Or Perry, CEO and Cofounder of StreamElements, on How His Hobby Became His Career

“After we presented the business model over a lot of slides and decks, the seed funding investors asked me a question I wasn’t ready for: ‘If StreamElements fails and shuts down, what are you going to do?’

“I thought about it for 10 long seconds in silence in front of that room of investors. And then I said, ‘I’ll do it all over again.’”

That’s the spirit of Or Perry, CEO and Cofounder of StreamElements, the leading platform for live streaming and video content creators. Providing both a suite of professional tools and a thriving marketplace for lucrative sponsorship deals, the company is focused on helping creators make their mark and achieve their goals.

Pitango First joined Perry in making StreamElements a reality early on. Gad Huldai, an online marketing entrepreneur himself, recognized the critical role Perry’s company would play in the then relatively untapped field of streaming content and online gaming.

In this interview, Perry tells us about his journey from a dedicated gamer to CEO of a company serving over 22 million content creators worldwide.

Was there an experience in your childhood that you think shaped who you are today?

When I was six or seven, my mom brought home a 486 computer and I immediately fell in love with it. I immediately learned how to navigate MS DOS and activate games. And I became a gamer very, very early on.

I was so good with computers that my parents made a decision that today would be called a mistake. They left me unattended in front of a computer with internet access throughout my childhood and into my teens.

I was very competitive and I was very good with technology. So, I became one of the best players in the country in a game called Counter-Strike. I was a pro player and then a team leader, but I eventually realized that my reflexes were just not ever going to be as fast as some of the kids who were playing.

How did you go from gaming to business?

When I figured out that I was not going to be the best gamer in the world, I decided to start my own e-sports team. I named it Elementals Gaming – you can see how that “elements” theme follows me.

By the time I was 20, I had 27 players playing various games under my brand. We were getting sponsors like Microsoft, Razer, Kingston, Red Bull, and it was highly successful, but I felt that the gaming ecosystem in Israel needed to be built up a bit more. So I moved from owning an e-sports team to organizing e-sports communities. We went through a couple of companies until, at one point, we had the largest gaming website in Israel, with about half a million kids logging in to our communities every month.

I built up two main skills as a community business development manager. The first is how to build gaming communities through engagement. The second is how to monetize them. I learned how a lot of the big brands spend their marketing funds – what months they spend the most, what they want to see back, how reporting works for them, etc.

Eventually, we had a self-sustained gaming ecosystem. But I wanted to do more.

I got an opportunity to be the business development manager for TechData, an importer and distributor of PC components here in Israel. For over three years, I was involved in some of the most impressive, most ambitious home and gamer tech projects here in Israel. And I was making a lot of money for a young adult.

But it wasn’t gaming.

So I quit and went looking for myself again in the gaming world. That’s when I discovered Justin TV, later renamed Twitch. Most of the content on that website is live gaming and gaming communities.

I noticed that none of the content creators are really making a lot of money and that they are missing a lot of the right tech. At first, I started as a viewer and an online moderator, offering my advice to content creators all over the world.

Then one of them told me, “Hey, you seem to know what you’re doing. Why don’t you become my agent?” And so I did, and I helped him make some money. Then a few more of them then hired me to represent them in their dealings with brand sponsors so they could focus on creating content.

Back then, the tech creators were using for their feeds and viewer engagement was community made and free of charge. That may be fine on a day-to-day basis, but it’s not fine when you have brand sponsorship and money from advertisers. I soon realized that I needed to build something stable and trustworthy and that’s how we started – creating the tools we needed to support sponsorships.

Then something interesting happened. The creators that worked with me and my tools were getting much more engagement than others. Pretty soon, a lot of creators were coming to me for those tools and for collaboration.

That’s when I realized we need to scale it up and make this into a company.

There’s a big difference between being a gamer and understanding an industry’s business side. How did you develop that mindset?

It’s like in gaming – sometimes you find a chest full of gold and sometimes you find the monster.

You learn and you make mistakes. For example, when I started talking with Doron Nir, Gil Hirsch and Reem Sherman – my eventual StreamElements co-founders –I told them I wanted to raise a few hundred thousand dollars in order to take it from five creators to 50.

And they said, “Are you kidding me? You can make this into something huge. You don’t raise a hundred thousand dollars to make it to 50 – you raise a million and make it into hundreds of thousands.”

They were right.

We came together as a founding team and officially launched StreamElements in 2017. Starting as a suite of cloud tools for live-streaming content creators, we began building a comprehensive platform and gaining traction with content creators. We soon went from counting the number of creators using our solutions to measuring our percentage of the ecosystem.

Tell us about StreamElements

The mission of StreamElements is to help creators achieve fame and fortune. “Fame” means we help them gain and engage their audiences, and now, alongside a really good platform and thousands of tools for live streamers, we support creators using YouTube shorts, TikTok, and more.

“Fortune” is helping them monetize and make more money. To that end, we built the largest scale sponsorship marketplace in the industry. Hundreds of thousands of content creators partner with hundreds of brands for deals that are both lucrative for the content creators and ROI positive for the advertisers.

When you set out on this journey, how did you know which investors to reach out to?

I would split the experience of raising funds into before we met Pitango First and State of Mind Ventures and after. We’d already spoken to a whole bunch of VCs – small and big funds – and I remember the painful experience of sitting in meetings and trying to explain gaming – “You know, like Super Mario?” – and content creators.

Then we met Yuval Baharav at State of Mind Ventures and Gad Huldai at Pitango – and they got it completely. Since then, we decided that we would only partner with investors who know and understand our market. Pitching yourself is one thing. But if you need to pitch the market, it’s the wrong investor for you. 

How did having investors who understand your business benefit your company?

Having the right investors means that they’re working with you, not against you. We have a very supportive and positive board because they know what our project is. 

For example, Gad was one of the leaders in Empire Online, an internet marketing company that went public in the London Stock Exchange. They were very early adopters of online marketing for gaming, and were writing the playbook on performance marketing. Considering that StreamElements monetizes through performance marketing, you can see why having someone like Gad on the board is very useful. 

When you understand each other, you can agree on the challenges and align on the path forward to reach your goals. We speak pretty much every week instead of just at the board meetings, and one of the best benefits of this relationship can be measured in very concrete terms – we have grown tremendously.

How do you keep motivation high, both for yourself and for your team?

StreamElements is a very feel-good positive business. We don’t make money unless more creators make money. All the time we have somebody sharing with us how their life has improved. Sometimes it’s something small like, “Hey, you helped me make 500 bucks. I bought this new camera and look how good my stream looks.” But we’ve also had somebody send us a picture of a key with a message saying, “I’ve been working with you for the last two and a half years. And now I was able to afford my first house.”

It’s very easy to keep people motivated when the company is doing something good.

And that’s the secret to our advertising partnerships, as well. They’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the ecosystem and we’ve learned a lot about creator preferences, engagement rates, monetization, and ROI. We take that data and feed it into a system that provides what I believe is the world’s best matching algorithm for content creators and brands.

The system automatically curates creators, prices, negotiates, outreaches, tracks deliverables, tracks results, and iterates all day, every day – helping us get really good, really fast.

What does the future hold for StreamElements?

Growing and working with more platforms and helping more creators monetize. For example, our recent agreement with Twitch that brings StreamElement sponsorship directly to the Twitch creator dashboard.  

The majority of Twitch content is by creators using StreamElements tools. So, it was great when they gave their users access to our unique business model for sponsorships. Them saying, ‘We trust them. You should trust them too’ meant a lot to me and makes me very excited about the future.

If a young aspiring entrepreneur asked you for advice, what would you say? 

First of all, don’t do it alone. You can’t do everything by yourself, and you don’t know everything.

If you’re a first-time founder, get yourself a co-founder who is experienced and who completes you. If you’re good at sales, don’t get another person who’s good at sales. Get someone who’s good at tech. If you’re good at sales and you have a co-founder who’s good at tech, but neither of you likes to talk to investors, then get a co-founder who can be the CEO and manage the investors or the board. When it comes to everyone else around you, you’ve got to find people who are passionate about the market and about the direction and about the business.

If there’s nothing else that you can imagine doing with your life, that’s all the motivation you need. Personally, I can say that I’ve made my hobby into my career. I think that’s a very lucky position to be in.

So I have to ask: Do you still have time for gaming?

Not as much as I would want. But I would say more time-consuming than being a CEO is being a parent. I used to game after work, but now I get to go be a new dad. 

Until you become a parent like yours and put your kid in front of a screen.

No, no, no, no, no, no. Back then, the internet was way less scary for young people than it is today. It’s going to be a challenge raising a daughter in this world, so I advise caution when introducing youngsters to the online world.

You may have to raise her offline.

A CEO of a company that monetizes online content creators does not allow their kid to be online? It’s the dentist who doesn’t believe in toothbrushes.