Linus Sebastian

Early career

From January 2004 to June 2005, Sebastian worked as a painter for the company Student Works Painting and as a lifeguard and swimming lesson instructor at Maple Ridge Parks & Leisure in Maple Ridge, British Columbia.

NCIX and LinusTechTips

Sebastian was working as category manager for the 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 and an unidentified cameraman and editor worked with limited resources, shooting videos with a camera borrowed from the son of the company's president, the first of which being a demonstration video 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 LinusTechTips 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 the 24th November, 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 Vancouver. 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 March 7, 2017, the Linus Tech Tips, Techquickie, and the ChannelSuperFun channel each is home to 3616 videos, 404 videos, and 129 videos respectively, including product reviews and advice, build logs, vlogs, and original web series. The channel posts a video every day, and has never missed an upload in recent history.

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 177 episodes as of March 7, 2017. 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.

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 2 years, 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 (2015-2016)

Scrapyard Wars is a series that follows Sebastian and Lafreniere 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.

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. 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.

"7 Gamers 1 CPU" (2015 - 2016)

On the 2nd of January 2016, Linus Tech Tips released a video demonstrating a $30,000 USD 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 the 31st of January, a follow-up video was released with further bench marking results.

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

On the 23rd of February, 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 the 22nd of May 2016, LinusTechTips 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."

Personal life

Sebastian has been married to Yvonne Ho since April 2011. Together they have one son and two daughters.

Sebastian owns two Bengal cats, named Rocket and Rumble. He occasionally shares videos about his pets and his home life on his personal channel '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.