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.
