Julian: Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Eric Tang, founder of Livepeer and Livepeer Studios. Livepeer is a video infrastructure built for Web3 developers. We're gonna get into what that even means. Eric, I'm so excited to have you on the show and chat with you about not only technology, but also Web3 and.

Kind of its evolution and even its current state you know, for those who don't know where it is and it's and it's maturity and all the technologies that are being built on it and what the, what it even means to build on Web3. But before we get into all that good stuff, what were you doing before you started Livepeer?

Eric: Yeah, thank you Julian, for inviting me. Yeah, what was I doing before starting Livepeer? You know, I've always been a entrepreneur, a New York based this is the third project that, that I've started. Prior to this I started a company called Life hyper Public. It was acquired by Groupon back in the heyday of Groupon.

And then I started another company called Wildcard, which you know, really inspired you know, the Livepeer, which has been around for about five years. Yeah. Yeah, so always been in, in tech. Started out as a technical engineer. Product manager. Yeah, now founder.  

Julian: Yeah, I love that. And talk about the acquisition. I'd love to talk to founders who go through, you know, acquisition process because it's so unique and so interesting the different decisions you make, you know, when you're going through this process. Did you have a few companies interested in the product, or was group one kind of the one that was kind of head and shoulders above the others that were interested in what you were  

Eric: building?

Yeah, for sure. I I think, you know, The approach of the acquisitions is always that it's better to approach it when you don't need to be acquired. So, so for us it was lucky that we, you know, we were kind of evaluating whether to to raise a round of funding. Yeah, really we weren't thinking about being a, an acquisition at all.

And and group Home was actually one of our biggest users at that time. We, you know, we were approaching some of our our investors and through the investor kind of relations network got connected to the bd like the BD arms at Groupon. So they heard about us. , they're like, oh, like we're trying to build this team internally.

We're already using guys. You know, would you be interested to, to talk about what it. To, for the acquisition that happened. And, you know, at that time I, I was like in my early mid twenties, no idea what the what an acquisition meant. So I just went through that crazy, right.

Yeah. Yeah. Would you have done it differently?  

No. No. I think it was really educational experience for me. Just you know, kind of, we had really great partners in, you know, in , our law firm was actually really helpful in that process. So they really coached us in, you know, kind of what, like what are the questions that you should be asking for?

Like, how do you approach it? Yeah. Like when they ask certain questions, right? And so it's always a, I feel like every acquisition is a bit of a dance. You know, they're trying to, you know, people are trying to negotiate in that process, right? But, you know, I think. , both sides go into the process with like the end goal in mind and with the aligned end goal in mind it oftentimes come out to to be a good outcome.

Yeah. And then of course there's also the post-acquisition, you know, process, which is also a great learning experience.  

Julian: Yeah. And what did you learn in particular that you, you've, you kind of remember, or maybe even that you would give another a founder advice if they're going through a similar process?

Eric: I would say like my number one advice would probably be like, know really well what your bottom line is cuz like, I guess the end negotiation process, right? Like you need to know just like exactly what you are not willing to give on and where you're wanting to give on. Right? And so just to be very clear and be consistent throughout cuz you know, through that process.

you know, emotions can be, can, you know, go high and low, right? So, so like, just having that clear consistency, I think is the most helpful thing. That's like the, yeah the important thing. And then like, post-acquisition, I think it's, yeah again, like setting really clear expectations going into it and and have partners work as partners instead of as as adversaries.

And sometimes it can, people can easily fall into that trap. and and, you know, just makes it, makes the whole process much harder.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. When you say post-acquisition, were you kind of aqua hired through that process, or were you working with them to make sure that technology was, you know, integrated, you know, within their team?

Eric: Yeah. We, you know, we were building a location based data company. You know, and this was back in, you know, 2010. And when, you know, location, like location platforms were just starting. Yeah. And we built this data platform that an API developer API that allowed anybody to kind of query based on a coordinate like all the different points of interests around that coordinate, right?

So imagine if you're like scrolling around Google Maps, you need to know like all the good restaurants, right? That's the API that you can call and get all the information. You know, we like categorize those information really well. Have good pictures and, you know, things like that allows the developer to build like a beautiful application.

And Groupon was, you know, of course one of the biggest location company at that, at the time. And they were relying on our data a lot internally. Yeah, so, so they really wanted to they really wanted to have that capability internally. And so eventually, you know, through after the acquisition, we like our product became the internal Groupon data product.

right? That, that powered all the different applications inside Groupon. And yes and yeah it was really interesting to kind of see through that. You know, helping through the acquisition process, helping with the technical integration process learning how a big company, you know, over 10,000 people actually work, right?

Like try to integrate with all these you know, almost like small companies within a large company. It's really interesting.  

Julian: Yeah. Is there something that, you know, you saw that Groupon did well, I'm always curious and ask this question a lot for founders who enter either a big company, whether they're working or have some kind of, you know, intimate relationship with, is there something that big companies do, Groupon in particular that you kind of translated or took into Livepeer and the other companies you've started running?

Anything in particular, whether it's structure or culture or yeah. Anything within that vein that you think kind of. Impre left an impression for the future companies you've built?  

Eric: Yeah. Yeah. I would say it was really, it was a really interesting phase in that company's history when we got acquired, because it, they were going through just the fastest.

I think Groupon was the fastest growing startup at the time. Like in history, right when they were, when when they're in their heyday and the way they grew is, you know, through lots of acquisitions. So we were in this environment. , everyone was super entrepreneurial, right? It's essentially like a bunch of small startups that got put into this one environment and everybody's trying to figure out like, how can I create impact?

How can I get value? Right? And people are really go-getters. So like, the way that, you know, that office, you know, we were, you know, in the Palo Alto office where the engineering headquarters were and just the amount. interesting ideas that, that people had sometimes related to the core business.

Sometimes not, right? Like, but it was really cool to see how, you know, if you put a re if you put a group of really entrepreneurial people together that it creates like a totally different atmosphere. Yeah. Then like what you would think of as like a, maybe like a more sleepy big big company culture.

Yeah. And that was exciting. So, so I try to emulate that, you know, but in my subsequent companies, right, like always looking for really entrepreneurial people and people with really interesting ideas and try to foster the culture of people bringing up good ideas and sharing those ideas and yeah, and that's always been a really helpful thing with building.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I wanna circle back on culture for sure. And in terms of Livepeer and structurally, you know, what you're doing that you think, you know, is kind of leading the company in the right direction. But before I get into that, what got you into blockchain and Web3 and started playing around with this technology?

It. , you know, live period, I think was, is 2016 is when you opened the doors and started working on the project. But was it then and there that you started really integrating with the new technology or was it before that and when and what kind of catalyzed your decision to, you know, kind of dive into to blockchain and Web3?

Eric: Yeah. So when, you know, we, after, you know, after the group session, I I stayed there for a little while and eventually, you know, We started another company with the same co-founders that I, you know, started the previous company with. And in this company we it was the early days of mobile and we tried to build a mo, we built a mobile data platform and then an application on top that was, you know, one of the top apps in the Apple app store in 2017.

But throughout that period, because the business was built very much on top of other mobile platforms, right? So , you know, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, those types of mobile platform that really cap captivated the mobile audience at that time. Because we were building on top of those platforms.

And you know, at the very beginning there were very, those APIs were very open and, you know, they corded developers to come and build on top and gave a lot of opportunity to those developers that are building on top. But over time every single one of those platforms started to have their APIs to be more restricted and to the point where they never really opened up all these they basically captured all the opportu.

In the underlining platform. , never kind of shared shared those opportunities with developers that were built on top. Like perfect example is Zenga, right? Like Zenga grew so so much on the back of Facebook and eventually Facebook's like, you know what, we're gonna take gaming now by Zynga, right?

And then they like and that was a huge hit for the company. So, you know that the lesson that we learned there is that don't don't build on other people. Like don't have platform risk. Don't build on these. Proprietary close platforms and have your whole business you know, be beyond that.

Right. And so when blockchain first came out, that type of like permissionless innovation really attracted us. And, you know, B Bitcoin came out sooner than Ethereum did. And we were interested, but when Ethereum first came out that the alphabet came out, the white paper came.

That's when we really started getting into the blockchain space first by just building open source project within the Ethereum ecosystem. And, you know, for a while we built, we tried to build video streaming into the core Ethereum stack kind of building with the core developers at the Ethereum Foundation.

And that was, you know, a really fun time.  

Julian: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. For those who don't know, you know, in terms of like the mechanics of Ethereum, what in particular was more exciting about that particular technology? Or was it the relationship that it had between the nose and you know, and how it kind of, the whole like proof of, well, it's changed from proof of stake to proof of work.

Eric: Proof of work to proof of stake. Right.  

Julian: Proof of work. To proof of stake. Yeah. So what about the technology and particularly were you particularly excited about and started building in that?  

Eric: Yeah. You know, before, before Ethereum came out you know, Bitcoin was kind of, the leading the leading blockchain, right?

And with the most momentum, certainly and Bitcoin is very focused on like transfer of value, right? You have a token. Yeah. Yeah. You can send each other to token. And that's the extent and people try to build other. types of Programs on it, but it was very difficult. And in fact, Vitalik was trying to build that on top of Bitcoin, realizing that it was gonna take too long, then decided to build Ethereum.

Right. And the, you know, at the very beginning the vision of Ethereum was really to build this like general purpose blockchain that, you know, not only allow people to transfer value, but also allow people to execute programs. And with that ability, you can now basically do anything you know, You can.

And we see all these subsequent you know, trends that happen on top of Ethereum, right? So, so I think the core of that smart contract layer is what really what really make, made us excited.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. what in particular about video and what were the, you know, limitations that you talked about?

That there was proprietary platform limitations for other technologies that were being built and outside of Web3. But what in particular about video? Was exciting to you in starting to, you know, create an infrastructure where you can build you know, video and integrate different video streaming platforms.

And I saw there's another tool that it was built on was like video meeting platforms as well and really just kind of, , you know, fostering this community of video in a Web3 world. What in particular about video was limited and why did we select video as the as a technology or direction that you wanted to go with Livepeer and its infrastructure?

Eric: Yeah, for sure. Like, that's a great question. There, there are a couple of reasons we, you know, why we decided video. One, one is that, you know, video is, you know, Video is about 80% of all the traffic on the internet. Right. And you know, when we started, you know, it was about, you know, maybe 65, 70% five years ago, and now it's only grown.

Right. And so if you think about it, like most of the stuff that we do on the web is like video based. Yeah. And most of the data that, that, you know, goes through the wires video. So at the very beginning when we started working on, you know, in this blockchain space and. realize the like the profound like impact that it can have on not only the technology, but really it's like a social technology, right? It changes the paradigm of how services get created and how users relate to each other. We built pretty strong condition in the very early days that you know, in the future, everything was going, like, everything was going to be blockchain based in some way.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so if we, you know, take that to the logical conclusion, well, like people's behaviors don't change that much. People still wanna watch video. Right? So, so in this, in the future state of the internet where everything's blockchain based, we need blockchain based video infrastructure in order for applications to be built that, you know, can still allow people to watch video. And you know, at that time no one was building that. And we had some video streaming experience. We knew what it would take to, to build build video infrastructure. So, so we thought, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna take that. It's gonna be a long, it's gonna be a long kind of vision.

And, you know, at the very beginning, we laid out a seven year roadmap of the project with different stages. And, you know, we started building from that point.  

Julian: You're what, six, about six years in. How far along is that roadmap? Has that changed at all while you've been building?

Eric: Yeah, for sure. You know, things always kind of evolve in unexpected ways, right? So I would say one thing that one thing that has emerged is that you know, it, things always take longer to build. Yeah. So, so we are probably at year number three, four out. Seven year roadmap. You know, we were too optimistic when we made that roadmap, but but not too far, but it is quite a common common theme in any kind of infrastructure building in technology, right.

Things just take a long time. Yeah. But I think we would've never thought of the rise the rise of DeFi, the rise of NFTs now, the rise of decentralized social, like all these different trends. It's just so interesting. To see how this thing emerged. Right. So, you know, when we first started, you can kind of see the direction, you know, things are very foggy, right?

You can only kind of, you know, try to predict the future, but living through it, actually seeing it, you know, turn by turn and how it plays out, it's been, it's just like a really interesting experience.  

Julian: Yeah. And from a consumer standpoint, is there any improvements or differe. , like if I'm a consumer working with a technology that is built on the infrastructure what changes will I see? Or will it almost be a seamless transition?  

Eric: Yeah. I think from a user experience on, on the application level I, don't I don't think it will be too big of a too big of a difference, right? Like, and I guess what I mean by that is the user experience in in the block in blockchain based applications will become pretty good or will become, you know, the same as any application that we use today.

The value that everyone gets will be different. And I think the number one difference would be that users will actually own their data. Instead of instead of. Lease giving their data to the platform or kind of feeling like they're renting. You know Yeah. From the platform, they're gonna feel like they actually own what they have.

Right. And that's a huge difference. It's you know, you live in a house, you always wanna own your house then to rent forever, right? It's and I would say right now on the internet, we very much live in like, feudalism, right? where like every single user is renting access to Facebook, to, you know, to, to Twitter, to like all these web two applications, right?

And, but we're gonna e evolve beyond that. We're gonna have like, true digital ownership, which blockchain gives us. And you know, there's already really interesting emerging applications that are attempting to solve that problem. Only gonna see that that accelerate.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Describe Livepeer studios and how is it different from Livepeer the infrastructure?

Eric: Yeah. So Livepeer to Infrastructure is a decentralized network, right? So it's made of, you know, different nodes around the world. Think of it as like, almost like Airbnb from computers, right? Like people plug in their computers into this network and. They can provide you know, video streaming services video processing services to this network, and at the same time be paid for the work that they do.

Right? And then there's a whole protocol that exists to make this secure and reliable. And the interesting thing is you know, not only kind of hobbyists do this, but professionals do this as well, right? So you see the same the same trend. Happened in the Bitcoin mining world where, you know, at very beginning it was hobbyist and then now it's like certain, like, you know, like it uses so much energy, which is not great, but it's been like professionalized and data centers.

Op operators do this right at a very high level. Same thing happens you know, with other networks like Livepeer, right where you have. Professionals with data center access, like running running these operations so that they can contribute value and gain value from from working within this network.

So, so that's the life peer network, right? But in order to access the life peer network, you need to run a life peer node. And not everyone can run a Livepeer node, right? Even if you are a software developer, you don't necessarily want to run your life, run a node in order to access a service.

You'd rather just be able to write an application and access a service, right? So Livepeer Studio allows you to do that. Like, we call it that a we call that a gateway service. And what that really means is just It kind of takes away all the complexity of blockchain tech technology and ma and makes it really simple for a developer to be able to create an application within, you know, 30 minutes.

Right. And it feels exactly like a like, like a, like the, you know, the application development experience is very similar to what they're used to. And that's what Life Pure Studio does. It's kind. We call it like a one stop shop for video developers that want to want to create kind of Web3 and blockchain centric applications.

Julian: Yeah it's amazing, you know, how you've evolved that to now allow developers to start building. I think when companies kind of focus, especially when they're working with developers and technology that enables developers to work it's awesome to see how much more efficient and.

You know, a lot of these newer applications become readily available to consumers and even just built, because, you know, all that technology's kind of pre-packaged there. Tell us a little bit about the traction. So how many developers are, or how many developers, how many people are building on your project or in studio?

How many are new technologies are kind of integrated into the infrastructure? What's exciting about this year's growth and what are you particularly excited about next year? .  

Eric: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think the traction has been pretty great. You know, but it's been recent and especially in this blockchain space where you know, you only, like I'd say in the last year or so, when is when we really started seeing like consumer facing applications being built and becoming mainstream, right?

Like probably the like. The NFT craze is the first is the first example of that, right? Open sea, you know, type applications like that, where it really captured a consumer attention for life, period. There's been, you know, hundreds of applications that have been built on the platform ranging from hackathon projects all the way to, you know, like venture funded companies that are using us, right?

And right now the Livepeer. Process you know, anywhere between two and a half to 3 million minutes of video per week. Right. And you know, this is like kind of new content that gets created on a weekly basis. And you know, we, it is, we're still just at the beginning, it's a tiny little bit compared to the 80% of the internet, right?

So, so we still have a long way to go. But what's exciting is I think application developers are seeing. More and more application developers are seeing the promise of Web3 and how they can actually build these applications, right? Because, you know, video streaming is just one aspect.

When you're building an app, you need all these other infrastructure pieces to be mature in order to build like a high quality consumer facing application. And it's just very recent that all of these pieces of infrastructures start to, to become good. To build like the next YouTube or the next Facebook. Right. And which is really exciting to see.  

Julian: Yeah. What are some of the biggest risks that Livepeer faces today?  

Eric: Yeah. I would say there's some market risk, right? So there's the risk of , you know, the blockchain industry goes through cycles, right? So there's right now I would say we're in the down cycle right now.

You know, lots, there's, you know, frauds happening in this space, right? People, there's a lot of criticism. And generally people are the, I guess general perception of blockchain technology on Web3 is, has been more negative in the recent time than before. Yeah. So, so that, that's always that's always a risk.

And I'll say the other risk is just the technology evolving not fast enough. Right. And, but we think that's not the case. We think there's already really interesting use cases that, you know, everyday users can be used that they can be using. But you know, we're still in the early days for sure.

Right? Yeah. So, so seeing. Timing is probably the hardest thing to get right. And that's always the, and oftentimes also a big risk.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. If everything goes well, what's the long-term vision for Livepeer?  

Eric: Yeah. I would say if everything goes well Livepeer would just. the be the video infrastructure for any application. Right. And the, because the interesting thing here is that no one owns Livepeer at the network. Right? Life. There's a company you know, that we've started that you know, is responsible for fostering a community, right? But Livepeer is also an ecosystem in community.

There's other people who are contributing to Livepeer and there is a way for the contributors to get to get. For their contribution. Yeah. And that's the really important part, right? And so if you extend that into the future one day Livepeer would just be the running underlining infrastructure of any video application because it's more sc it'll become more scalable.

It'll it's already seven to 10 times cheaper than video services that are offered by like cloud services, like, , right? And it's only gonna get even cheaper and much faster. We think it's gonna, the cost of u the cost of using the Livepeer network, it's gonna approach the cost of electricity, right?

Because at the end of the day, that's like the cost that the infrastructure providers are using. Yeah. So, so I think that's gonna be, that's gonna be 1, 1, 1 aspect. The other aspect, that it'll be, you know, an open platform. Right? And what that, what I mean by that is anyone can build applications on top of it.

No one can stop you. You don't need to register for an Amazon account in order to, to use Livepeer. You don't even need to have a bank account to use Livepeer, right? You can have cryptocurrency and then build. Of course it comes with risks. So, so there has to be good safety measures and moderation in place to make sure harmful content doesn't get doesn't get proliferated.

And those are problems that, that we're definitely working on and, you know, have a have an idea on how to solve at scale. But the upside there is that we have this type of open innovation just unlocks so much more. That we aren't even seeing, right? If we're, if we look at the main way that we consume video today, it's, you know, one person creates some video, they record it, and then they put it onto a streaming platform.

And then they hope that, you know, they hope that people will watch it, right? And they try to get people to watch it, right? And what happens is these types of videos start to become, start to look. And they start to start to become like very controlled genres that are basically influenced by the streaming platforms themselves.

Right? Yeah. And that's a very limiting way to think about the vi the a, the art of video creation. Right. Yeah. And people should be able to create all kinds of videos, right? And different, and the different types of video can, should have different values to different audiences.

And video is really just a way of communication, right? It's a way of one person providing value to another person through talking to them or through showing them something. If you think of it in that way, the, like, the possibility is endless, right? And there's going to be different types of tools that become available for video creators to ma to be much more effect effective in creating videos.

You know, we're seeing a lot of really re interesting recent AI breakthroughs in, in, in how that can impact videos, right? So all of those things can grow much faster in an open platform where where no one is the bottleneck and people can can kind of contribute in this open. So, so I think that's the really exciting upside that I'm looking forward to.

Julian: That's amazing. If you weren't working on Livepeer, what would you be doing? ?  

Eric: I don't know cuz I I've been wor I've been doing Livepeer for so long. I I have no idea. Probably if I wasn't working on Livepeer, I would probably be working on some cool Web3 video applications. Right. I, you know, I guess through working on the infrastructure layer for the last five, six years I've seen a lot and I think there's some really interesting opportunities that I wish people are working on.

But maybe if I wasn't working on this, I'd be working on some, something like that.  

Julian: I love that. I love that. I always like to ask this next question for, you know, just gems of knowledge and kind of thinking about what you know, has influenced you and impacted you, but whether it was early in your career or now, what books or people have influenced you the most?

Eric: That's a great question. I would say, yeah, when I was in high school my senior year of high school, I, you know, I grew up in China and I came to the U.S. When I was 16 and two, my senior year in high school my teacher , my English teacher, gave us this book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

By this author Joseph Campbell, which is like a. Modern day philosopher. And this book is, it was like a grad school level philosophy book, which was a pain in the blood to, to read as a high schooler, especially English as a second language. But but it was really cool to like go through that and learn this idea of like the, like some, like someone's journey can.

Like one person's journey is one person's journey. the way that you can relate to that journey can be very different. Right. And that's this whole idea of like the hero kind of with dozen faces. And by the way, this is the book that inspired Star Wars. George Lucas was was a student of Joseph Campbell and and invited him to, to.

To teach 'em about this and eventually through their conversations, inspired many of the character traits and the storylines of Star Wars.  

Julian: It's incredible. You know, how so many people can take different inspiration from whether it's pieces of knowledge or conversations, and it's awesome to see that, you know, hear you know, even all the way back in high school, you.

Kind of antithesis or kind of highlighted moment that really stuck with you. And it's always cool from founders perspective to hear what's been influe influential to them because I just think it, it speaks to how diverse founders are in, in particular. But I think founders also have a very specific way of tackling the world through anecdotes and problems and solving and I have a similar mentality.

Of, you know, kinship and what leads to the kinship around founders. So, Eric, I always like to get, I know we're at the end of the episode here, and I always like to give our founders a chance to give us your plugs. Let us know where, you know, we can get involved with Livepeer. Livepeer, studios.

What are your LinkedIns, your Twitters your website? If I'm a developer, where can I start building?  

Eric: Yeah. If you're developers you can go to Livepeer Studio. It's the easiest way to get started. It, you know, it'll take. 10 minutes to get an application going. And we're actually currently doing a promotion.

If you go there and sign up through the signup form which I believe is gonna be in the notes of the podcast is lvp.link/blc. Uh bcl you got a 30 $30 streaming credit so you can get started even easier.  

Julian: Incredible. Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself, Eric, and thank you so much for the stories, and thank you again for being on the  

Eric: Yeah. Thank you again for having me Julian.

Julian: Of course.