Meet Emmett Shear, the new interim CEO of OpenAI, who sold his first startup on eBay for $250,000
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- Emmett Shear is the new interim CEO of OpenAI following the ouster of Sam Altman.
- Shear is a cofounder of Twitch and the former CEO of the gaming-focused streaming platform.
- Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million in 2014.
Former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear has been named the new interim CEO of OpenAI following Sam Altman's shock firing at the artificial intelligence startup over the weekend.
Shear was the CEO of livestreaming platform Twitch — best known for its gaming content — for more than 16 years before stepping down in March.
At the time of his resignation, Shear said he was stepping down to care for his newborn son.
But just eight months later, Shear is back in the limelight.
Who is Emmett Shear?
Shear, 40, grew up in Seattle. He was a video game fan and loved StarCraft to the point that he had "a number of fights" with his dad over all the time he was spending on the game, he told United Airlines' Hemispheres magazine in 2022.
In 2005, Shear graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in computer science.
He then founded his first startup, Kiko Calendar, with Justin Kan.
"It didn't go so well. Well, it went alright. We built it, we sold it on eBay," he said in a 2014 lecture. "That's not necessarily the end you want for your startup."
In 2006, Kiko — which was facing competition from Google Calendar — was sold for $258,100 to Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows, an internet services company.
But Shear did better with his next startup with Kan — a livestreaming service called Justin.tv, which started as a single channel streaming Kan's life 24/7 in 2007.
In 2011, Shear spun the popular Twitch off from Justin.tv. In 2014, Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million and Shear stayed on as the CEO of the company.
The platform says it now sees 7 million livestreamers each month — up from 1 million in July 2014.
Shear is also an investor.
In June 2011, Shear joined Y Combinator as a part-time partner. He remained at the tech startup accelerator for five years up until June 2016, according to his LinkedIn account. He was an angel investor in the Fathom transcription app in 2021. In April 2023, Shear joined Y Combinator again as a visiting group partner, his LinkedIn shows.
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