product, the audience gets an editorial vote.

A live audience needs a backstage

Streamup placed Michelson in a business where the promise was immediate. Someone goes live; someone else watches; conversation happens alongside the performance. The screen suggests spontaneity. The machinery has to be rather more disciplined. A broadcast that attracts attention also brings a sudden crowd, and a sudden crowd is an engineering event before it becomes a business achievement.

Engineer Guillaume Besson worked on Streamup between April 2015 and August 2016. His account describes building its chat system to handle 250,000 simultaneous clients across thousands of rooms. Traffic arrived in surges when events started. The team encountered dropped connections as an existing load-balancing service adjusted to demand, so Besson implemented an alternative way to direct clients to available chat servers.

He also worked on the move from Flash to an HTML5 video player, changes to video delivery, and infrastructure across several geographic locations. Those details supply the backstage to Michelson’s consumer proposition. The casual pleasure of watching together depended on technical work that most viewers would have had no reason to notice.

This is an instructive way to look at a founder: through the work other people did to make his proposition usable. A product biography can become terribly crowded with the person at the top. Here, the engineering account restores the team to the picture. Michelson supplied the company and its direction; colleagues built the systems that allowed its audience to gather.

Hollywood wanted a play button

By January 2016, Streamup was making a more theatrical public argument. Its president, Will Keenan, wanted the Hollywood Walk of Fame to recognize digital performers with a new symbol: a play button. He launched a petition seeking a place for streaming stars alongside the established entertainment categories. The campaign belonged to Keenan, but it reveals the cultural territory Michelson’s company had entered.

A play button is an economical piece of ambition. It says that the performance on a small screen deserves to be taken seriously by the people who install names in pavement. Streamup’s announcement presented a service with overlays, effects, an embeddable player, and tools for broadcasters. The company reported an audience exceeding 25 million monthly active users at that time. That was its own historical claim, rather than a measurement of the business today.

The juxtaposition is rather good: professional tools behind the screen, a proposed new star in front of the theater. The platform wanted creators to have both the means to perform and a claim to recognition. Building a place to broadcast meant entering arguments about whose performances counted.

Streamup joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch. The accelerator’s company description centered music, shows, and conversation with musicians. That combination gave participation a particular setting: an audience could gather around a performance and speak to the person making it. The service’s current directory status is inactive. Its place in Michelson’s working life remains an early encounter with the effort required to bring people to the same digital room.

For a young company, a creative community brings several constituencies through one door. The performer wants an audience. The audience wants something worth watching. The engineers need enough warning, capacity, and reliable tools to make both possible. The founder has to keep those interests in the same conversation. A product can appear wonderfully direct from the outside while requiring a surprisingly crowded meeting behind it. Streamup’s combination of creator tools, live conversation, and technical infrastructure makes those competing demands visible.

The company behind the button

Michelson founded Getlabs in 2018. Four years later, the company announced a $20 million Series A led by Emerson Collective and Minderoo Foundation. Its backers included Tusk Venture Partners and individuals from consumer technology, among them Anne Wojcicki and Susan Wojcicki. Alongside the financing came a new API and plans to move the headquarters to Miami. Michelson was speaking as founder and CEO.

The combination tells a business story about changing responsibilities. A founder raising money has to give investors a reason to believe. A founder introducing an API has to make a company useful to other companies. A founder choosing a headquarters has to think about where an organization belongs. These decisions turn the original product idea into commitments that involve many more people than its first users.

In 2022, Getlabs described itself as a distributed team while preparing the Miami move. The arrangement gave the headquarters announcement a particular character. A city could become the company’s center without every employee appearing in the same room. For Michelson, the job now included deciding how a growing organization would operate across distance.

Getlabs’ 2022 leadership additions made the division of labor visible. Craig Thompson joined as chief commercial officer, Jaime LaFontaine as vice president of business development, and Matt Rubens as vice president of engineering. Rubens brought experience from Tophatter, Remind, Change.org, and Amazon. The appointments put names beside the work of selling, developing partnerships, and building the technology.

Hiring is where a founder’s ambitions acquire colleagues with their own experience and judgment. An org chart is seldom an amusing document, but it can be a revealing one. Each new responsibility means that the company has become too substantial to exist solely as the founder’s personal project.

In March 2024, Claire Hough joined as chief technology officer, responsible for engineering, product, and design, while Roger Pricer joined as chief commercial officer. Michelson remained founder and CEO in that announcement. Hough’s earlier experience included Udemy, Netscape, Napster, and Nextag. The leadership team was drawing on people who had already worked through several generations of internet companies.

These appointments also complicate the familiar picture of the founder as the person with every answer. Engineering, commercial work, and design ask different questions of a business. Putting experienced people in charge of them creates more voices around the original idea. The promise has to survive that conversation and become something the whole organization can deliver. In Michelson’s career, the executive announcements give that process a set of dates and names. They show the work continuing beyond the moment someone first decides to start a company.

A founder moves on

On April 8, 2026, Function announced that it had acquired Getlabs. The announcement identified Claire Hough as Getlabs’ CEO. The company’s current team page lists Michelson as founder. Those titles mark a consequential change in a career that is still often introduced through his earlier executive role.

Michelson now identifies himself as founder and CEO of Italic, a venture described publicly as being in stealth. His current founder biography also identifies him as an angel investor. The sequence runs from Streamup to Getlabs to another beginning. An acquisition supplies a date for one company’s history; the founder’s working life continues beyond it.

There is a useful restraint in leaving that new chapter at its public outline. The established story already contains enough movement: a consumer platform, an accelerator batch, a second company, financing, leadership hires, and a change of ownership. These are different stages of making an organization, each with its own demands. The next company has to earn its own account.

The appeal of an easy answer

Michelson’s stated interests offer a more personal way to read that progression. He has named The Lean Startup as a useful business book and The Paradox of Choice as a favorite outside that category. Asked to describe his strength, he chose the problem of making complexity feel simple. His interests include the design, growth, and marketing of products intended for large audiences.

Read alongside the career, that preference for simplicity has some texture. A video service needs an invitation people understand. A live audience needs infrastructure that can accept its arrival. An expanding company needs executives who can take responsibility for different parts of the work. The apparent ease of the finished experience rests on decisions made elsewhere.

Perhaps the most human detail is still the early wish to find agreeable company after London. It gives the business history an ordinary appetite beneath the machinery. Before there were rounds, appointments, and acquisition announcements, there was a person who wanted a better way to meet people he liked. The invitation has changed several times since. Finding a reason for someone to accept it remains a thoroughly practical occupation.