The StreamElements Situation Just Got Worse (WTF)

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]A couple of weeks ago, a screenshot started circulating in the creator community of a staffer at Stream Elements, the platform powering most streaming platforms who was telling creators they had 30 days to save their assets because the platform was shutting down. Nobody knew if this was true and then a bunch of videos came out about how Stream Elements was shutting down, but the reporting has been pretty thin.

[00:00:25]So, I did my research and I'm going to walk you through what actually happened.

[00:00:30]So, this is Stream Elements. If you are unfamiliar, Stream Elements is a suite of tools for live streamers. They integrate with Twitch, YouTube X, and others. 23 million creators over the life of the platform. They powered the majority of Twitch content. They've got free tools like alerts, chat bots, overlays, tipping tools, and sponsorships for creators of all sizes, which we will get into later. If you watch live content at all in the last decade, you watch something sponsored or powered by Stream Elements. Stream Elements was founded in 2016. They launched in 2017 from Tel Aviv, Israel, which I am surprised that they have not been just brutally cancelled from the streaming industry as a result of being attached to Israel. According to a former team member, the internal mantra was every decision led back to one question. Are we doing right by creators? So, they had this creator first mantra and it wasn't just marketing language. It was something they legitimately cared about. What a lot of people don't know about Stream Elements is that they are partially responsible for cooking streams existing. The Stream Elements team pitched HelloFresh on cooking streams because HelloFresh wanted to work with streamers. It was CO era. Everybody was staying home. People were cooking from home. And so HelloFresh invested a 750K test budget into working with some of the largest streamers. That test budget quickly expanded from 750K to 2 million a month.

[00:02:12]Roughly around $30 million per year was spent on HelloFresh and Factor campaigns with streamers. Though the Stream Elements team was making a ton of money, the former team member I spoke to said it was like walking into a casino for the first time, putting a max bet on a slot machine, and hitting the jackpot.

[00:02:37]There were a couple of different teams.

[00:02:38]So, the team running these brand awareness deals was at peak 60 to 70% of total profit at Stream Elements. They were working with HBO, Disney, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Spotify wrapped. And apparently the these companies were really happy with the results that they were getting because they were working with large creators who were converting really well. In September of 2021, Stream Elements raised $100 million from SoftBank's Vision Fund 2. They had co-investors which were PayPal ventures, Mortekch and their existing investors also reinvested during this round. They had a leadership change as well from Doran Near being the CEO to Gilhir being the CEO. Their headcount increased so they hired a lot of engineers. I talked to a CEO of a competitor product within this same category who said they raised at a hot time. Basically, the peak. I had six conversations on Zoom and the whole round was done. So, at this point, everything for Stream Elements is great.

[00:03:49]They raised a bunch of money. They seem to be profitable. Their model works. The brands are happy. Creators are happy.

[00:03:56]But that's not the way that this story ends. So around the same time of the raise, the leadership team at Stream Elements introduces this system called boss, back office something system. I dug and for the life of me could not find what that first S and the acronym actually stands for. This is a video of Orperry. In this video, he says that boss is our business brain. It allows advertisers to hire tens of thousands of content creators for sponsorships while accurately predicting results. Or Perry is one of the co-founders in Tel Aviv.

[00:04:35]He claims that the boss system is one of a kind. No other system in the world can do this. The team at Stream Elements dedicated 50% of the raise to building boss. $50 million. This is the time when Gil Hirsch takes over as CEO. So he takes over with the series B. He's the champion of boss internally. You can see he is CEO at Stream Elements from June of 2021 to July of 2023. Or Perry was the public face. Okay. But Gil Hirs is like the architect behind the scenes.

[00:05:18]Most of the series B raise went to engineers and like analysts and things for the boss system. So the company at this point triples in size. And remember, you've got two different teams. So you have the brand awareness team. This is the team that is doing 60 to 70% of the revenue for stream elements. They are working with large creators and working on brand awareness campaigns with large brands like HelloFresh. And then you have the performance marketing team and these are the people who are more likely to utilize the boss system. They are going to um create these deals and campaigns with smaller creators and really try to scale up what the brand awareness team was originally doing and seeing so much success with. So, this was pitched internally to them that the boss system was going to be a way to make their jobs easier. Phase one was going to automate all of the performance deals and get a lot of small creators on board. And then phase two, they were going to consolidate and kind of make the awareness team's workflow a lot easier as well. Phase two never happened. Phase two never happened because the brand awareness team was laid off. So they were told that this system was going to make their jobs easier. They were doing 60 to 70% of the revenue working with the largest creators on Twitch. Brands were happy and they got laid off and instead all of their work went over to the performance team and several other things happened afterwards which we'll get to in just a second. Now, we don't know if the layoffs were always the plan or if maybe it just the team became impractical in the middle of the build or maybe they were trying to cut costs so that they could spend more on the performance marketing and boss side. But for whatever reason, these layoffs happened. So, let's look at the technical reality of the boss system.

[00:07:31]The competitor CEO that I spoke to said, "There's nothing super novel here." This is the equivalent of saying, "We're training our own model, but your model's never going to be better than what Google or OpenAI is shipping." So, Google's Big Query has similar functionality already, which means that the boss system is not completely unique. and it seems to be a bit of a forecasting issue in the leadership of the Stream Elements company.

[00:08:02]The competitor CEO also said it's not like they're building a space shuttle.

[00:08:06]It's an ad tech product. It shouldn't cost $50 million.

[00:08:10]So, I think that's my biggest question still to this day is why did it cost $50 million to build this? Stream Elements leadership might have believed that they could build something defensible, which is what usually happens with tech and why technology can lead to such large raises and money from VCs. So, they thought that they could build something that it would take other companies forever to build or maybe would even be impossible for them to build.

[00:08:40]Unfortunately, that was not really the case. It seems like the stream elements leadership mistook a co era jackpot with HelloFresh for a replicable system that they could do many many times over. HelloFresh was this weird convergence during the pandemic of like cooking streams with at home spending increasing so dramatically, Twitch sponsorship novelty. I remember back in 2020, my YouTube channel to help Twitch streamers tripled like overnight because people were staying home in lockdown. We saw this massive flow of interest into atome hobbies and activities. Per the team member leadership openly said on calls, "We need to find the next two to three HelloFresh clients." They tried to replicate this system with Go Puff, with Chinese mobile games. Nothing really quite reached the scale of HelloFresh and the $30 million per year that they were spending. So, they didn't place a bet on a steady market. They bet on hitting another jackpot, which is a really risky bet to make. And it seems similar to what a lot of other companies did during the pandemic as well. This is why we're seeing a lot of layoffs right now because people overhired during a period of time when everybody was staying home. So, this is probably the streaming industry equivalent of that mistake in other industries. Something else I discovered in my research, if you have been on Twitch in the last like six or seven years, you probably saw a ton of ads for a game called Raid Shadow Legends. There were so many streamers who were doing the Raid Shadow Legends partnership. You would have your community members like play through the trial and then you would get a certain amount for every person that made it through the trial. So Raid Shadow Legends was the other major performance client. This is owned by Pllearium and Pllearium is actually based in Tel Aviv.

[00:11:02]Both of these companies are operating in the same small Israeli gaming ecosystem.

[00:11:09]This is how the first big performance deals manifested. They had proximity, relationships, opportunity. This is why Raid was such a dominant part of these streaming platforms for so long. What's interesting about the Raid: Shadow Legends campaign, if you saw it, is that because all you had to do was have a unique email address and make it past the trial of the game.

[00:11:39]streamers could kind of maybe commit fraud because all you had to do was have your community members create new email accounts and run through the trial over and over and you would get paid for each one. So, in mid to late 2022, a bunch of these layoffs happened on the brand awareness team. And these were people who really cared about creators who busted their ass to make sure that they were creating the best campaigns and doing good work. The internal framing framing from the leadership team was that they were reassessing the business.

[00:12:19]In the back of everyone's minds, we were thinking, "We just got $100 million. Why are we talking about runways?" So at this point, the leadership team was talking about the runway, which is the amount of time that the business can continue to operate because they had the funds to do so.

[00:12:38]In mid to late 2022, they were concerned about Runway, not even a year after they had raised $100 million.

[00:12:48]Is Is that what I'm getting from this?

[00:12:51]Is that what you guys are getting from this? Cuz that's how I'm understanding it. Anyways, so there's some weird confusion happening here. They tripled headcount within 12 months, but the revenue did not ramp up to match the increase in labor. So, it's very likely their labor costs were incredibly expensive. They were burning through money every single month and they weren't making more money to make up for that. If we go into the glass door reviews for stream elements, you can see that they have a 3.5 out of five based on 125 ratings. 58% would recommend to a friend. 59% approve of the CEO. Whenever you start working through these reviews, people are saying that they promised us several times there would be no more layoffs and then there were. There were three rounds documented through 2022 and 2023. Seems like they had around 200 employees at their peak and something like maybe 70 today, not including any of the layoffs that they have likely done recently. To be fair to leadership, it's possible that they genuinely believed each round would be the last.

[00:14:06]After the awareness team was laid off, they were so good at their jobs. They went to some really cool places. They went to Tik Tok, Fortune 500 marketing companies, threeletter agencies, you might be able to guess who. They founded new companies. Like these are some killers for sure. And you know, here's the thing with layoffs. Like it is a reality in business, especially with early companies. I have led marketing in over 60 startups. These are very early stage companies similar to stream elements.

[00:14:41]And it is very common that early team members are not necessarily the same team members that are needed as a company grows and matures. And it's not malice. It's not mean and it's not personal. This is why a lot of people say it's just business. It sucks, but it does happen. And there are ethical examples of this happening, too. But also, or Perry has consistently said publicly that stream elements only makes money when creators make money. And I think that framing fits the original business model. But whenever we start to look at the boss era model where the top 2 to 500 creators were not the priority, that is is less clean. And it's also less clean if you're raising $100 million from venture capital. They they want you to be profitable. According to another one of the former team members that I spoke to, their brand relationships mostly left with the awareness team. So the Spotify wrapped activations died. HBO, Disney, and McDonald's were all gone. This was probably foreseeable by the stream elements leadership team because relationshipdriven sales doesn't really survive when the people who have the relationships with the businesses leave and then their marketplace narrowed to performance only which were some meal kits and mobile games. They also had a couple of other failed bets that they made. So, they tried to do the same thing that they did for Twitch over on YouTube, and this service never got off the ground. They tried with Tik Tok as well. The project didn't survive, but the thinking behind it influenced where Tik Tok's tooling itself went, including things like Tik Tok won. So, they had multiple bets, multiple failures. It's likely that there's a mixture here of execution being the problem and some of it is just all of these categories are really hard and they're all very different in unique ways. You can't do the exact same stuff on Twitch that you can do with content over on YouTube or over on Tik Tok regardless of, you know, if you're able to get $30 million a year from a single brand or not. In February of 2025, Twitch embedded stream element sponsorships directly into the creator dashboard on Twitch itself. You can see this on the press release on Gamesbeat.

[00:17:28]You can also see this article on Tube Filter. So, this gave streamers of all sizes access to sponsorships from Factor and many other great brands directly from Twitch itself. They didn't have to go to Stream Elements publicly. This was framed as a major win, but insiders have a totally different read. One of the former team members I spoke to said that they tried to get on Twitch officially for years and Twitch was not interested.

[00:17:54]The CEO of the competitor tool said that Twitch always plays Switzerland with third party tools. They refuse to favor any one company. The fact that they broke that for stream elements shows how close Perry was to Twitch leadership. So your question now might be, well, wasn't Gil Hirs close to Twitch leadership and he was the CEO, right? This is true from June of 2021 to July of 2023, at least according to LinkedIn. Or Perry is a co-founder of Stream Elements, has been there since the very beginning. It seems like he's been CEO since January of 2016 to the present. But then there's also this guy Doran Near who has been cited as the CEO as well. It seems like he was CEO from August 2016 to May of 2021. So basically what we're seeing here is that the the responsibility of being the chief executive officer for stream elements has probably changed hands many times based on maybe things like availability. Um who had the skills or the connections or the insight to be able to run the team at the time um who had the energy to be able to do it because it is a big responsibility. So stream elements getting featured in the creator dashboard on Twitch could have been just or Perry building a really strong relationship over several years.

[00:19:28]It also could have been an absolute hailmary from Twitch themselves trying to save Stream Elements because it was embedded into so many creators workflows across their ecosystem. So, if stream elements went down, it's likely that some streamers might have moved platforms or might have moved tools or might have stopped streaming entirely.

[00:19:50]The point here is that whenever these sponsorships got featured in the creator dashboard on Twitch, the quality of them completely changed. Whenever the brand awareness team was working with the largest like top 200 creators on the platform, they were getting great results and the companies were happy.

[00:20:10]Whenever these sponsorships made their way into the creator dashboard, they were really low stakes. They had bad rates. The ROI for the companies was bad. Streamers weren't signing up for them as much anymore, especially not these mid to largesiz creators who were actually getting a really strong ROI.

[00:20:31]This is interesting because if you've ever heard of tools or brands or let's say like startup ideas for the streaming space where people want to package a lot of small creators together and sell that reach to sponsors, stream elements did that and the ROI they were able to get for brands was really low. So maybe that's not actually a viable business model. I find that to be fascinating.

[00:20:58]And this brings us to the present May of 2025.

[00:21:03]As of this week, the sponsorship dashboard on stream elements is completely empty. No active campaigns, nothing. Just absolutely zero. You can see here the performance side, so Raid Shadow Legends deals, HelloFresh, the boss power deals are completely gone.

[00:21:20]And the awareness side was deprioritized years ago. So, the marketplace that was supposed to generate the revenue to justify a $100 million investment from SoftBank and all of the other investors is not currently operating. On May 21st, as I was finalizing this video, Stream Elements posted a public statement where they say they're not shutting down.

[00:21:46]They're in conversation with an amazing partner. They say tools and data are safe. They say they've secured funding while partner integration is underway and that pending creator payments will roll out over the coming weeks. We don't know who the partner is. It could be Rumble. It could be Kick. It could be just a good Samaritan who doesn't want Stream Elements to go down or maybe a super rich streamer who has a ton of money to be able to bail them out. Maybe like a a good-hearted sweet girl Pokemon. So, we also don't know. Okay.

[00:22:21]What in conversation with means in practice? Is this an acquisition? Is this a loan? What is this? This could be a signed term sheet, a letter of intent, or other like very early stage discussions. What is this going to look like over the next few months as all of these creators are waiting for their payments from the sponsorships that they did? Typically, when an acquisition is a is providing this bridge financing during a diligence period, that is the language that that a company is going to use. They're going to say, "We're getting a bridge loan." And that loan is to like hold them over until the next period of funding can hit. Whether that is like cash flow from the actual users themselves or if that is, you know, maybe from sponsorships or from uh maybe another period of funding. Who knows? We don't know when this deal closes. We don't know if Stream Elements is going to look any different on the other side of this deal or if they're going to be maybe integrated into Kick or Rumble next. The thing is here, creators have been affected. This is Zasty Bestie who said that they're currently owed over $1,000 from sponsorships. That was guaranteed payment on May 3rd. They posted this on X on May 19th and they haven't received payment yet. So, there are potentially hundreds of creators in this position, maybe thousands, who knows, that have not received payment.

[00:23:54]They have bills to pay. They have food to buy. Groceries are expensive right now. We can't all raise millions of dollars, you know what I mean? When this dashboard on Stream Elements is empty and the people who previously answered your DMs have been laid off and you don't get paid.

[00:24:15]That feels like negligence. That feels like you don't matter and it makes creators really angry. This is also just what happens whenever a company's operational capacity collapses faster than they can keep up with the obligations of their business. It seems like the Stream Elements leadership team knew that something was going wrong towards the end of 2025 because January 29th of 2026, they launched a crowdfunding campaign called Keep It Live. They say, "For over 10 years, we've been keeping Stream Elements 100% free for over 23 million creators. Help us keep it free and stay alive basically." And you can see this is signed by or Perry. If we go to the crowdfund page, 2 million creators are going live with Stream Elements this month. $300,000 in monthly tool costs. And this resulted in the last 30 days in 81 supporters and $2,000 raised. Probably what's happening here is that they are trying to get money to float them for these creator payments.

[00:25:27]almost similar to a bridge where they're hoping maybe more money is going to come in in the future and they need a a smaller, you know, specific amount to be able to um pay everybody out and just like keep paying all of the costs associated with the business.

[00:25:48]So, this campaign obviously did not work. Kind of sad, honestly. Kind of sad. If we go to the nope, this post, we can see that Nathan or die um from Nerd or Die asked a really good question. He says Stream Elements raised 100 million in VC funding back in 2021. That's not a small amount. Asking for voluntary contribution to keep the lights on at this point feels like either something's gone wrong or there's a bigger shift happening. So or Perry comes on and explains where all of the money went and this is where we get very specific figures from him. So I made a post you can follow me on Ashnne Christ on X. He said 25% went to salaries. So this is normal labor is often the highest cost for a business and we need to pay our employees so that's fine. 25% went to server hosting. So AWS, 50% went to the boss system, BOSS.

[00:26:51]$50 million was dedicated to this predictive advertising tool. So what's interesting about this keep it live crowdfund campaign is that usually a business does not want to signal to their investors that things are not going well. And that's what this would immediately signify to anybody who was paying attention. If you have to ask your users to give you money because you don't have any more funds, like where did all of that money go? What happened?

[00:27:22]Was there mismanagement? Should we spend on something that we shouldn't have?

[00:27:26]There is a lot of questions an investor is going to have in their head if you get to a position where you are asking for money publicly. So, the previous team member said that this is classic Perry. He was being very reactive, very impulsive. This likely didn't go through PR because if a PR person had seen this, they probably they they might have been like, "Hey, h maybe this isn't a good idea." So, I don't have personally a massive criticism about this. I actually think founders who can speak directly to their communities, whether that's in campaigns or if that's in this video that Perry put out, is actually a huge strength because they don't have this PR filter. They're not using a ton of media training. It's like it comes across very genuine and real, but it's also kind of a sign of like potentially accountability structures. And I'm I'm being generous here because I don't know or Perry guys, I have no idea. I like a founder who can, you know, be honest and genuinely speak to their community, but we also have to understand that each good founder, even genuine founders, need accountability systems around them.

[00:28:36]From the video that or Perry made, he said that 2025 was pretty slow on demand for creator traffic, which isn't necessarily wrong. We have seen some people pulling out of Twitch and there's been a bunch of botting and so sponsors are less interested in the platform just overall right now because the ROI they can get on campaigns is low. However, Mooney from Crowd Control, so she's a senior marketer over at Crowd Control had a really good point. She said, "I definitely agree that the model was broken, but advertisers for Stream Elements products specifically pulled out because mid to large-siz creators were not doing these sponsorships anymore because of the rates. So, there was lower ROI and then there were marketing budget cuts. They got acquisition from mid to large creators, especially on referral programs like HelloFresh and Factor. But after that, pay for streamers got lower and lower.

[00:29:41]So, the market became mostly small streamers, which of course are not going to drive the same CCVs and reach and therefore results on these campaigns.

[00:29:51]So, it seems like there was this death spiral that happened because Stream Elements actually cut the brand awareness team that was doing all of this good work that the sponsors were happy with and instead tried to package up all of these small creators. So, here's what the users of Stream Elements need to be thinking about right now.

[00:30:13]You've got two things. One is your data.

[00:30:17]Stream Elements has banking details.

[00:30:20]personally identifying information authentication data, the boss and invoice payment records on potentially 23 million users. The former team members that I spoke to said that they were surprised there has not been any issues with data management before. So that is the first thing you need to think about is your data. That is a viable concern. Two, competitive dynamics. Who buys Stream Elements or who the partner turns out to be determines a lot about what happens to your overlays, your chatbot, your viewer data, your relationship, your alerts, everything. If it's Kick, Twitch's biggest competitor will own the tool set that powers a huge part of Twitch creators. If it's another player, the dynamics might shift in a different way. So, if it's Rumble, I don't know. A lot of people are going to be probably really pissed because of Rumble's political affiliation. So, this is just standard consideration in acquisition of a company. So, if you're using Stream Elements, it's worth being aware of. The competitor CEO that I spoke to actually said, "I don't think anybody is going to buy them. I don't think Kick will buy them. I don't think Rumble will. I think everyone's going to wait it out and then try to grab pieces in the bankruptcy."

[00:31:44]This is because if you do acquire stream elements in its current state, you are also responsible for all of the missed creator payments. So that is something that all of these companies are thinking about during the diligence process.

[00:31:59]Although access to an email list of 23 million creators would definitely be worth $100,000, $300,000. is like if you get access to that information, that could potentially be a huge influx of new users for Kick or Rumble or whoever ends up fronting the cash for this company. VC funded streamer tools, are they actually even viable?

[00:32:26]Streamlabs raised VC. They sold to Logitech in 2019 for around $89 million plus a $29 million earnout. That was really smart. So, they got out before the pandemic and before all of the funding really started to cool off. Stream Elements raised 111 million from SoftBank and others. As of recently, they're looking for a buyer or a rescue partner. Tiltify, the charity fundraising tool used by Markiplier, Pokemon, Courage, Jack Septic Eye.

[00:32:59]basically every major streamer running a charity event raised 8 million across multiple rounds since 2014. Most recently, a series A extension in September of 2023. By Tiltifi's 2024 reporting, they say Twitch fundraising on their platform dropped 21% year-over-year. That is terrible for the charities. Like, they need this money.

[00:33:22]Streamloots raised 8 million from Bessemer Venture Partners in November of 2020. They haven't raised since. Meld raised 2.5 million seed round from Notation Capital in November of 21. They have nine employees and haven't raised again. Reream raised 50 million from Sapphire Ventures and Insight Partners in October of 2020. They haven't raised since. They pivoted away from streamer specific positioning to general video and streaming creators across lots of platforms. and Throne, the wishlist tool, raised $830,000 from Ryan Hoover's weekend fund and disfellows in early 22. In 23, instead of raising a series A, which would be the next round of funding, they did something almost nobody does. They returned the investor money and went bootstrap. The throne founder said, "We know of many companies with a limited market size but healthy revenues that could operate profitably, but they're stuck in the VC cycle." So, all of these streaming platforms, tools, these free tools that the entire industry uses raised a ton of VC money, but now they're in an interesting position.

[00:34:41]There is nobody that has raised recently and the CEO of the competitor product that I spoke with said that investors will not touch streaming tools right now and that it's very difficult to find a VC who will actually invest into streaming tools because they don't pay back. I think this is probably a massive red flag for all of us that if Stream Elements who raised $110 million could not make it. What about all of these tools that raised less money and now can't raise because VC is not interested? This infrastructure powers streamers. This is how live content operates. This is how it functions. Are a lot of these tools about to go bankrupt? Is this model is this streaming infrastructure just impossible to be financially viable at the scale that VC requires? Like whenever you get VC investment, their expectation is for you to become a unicorn. Most of the teams that seem to be doing well right now are like bootstrapped or solo creators. It's possible that there is a future where streaming infrastructure and streaming tools do not raise VC because they can't get the scale that makes it viable for investors, especially because most of these tools are not paid. They are free tools. So, how would these companies even make money in the first place?

[00:36:19]Because streamers expect all of their tools to be free. Bringing it back to stream elements for a second. If I was or Perry, I'd probably argue something like this, I would say we had a profitable business. It was capped because it was very manual. We had the top 200, maybe top 500 streamers. We had low margins. In order to become the company that our investors expected, we had to automate. We had to industrialize and create more systems and more technology that could scale. The HelloFresh playbook worked at $30 million a year. If we could replicate it with even two or three more clients, we would have a hundred million or 200 million ARR business. We bet on automating this layer and we bet that the brand budgets would keep flowing into Twitch. But the bet didn't pay off.

[00:37:21]That's more market timing than a strategic mistake. And the HelloFresh moment was real revenue. So the bet wasn't completely insane by the leadership team. But it seems like the business that they were trying to automate. So connecting creators to brand budgets depends on something that resists automation, which is the relationship between a creator and their audience or the relationship between the brand awareness team and the creators.

[00:37:50]And that's not really a forecasting problem that you can solve with $50 million ad tech system. Those are relationships that need to be honored.

[00:37:59]If Stream Elements had made a bet on this boss system today, it might have played out differently because there are a lot of AI tools now that can make building something like this insanely affordable. So maybe Boss was just a bet that they made a little bit too early.

[00:38:21]But maybe this bet is just like structurally incompatible with the streaming industry and how sponsorships and advertising works. Maybe you can't package a bunch of small streamers together and sell them to sponsors. If you're a creator, regardless if Stream Elements is saying their tools and your data are safe, the best move is to act as if you might need to migrate. So, download all of your assets, export all of your configurations, request payout on anything that's outstanding, set up chat bots and things elsewhere so you're just ready just in case because we don't know what is going to happen. Invest in your relationship with your audience.

[00:39:05]Don't become too dependent on tools that might disappear, especially because some of these other companies might end up going bankrupt as well and shutting down. The competitor CEO also said there's one human being behind this who put 16 years of their life into it and is going to walk away with absolutely nothing. The employees will get severance. He won't get anything. So that perspective assumed a bankruptcy scenario with an acquisition potentially happening or a bridge or something. The math might shift a little bit here, but not by that much. After SoftBank's senior preferred stock takes its position, after other preferred holders take theirs, what's left for common shareholders in a distressed acquisition is usually like very little, sometimes nothing. So the team that got cut years earlier moved on. creators are looking at new tools. The founder who spent 16 years on this is in a bad position. So, there's no real winner in this story.

[00:40:06]It's easy to look at $110 million and assume that somebody somewhere made out fine. We don't know. This isn't the outcome that anybody was building towards. And I think that's something that we can all agree with. The Stream Elements team members, the former team members that I spoke to said we were robbed of more time together. The path forward was so easy to see. The fact that was not what was chosen kind of sucks. They really wished that hund00 million had been invested into the brand awareness team because it was already doing 60 to 70% of the revenue for stream elements. So why not pour more gasoline on that fire? That's my question. What I can say with confidence and I think my personal perspective of this is that this is a really expensive lesson and we should all learn from it and heed the other warnings that I shared in this video. We don't know what's going to happen with Stream Elements. We don't know if other companies are going to shut down and we don't know if VC funded companies will work in the streaming industry and what does that mean for the future of this industry?