Emmett Shear
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Last reviewed
Jun 8, 2026
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Emmett Shear (born 1983) is an American entrepreneur, software engineer, and investor best known as a co-founder and longtime chief executive of the live-streaming platform Twitch, and for a brief, closely watched stint as interim chief executive of OpenAI during that company's November 2023 leadership crisis. Since 2025 he has led Softmax, a San Francisco startup he co-founded to research AI alignment through an approach he calls "organic alignment."[1][6]
| Year | Role or event |
|---|---|
| 1983 | Born in Seattle, Washington |
| 2005 | Graduates from Yale; joins Y Combinator's first batch with the calendar app Kiko |
| 2006 | Kiko's assets sold on eBay for $258,100 |
| 2007 | Co-founds Justin.tv with Justin Kan, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt |
| 2011 | Twitch spun out of Justin.tv; Shear becomes CEO; joins Y Combinator as a part-time partner |
| 2014 | Amazon acquires Twitch for about $970 million |
| 2023 | Steps down as Twitch CEO (March); serves about three days as OpenAI interim CEO (November) |
| 2025 | Co-founds Softmax, an AI alignment research startup |
Shear was born in 1983 in Seattle, Washington.[1] He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Yale University in 2005.[1] He and fellow Yale student Justin Kan became close friends and frequent collaborators, and the two would co-found a string of companies together over the next two decades.[1]
In 2005, Shear and Kan were accepted into the very first batch of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator newly founded that year by Paul Graham and his partners. Their project was Kiko, one of the earliest web-based calendar applications built with then-novel AJAX techniques.[1] Kiko attracted an early following but struggled after Google released Google Calendar in 2006, and the founders sold the application's assets in an eBay auction that closed at $258,100.[1][8] Rather than ending their partnership, the sale freed Shear and Kan to pursue a more ambitious idea.
In 2007, Shear co-founded Justin.tv alongside Justin Kan, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt.[1][2] The site began as a single round-the-clock video feed of Kan's daily life, captured by a webcam mounted on a cap and streamed through a backpack rig that Vogt engineered; the first broadcast went live on March 19, 2007.[2] Later that year the company opened the platform so that anyone could register and stream, organizing content into categories such as social, sports, entertainment, and gaming.[2]
Gaming proved by far the most popular category. In 2011 the team spun the gaming streams into a separate brand named TwitchTV, a nod to the fast-reflex "twitch" gameplay of competitive video games; it launched in public beta on June 6, 2011.[1][2] Shear became chief executive of the new venture and built Twitch into the dominant platform for live game streaming and esports.[1] That same year he also joined Y Combinator as a part-time partner, advising early-stage founders.[1]
Twitch's rapid growth attracted major acquirers. In August 2014, Amazon acquired the company for about $970 million, one of the largest purchases in Amazon's history at the time.[1] Shear remained CEO under Amazon ownership for nearly another decade, building Twitch into a cornerstone of online gaming culture. On March 16, 2023, he announced that he was stepping down after 16 years with the company, citing the recent birth of his first child and a desire to be present for his family; he said Twitch felt mature enough to "move out of the house and venture alone."[3][9] Dan Clancy, the company's president, succeeded him as CEO, and Shear stayed on in an advisory capacity.[3][9]
In November 2023, Shear was thrust into one of the most dramatic episodes in recent technology history. On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's nonprofit board abruptly removed co-founder Sam Altman as chief executive, saying he had not been "consistently candid in his communications," and named chief technology officer Mira Murati as interim CEO.[5] An attempt to bring Altman back over the weekend collapsed, and in the early hours of November 20, 2023, the board instead appointed Shear as interim chief executive, making him OpenAI's third leader in three days.[4][5]
Shear used a public statement to outline his plan: he said he would hire an independent investigator to examine the events leading to Altman's firing, speak with employees and partners, and reform the company's management.[4][5] He emphasized that he had not been brought in to dismantle OpenAI, that the board had assured him the decision was not made over any specific disagreement about AI safety, and that he was prepared to resign if the directors could not substantiate their reasons.[4][5]
His tenure lasted only about 72 hours. Pressure to reverse the decision mounted rapidly: Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella announced that Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman would join Microsoft to lead a new AI lab, and more than 700 of OpenAI's roughly 770 employees signed an open letter threatening to resign unless the board stepped down and reinstated Altman.[5] Late on November 21, 2023, OpenAI announced an agreement in principle for Altman to return as CEO under a reconstituted board chaired by Bret Taylor.[5] Shear's brief stewardship ended, but the episode cemented his public profile as a safety-minded executive trusted to steady the company at a moment of crisis.[4]
In 2025, Shear returned to building with Softmax, a small San Francisco startup he co-founded to research AI alignment, the problem of ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems pursue goals compatible with human flourishing.[6][7] He launched it with Adam Goldstein, an entrepreneur who had earlier founded the travel-search company Hipmunk and later worked in the laboratory of biologist Michael Levin at Tufts University, and David Bloomin, a machine-learning researcher focused on multi-agent reinforcement learning.[6] Softmax emerged from stealth in April 2025 as a roughly ten-person team and raised an undisclosed amount from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Lionheart Ventures, and Plural.[6] As of 2026, the company lists Shear as CEO and founder, Bloomin as a founder, and Goldstein as a board member and founder emeritus.[7]
Softmax's central idea, which Shear calls "organic alignment," draws on developmental biology and the study of collective intelligence. He contrasts it with the "hierarchical alignment" pursued by most large AI labs, which tries to keep AI systems under top-down human control.[6] Organic alignment instead treats alignment as something that emerges among peers, the way cells cooperate to form organisms, animals form packs, and people form societies, with each agent finding its role in a larger whole while keeping its own identity.[6] The company frames its working thesis as the claim that "the kinds of agents that stay aligned with us are the kinds that stay aligned with each other."[7] To test these ideas, Softmax runs reinforcement learning experiments in which large numbers of small AI agents interact in simulated worlds, studying when and how they learn to share goals and develop specialized roles.[6][7] Some of this research traces back to Levin's Tufts lab, which examines cognition across living systems from single cells to groups of organisms.[6]
Shear has long described himself as concerned about the risks of advanced artificial intelligence. He has publicly estimated his subjective probability of an existential catastrophe from AI at somewhere between 5 and 50 percent, and he has argued that the industry lacks a credible plan for keeping superhuman systems aligned, saying that "no one has a secret plan to deal with this technology."[6] At the same time, he has resisted the idea that advanced AI should be treated purely as a controlled tool, contending that genuinely intelligent systems may warrant moral consideration and that society should begin thinking now about frameworks for AI rights.[6] These convictions, that alignment remains unsolved and that control alone is insufficient, underpin both his caution during the OpenAI episode and the founding premise of Softmax.[4][6]
Beyond his operating roles, Shear has been active as an angel investor and an early supporter of pandemic-relief efforts, including a donation that helped launch the SF New Deal nonprofit in 2020.[1] He is married, became a father shortly before leaving Twitch in 2023, and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.[3]