About Greylock
Greylock Partners invests in entrepreneurs that focus on consumer and enterprise software companies.
- 📌 Menlo Park, California, United States
- 👥 101-250
- 📊 Venture Capital
- 🌟 Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture, Private Equity, Seed, Venture
- 🌐 www.greylock.com
About Meerkat
Tweet Live Video
- 📌 San Francisco, California, United States
- 🌟 Private
- 🌐 www.houseparty.com
Our Investment in Meerkat
The Evolution of Live Video
Live video is one of the most powerful ways to bring people together when they are physically apart. It’s an unpredictable and deeply human shared experience.
Being live captures an ephemeral moment in time and keeps us transfixed. The moon landing in 1969 had over 500 million concurrent viewers, and the World Cup Final in 2014 had over 1 billion viewers.
These are the rare moments where people are truly connected as a society and sharing moments together. Ben Rubin, CEO of Meerkat, calls this “Spontaneous Togetherness”.
I’ve been thinking about the power of live video since my very first job as an engineer at RealNetworks back in 1997.
I was a software developer, coding up the RealProducer which allowed you to connect a video cable into a video capture card on your Windows PC and broadcast it live to the internet as RealVideo.
While the resulting video may have been the size of a postage stamp, it cleared the way to a world where anyone with a computer could be a broadcaster.
There was no more proprietary ownership over airwaves, no expensive machinery; all you needed to broadcast was a computer, a camera, and a video capture card.
Shifting Behaviors and Technology
Fast forward 10 years and you get to 2007. By this point, social networking — MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn were just starting to grow in importance and we started realizing the power of people sharing their own ideas, thoughts, and images as part of their identity.
Every individual was becoming a content creator. YouTube was starting to dominate the world of stored video, and Justin.TV and UStream were just launching to show the possibilities of live video.
I was an advisor to UStream for part of this period, believing in the same potential I had seen with RealNetworks. But as a society, we weren’t quite ready — we were still getting used to social networks and what it meant to share our lives.
And the technology in mobile phones and our network bandwidth made it very difficult to get a great stream of video out from anywhere without expensive equipment and data plans.
But this era was another important stepping stone: UStream continues to be successful selling streaming to enterprises, and Justin.
TV found a great model for broadcasting games, became Twitch, and had a huge exit to Amazon.
Today, it feels like we are at the dawn of a new era for live video. As a society, our behaviors have shifted to a place where sharing our lives is something we do naturally.
People share moments on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter hundreds of millions or billions of times per day. Snapchat has shown us that these don’t even have to be perfectly curated moments and thoughts, but can be true, authentic pieces of life.
But all of this is still asynchronous — you post, I read it later. Twitter is the closest — where the conversation often feels realtime like at a watercooler. It’s an incredible product and an incredible company.
It makes sense they are very excited about live video and it makes sense that Meerkat found its footing on Twitter.
I first met Ben Rubin nearly a year ago and he painted the biggest vision for why the shared experience of live video — “spontaneous togetherness” — was about to happen.
He was building a product named Yevvo at the time and I couldn’t have left our first meeting more excited. I did an interview last October with the MIT media review where we talked about Yevvo — which was just printed a few weeks ago.
The Vision for Meerkat’s Future
Now that Meerkat has lit the world on fire over the past couple of weeks, it’s becoming the foundation of what I hope will become a powerful new network.
A way for people to instantaneously broadcast moments in their lives to anyone, or to schedule and plan ahead for interesting content they want to broadcast live.
For viewers, we think this is going to provide an amazing alternative to other kinds of engagement and entertainment.
Instead of reading asynchronous messages, you can jump in live, with friends, to view the world through someone else’s eyes and talk and express yourself together.
For artists and creators, we think this will inspire a new way of engaging with their fans and enable them to create and earn significant new value for their content along the way too.
Conclusion
It’s a new beginning for live video, and I’m thrilled to be on board with Ben to build the future. Check out Ben’s thoughts on Spontaneous Togetherness.
You can read the rest of “Why we invested in” collection here:
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