Matthew Salsamendi

The feature that Microsoft published in 2017 states that in 2011, at 13, he was living in Fort Lauderdale, FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, and hosting Minecraft game servers as a hobby; he built desktop computers from whatever parts he could find, and users paid him $10 through PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry for a gaming server of their own, on which they could modify the game and give permissions only to certain players.⁠[1]

The article relates that he borrowed $7 from his father to buy server software, that his father gave him the money, and that word of his hosting service then spread through the Minecraft and gamer community. He recalled asking: “Hey, can I borrow $7.00? I’m doing this cool thing.”⁠[1]

Microsoft’s article states that James Boehm, then 15 and living in Atlanta, Georgia, saw his hosting advertisement and got in touch, and the two became online friends; James Boehm offered his business development and marketing skills to help grow the company. Demand soon outgrew the bunch of PCs stacked under his desk at his parents’ house, which lacked the networking capacity, power and internet speed, so the two moved the servers into a bona fide datacenter and named the company MCProHosting.⁠[1]

The article states that from 2011 to 2014 that first $7 investment grew into a company worth nearly $5 million. The opening of the same article puts it differently: the duo’s company began as James Boehm’s community gaming server.⁠[1]

An article on the HyperX blog states that he and James Boehm started their first venture, the game server business MCProHosting, at 14 (Microsoft’s article gives his age in 2011 as 13), and describes the company as the leading game server provider with more than 600,000 clients.⁠[2]

phoenixNAP’s customer case study names him as chief technology officer (CTO) of MCProHosting, LLC and quotes him as saying that phoenixNAP’s services had been instrumental in the company’s expansion while allowing it to keep costs low. The case study describes MCProHosting as an unmanaged Minecraft hosting provider that gives customers custom-built tools to upload files, change settings and monitor their servers; it started on phoenixNAP dedicated servers, scaled them as it grew, and planned to move some systems to phoenixNAP colocation to lower long-term costs.⁠[3]

Microsoft’s article states that in 2014 he started high school while working full time on the company and trying to keep up with school and friends; when servers went down, James Boehm would call his mother, who signed him out of school so that he could fix them. He recalled once hiding inside a locker in the locker room after PE class to restart a server, because phones were banned at school.⁠[1]

The article states that the company would not last unless they found a way to scale, so he and his parents made the difficult decision to take him out of school altogether in his freshman year. He said: “I could already support myself, and I needed to focus on where this thing could really go,” adding that it was hard to argue with a million-dollar company that was still growing.⁠[1]

GeekWire wrote in 2020 that he was “barely old enough to drive” when he and James Boehm founded the game-streaming startup Beam Interactive, which was built on technology the two had made for themselves and their friends; the article’s photo caption states that he co-founded the streaming platform that came to be known as Mixer at 16, and in the interview he described its beginning as “a 16-year-old kid working on what was effectively just a fun side project.” Engadget, for its part, wrote in 2019 that he was 18 when he co-founded Mixer.⁠[4][5]

The same GeekWire article states that he grew up in South Florida and moved to Seattle before launching Beam.⁠[4]

Microsoft’s article states that after he left school the two moved from server hosting into game streaming, a pastime that was rapidly growing in popularity, first releasing an alpha product under the website name “chilly dot cool,” with low-latency broadcasts, real-time chat and streamer discovery, and growing from 10,000 to 20,000 monthly users; he said: “When we reached 20,000 people using it every month, we knew there was something there.” In the article’s account, the two felt that YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry and Twitch, which dominated the field, kept streamers apart from their audiences: YouTube allowed comments but no real-time chat, and Twitch’s chat had high latency; he said the team first wanted to solve real-time feedback for themselves as viewers of game broadcasts, if only for themselves.⁠[1]

Beam took part in the Techstars Seattle class of 2016. GeekWire wrote that Techstars helped connect the company with investors at a critical juncture; Chris DeVore, managing partner of Founders Co-op and then managing director of Techstars Seattle, said: “Matt and James were the youngest founders we’d ever taken into Techstars Seattle.”⁠[6][4]

TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in August 2016 that Beam launched on January 5, 2016; Microsoft’s article states that the two launched Beam in January 2016.⁠[6][1]

GeekWire’s “Startup Spotlight” feature on the Techstars Seattle class of 2016 states that after running a massive game server platform for four years, Matthew Salsamendi and his team realized how difficult it was for game streamers to interact with viewers, and that the 18-year-old CEO took another entrepreneurial plunge and co-launched Beam, a Seattle startup; the photo shows the Beam team as Micheal Yu, James Boehm, Matt Salsamendi and Luca Rager. In the Q&A he explained that Beam lets viewers of a game broadcast “control the enemies and challenges”; the team had worked on it for more than a year with money from their previous startup, had drawn interest from venture capitalists and angels, had closed a bridge round and planned to raise a seed round in early May; it had built what it called a world-first low-latency streaming protocol on WebRTC and VP8 with sub-second latency; and about 80,000 people used Beam each month without any paid marketing.⁠[7]

In the Q&A he said the idea came from seeing content creators lose critical portions of their audiences as their channels grew because they had no way to involve viewers; asked about the biggest mistake so far, he said the team needed to invest more and more resources in creating and fostering new interactive games for the platform and was expanding its developer programs so that developers and modders could build integrations tying the platform into games for streamers to play; that in hiring the team looked for clearly articulated technical excellence and a “passion for gaming”; that its team building was ping-pong, with tournaments after feature launches; and that of Bill GatesBill GatesBill Gates is an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and served as its chief executive and chairman. He later shifted his focus toward global health, education and climate, chairs the Gates Foundation, and manages investments through arrangements including Cascade.Open the full entry, Mark ZuckerbergMark ZuckerbergMark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook, Chairman and CEO of Meta, and a co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His work spans social networking, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry and Jeff BezosJeff BezosJeff Bezos is an American entrepreneur and investor who founded Amazon in 1994, led it as chief executive for many years, and became its executive chair in 2021. He also founded the spaceflight company Blue Origin, bought The Washington Post in 2013, and set up philanthropic funds including the Bezos Earth Fund.Open the full entry he would choose Mark Zuckerberg, saying “Zuckerberg, hands down,” because Mark Zuckerberg has a unique global perspective on human interaction and communities and Beam functions as an indirect social network for gamers: “Zuckerberg is the king of social.” His advice to entrepreneurs just starting out was that “Startups are HARD,” that they should be ready to spend every waking hour thinking about the company, and that they should find a co-founder they would trust with their life and build a team they can rely on.⁠[7]

On May 9, 2016, Beam launched a public beta from the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, where its CEO, Matt Salsamendi, said: “Massive communities are formed around games.” TechCrunch wrote that broadcasters could let viewers take part through crowdsourced controls, such as choosing the streamer’s weapon before a battle, or hand control of a character entirely to the group; he put Beam’s delay at about two-tenths of a second, against 15 to 20 seconds on platforms such as Twitch. The article states that Beam’s beta had gone live 90 days earlier and that in the previous month more than 100,000 users had visited to watch streams, for about 3 hours per session on average.⁠[8]

CNNMoney’s gallery from the conference states that he, at 18, presented the company onstage, saying that “hundreds of millions” of people watch others play games each month on sites such as Twitch and YouTube, while “traditional platforms don’t provide any way for viewers to participate.”⁠[9]

The HyperX blog article states that in May 2016 he said that Beam users averaged up to 3 hours per session, against 1 hour and 46 minutes on Twitch, and that he said “a surprising amount of viewers watch stream gameplay for the social experience.” Recalling the development work, he said: “I vividly remember many of the hundreds of late nights that were spent.”⁠[2]

On May 11, 2016, Beam won the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016, taking the $50,000 prize and the Disrupt Cup. The other five finalists were Bark, BitPagos, Ritual, SeaDrone and WaterO; the final judges were John Borthwick of betaworks, Charles HudsonCharles HudsonCharles Hudson is the founder and managing partner of Precursor Ventures.Open the full entry of Precursor Ventures, Alfred LinAlfred LinAlfred Lin is an American venture capitalist who has been a partner at Sequoia Capital since 2010 and, since November 2025, one of the firm’s co-stewards together with Pat Grady. Before joining Sequoia he was an executive at LinkExchange, Tellme Networks, and Zappos, companies acquired by Microsoft and Amazon; at Sequoia he has represented the firm on the boards of companies including Airbnb and DoorDash.Open the full entry of Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry, Susan Lyne of BBG Ventures, Alan Patricof of Greycroft Partners and Matthew PanzarinoMatthew PanzarinoMatthew Panzarino is a technology journalist and content executive, a former TechCrunch editor-in-chief who announced his appointment as GrowthX chief content officer in 2025.Open the full entry of TechCrunch. TechCrunch described Beam as offering low-latency chat for live-streamed games and letting viewers play along with the streamer by measuring the general intent of all the comments, calling it “a Twitch WePlay that actually works.”⁠[10]

Microsoft’s article includes photographs of him and James Boehm demonstrating Beam at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 and accepting the check onstage.⁠[1]

On June 21, 2016, the Thiel Foundation announced its 2016 class of 29 Thiel Fellows, and he was selected together with James Boehm. The announcement states that the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry gives young people $100,000 and that the class was chosen from more than 6,000 applications from around the world. The list gives the two in a single entry, from Seattle, Washington, with the project Beam in the field of social gaming, and describes them: “Matt and James co-founded Beam, an interactive live-streaming platform for gamers.” It adds that Beam lets viewers of live-streamed video game sessions get involved in the game, influencing gameplay in real time.⁠[11][11]

CNNMoney wrote in August 2016 that he and his co-founder James Boehm, then 20, had been named Thiel Fellows in June 2016, describing the fellowship as paying $100,000 over two years to young entrepreneurs who skip or drop out of college to pursue their ventures.⁠[12]

On August 11, 2016, Chad Gibson, Partner Group Program Manager for Xbox Live, announced on Microsoft’s official blog that Microsoft had signed an agreement to acquire Beam, a Seattle-based interactive livestreaming service whose award-winning team and technology would join Xbox. The post describes Beam as letting viewers play along with streamers and make real-time choices that affect their gameplay rather than only watch and chat; it names him as Beam’s CEO, relays his blog post’s statement that Beam remained committed to empowering users and streamers across platforms, and states that Beam would be better positioned to grow and to give back to its community.⁠[13]

TechCrunch wrote that no deal terms were disclosed, that Beam had raised around $420,000 in seed funding, and that he would lead the Beam team from Microsoft’s Redmond campus within the Xbox engineering department. He said: “I’m really excited about Xbox’s focus on community,” and “Right now it’s business as usual!” CNNMoney wrote that he, at 18, had launched the Seattle-based startup eight months earlier, that it had 24 employees and 100,000 community members, and that he wrote the company would bring on new team members to help grow the platform.⁠[6][12]

GeekWire wrote in 2020 that Rahul Sood, CEO of Unikrn, introduced them to Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, which led to the acquisition, and that he was 18 when they sold the company to Microsoft. Microsoft’s article states that the two then moved across the country, bought a house in Redmond, Washington, and became Microsoft employees, and that after the deal closed the first thing he bought was a McDonald’sMcDonald’sMcDonald’s is a publicly traded restaurant company headquartered in Chicago, known for hamburgers, fries, drive-thrus and its franchise network. Its origins lie in the restaurant opened by Richard and Maurice McDonald in 1940; Ray Kroc expanded franchising from 1955. It operates across more than 100 countries, with the great majority of restaurants run by independent operators.Open the full entry apple pie.⁠[4][1]

The HyperX blog article calls him and James Boehm 18-year-old gamers and entrepreneurs; it states that in a blog post he assured the Beam community that Beam had no plans to change direction after the acquisition and promised new features, and that the roadmap on Beam’s website included co-streaming, voice-chat commands, chat polls and built-in raiding and hosting.⁠[2]

On May 25, 2017, Xbox Wire published a post and video announcing that Beam was being renamed Mixer, introducing him as co-founder and Mixer Engineering Lead. The team wrote that the name Beam could not support its goal of growing in major markets and that the new name reflected bringing people together. He said Mixer was chosen because it represented what the team loved most about the service, called it “livestreaming that’s actually LIVE” and “our vision for the next generation of multiplayer,” and said the team wanted to grow the platform in every major market around the world.⁠[14]

The co-streaming feature launched that day let up to four streamers combine their broadcasts into one split-screen view with a shared chat; the post also described Mixer’s integration into the Guide on Xbox One and the Game bar on Windows 10, the Mixer Create mobile beta, and Crowd Play with Telltale Games. In the launch-day broadcasts, the co-streaming spotlight was hosted by James Boehm.⁠[14]

Fortune wrote that he authored the announcement and that he said Mixer’s streams had less delay than the 10–20 second latency typical of other platforms, which he did not name. The article states that Microsoft bought Beam Interactive for an undisclosed amount, when the service was still being tested and was not widely available to the public.⁠[15]

On September 28, 2017, Microsoft published on its news site a feature by Candace Whitney-Morris on how he and James Boehm went from teenage founders to Mixer, giving his age as 19 and James Boehm’s as 21 and describing them as having joined Xbox in a shared vision of building a vibrant and interactive gaming community.⁠[1]

The article states that Age of Empires is his all-time favorite game and that he could not guess how many hours he has spent playing it; that he was a PC gamer who had not been into console gaming and admits he was naïve about how much Xbox was doing in the gamer community space, singling out the Xbox Insider Program’s use of user feedback; and that the pair’s “golden rule” of building things they would want as gamers themselves guided their thinking about Beam’s future, including a possible partnership with Microsoft. One photograph shows him speaking at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, with the caption quoting him: “Our North Star is always going to be those interactive broadcasters.”⁠[1]

On October 10, 2019, he announced on Twitter, under the handle @MattSalsamendi, that he was leaving Microsoft: “After 5 incredible years, tomorrow will be my last day at Mixer,” adding that he would share the story of Beam and what was next for him. Engadget quoted his statement that during his time at Mixer the team made leaps in technology and community that changed the way people think about competition in the game streaming space, that “The support we received from across Microsoft was humbling for me,” and that the experience he had gained in the previous three years was “irreplaceable.”⁠[16][5]

Windows Central wrote that he planned to work with lasers “in some capacity”; Engadget wrote that he gave few details of his new project but said he had a passion for lighting at EDM festivals and tours and would use lasers in music projects. Engadget described Mixer as having grown into the third most popular game-streaming platform and noted that the other co-founder, James J. Boehm, had announced his departure from Microsoft the previous week.⁠[16][5]

He later explained in an interview with GeekWire why he had left: his boss, the general manager, and the corporate vice president both departed in October 2019 for different reasons; he had worked on startups since he was 13 and had never had a boss before Microsoft; he had been “going nonstop” since starting MCProHosting in 2011, had “skipped a lot of my adolescence” and wanted to take some time while he was young; and Mixer’s team of “well over 100 people” was focused on growth, which left him little room to rethink the core experience.⁠[4]

GeekWire wrote that Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, announced in a blog post that week that Microsoft had decided to close the operations side of Mixer and help the community transition to a new platform, Facebook Gaming. On June 27, 2020, GeekWire published Todd Bishop’s interview with him, giving his age as 22 and stating that he had been an entrepreneur for more than a decade, running the Minecraft server hosting company MCProHosting since 2011. He said that what Beam ended up becoming was “pretty awesome” and that “I generally agree with what Microsoft did”; he said: “I think what we were doing was a long shot. It’s a big investment,” and that partners could “effectively get a matched contract” with Facebook. He said he understood and empathized with Mixer partners, streamers and users disappointed by the outcome and wished the community could have had more of “a heads up and notice,” but that “it’s hard to look back and be upset about where it ended up going.” He stays in touch with former team members, including early Beam members who moved to the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry from Europe to work on Mixer.⁠[4]

He said Mixer’s FTL protocol “does not exist on any other mainstream platform,” putting YouTube’s latency at about one second and Twitch’s at three seconds at least and usually about seven. He said he used Twitch daily and loved the product, and that the team’s success and inspiration came from Twitch; but its partner contracts were “very stringently exclusive,” its affiliate program had a 24-hour exclusivity clause, and streamers faced an all-or-nothing choice in switching; he declined to use the word “monopoly” but said “it’s hard to imagine where else you go right now.” He said the deals with Ninja and Shroud had not been seen internally as “the last hurrah.”⁠[4]

He said streaming has given a voice to many people who would otherwise not have one, referring to prolific community members who had recently spoken about experiences of sexual harassment on Twitch and Mixer, and called anonymity “a two-sided sword.” At the time he was enjoying time off and doing laser light design for musicians’ music videos and performances, noting that with COVID-19 and quarantine there were not many live shows; he said “I’m really enjoying the creative side” and that there were many ideas for the future. He said: “75% of where I am is because of timing, not necessarily skill.”⁠[4]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

MCProHosting: Official website: https://mcprohosting.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]

Microsoft: Official website: https://www.microsoft.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

X: Public account: https://x.com/MattSalsamendi (opens in a new window).⁠[16][5]