Emmett Shear

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Emmett Shear
Web Summit 2018 - Contentmakers - Day 2, November 7 SM7 9280 (45715722382).jpg
Shear in 2018
Born1983 (age 40–41)
Alma mater Yale University (BS)
Known for

Emmett Shear (born 1983) is an American Internet entrepreneur and investor. [1] [lower-alpha 1] He is the co-founder of live video platform Justin.tv. He served as 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 served as interim CEO of OpenAI. [3] [4]

Contents

Early life and education

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[ when? ] computer science as an undergraduate student at Yale University. [8] He attended with his eventual Twitch co-founders Justin Kan and Michael Seibel. [5]

Career

Y Combinator

Shear, along with Justin Kan, applied to the first class of Y Combinator when they were seniors in 2005[ citation needed ]. As part of Y Combinator, the two built a calendar application called Kiko, which they eventually sold on eBay for $250,000 after Google Calendar was introduced. [7] [6]

Justin.tv

In 2006, Shear and Justin Kan, along with Michael Seibel and Kyle Vogt, started Justin.tv, a 24/7 live video feed of Kan's life, broadcast via a webcam attached to his head. [9]

Kan's "lifecasting" lasted about eight months until the four partners decided to transition to providing a live video platform so anyone could publish a live video stream. Launched in 2007, [10] [11] Justin.tv was one of the largest[ citation needed ] live video platforms in the world with more than 30 million unique users every month until it was shut down on August 5, 2014.[ citation needed ]

Twitch

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. [12]

In June 2011, [13] [14] 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 became its core product. [15] [16]

On August 25, 2014, Amazon officially acquired Twitch for a reported $970,000,000. [17]

Emmett Shear speaking at Manifest 2023 Emmett shear manifest talk.jpg
Emmett Shear speaking at Manifest 2023

In March 2023, Shear announced that he was resigning as CEO, and that Daniel J. Clancy would take over. [18]

Investor Activities

Shear became a part-time partner at Y Combinator in June 2011, where he offered advice to the new startups in each batch. [19] [20]

OpenAI

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, putting his “P(Doom)”, or probability of human extinction from AI, at between 5 and 50 percent. [22] [23] [6]

Philanthropy

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. [24] [25] [8]

Notes

  1. ↑ Name appeared as "Emmett Sheer" in "The ESPN of Videogames", Forbes (paper), ppg. 36,40, 2 Nov 2013.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Y Combinator</span> American startup accelerator

Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator 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.

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".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Justin Kan</span> American internet entrepreneur and investor

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 is also the cofounder and former CEO of law-tech company Atrium.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexis Ohanian</span> American internet entrepreneur and investor (born 1983)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenAI</span> Artificial intelligence research organization

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References

  1. ↑ "Forty Under 40: Emmett Shear, Twitch". March 9, 2017. Retrieved May 7, 2018.
  2. ↑ "Y Combinator's latest partners are also alums". VentureBeat. June 13, 2011.
  3. ↑ Hagey, Berber Jin, Deepa Seetharaman, Tom Dotan and Keach. "Sam Altman Not Returning as CEO of OpenAI; Emmett Shear to Be Interim CEO". WSJ. Archived from the original on November 20, 2023. Retrieved November 20, 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. 1 2 3 Heath, Alex (November 22, 2023). "Breaking: Sam Altman to return as CEO of OpenAI". The Verge.
  5. 1 2 Goldman, Justin (April 14, 2022). "How Emmett Shear Turned Video Game Fandom into a Billion-Dollar Business". Hemispheres. Archived from the original on November 20, 2023. Retrieved November 20, 2023.
  6. 1 2 3 Twitch Started as a Reality TV Show, archived from the original on November 20, 2023, retrieved November 20, 2023
  7. 1 2 Lynley, Matthew (August 8, 2014). "How A Site That Streams People Playing Video Games Became A Billion Dollar Business". BuzzFeed News. Archived from the original on November 20, 2023. Retrieved November 20, 2023.
  8. 1 2 Needleman, Sarah E. "New OpenAI CEO Emmett Shear Lands at Center of High-Stakes AI Boom". WSJ. Retrieved November 21, 2023.
  9. ↑ "IT'S JUSTIN, LIVE! ALL DAY, ALL NIGHT! / S.F. startup puts camera on founder's head for real-time feed, and a star is born". San Francisco Chronicle. March 30, 2007. Archived from the original on December 18, 2008. Retrieved November 3, 2011.
  10. ↑ Liz Gannes. "Justin.tv Wins Funding, Opens Platform". gigaom.com. Archived from the original on June 17, 2012.
  11. ↑ "Grab a webcam and give lifecasting a try". CNN. Archived from the original on December 10, 2014. Retrieved November 3, 2011.
  12. ↑ "Live-streaming site Justin.tv buffing up for e-sports channels". VentureBeat. March 10, 2011. Archived from the original on August 9, 2017. Retrieved August 31, 2017.
  13. ↑ Ewalt, David M. (December 2, 2013). "The ESPN of Videogames". Forbes. p. 40. Archived from the original on August 3, 2017. Retrieved August 27, 2017.
  14. ↑ Alex Wilhelm (June 6, 2011). "TwitchTV: Justin.tv's killer new esports project". The Next Web. Archived from the original on June 14, 2018. Retrieved June 18, 2018.
  15. ↑ "After A Hot Start, Justin.tv Spins Off Socialcam, Its 'Instagram for Video'". TechCrunch. AOL. August 29, 2011. Archived from the original on December 17, 2017. Retrieved June 25, 2017.
  16. ↑ Lawler, Ryan (September 19, 2012). "With More Than 20M Gamers Tuning In, Twitch Raises $15M From Bessemer Venture Partners". TechCrunch. Retrieved November 22, 2023.
  17. ↑ "Here's Why Amazon Just Paid Nearly $1 Billion For A Site Where You Watch People Play Video Games". Business Insider. August 25, 2014. Archived from the original on May 7, 2018. Retrieved May 7, 2018.
  18. ↑ "16 Years of Twitch". Archived from the original on March 17, 2023. Retrieved March 17, 2023.
  19. ↑ "Good night, Posterous". posterous.com. Archived from the original on October 11, 2021. Retrieved November 3, 2011.
  20. ↑ "Y Combinator's latest partners are also alums". VentureBeat. June 13, 2011. Archived from the original on June 25, 2022. Retrieved August 31, 2017.
  21. ↑ Efrati, Amir (November 20, 2023). "Emmett Shear Becomes Interim OpenAI CEO as Altman Talks Break Down". The Information. Archived from the original on November 20, 2023. Retrieved November 20, 2023.
  22. ↑ "Tweet by @rowancheung of excerpt of podcast interview with Emmett Shear". X (formerly Twitter). Archived from the original on November 20, 2023. Retrieved November 20, 2023.
  23. ↑ Verma, Pranshu; Tiku, Nitasha; Vynck, Gerrit De (November 20, 2023). "OpenAI stands by its ouster of Sam Altman. Emmett Shear named interim CEO". Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286. Archived from the original on November 20, 2023. Retrieved November 20, 2023.
  24. ↑ Duffett, Becky (March 27, 2020). "A Tech Angel Just Gave an SF Pie Baker a Million Dollars". Eater SF. Archived from the original on April 22, 2023. Retrieved November 20, 2023.
  25. ↑ Katie Canales. "Twitch CEO Emmett Shear just gave $1 million to a San Francisco baker to launch a nonprofit that will help small businesses amid a citywide shutdown to contain the coronavirus". Business Insider. Archived from the original on March 30, 2020. Retrieved March 31, 2020.
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