In part II of Chris Dixon’s Founder Stories interview with Livestream co-founder Max Haot, Hoat offers his analysis of what he encountered while attempting to secure funding between roughly 2007 and early 2008. At the time, Haot feels VC’s were hovering over technology that allowed people to digitally record events and watch the action on their own time.
However, as presidential candidates crisscrossed the country during the ’08 election, Livestream caught a break thanks to an invite from Gannett who started using Livestream (then known as Mogulus) to broadcast the activity. Pleased with the results, Haot says Gannett invested $10-million and delivered a bundle of cash that arrived just in time.
Livestream pocketed the money shortly before the financial sector imploded, and after it did, the team seemed to sharpen its focus. He tells Dixon, we needed “to operate under the assumption that we will never get anymore cash and we started monetizing and deploying our premium business, understanding our customers more and rebranding to Livestream.”
Haot adds renaming Mogulus to Livestream was “one of the single best decisions” the company has ever made.
As Livestream looks ahead, Hoat is broadening Livestream’s offerings by blending various forms of media (text, photos, pre-produced video clips and live video) into a scrolling event pages in order to “extend the event online.” He says Livestream is not just “live video” but “a stream in realtime”
Make sure to hear his full thoughts by watching both videos, and check out episode I of this interview here.
Past episodes of Founder Stories with leaders from Gilt Groupe, BirchBox, Eventbrite, and Flipboard are here.
Livestream’s mission is to connect people and live events. Livestream offers event owners a complete set of hardware and software tools to share their events with a growing community online. More than 30 million viewers each month watch thousands of live events from customers including The New York Times, Facebook, ESPN, SpaceX and Warner Bros. Records. Founded in 2007, Livestream is headquartered in New York with offices in Los Angeles, Ukraine and India. http://www.livestream.com.
Based in New York, Max is co-founder and CEO of Livestream. Max is an expert in user generated content, broadcast technologies and workflow. He previously founded ICF a media asset management platform which was sold to Verizon Business in 2005. He held positions as VP of Digital Media at Verizon Business and Senior Vice President at IMG Media - the television and interactive arm of the sport marketing giant (www.imgworld.com). Max is a recognized digital content industry pioneer and...
Chris Dixon is a Partner at and co-founder of Founder Collective. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch. He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, and Hunch, which was acquired by eBay. In addition to his work with Founder’s Collective, Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that...
Ustream is the pioneer in live social video streaming, boasting the largest global community with more than 80 million viewers and broadcasters. The company’s innovative cloud technology enables anyone – from entertainers to consumers, to companies to non-profit organizations – to easily connect and broadcast in real-time. Founded in 2007, Ustream is a San Francisco-based company that has grown to more than 160 employees within their San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Budapest offices. Company partners include Panasonic, Samsung, Logitech,...
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