The Billion Dollar Founder: Kyle Vogt’s Wild Ride from Twitch to Cruise (and What’s Next)

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🚀 The Founder Who Built (and Sold) Two Billion Dollar Startups

Hey Deal Lifters,

Scaling a company to a billion-dollar exit is the stuff of tech legend. Doing it twice? That’s unicorn-level insane 🦄💰

But that’s exactly what Kyle Vogt — aka the lowkey genius from Kansas City — pulled off. And he’s not done yet.

Let’s rewind this movie 🎬

👶 Small Town Kid, Big League Dreams

Born in Kansas City, Kyle wasn’t your average teen. While most kids were dreaming about driver’s licenses, Kyle built a self-driving car at 14. Yes, using a Power Wheels toy. Insane, right?

He later rolled up to MIT to study computer science and electrical engineering (obviously), but what changed his life forever was a random email 💌

🎮 From Dorm Rooms to Twitch Streams

It was 2006. Justin Kan and Emmett Shear were looking for someone to help them build a live-streaming site — Justin.tv. They shot a cold email to an MIT mailing list, and guess who answered? You already know.

Kyle joined as a co-founder and built the tech stack that kept the site alive and streaming. Fast forward:
➡️ Justin.tv pivots to gaming
➡️ Becomes Twitch
➡️ Amazon swoops in and buys it for $970 million in 2014

That’s Kyle’s first billion-dollar exit. Cha-ching 💸

🤖 Back to His First Love: Self-Driving Cars

After Twitch, Kyle went back to his OG obsession: autonomous vehicles. He started small — just a few folks in a San Fran garage, tinkering with driver-assist kits for Audis.

But soon, Kyle realized something: if you're going to go big, go full robo. So Cruise pivoted to build a full-stack self-driving car company.

They raised a cool $2M in 2014. Then $12.5M in 2015. And before even launching a product?

💥 General Motors acquired Cruise in 2016 for over $1 billion — just three years after it was founded.

Two startups. Two unicorn exits. 🦄🦄

🚧 Cruise Hits the Brakes

It wasn’t all rainbows and exits though. Cruise ran into major regulatory heat, tech issues, and even serious accidents on public roads. GM eventually hit pause on the whole thing in 2023 and fully shut it down by late 2024 🛑

Painful? Yeah. But that’s the startup game. Big bets, big risks, and sometimes — big crashes.

🧹 What’s Kyle Doing Now?

Kyle’s newest venture is called… The Bot Company 🤖

Their mission? Build affordable robots to do boring household chores. Think: Roomba on steroids. Vacuuming, dishwashing, folding laundry — you name it. Stuff you hate doing.

Could this be exit #3? Maybe. But if anyone’s got the track record for a three-peat, it’s this dude.

💭 The Big Takeaway

Kyle Vogt isn’t just building companies — he’s building freakin’ empires across entirely different industries. And the wildest part?

He started with an email reply.

If you're sitting on a crazy idea and thinking “this is too big,” that’s probably a good sign. It might just be your Twitch. Or your Cruise. Or hell — your third unicorn.

🚀 Go build something wild. Go lift the damn deal.

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*The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research.}