Vincent
Yang

The Man Who Brought the Livestream to Your Website

In Hangzhou, a single livestreamer can move $1 million of merchandise in an afternoon. In San Mateo, Vincent Yang watched that happen and decided he'd build the infrastructure to make it possible everywhere else. Not on TikTok. Not on Instagram. On your website - where you keep the data and write the check.

Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Firework, the AI-powered video commerce platform that has quietly become the backbone of how 1,500+ brands embed shoppable live and short-form video directly on their own digital properties. Kraft Heinz, Albertsons, Unilever, Mattel - the kind of names that don't take bets on unproven tech.

He didn't start in retail. He started in mathematics. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2001-2005, a bachelor's in math. Then Stanford for his MBA. Then J.P. Morgan as an investment banking analyst, then Summit Partners as an investor. The pattern is someone assembling a toolkit before choosing what to build with it.

Before Firework: The EverString Chapter

In 2014, Yang co-founded EverString, a predictive analytics platform that became the number-one-ranked product in its category. It was a B2B data play - helping sales and marketing teams score accounts and prioritize outreach using machine learning. By 2018, he had stepped back from the CEO role. In 2020, ZoomInfo acquired EverString, absorbing its 100 million company records and 70 million professional profiles.

The timeline matters: Yang was already building Firework while EverString was still running. He co-founded the video platform alongside Jerry Luk in 2017, under the parent company Loop Now Technologies. The working assumption was that short-form video was going to become the dominant language of the internet, and brands would need their own fluency - not just borrowed reach on someone else's platform.

The early days involved moving the company from Mountain View to Redwood City, testing apps that didn't stick, and eventually assembling a team that mixed Silicon Valley data scientists with former executives from Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, and LinkedIn. Fifty-one people building a product looking for its moment.

The Pivot That Wasn't Really a Pivot

When Firework launched publicly in March 2019 backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, it had two million registered users and was pitched as a short-form video storytelling app. The framing was consumer-social. The destination was enterprise. Yang understood, even then, that the long game was getting brands to own their video relationship with customers - not rent it from social platforms that could change their algorithm on any given Tuesday.

By 2022, the thesis had crystallized into a number: $300 billion. That's what live commerce generated in China that year, nearly one-fifth of all retail e-commerce in the country. Yang's pitch to Western retailers was essentially: the infrastructure to do this at scale now exists, the behavior is proven, and the brands that move first will own the customer relationship that platforms have been extracting rent from for a decade.

SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 agreed. In May 2022, Firework closed a $150 million Series B at a $750 million valuation. Linda Yu, the SoftBank partner who led the investment, said at the time: "Short videos and livestreaming are now the default language for the digital era, which is reshaping how consumers engage with brands and products online."

What Firework Actually Does

Strip away the press release language and Firework does something specific: it lets a brand embed live and shoppable video experiences directly on their website, app, or physical store screen - without sending the shopper to YouTube or Instagram to watch it. The viewer stays on the brand's property. The brand keeps the data. The transaction closes in context.

That distinction matters enormously for retail economics. Customer data collected on owned properties is first-party. Customer data that happens on TikTok belongs to TikTok. Yang has been consistent on this point in interviews: decentralized video commerce infrastructure is the answer to the platform dependency problem that most digital retailers have quietly accepted as permanent.

The platform now spans 20+ countries, serves brands in beauty, grocery, fashion, consumer electronics, and direct-to-consumer, and has offices in San Mateo, New York, Toronto, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Ninety-plus engineers and data scientists handle the underlying technology. The client list spans Kraft Heinz to Mattel, Omnicom to American Express.

Agentic Commerce: The Next Chapter

At eTail 2025, Yang outlined what Firework is building next: agentic commerce. The framing is AI that doesn't just recommend products but acts - answering questions, guiding purchase decisions, and completing transactions on behalf of both the brand and the shopper in real time. Not a chatbot. An agent trained on a brand's product catalog, FAQs, and return policies, capable of holding a natural-language conversation that ends in a sale.

In January 2025, Yang published Firework's 3C Framework, identifying three pivotal trends reshaping commerce. The through line is the same as it was in 2017: own the relationship. The medium has evolved from short-form video to live commerce to AI-powered conversation, but the underlying logic - that brands should control their own customer experience stack rather than outsource it to aggregators - has not changed.

Ad Age put him on its 2024 Tech Power List specifically for this work on conversational and agentic AI applied to retail. It's recognition that positions Firework not as a video tool but as commerce infrastructure for the AI era.

The Fun Details

Yang's Twitter handle is still @vyeverstring - a relic from his EverString years that he has apparently seen no reason to change, despite Firework now being the bigger story. There's something characteristically understated about that.

He studied mathematics as an undergraduate, which means his instinct for data - in predictive analytics, in video engagement metrics, in agentic AI - is native rather than acquired. The math degree is not incidental. It explains why two very different companies (one B2B data, one video commerce) came from the same founder: both are fundamentally problems of signal extraction from large datasets.

Firework's technology stack includes Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Redis, and - notably - Claude, Anthropic's AI model. The company is building its agentic commerce layer on multiple AI providers, which is consistent with its infrastructure-layer positioning: Firework doesn't want to be locked into any single AI vendor any more than it wants its clients locked into any single video platform.

Vincent Yang on Video