Emmett Shear | |
|---|---|
 Shear in 2018 | |
| Born | 1983 (age 40–41) |
| Alma mater | Yale University (BS) |
| Known for | |
Emmett Shear (born 1983) is an American Internet entrepreneur and investor. [1] [a] He is the co-founder of live video platform Justin.tv. He was the chief executive officer of Twitch when it was spun off from Justin.tv until March 2023. In 2011, Shear was appointed as a part-time partner at venture capital firm Y Combinator. [2] In November 2023, he briefly was interim CEO of OpenAI. [3] [4]
Emmett Shear grew up in Seattle, Washington, [5] where he attended the Evergreen School for Gifted Children. There, he met his eventual co-founder Justin Kan at age eight, [6] and the two were bonded by their accelerated math classes and playing Magic: The Gathering . [7]
Shear studied computer science as an undergraduate student at Yale University, and graduated in 2005. [8] [9] He attended with his eventual Twitch co-founders Justin Kan and Michael Seibel. [5]
Shear and Justin Kan have been part of Y Combinator's first class in 2005. [2] As part of Y Combinator, the two built a calendar application called Kiko, which they eventually sold on eBay for around $250,000 after Google Calendar was introduced. [7] [10]
In March 2007, Shear and Justin Kan, along with Michael Seibel and Kyle Vogt, launched Justin.tv, a 24/7 live video feed of Kan's life, broadcast via a webcam attached to his head. [11] It quickly obtained some media coverage. In October 2007, the site added the possibility for other users to host their own broadcast. Three years later, the platform had secured $7.2 million in venture capital funding and reported a monthly user base of approximately 31 million unique visitors. [10] Its gaming-oriented spin-off Twitch eventually became more popular, [10] and Justin.tv was closed on August 5, 2014. [12]
After Justin.tv launched in 2007, the site quickly began building subject-specific content categories like Social, Tech, Sports, Entertainment, News & Events, and Gaming. Gaming, in particular, grew very fast and became the most popular content on the site. [13]
In June 2011, [14] [15] the company decided to spin off the gaming content under a separate brand and site. They named it TwitchTV, inspired by the term twitch gameplay. On August 29, 2011, Shear became CEO of Justin.tv, and remained in that role as the company rebranded around Twitch in 2014, which had quickly become its core product. [16] [17]
On August 25, 2014, Amazon officially acquired Twitch for a reported $970,000,000. [18]
In March 2023, Shear announced that he was resigning as CEO, and that Daniel J. Clancy would take over. [19]
Shear became a part-time partner at Y Combinator in June 2011, where he offered advice to the new startups in each batch. [20] [2]
On November 19, 2023, Shear was named as the interim CEO of OpenAI, [21] following the removal of Sam Altman by the board two days earlier. On November 21, an agreement was reached to reinstate Altman as CEO. [4] It was previously reported that Shear had threatened to resign as CEO if the board could not provide evidence to support Altman's removal. [4]
Shear has publicly stated that he is concerned about the impact AI can have on civilization, estimating his "P(Doom)" (subjective probability of an existential catastrophe from AI such as human extinction) as between 5 and 50 percent. [22] [23] [24]
In March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, via Twitch, Shear donated the initial US$1 million to start a SF New Deal, a non-profit organization which ordered meals from San Francisco eateries and delivered them to people in need. The organization was started by his Yale college classmate Leonore Estrada, who owned the Three Babes Bakeshop in San Francisco's Bayview neighborhood. [25] [26] [8]
Y Combinator, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.
Vimeo, Inc. is an American video hosting, sharing, and services provider headquartered in New York City. Vimeo focuses on the delivery of high-definition video across a range of devices. Vimeo's business model is through software as a service (SaaS). They derive revenue by providing subscription plans for businesses and content creators. Vimeo provides its subscribers with tools for video creation, editing, and broadcasting, enterprise software solutions, as well as the means for video professionals to connect with clients and other professionals. As of December 2021, the site has 260 million users, with around 1.6 million subscribers to its services.
Justin.tv was a website created by Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt in 2007 to allow anyone to broadcast video online. Justin.tv user accounts were called "channels", like those on YouTube, and users were encouraged to broadcast a wide variety of user-generated live video content, called "broadcasts".
Justin Kan is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of live video platforms Justin.tv and Twitch, as well as the mobile social video application Socialcam. He was also the co-founder and former CEO of law-tech company Atrium before it was shut down in March 2020. In 2021, he launched NFT marketplace Fractal, which was renamed to Stash in 2024.
Jessica Livingston is an American investor, writer, and podcaster. She is best known for being a founding partner of the seed stage venture firm Y Combinator. She is the wife of founding partner Paul Graham.
Livestreaming, live-streaming, or live streaming is the streaming of video or audio in real time or near real time. While often referred to simply as streaming, the real time nature of livestreaming differentiates it from other non-live broadcast forms of streamed media such as video-on-demand, vlogs and video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and Twitch (service).
Samuel Harris Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the chief executive officer of OpenAI since 2019. He is also the chairman of clean energy companies Oklo Inc. and Helion Energy. Altman is considered to be one of the leading figures of the AI boom. He dropped out of Stanford University after two years and founded Loopt, a mobile social networking service, raising more than $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019.
Daniel Joseph Clancy is an American technologist and computer scientist. After working at NASA, he was the engineering director for Google Book Search from 2005 to early 2014. From 2014 to 2018, Clancy was vice president of product and engineering at social networking service Nextdoor.
Twitch is an American video live-streaming service popular in video games, including broadcasts of esports competitions. It also offers music broadcasts, creative content, and "in real life" streams. Twitch is operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon. It was introduced in June 2011 as a spin-off of the general-interest streaming platform Justin.tv.
Gigster provides a service that allows users to get tech projects built on demand. It was co-founded by Roger Dickey and Debo Olaosebikan and based in San Francisco, California. They received seed funding from Greylock Partners, Bloomberg Beta, as well as notable angel investors and founders Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Justin Waldron of Zynga, and Emmett Shear of Twitch, among others. They were a part of Y-Combinator's Summer 2015 class.
OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its stated mission is to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.
Qasar Younis is a Pakistani American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, and the CEO of Applied Intuition, a technology company that is building advanced software and infrastructure tools for self-driving vehicles. Prior to Applied Intuition, he was the COO of Y Combinator during Sam Altman’s tenure as President. He was also the co-founder and CEO of Talkbin.
Garry Tan is an American venture capitalist and executive who is the CEO of Y Combinator and a founder of Initialized Capital. He previously co-founded Posterous and Posthaven. He was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, and previously a partner at Y Combinator. Tan is also known for his engagement in San Francisco politics, both as a commenter on social media and as a political donor.
Hitbox was a live-streaming esports video game website launched in October 2013. It was a competitor to Twitch. It was acquired by Azubu, and then became Smashcast.
Michael Seibel is a partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam. He first joined Y Combinator in 2013, advising hundreds of startups, and has been active in promoting diversity efforts among startup founders.
Kyle Vogt is an American technology entrepreneur known for his contributions to autonomous vehicle technology and live-streaming platform technologies.
Daniel Kan is an American entrepreneur and technology executive. He is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Cruise Automation. Kan and Cruise Senior Director Kyle Vogt are listed as number 7 on Fortune's 2016 40 Under 40 List.
Contrary is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. Formed in 2016, the firm invests across early stage companies in North America and India. Select investments from the firm include DoorDash, Anduril, Ramp, and Zepto.
Ermira "Mira" Murati is an engineer, researcher, and tech executive. She served as chief technology officer of OpenAI from May 2022 to September 2024.
On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board of directors ousted co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman after the board had no confidence in his leadership. The removal was caused by concerns about his handling of artificial intelligence safety, and allegations of abusive behavior. Altman was reinstated on November 22 after pressure from employees and investors.
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