On a July morning, Alexis Ohanian — a Y Combinator partner at the time — is doing what he does when he's restless and curious: scanning the internet for edges. The scroll is familiar: founders courting attention, investors testing conviction, the daily noise of a world trying to make something new. Then a headline catches his eye.

This instinct for spotting interesting signals wasn't new to Ohanian. A decade earlier in 2005, he and co-founder Steve Huffman had themselves been YC founders in the accelerator's very first batch, creating what would become Reddit. After selling Reddit to Condé Nast in 2006, Ohanian eventually returned to YC in 2014 as a partner, now sitting on the other side of the table, hunting for the next generation of transformative ideas. His own journey from founder to investor gave him a particular eye for ventures that might seem niche to others but carried the potential to connect communities at scale. That's exactly what caught his attention that morning.

Afrostream Is Netflix For African And African-American Movies.[1]

He clicks. Romain Dillet’s piece is brisk and factual, but the heart of it is a quote from a founder named Tonjé Bakang: “When I was a kid, for a long time, I was looking for role models on TV to relate to them.” It’s not a slide or a slogan but a remembered ache. Ohanian reads about a service launching across France, Belgium, Switzerland, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire at €7 per month, about thousands of early signups driving six figures of subscription revenue in weeks. He’s been pitched every version of streaming’s future. This one doesn’t look like a derivative knock-off; it looks like a correction. It’s compelling enough that he opens a new doc and starts writing.

“Afrostream (YC S15) Makes It Easy To Find And Watch African And African-American Movies,” he titles the post when he publishes it to Y Combinator’s blog later that day, quoting Bakang’s childhood search for mirrors and pointing readers to the TechCrunch piece and a growing Hacker News thread. The byline — Alexis Ohanian — adds reach to the signal, one more voice amplifying an idea already gathering momentum elsewhere.[2]

What the post does in practice is straightforward and notable, but it is part of a larger chorus. It helps convert a specific longing into a more legible thesis for a wider audience. It nudges Afrostream from a niche curiosity toward something the impatient, spreadsheet-reading faithful can recognize on YC’s feeds. Alongside press, early users, and the work of a team shipping across borders, it tells a room of influential people that a French-Cameroonian founder is building a bridge across continents — and that the bridge is already carrying traffic.

In the compressed physics of startups, advocacy like that becomes one catalyst among many: a builder of megaphones lending a voice to a builder of mirrors. The ground shifts — just a bit, and together with other shifts, enough.

A Childhood Without Mirrors

Every founder story has a first copy. Before the pitch decks and the growth curves, there is some original, stubborn experience that refuses to be ignored. For Tonjé, that copy was a lonely one: a kid searching for a reflection in a TV landscape that didn’t include him. The shows he loved had their own energy, but even their wide worlds contained narrow mirrors. Representation, for him, wasn’t a discourse. It was the daily texture of watching and not seeing.

Years later, after careers that taught him the pleasure and peril of making things for audiences, he found himself circling the same problem with a builder’s gaze. If curation could fix taste, could distribution fix dignity? He opened a Facebook page—not a company, not yet—with trailers, clips, and proof that there was a community scattered across borders and algorithms waiting to be counted. Demand showed up fast. The question became what it always becomes in the modern internet: could anyone build the pipes?[3]

Afrostream was his attempt to answer that question with a product, a plan, and a provocation. It would not be a spray-and-pray catalog. It would be a curated, rights-cleared library of films and series by and about Black people—African, African-American, Afro-Caribbean—delivered in markets where the option to watch legally and easily often did not exist. The first geographies were pragmatic: France and francophone Europe, where Bakang knew the broadcasters and bureaucracies; Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, where the audience was young, culturally hungry, and underserved.

The price point—€7 a month—was a flag in the ground. It said premium, yes, but also “priced for reality.” The signups and early subscription dollars, measured in days and weeks not quarters, were proof that this wasn’t charity culture. It was commerce with a waiting room.[1]

What he needed next was the unglamorous thing that makes or breaks streaming: rights.

The Licensing Room

The licensing room is the unromantic heart of any streaming revolution. It is where catalog dreams go to endure rate cards, windowing rules, and lawyers who think in territories, not communities. Bakang walked in with an asymmetric advantage. He wasn’t pitching filters and algorithms; he was pitching a readership he’d already assembled and a landscape he understood. Still, the math wasn’t pretty. To get a compelling library, he’d need to knit together deals with Hollywood distributors who priced for first-world wallets, European broadcasters who jealously guarded their boxes and brands, and African telcos who controlled the last mile.

Afrostream began to stack the right names on the right lines. Multi-year deals with Sony Pictures Television and ITV Studios Global Entertainment opened access to crucial titles: “This Christmas,” “Think Like a Man,” “The Boondocks,” even classics like “Boyz n the Hood” and “Bad Boys.” The agreements did more than decorate a front page—they signaled editorial seriousness and operational grit to a skeptical industry. On the other side of the Atlantic, TF1’s MYTF1VOD partnership made the offer legible to mainstream French households, putting a curated “Afrostream” window inside an incumbent’s ecosystem.[4][5][6]