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 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.
