The shift to gaming worked and Twitch became profitable before the tech heavyweights started to take notice.

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“Companies are bought not sold, an investment banker told me that once and it is very true,” Kan says. “Basically what it means is you can’t control selling your company, you can only sell it if somebody wants to buy it, and you need someone to want to buy it.”

Kan says the first step was convincing the tech giants that they really wanted to buy Twitch and from his perspective that mainly involved making sure that conversations were started with the right people.

While Twitch’s sale price in 2014 was “mind-boggling” at the time, Kan says in retrospect it has turned out to be a pretty good deal for Amazon. The platform, recently valued as high as $US15 billion, serves more than 2 million viewers at any given time in the day.

Kan says Twitch’s continued success has come on the back of a couple of trends, including video gaming gaining as entertainment and competitive multiplayer gaming gaining traction.

“It used to be that games were more like movies where a game would come out and then people play it for two months and then it’s over,” he says. “And then games became more multiplayer, it’s more like poker or chess or something like that where you play against other people, it’s timeless, right. And so Twitch rode that wave, where games were competitive multiplayer online and so you can make content from them over and over and over again.”

The coronavirus pandemic has further boosted the demand for gaming and other applications of Twitch, such as musicians using it to stream performances to paying subscribers.

“During the pandemic, obviously gaming has become almost like a primary activity,” Kan says. “People are at home all the time, they need to entertain themselves, gaming has seen huge growth in all the gaming companies and so Twitch is no exception.”

Since Twitch’s sale, Kan has spent time as a partner at leading accelerator Y Combinator, founded a legal tech startup Atrium which folded last year, and now runs his own startup incubator Zero-F while creating podcasts and a YouTube channel.

The way hr sees it the influence of gaming on the tech sector is only going to continue, pointing to the growth of $US10 billion chat platform Discord which started out as a means for gamers to communicate.

“I feel like a lot of the technology that happens in gaming, starts in gaming and it goes broader than gaming,” he says.