Linus Sebastian

Linus Sebastian was born on August 20, 1986 in Vancouver, a coastal seaport city in British Columbia, Canada. He has six siblings and one half-sibling, including a sister Isabelle, and two brothers, Asher and George. He was in high school when his life-long fascination with technology started. He graduated from Garibaldi Secondary School and enrolled in the University of British Colombia. He dropped out a couple of years later, the reason for which, in his own words, is that he used to spend most of his time “tinkering with his computer, hanging out on hardware forums and playing video games.”

Sebastian married Yvonne Ho in an outdoor ceremony in late April 2011. She currently serves as the CFO of Linus Media Group. They have one son and two daughters.

While still in school, Linus Sebastian started working for NCIX in the weekends. Afterwards, he joined their store at Langley full time in the capacity of a sales person. He became their top seller of high-end gaming systems within only a few months of employment. Soon the president of the company offered him a position at the head office in Richmond to take care of the system configurations on the company website. Sebastian worked really hard and was instrumental in NCIX becoming the #1 seller in water cooling parts in Canada. That led him to the opportunity of managing core business components like motherboards, SSDs, RAM, and networking.

In a few years, he was promoted to the position of a category manager. In 2007, NCIX asked him to host their technology channel, which was created to demonstrate their products and keep up with competitors such as ‘TigerDirect’ and ‘Newegg’ in a rapidly changing market. With the help of an editor and an unidentified cameraman, and by borrowing a camera from the president of the company who bought it for his son, Linus posted his first ever video on July 24 of that year. The initial response to the channel wasn’t particularly encouraging. To maintain a modest cost for video making, and yet not to directly associate the company with the substandard content that would produce, Sebastian launched ‘LinusTechTips’ on November 24, 2008.

Sebastian met Luke Lafreniere (aka SlickPC) while they were both employed at NCIX. They worked together to create ’Techquickie’ in early 2012, a channel for the “latest cool technology information in couple of minutes”. When Sebastian left the company to start his own, Luke joined him. They, along with Edzel Yago and Brandon Lee founded ‘Linus Media Group’ out of a garage in January 2013. A third Channel, ‘Channel Super Fun’, was made on May 28, 2014. Sebastian and Lafreniere have been using Twitch to live stream ‘The Wan Show’ since 2012. The show is based around discussions on the latest news in the technology world and Q&As.

As of early June 2017, the show had aired 184 episodes. A few of the other projects he and his company have worked on over the years are, ‘Whole Room Water Cooling’ (2014-2015), ‘Scrapyard Wars’ (2015-Present), ‘7 Gamers 1 CPU’ (2015-2016), and ‘8/10 Gamers, 1 CPU’ (2016). In an interview with ‘Lifehacker.com,’ Sebastian summed up his work ethic with following words, “Execution is everything. Sitting around and planning is worthless unless it turns into something tangible. You’re better off to have 100% execution of a 50% plan than 50% execution of a 100% plan. Nothing drives me crazier than sitting around pontificating about ‘the perfect way to do something’ when we’re in a hurry, which is always if you want to get anything done.”

Sebastian has been hacked a few times, most devastatingly in 2011 when a hacker only known as ‘XxxV1rOj4NxxX’ took control of ‘LinusTechTips’ and resorted to blackmailing Sebastian.