Twitch is the world's largest live-streaming platform, where creators broadcast video games, IRL content, music, and talk shows to a real-time audience that talks back in chat. Founded as a gaming-focused spin-off of Justin.tv in 2011 and acquired by Amazon in 2014, Twitch turned watching someone play a game into a social, participatory medium, building a creator economy powered by subscriptions, Bits, ads, and a culture of emotes and live community.
Susan Cubillos is the Senior Executive Business Partner to the CEO and CTO at Twitch, the live streaming giant headquartered in San Francisco. She operates at the hinge of the company, where calendar physics meets strategy, translating intent into motion for the people running one of the world's largest interactive video platforms.
Steven Kenneth Bonnell II, known online as Destiny, is an American live streamer and political commentator who pioneered full-time video game streaming and pivoted into round-the-clock political debate. From a former StarCraft II pro to a fixture of online political combat, he debates everyone from Marxists to alt-right YouTubers, often for ten or twelve hours at a stretch.
Hasan Piker, known online as HasanAbi, is an American Twitch streamer and left-wing political commentator who built one of the largest political audiences on livestreaming. A former Young Turks producer turned full-time broadcaster, he hosts marathon news-and-gaming streams from West Hollywood and has become a flashpoint inside Democratic Party debates about how the left talks to young men online.
Tyler 'Ninja' Blevins is the world's most recognized gaming streamer, having transformed competitive gaming into mainstream entertainment. Starting as a Halo pro in 2009, he became the face of Fortnite's cultural takeover - playing live with Drake to a record 628,000 concurrent viewers in 2018 - and parlayed that moment into a media empire spanning Twitch, YouTube, brand deals with Red Bull and Adidas, a Chief Innovation Officer role at GameSquare Holdings, and a co-founded cashew milk brand. With 19+ million Twitch followers and 23+ million YouTube subscribers, he continues to define what a professional streamer can become.
Imane Anys, known globally as Pokimane, is a Moroccan-Canadian content creator who turned a $250 secondhand PC and a Platinum-rank League of Legends account into one of the largest streaming presences on the internet. With over 9.4 million Twitch followers, 6.6 million YouTube subscribers, and a growing portfolio spanning snack brands, talent management, and podcasting, she has spent more than a decade redefining what it means to be a professional gamer - on her own terms.
Rachell Marie Hofstetter, known as Valkyrae, is a Filipino-American streamer, co-owner of 100 Thieves, and founder of Hihi Studios. After a record-breaking YouTube exclusivity run powered by late-2020 Among Us, she returned to Twitch in January 2025 on her tenth streaming anniversary and is now building anime-inspired IP through her own studio.
Hubert Thieblot is a French-born entrepreneur and General Partner at Founders, Inc. (f.inc), a San Francisco-based venture fund and community campus occupying 42,000 sq ft at Fort Mason. He built Curse, Inc. - a gaming media empire with 30M+ monthly visitors - from a World of Warcraft fan site he started as a teenager in Paris, grew it into an Inc. 500 company, and sold it to Twitch (Amazon) in 2016. After serving as VP of Emerging Markets and Mobile at Twitch, he joined Founders, Inc. to back early-stage founders tackling hard problems in AI/ML, hardware, web3, AR/VR, and other frontier tech sectors.
Tracy Chan is the CEO of Splash, the AI music platform that turned Roblox into the world's biggest music game with 480 million players. A veteran music-tech executive who built creator tools at YouTube, founded and sold CrowdAlbum to Spotify, scaled Spotify for Artists, led music at Twitch during the pandemic, and ran content at SoundCloud before joining Splash in March 2024 - Chan has spent his career at the exact intersection where technology meets the moment an artist connects with a fan. At Splash, he is building the infrastructure for a generation that doesn't just listen to music, it creates it.
Tips Out (known online as TipsOutBaby) is a gaming entrepreneur and Creator Scout at Andreessen Horowitz's a16z Games division, operating at the intersection of creator culture and venture capital. Best known as co-founder and COO/CEO of One True King (OTK) - the Austin-based creator collective he helped launch in October 2020 alongside Asmongold, Mizkif, Esfand, and Rich Campbell - he has quietly built one of gaming's most ambitious creator-led business empires. Beyond OTK, he co-founded Starforge Systems (a PC hardware company), Mythic Talent (a talent management agency), and Mad Mushroom (a creator-led game publishing label). In October 2023, a16z tapped him as a Games Creator Scout, formalizing his role as a bridge between gaming culture and the startup investment world.
Ann Miura-Ko is co-founding partner at Floodgate, the seed-stage VC firm behind Lyft, Twitch, Twitter, and Okta. A NASA rocket scientist's daughter who went from painfully shy piano prodigy to national debate champion to Forbes' 'most powerful woman in startups,' she holds a PhD in mathematical modeling of cybersecurity from Stanford and has spent 15+ years betting on founders before anyone else believes in them. She co-founded AllRaise to diversify venture capital, teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford, and invests in roughly 3-5 companies per year with a philosophy built on secrets, stories, and world-class effort.
Mike Maples Jr. is a legendary Silicon Valley seed investor and co-founder of Floodgate, the firm behind some of the most category-defining startups of the internet era - including Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, and Okta. An 8-time Forbes Midas List honoree, Maples pioneered seed-stage venture capital before it was a recognized asset class, developing frameworks like 'Thunder Lizards' and 'Inflection Theory' that have shaped how the VC world thinks about breakthrough startups. His 2024 book 'Pattern Breakers' became a USA Today national bestseller.
Emmett Shear co-founded Twitch in 2007 and spent 12 years as its CEO, growing it from a scrappy live-streaming experiment into the dominant gaming and creator platform that Amazon acquired for nearly $1 billion in 2014. After a surreal 72-hour stint as interim CEO of OpenAI during the Sam Altman board crisis in November 2023, he pivoted to founding Softmax, an a16z-backed AI alignment startup working on 'organic alignment' - a biology-inspired approach to making AI systems genuinely care about their communities rather than merely comply with rules.
Justin Kan is a serial entrepreneur and investor best known as the co-founder of Twitch, the live streaming platform acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014. A Yale graduate who studied physics and philosophy, Kan pioneered lifecasting by wearing a camera 24/7 for Justin.tv in 2007, which evolved into Twitch and revolutionized gaming culture. He's launched multiple ventures including Socialcam (sold to Autodesk for $60M), served as a Y Combinator partner, and now invests through Goat Capital while building new companies in Web3, commerce, and music. Despite selling Twitch for nearly $1 billion, Kan has been candid about struggles with happiness, anxiety, and finding fulfillment beyond exits, making him a rare voice of authenticity in Silicon Valley's success-obsessed culture.
Kyle Vogt is a Kansas-born serial entrepreneur and robotics pioneer who has founded three billion-dollar companies before age 40. He co-founded Twitch (acquired by Amazon for $970M), founded Cruise Automation (acquired by GM for $1B+), and currently leads The Bot Company, developing AI-powered household robots. Starting as a teenage BattleBots competitor who built his first self-driving car at 14, Vogt left MIT to pursue entrepreneurship, becoming one of the rare founders to create multiple unicorns across live-streaming, autonomous vehicles, and consumer robotics.
Kevin Lin is a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and co-founder of Twitch.tv — the live-streaming platform acquired by Amazon for ~$970 million in 2014. Serving as COO for 12.5 years, he helped grow Twitch to 90%+ market share, $1.5B annual revenue, and 2,000+ employees. After departing in 2020, he co-founded Metatheory (a Web3 gaming company backed by a16z), launched Lifelike Capital (an early-stage VC fund), and co-created the Ikigai Launchpad accelerator in Taipei — all while staying deeply rooted in his Taiwanese heritage and AAPI community through Gold House.
Stewart Alsop is a veteran technology journalist turned venture capitalist who co-founded Alsop Louie Partners and, in 2024, TK MediaTech Ventures. One of the first journalists to become a full general partner at a major VC firm, he backed Twitch, TiVo, and Sonos, founded the legendary DEMO Conference, and spent 20 years shaping tech journalism at InfoWorld, Inc., and Fortune before pivoting to investing. A proud member of one of America's most storied journalistic dynasties - son of columnist Stewart Alsop Jr. - he now operates from Santa Fe, New Mexico, writing on Substack and co-hosting a podcast with his son.
Peter Yang is a product leader turned creator economy educator, currently a Principal Product Lead at Roblox with a decade of experience shipping features at Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Credit Karma, and Reddit. He runs Behind the Craft, a Substack newsletter and podcast with 148,000+ subscribers focused on practical AI tutorials and interviews with top product and AI leaders. He invented Twitch Raids, launched Reddit Talk, and grew Facebook Live from zero to millions of viewers — and now teaches 100,000+ subscribers how to build products and careers in the AI era.