Michael Seibel is a group partner of Y Combinator, and the co-founder and former CEO of both Justin.tv (which later became Twitch) and SocialCam.
Seibel co-founded Socialcam with Ammon Bartram and Guillaume Luccisano. Socialcam was founded sometime between late 2010 and 2012, with various sources reporting multiple dates in that timeframe. Socialcam was a mobile app that allowed users to post, edit, and share videos online, similar to Instagram. The app had a built-in editing feature that included picture filters, sound clips, and more. Users could sign up through email or Facebook, the latter of which allowed users to find and follow their friends who were also registered through the site. Socialcam allowed unlimited length videos and cloud storage. In July 2012, Autodesk announced it was acquiring Socialcam for approximately $60 million. The deal was expected to close in late 2012, after the end of the company's fiscal third quarter. Socialcam was closed in October 2015.
Justin.tv was a livestreaming website where users broadcast themselves online doing various activities in real-timereal time. Seibel co-founded Justin.tv in 2007 with Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, and Kyle Vogt. Justin.tv established different categories for video broadcasts so users could sort by content. Hosting sexual content on the site was prohibited. Accounts were called channels, and live channels were set at the top of each applicable category page. At one point, Justin.tv had over 30,000 channels available. Some categories included Featuredfeatured, Animalanimal, Creativitycreativity, Entertainmententertainment, Newsnews, Pokerpoker, Sportssports, Socialsocial, and Otherother. The site's video games category quickly proved to be the most popular by far; the category eventually had more user views than all of the other site categories combined. In June 2011, Justin.tv created a separate platform for video game streaming, which they called TwitchTV. In 2014, Amazon bought TwitchTV for $970 million. It was rebranded as Twitch Interactive.
Before beginning his work in the technology field, Seibel was a finance director for a 2006 U.S.US Senate campaign. He graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a Bachelor's degree in political science. As of 2022, he lives in San Francisco, California with his wife Sarah and their son Jonathan.
2007
Michael Seibel is the CEO of Y combinator, investor and Founder of SocialCam.
Michael Seibel is a group partner of Y Combinator, and the co-founder and former CEO of both Justin.tv (which later became Twitch) and SocialCam.
Michael Seibel has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 2006. Since January 2013, he has worked at Y Combinator as a full-time partner and CEO of the YC startup accelerator program.
Previously, he was a co-founder and CEO of Justin.tv from 2007 - 2011 and the co-founder and CEO of Socialcam in 2012. During 2012, Socialcam participated in Y Combinator, raised angel financing from a group of investors, and sold to Autodesk Inc. for $60m. In 2014, Justin.tv became Twitch Interactive and under the leadership of Emmett Shear and Kevin Lin sold to Amazon for $970m.
Before entering the tech world, he spent a year as the finance director for a US Senate campaign and before that, graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in political science.
As of 2020, he lives in San Francisco, CA with his wife Sarah and their son Jonathan.
Michael Seibel is the co-founder and former CEO of both Justin.tv (later known as Twitch) and Socialcam. He has been a full-time group partner of Y Combinator since December 2014, where part of his job is to reach out to underrepresented minorities in both the company itself and Silicon Valley. He is also an investor and advisor of many companies and funds, including Reddit, Qwest, PayFazz, and Squire.
Justin.tv was a livestreaming website where users broadcast themselves online doing various activities in real-time. Seibel co-founded Justin.tv in 2007 with Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, and Kyle Vogt. Justin.tv established different categories for video broadcasts so users could sort by content. Hosting sexual content on the site was prohibited. Accounts were called channels, and live channels were set at the top of each applicable category page. At one point, Justin.tv had over 30,000 channels available. Some categories included Featured, Animal, Creativity, Entertainment, News, Poker, Sports, Social, and Other. The site's video games category quickly proved to be the most popular by far; the category eventually had more user views than all of the other site categories combined. In June 2011, Justin.tv created a separate platform for video game streaming, which they called TwitchTV. In 2014, Amazon bought TwitchTV for $970 million. It was rebranded as Twitch Interactive.
Seibel co-founded Socialcam with Ammon Bartram and Guillaume Luccisano. Socialcam was founded sometime between late 2010 and 2012, with various sources reporting multiple dates in that timeframe. Socialcam was a mobile app that allowed users to post, edit, and share videos online, similar to Instagram. The app had a built-in editing feature that included picture filters, sound clips, and more. Users could sign up through email or Facebook, the latter of which allowed users to find and follow their friends who were also registered through the site. Socialcam allowed unlimited length videos and cloud storage. In July 2012, Autodesk announced it was acquiring Socialcam for approximately $60 million. The deal was expected to close in late 2012, after the end of the company's fiscal third quarter. Socialcam was closed in October 2015.
Before beginning his work in the technology field, Seibel was a finance director for a 2006 U.S. Senate campaign. He graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a Bachelor's degree in political science. As of 2022, he lives in San Francisco, California with his wife Sarah and their son Jonathan.
2007
2005