The Startup Story

Geige Vandentop, co-founder of StreamYard

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About this episode

My guest this week is Geige Vandentop, co-founder and CEO of StreamYard. For those that are not aware of StreamYard, they are a livestream platform that allows broadcasters and creators to automatically distribute your video feed to numerous popular platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and even LinkedIn.

As you can imagine their business blew up in a huge way in 2020 as events all over the world were being cancelled, and brands were trying to figure out had a move their engagement online. Well, they responded to the demand successfully and in 2021 they completed the sale of the business to Hopin for around 250 million in cash and stock.

There are various online articles that speak about the acquisition and one of them from TechCrunch actually shares that the time of acquisition Stream Yard has scaled itself to 30 million in annual revenue and they had zero external capital. That is an amazing accompanishment and Geige will unpack his journey in this episode.

In fact, the StreamYard journey is a very quick one, because it was just three to four years from concept to acquisition. So for anyone who has tried to launch a technical solution that timeline has to impress you, and so will his entire startup story journey.

In this episode, you'll hear:
  • How Geige didn’t grow up around entrepreneurs. Instead he followed his fathers path and pursued math and science. This led him to do an electrical engineering degree.
  • Geige explains that he didn’t like his degree but did enjoy the internship they were sent on, especially his internship at Intel where he met his Co Founder Dan. These Internships provided them with their first entrepreneurial experience. Together they built a music visualizer but the major flaw in their product is that they didn’t speak to customers.
  • Geige explains how they came up with StreamYard, he shares how they did loads of market research and user testing before writing a single line of code.
  • How Geige and his co-fonder focused on ensuring that StreamYard was always customer-centric. To the point that every week they would livestream so they could directly to their customers.
  • Geige explains how they weren’t planning on selling their company but the partnership with Hopin was perfect. He explains that in a 3 to 4 year window the idea was conceived, the solution was developed, the business was scaled and the acquisition was negotiated.
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    StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/

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    The Startup StoryBy James McKinney