Pitch your start-up to venture capitalists, all via Snapchat
LOS ANGELES — Justin Kan, a pioneer in live video streaming, has refashioned his Justin.TV brand for Snapchat — and later this month, will be holding a funding competition for start-ups via the video-focused social network.
“The audience we want to find is on Snapchat, and not Facebook or Twitter,” says Kan, who is also a start-up investor in companies like Tilt and Zenefits and a partner in the San Francisco start-up incubator Y Combinator. “It’s what the kids are using.”
Y Combinator, which has groomed companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit, is looking to make a $20,000 investment in early stage tech companies. Kan says he’d like it to go to high school students, the folks who are on Snapchat all day long.
“A lot of our best founders are young,” says Kan, 32.
Kan’s daily Snapchat Story is his own series of short, 10-second video stories. That's different from the official channel in the Snapchat Discover program, where companies like the Food Network, Tastemade, MTV, BuzzFeed and People magazine program offer made-for-Snapchat content.
The competition shows how Snapchat is increasingly becoming a contender for engagement with the social network heavyweights.
Once known as the app for photos that disappeared within 10 seconds, Los Angeles-based Snapchat has evolved into a major video competitor to YouTube and Facebook with its Story section, where anyone can create short 10 second videos that stay online for 24 hours. Snapchat says it has over 10 billion hours of videos viewed daily on the app.
To view the non-branded videos, you need to follow the person who makes them — like justinkan, in the Story section of Snapchat. (http://snapchat.com/add/justinkan)
When he co-founded Justin.TV with Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel and Kyle Vogt in 2007, iPhones and video streaming were both in their early stages. Kan said they were trying to “make our own video reality show" with live-streaming of daily life, both with Kan and others. The offering foreshadowed by nearly a decade the current live-streaming push led by Twitter's Periscope and Facebook Live.
His company shifted into a place to watch videogamers, which became TwitchTV, which was sold to Amazon for about $1 billion in 2014. Amazon has used Twitch to expand beyond livestreaming games to activities such as a Julia Child marathon.
Kan earlier this year brought the Justin.TV brand to Snapchat, with a live video channel and the mission of finding and funding the next great tech startup.
Kan, whose LinkedIn profile calls him a "Professional Snapchat Q&A Answer Giver," says he's spent the past few months giving advice to entrepreneurs, and that three of the YC companies just funded contacted him on Snapchat before they were interviewed.
"Because of the interest, we've decided to take it to the next level and do a pitch competition where we will potentially fund a startup through Snapchat."
To participate, companies apply, (http://justinkan.com/snapchat-pitch-competition) and then Kan will select finalists to “take over” his channel, in a series of 10 second pitches. Then Kan will reach out to his Snapchat followers to vote on the submissions.
“Since we are investing our money, we will be making the final decision on the winner, but it’s always good to know what people are thinking.”
The application deadline is May 19th, and finalists will take over the channel between May 23rd to May 26th.
His thoughts on seeing live mobile video take off in a big way, as it has recently, with Periscope and Facebook Live?
“It’s cool. These technologies have been around for a long time, they just weren’t in apps for Facebook and Twitter. We had the same functionality in 2011.”