We’ve hustled hard over the last five and a half years at Kamcord in pursuit of helping people capture and share interesting moments from their digital world. We built a mobile gameplay recording SDK that was on 200 million devices and grew a live streaming community focused on broadcasting your phone screen to 2 million active users.
Today, we’re excited to share that 12 Kamcord team members including the founders have joined Lyft. We’re eager to continue our streak of building cutting-edge technology, creating delightful experiences, and helping people earn extra income.
The transportation space is very different from mobile live streaming but we see a lot of parallels. Prior to Kamcord, broadcasting your mobile screen involved cables and desktop software. As Steve Jobs would say, YUCK! We simplified the process to one tap on your phone and invested heavily in making the broadcaster-viewer interactions natural and fun. In many ways, Lyft has done the same thing for getting from point A to point B, pioneering the peer-to-peer ridesharing model and placing an importance on a delightful experience for the driver and passenger.
Having worked on a startup for five and a half years, we believe that much of the impact that you can have on this world is tied to market conditions and timing. We were able to quickly grow our mobile gaming community on the backs of many mobile gaming hits but hit a plateau in terms of content watchability because the mid and hard-core mobile gaming categories didn’t evolve as fast as we would have liked.
At Lyft, we are very bullish on the positive effects that transportation-as-a-service can have on personal car ownership, safety, the future of our cities, and the environment. With autonomous vehicles on the horizon, it’s going to be a fun next decade in the transportation space. We’re eager to leave our mark on the world and felt that Lyft, with its ideal combination of vision, product-market fit, culture, and size, was where we could have the most impact.
Not that we needed another reason to join forces but meeting with CEO Logan Green really cemented our belief that Lyft is the right place for us. My co-founder Kevin and I felt a deep connection with Logan on mission, values, and grinding through challenges. Despite being in very different stages of the startup lifecycle, we bonded over the commonalities in our entrepreneurial journey. Much like John and Logan, Kevin and I have known each other for 10+ years. We joked about the early days when we had to work incredibly hard to get any traction at all and the times when we had to work harder to keep up with the user demand :) Working with great people on big problems trumps everything else and the close-knit KamFam is beyond pumped to be part of the Lyft team.
And finally, a huge, huge thank you to our community of investors and users for all the support over the years. We know you’ll be cheering for us in this next chapter at Lyft.
