Emmett Shear

Emmett Shear is an American technology entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and longtime chief executive of Twitch, the live-streaming platform. Shear and his collaborator Justin Kan were members of Y Combinator's first batch in 2005, the same early cohort that funded Reddit's founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. Their first YC project was a calendar application called Kiko, which they sold on eBay for roughly $250,000 after Google launched its own calendar product. This shared origin makes Shear a frequently cited peer and contemporary of Reddit's founders within the early Y Combinator ecosystem.

In March 2007, Shear, Kan, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt launched Justin.tv, a continuous live video stream of Kan's daily life. Shear became CEO of Justin.tv in August 2011, and the company increasingly focused on its gaming-streaming product, which was rebranded as Twitch in 2014. Amazon acquired Twitch later that year for a reported sum of roughly $970 million, and Shear continued to lead the company for years afterward as it became the dominant platform for live game streaming. In 2011 he was also appointed a part-time partner at Y Combinator.

Shear gained mainstream attention in November 2023 when, during a dramatic governance crisis at OpenAI, he was named the company's interim CEO following the board's abrupt removal of Sam Altman on November 17. Shear's tenure lasted only days; by November 21 an agreement was reached to reinstate Altman, making Shear one of three people to hold the OpenAI CEO title within roughly seventy-two hours. The episode briefly placed him at the center of one of the most closely watched leadership disputes in technology.

Shear's direct role in Reddit's corporate history and governance is limited; he is relevant chiefly as a contemporary who emerged from the same foundational Y Combinator class as Reddit's founders and as a fellow leader of a major user-generated-content platform. His career, spanning the rise of live streaming and a cameo at the helm of the most prominent artificial-intelligence company, illustrates the tightly interconnected network of founders and investors that shaped the early Web 2.0 and YC startup era in which Reddit was created.