Pride & Joy: Inside the Launch of JoySauce TV

In an interview, Sposato banters with the episode’s co-host, writer and actor Rachel Tatsumi Perry, and guest Kiki Wolfkill, a Chinese American video game developer known for her work on the Halo franchise.

For the final act of the night, Sposato breaks into song. He and the JoySauce crew belt out lines like “Grew up excluded, even on our TV,” “Token sidekick is not all that we can be” and “Let’s normalize Asian mediocrity,” ending on the song’s title: “We Can Do Anything.”

The episode showcases Sposato’s vision as CEO and Founder of JoySauce: a streaming TV network that “leans into the joy” of being Asian American.

JoySauce, which started in 2022 as a pop culture news site, began producing its own shows in 2024 and expanded to streaming television in November 2025 when it joined Amazon Prime’s live channel lineup.

The network offers 500 hours of programming, including JoySauce originals and exclusives (see “Binge-Worthy on JoySauce” below) and a portfolio of third-party shows, movies, comedy specials and more. Sposato says the network is working to encompass the entire Asian American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander diaspora, while welcoming non-Asian allies.

The “big, hairy, audacious goal,” Sposato says, is to do for Asian American culture what MTV did for music in the ’80s and ’90s—influence the cultural tastes of a generation of Americans. 

By reaching a broad audience, he aims to help Asian Americans accrue cultural capital in entertainment and beyond: “I want some 12-year-old sitting out there who’s not Asian American to be watching JoySauce and be like, ‘Wow, these guys are so cool. I want to be like them.’”

Bridging Tech & Media

Sposato’s journey to late-night TV began with his love of technology.

Sposato grew up in London, New York, Hong Kong and Seattle in a multiracial household: He is half Chinese and half Korean and was adopted by his Italian American father. He designed his first video game at age 13, but was drawn to a variety of fields as a student at Whitman College, where he majored in Political Science and minored in Art.

“I truly believe that going to an immersive, high-quality residential liberal arts school helped me to explore all the things that piqued my intellectual curiosity,” he says.

Sposato says his education gave him an advantage when he began his career as a tech product developer and had to communicate with people across the industry: “Whitman really helped create the kind of brain that could accommodate those efforts.”

After working at Microsoft post-college, Sposato became an entrepreneur, founding startups he later sold to Google and Shutterstock, as well as investing in other companies.

Today, he serves on the Whitman Board of Trustees and created the Sposato Internship Endowment with his wife, Heather Lowenthal, to help empower students to explore careers in startups and tech.

In 2011, he founded technology news site GeekWire and discovered the possibilities of media.

“It expanded and grew beyond our wildest imagination. That was lovely, but it made me realize that, unlike … a technology product or an app, media allows you to change and influence the conversation,” Sposato says.

In 2020, he expanded his media portfolio, buying Seattle Magazine and Seattle Business Magazine to help capture the thriving essence of the city. 

Then as reports of anti-Asian hate grew in recent years, Sposato began looking for ways to change the narrative. “What’s a more positive way of talking about the Asian American experience?” he asked himself. “What’s a way to build bridges, to create familiarity, versus being perpetually foreign or othered?”

His answer to those questions was JoySauce.

Stories of Humor & Happiness

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up almost 8% of the U.S. population, and the proportion is higher in Seattle and other major cities. But they have less than 3% of speaking roles in broadcast and streaming television, according to The Asian American Foundation.

“That gap didn’t make sense to me,” Sposato says, especially given the growing market appeal of Asian American content. 

Sposato cites a 2024 ThinkNow report that found that over 40% of Gen Z Americans and over 25% of Millennials consume Asian entertainment content at least once a week.

As he conceptualized the JoySauce Network, Sposato wanted to emphasize the positive. People often assume that Asian American media will mostly be about pain and trauma, he says. He believes those topics are important, but they’re already being discussed.

“What’s the next set of conversations? Let’s talk about how epically amazing some Asian Americans are in these fields or categories that you wouldn’t expect,” he says.

Sposato is also a fan of cognitive scientist Don Norman, who studies how people make emotional connections to products.

“The best way to forge that emotional connection, in my opinion, is through joy, happiness, humor, making people feel good,” Sposato says.

Growing the Network

As JoySauce began producing shows, Sposato got to tell the stories he’d been dreaming of.

For example, the reality show “Mixed Six” highlights interracial and inter-Asian couples. Sposato’s wife is white, and they’d always wanted to see more narratives like theirs.

And “JoySauce Late Night” was a way to challenge late-night TV’s “realm of older white guys.”

“What if there was this parallel universe where everybody on a late-night talk show was Asian American—the guests, the young sketch comedy players, the band, all of it?” he asks.

Since the JoySauce channel launched on Amazon Prime, the network has shifted from the “storming” phase (testing roles and boundaries) to the more stable “norming” (establishing procedures and norms), Sposato says. “I’m hoping to do a little more norming, where we figure out the dials and knobs and levers that have to be adjusted in order to make it grow more and more.”

To guide that growth, the network has an informal community of advisors, including Asian American entertainers, CEOs and young social media influencers.

And Sposato always keeps his eye on that audacious goal of changing the story not only for Asian Americans, but for everyone.

“I call it the first American Asian TV network, because I wanted to switch the emphasis,” he says. “I say American Asian, and I want to do it with swagger and power and joy.”

Get a taste of JoySauce. Visit joysauce.tv to watch movies and shows on demand or stream live TV. Or watch through Prime Video’s Live TV menu or the free JoySauceTV apps for iOS and Android.