Theo Browne

Founder and CEO of Ping Labs

Issue #267 March 9, 2023

About

Theo Browne is the Founder and CEO of Ping Labs, building better tools for video content creators and enabling you to create studio quality video without the studio.

Content creation is hard. Creating with your friends is even harder. We built Ping to make bringing on guests as easy as copy-pasting into OBS.

Prior to founding Ping Labs, he was a Software Engineer at Twitch.

He also writes about tech and content creation as well as creating content on his popular YouTube channel.

I do almost all of my work on the couch on my laptop. The desk is for meetings and videos.

Gear

2 items

Microphone Mic: Shure SM7B (most people are fine w/ the MV7) Buy

Speakers Speakers: JBL LSR305. I love them dearly. Buy

Interview

4 questions

› How do you spark creativity?

I don’t really believe creativity can be “sparked”. I optimize to be ready to act on it whenever it happens. I obsessively document any weird concepts and ideas in Notion so I always have a list to work from. When I feel like recording, I’m never more than 2 button presses away from starting. I’ll regularly pause a conversation to go jot down an idea. I envy people who can sit down and just come up with shit.

› How do you manage work-life balance?

By having two “jobs” that feel equal parts work and play. The YouTube success is a really nice balance to the stress of running a company, and the consistency of the company is a great break from the rollercoaster that is YouTube.

› What do you enjoy most about being a creator?

The depth of conversations. When I worked at Twitch, I had a slack channel with hundreds of engineers I could talk about new stuff with every day. When I left, I lost that. Original goal of the channel was to find a group of people I trusted enough to have similar convos. Ended up reaching hundreds of thousands, including the people who are building the tech I wanted to talk about 😂

› What do you enjoy least about being a creator?

Overall it’s been great, and I’m lucky to avoid a lot of the common issues (harassment, unstable income, content demonetization).The one thing I run into a lot is, well, judgement. Many no longer look at me as an engineer or open source dev, they see me as a “YouTuber”. I’ve had many of my open source contributions downplayed and ignored due to my success on YouTube. Thankfully, there are countless open source legends who get it and support the hell out of me.