Theo Browne on Ping Labs, building creator tools after Twitch and a viral YouTube channel

here to get catch a flight, correct? Okay, let Nick know. How you doing? What's happening? Nice to meet you, Theo. Good to meet you, guys. What's happening? How you doing, fellow? Yeah, fellow content creator, streamer, accidental business guy turned into an influencer somehow. Introduce yourself to the stream.

Yeah, for those who don't know me, I'm Theo. I started I was actually doing a YC company for making stuff like this easier because I worked at Twitch for 5 years. I wanted to be easier to do live content collaborations. So, I built Zoom for streamers. Make it easier to bring a guest like you like mine in HD.

I'm assuming you guys are actually not using OBS. That's cool. But we built everything around OBS so that you can use your professional existing solutions. Copy paste somebody straight from your browser into our into OBS at 1080p.

What you're using if you're using Hangouts or Zoom in the We're an alternative to Hangouts and Zoom. We're like better. But to be clear, we don't really focus on this product anymore. We built it because it was so needed and nothing else like this existed before. And I saw the need when I was at Twitch.

We won half the top streamers. Our reward was 8K a month. So we started exploring more. It was like one of those things where you can get all the most important customers and have a tiny business. Yeah. Yeah.

I had a buddy who built uh this amazing tool for helping make documentaries and I was just like this is a very small market man. Oh yeah. And I was like this is the best. I was making YouTube videos like video. What did you So did you guys tag them all? Kept the product running. It's still running to this day.

It's relatively easy to maintain. Thankfully, we uh I'm proud of what we built there. But at the same time, I wanted to better understand creators.

And I just missed going deep on tech cuz when I was at Twitch, my favorite time of day was lunch and dinner where I could just nerd out with these super experienced engineers. Co took that away from me.

So, I built my YouTube channel to better understand what creators needed and to just get all this weird tech stuff off my chest and it blew up almost immediately. I'm still I the last Do you do you have a head of membership? So, you've seen the browser company video. I love that. So, uh, it was a fantastic reaction.

Jordy was saying the same thing in the morning. Yeah, I I mean I I think it's a fantastic outcome. I'm super happy for everyone involved. I think I think I can see Atlassian like wanting to take the browser very seriously.

And so there's a way that in the fullness of time that it will look like, you know, incredible deal for both sides. Uh, but I did see the video. I was like, wait, had a membership? What's going on there? There's just certain things in that scenario that are like hard to not have your eyes catch.

So, the chaos I've engaged with since my YouTube channel blew up accidentally, just got more into DevTools stuff, built some DevTools as well for the business, got so annoyed with the state of all the AI chat apps. Deep Seek V3 drops, like, "Oh my god, this model's incredible. " But the website was somehow even worse.

So, I said, "Time to make a better one cuz I'm a nerd about like full stack web and application performance and just quality of experience. I helped build a lot of Twitch chat when I was over there, the world's as far as I know, fastest updating text interface on the web. " Oh, yeah. People love Twitch chat.

Yeah, Twitch. It's so much better than YouTube. It's unbelievable to this day. So I wanted to make this unpack that because I believe that Twitch chat is specifically like doesn't just endlessly load. It loads blocks at a time. It's blocks but they come in really fast. Is that a mistake? No, that's by design.

That's absolutely by design.

Like chat readability is like comprehensive like your ability to comprehend what's happening in chat is like Lewig and he was saying like could I start over if I didn't have any Twitch followers and he did this experiment and he was like I think I have an edge just because I'm good at reading chat.

And I was like I never would have clocked that as like an as like a thing but it is. Actually, one of the things I do differently is I film all my YouTube videos live on Twitch. So, I'll be like and I have chat open next to my like return feed. Yes.

I have a team that like helps me that we built some custom software to auto chop the individual topics so we can get a video out within an hour of it being recorded, which I'm really proud of.

But the goal is really to do it live so any like mistakes I make, any sources I need help finding, any weird comments or questions I would get about the thing can happen while I'm filming. Yeah. So then the final thing is much better. Yeah.

It just cuts like it takes us an hour and a half to film an hour long video and then like 30 minutes to edit it. That's great. I'm really proud of our workflow there. That's cool. Super fun. Uh, was that a content creation injury? Uh, got in a fight with a Firefox user. Joking.

It was a skateboard injury from a long time ago. Oh, wow. Slowly built up. Yeah, I was a sponsor skater for a little bit. I really into that to this day. But, uh, yeah, 10 years ago had a really bad 15 years ago had a really bad wrist break.

Also tore the entire ligament for my thumb and it's just slowly been like falling off of my hand. So, finally got that reconstructed. Will you you should build an app that uses uh computer vision to teach people how to kick flip. I think there's a there could be a bull market in that in that space. Yeah.

It'll be slightly bigger than the one for content creator tools. No, but it's a it's it's a public service, right? Teaching the world to kick flip. You just come out. Our mission is to kick flip.

Something that's been fun for me recently that I actually really appreciate you guys for, too, is it seems like the hunger for people to understand how the startup stuff actually works has been growing a lot recently. I've always been a nerd about it. Really, I've been investing in a lot more.

I think I've been over a 100 YC startups at this point. It's been really fun for me and love it. The and recently it feels like I can actually talk about that stuff more where previously people's eyes would just glaze over. They wouldn't care.

But I'm doing like one startup e video a week at least right now and they're performing incredibly well. The response has been awesome. It feels like people are ready to talk about this now. It's a really good time. Finally big enough.

I mean you look at the the the traction on like the actual Y cominator account and like on YouTube and this has like over a million followers. Still one of the most underrated YouTube channels, too. Like the old Michael Cyel Dalton podcast like I reference it all of the time. So good. Yep. Yeah.

And I mean that they've but all the stuff that Gary's done, they've done really absolutely love all of them. It's like like the Y Combinator like program, Y Combinator content, the Y Combinator partners, everything I went through there is a huge part of why my YouTube is successful and now why T3 chat's successful too.

I wouldn't trade it for anything. Makes sense. What uh what's a what's your goal over the next 5 10 years? If I had a 5 to 10 year goal, I would be probably not here. I'd be working on it. I have no idea. I've always kind of just went with the flow and that works really well.

My thing's always been it's better to be late than early. I find that people try way too hard to be early to a thing and it ends up kind of rotting their brain a little bit. Like imagine you saw how big powerful smartphones were getting back in the day. You're like, "Oh my god, this is obviously the future.

Everything's going to be on phones. So I'm going to go all in making Java applets for the Kaioera Echo and Blackberry. Are you better or worse off than somebody who got into app development 2 years after the App Store came out? " Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it's better to be late.

Everybody told me I was too late when I we made our chat app and we're as far as I know the fastest growing third party chat app. Wow. Crazy. Fantastic. Uh we've been asking everyone two questions. Uh who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? History makes it tough.

I would say like alive or modern history like alive makes a lot easier. Modern history. I think Tim Sweeney is my personal favorite. The way he's aligned his business is incredible. Like to this day he still owns exactly 51% so nobody can outvote him.

his focus on making everything better for developers, knowing the flywheel will eventually like fund him back. It's kind of like Apple strategy, but way more focused on developers, which I care a lot about.

Even things that have been a flop like Epic Games Store were with the goal of getting developers more money because he was tired of Apple getting subsidized with 30% revenue from an indie game dev. Yep, that makes a ton of sense. Uh, what did you what did you think of the the um Apple launches today?

Apple launch today was, as a nerdy tech and video guy, I love it. The iPhone 17 Pro is a actual like monumental leap in what you can do for video production. Have you guys paid attention to any of that stuff? I'm sure these guys are going to love it. I just know 14 48 megapixel like better camera. That's cool.

But the No, I mean that they added Genlock support. Okay. So like full Blackmagic S like integrations. You can do time code with a new USB like device they partnered with Blackmagic to make.

You can do crazy synchronization shots where you get like 20 iPhones at different angles and do like frame by frame like like freeze frame 3D shots and stuff with it. That was normally you need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars before. Now you just get like 20 iPhones and a couple USB adapters. It's insane.

Yeah. And that's going to be even cheaper in like 2 years when these things and ProRes RAW which is really cool too because I know way too much about cameras. I'm really nerdy about this but uh the Red camera company had an exclusive patent on compressed raw video encoding where on on camera specifically.

So the reason that all those like USB or not USB like external HDMI recorders got popular Atmos is a business because of Red's patent. That patent allowed them to just get away with things they absolutely shouldn't have and shut down every other camera company trying. The patent was they had succeeded in suing Apple.

They succeeded in suing DJI. They almost got the barred from the US. They succeeded in suing Sony, Canon, a bunch of other companies. They were suing Nikon. Nikon said, "How expensive are you guys? " And bought them for like $30 million. So now the patent's not being enforced.

So Apple got to put ProRes Raw in the new iPhone, which is unbelievable. That's wild. Actual raw video encoding on a phone is just I could not have imagined that even 2 years ago. That's crazy. Uh, other question we've been asking, how do you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? Minecraft. Minecraft.

I was Minecraft servers. Yeah, somebody else said this. I if I hear from a founder that they started Minecraft servers, I don't even think twice. I just write the check. Yeah, that's crazy. It's so crazy. It's sneaker botting. Sneaker bottle way back like buying and selling stuff on eBay.

It was popular in like the '9s, 2000s. Yeah, there's always one of those every generation. It's been really fun to see. And now I feel like people skip the step and just go straight to the business, which is interesting. Just start an enterprise fast. Crazy. Yeah. Just going to like the founders Inc.

events and seeing how many like excited young founders there are now is just something I never would have imagined before. Like when I was a kid, it was the promise like the exciting thing is you'll get to work at the Google campus one day. Like that's what you were aspiring for.

Now you're aspiring to be here and that's a really interesting shift. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Are you GPU poor, GPU rich? I'm GPU middle class. GPU middle class. Well, you could pick a hat if you want one. Oh, I want the GPU poor hat for sure. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Middle class. You got to go.

You got to go up or you got to go up or down. Well, thank you for joining. It's not properly fitted, but you will fix that for sure. Yeah. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for meeting you guys. Let me know. You want me to comment on any weird stuff in like the AI chat space or UI or whatever?

No worries at all. I miss even more of them than you guys do. Let me know if you ever need help with anything. I'll be around. Have fun, man. Cheers. Have a good rest of your day. Lightning round. Let's Let's Oh, there's people out there. Okay. Okay. Let's run it. Let's run it. Let's run it. Come in quickly.

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