Linus Sebastian

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Linus Gabriel Sebastian (born August 20, 1986) is a Canadian YouTube personality, presenter, producer, and founder of Linus Media Group.

He is best known for creating and hosting three technology-oriented YouTube channels: Linus Tech Tips, Techquickie, and Channel Super Fun, which have a combined subscriber base of over 8 million. From 2007 to 2015, he was also a regular presenter of technology videos for the now defunct Canadian computer retailer NCIX. In 2015, Inc. magazine ranked Sebastian 4th in a list of the "Top 30 Power Players in Tech".

As of March 2018, Linus Tech Tips is ranked the 7th most watched Technology channel on YouTube. In 2014, Tubefilter named the channel as being within the "top 1% of Google's preferred advertising channels" on YouTube for the technology category.

Video Linus Sebastian

Career

NCIX and Linus Tech Tips

Sebastian was working as category manager for the now defunct Canadian online computer store NCIX. He was asked by the company to be the host for its technology channel, which was created to help demonstrate products. Sebastian was assisted by an unidentified cameraman and editor, and worked with limited resources, shooting videos with a camera borrowed from the son of the company's president. His first video was a demonstration for a Sunbeam processor heatsink.

Due to high costs and low viewership during the early days of the channel, Sebastian was instructed to create the Linus Tech Tips channel as a cheaper offshoot of the NCIX channel, to allow for lower production values without impacting the NCIX brand. He described TigerDirect and Newegg as competitors. It was created on November 24, 2008.

Sebastian did not develop videos full-time at NCIX. During his time at the company, he worked as full-time sales representative, a high-end systems designer, a product manager, and a category manager.

Linus Media Group

Sebastian founded Linus Media Group in January 2013 out of a garage, with Luke Lafreniere, Edzel Yago, and Brandon Lee. The group developed the Linus Tech Tips channel as an independent venture. Sebastian also began working on Techquickie.

In September 2013, Sebastian was interviewed by Chris Pirillo. Sebastian discussed the future of his channel and answered questions that had been sent to Pirillo through social media.

In a 2014 interview, Sebastian revealed he had sleepless nights under the pressure of figuring out how to support his family while also employing staff during the early days of his independent YouTube career, having had no startup capital to work with.

In 2015, the company moved into a commercial office space for the first time, having previously worked out of a residential address in Surrey, British Columbia. The moving process was documented in a series of vlogs that became one of the most acclaimed series of videos in the Linus Tech Tips channel history. Since then, Sebastian has infrequently created office vlogs following the move.

As of November 8, 2017, the Linus Tech Tips, Techquickie, and the Channel Super Fun channel are each home to 4013 videos, 498 videos, and 153 videos respectively, including product reviews and advice, build logs, vlogs, and original web series. Linus Tech Tips posts a video every day.

Notable projects

The WAN Show (2012-present)

The WAN Show is a regular Twitch live stream hosted by Sebastian and Lafreniere. The pair discusses topical news stories from the technology world, offering their opinion and fielding questions. Each show is uploaded to YouTube following first broadcast. There have been 226 episodes as of March 5, 2018. Since the first incarnation of the show, other Linus Media Group staff have intermittently hosted in place of either Sebastian or Lafreniere. Features of the WAN show include the live audience chat stream, the intro video failing & the show never starting on time. NitroblastDigital, one of the noteworthy chatters in Twitch, as well as a moderator on Luke Lafreniere's Twitch, is well known for his 'memes', such as a website for viewing short videos based on the members of Linus Media Group.

Whole Room Water Cooling (2014-2015)

"Whole Room Water Cooling" documented Sebastian's attempt to lower both the temperature of their workstations, as well as the ambient temperature of the room by hooking their workstations to a watercooling loop and dissipating all the heat out of the building. After 7 episodes over 7 month, Sebastian claimed the project to be unsuccessful, describing that the system did not adequately decrease the ambient temperature in the room. Sebastian mentioned this was mostly due to the use of copper piping, which resulted in the majority of the heat produced from their workstations being reintroduced into their work room before exiting the building.

Scrapyard Wars (2015-present)

Scrapyard Wars is a series that follows Sebastian, Lafreniere, and occasionally guest competitors, as they compete to build the best performing computer within the confines of a specified budget, time frame, and theme.

In series one, Sebastian and Lafreniere were each tasked with building a gaming PC for $300 CAD. It concluded in three episodes after two days.

In series two, the pair were required to each build a water cooled PC for $500 CAD, without using "off the shelf" water cooling components. The series was four episodes. The budget was divided with $300 towards the computer and the remaining $200 to the DIY water cooling supplies.

In series three, Sebastian, Lafreniere, and guest Austin Evans (an American technology YouTuber) were given the challenge of building the best price per performance gaming PC with an unlimited Budget. The third series spanned a total of seven episodes.

In series four, Sebastian, Lafreniere, and guests Bob Stewart and Rob Rosenberg from computer modifications company BS Mods, were given $900 CAD to build a gaming PC with custom modifications added to the chassis. The fourth series concluded with a total of four episodes with Linus and Bob winning.

A fifth season was announced on the WAN Show, aired March 24, 2017. Sebastian and Lafreniere teamed up in Los Angeles, California to compete against Paul and Kyle from Paul's Hardware and Bitwit, having the first episode uploaded on May 20, 2017. During this series, 10% extra points could be obtained by making the most clever use of the theme "RGB". The winners, at first, were Paul and Kyle. However, they were then stripped from their titles due to an external hard drive they took from Paul's personal collection of hard drives, which was not purchased with the funds of US$500 allocated for them at the beginning of the series.

Season 6 was aired on October 14, 2017, and featured JayzTwoCents and Dmitry Novoselov from HardwareCanucks. This time, the teams were split up as Sebastian and Dmitry vs Lafreniere and JayzTwoCents. The budget for this PC was $1337, but along with building the PC, the teams were required to use part of their budget when purchasing necessities such as food and public transport. This series ended after 4 episodes with Lafreniere and JayzTwoCents winning.

"7 Gamers 1 CPU" (2015-present)

On January 2, 2016, Linus Tech Tips released a video demonstrating a US$30,000 gaming computer displayed at CES 2016 able to support seven individual players. The video made technology news on a number of websites, and was watched over a million times on the day it was uploaded. Sebastian responded on Twitter, saying "In 8 years I have never achieved 1 million views in a month let alone in a single day. Thank you for your support."

The computer had eight sticks of 32 GB ECC DDR4 RAM, eight 1TB Kingston SSDs, two Intel Xeon 14 core E5 2697 v3 processors, seven AMD R9 Nano GPUs, an EVGA T2 1600W PSU, and was housed in a Caselabs Mercury S8 with an Asus Z10PE-D8 WS motherboard. The project was sponsored by Kingston Technology.

On January 31, a follow-up video was released with further benchmark testing results.

On February 16, one more video about overclocking the $30,000 PC was released.

On February 23, a video was released titled "THE $30,000 7 GAMERS 1 CPU BUILD IS NO MORE! - Disassembly Stream". The system was disassembled by Sebastian during a stream on Twitch.tv.

"8/10 Gamers, 1 CPU" (2016)

On May 22, 2016, Linus Tech Tips released a sequel to their "7 Gamers 1 CPU" project. In the video, a system was built to allow for eight users to play games simultaneously, using Steam In-Home Streaming to stream games in 4K resolution to eight Zotac mini computers (either B or C models) across a local area network.

The new build included a Supermicro 4028GR-TRT barebone server chassis, two Intel Xeon E5 2699 V4 22 Core processors, eight Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti Amp Edition graphics cards, two Zotac GTX Titan X graphics cards, ten 1 TB Kingston KC400 Business solid state drives, eight sticks of Kingston 32GB DDR4 ECC RAM and two Noctua NH-B9 CPU tower coolers.

During the video, Sebastian stated that "7 Gamers 1 CPU is all about my vision for a high-tech household in the future... a high-powered machine in the closet that can allocate computing power, ..., to where ever it is needed."

"Server Room Vlog" (2017)

On February 23, 2017, the Linus Tech Tips channel published a video in which Sebastian introduced "Server Room Vlog", a series of videos where Sebastian and a helper clean up and manage Linus Media Group's server room.

In the first video, they removed the servers and cables, dusted them off and vacuumed the room.

In the second video, they added new networking cables and network switches to the room, reconfigured the positioning of the servers, installed a new power distribution unit, installed new Wi-Fi access points, and added cable management loops.

In the third and final video, they installed sound insulation to the room, added dust filtration on top of the insulation, installed a custom air vent, and added RGB lighting to the rack.

The series turned out to be one of the channel's most popular, with a total view count of 3.2 million.

Maps Linus Sebastian

Personal life

Sebastian has been married to Yvonne Ho since May 20, 2011. They have one son and two daughters.

Sebastian owns one Bengal cat, named Rumble, and previously owned another Bengal cat named Rocket (deceased 2016). He occasionally shares videos about his pets and his home life on his personal YouTube channel entitled LinusCatTips.

In an interview with technology startup website Tech.Co, Sebastian said that his favourite YouTubers were TotalBiscuit, Marques Brownlee and Austin Evans. In February 2014, Sebastian was among the YouTubers who contributed funds and support to Evans, who lost his possessions and home in a fire.

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References