creators

Emmett Shear - Softmax CEO, Twitch co-founder

Emmett Shear is CEO of the AI alignment lab Softmax, co-founded Twitch and led it until 2023, and was OpenAI's interim CEO for two days in November 2023.

Emmett Shear (born 1983) grew up in Seattle and studied computer science at Yale, graduating in 2005. In 2007 he launched Justin.tv with Justin Kan, Michael Seibel and Kyle Vogt; its gaming spin-off became Twitch, which Shear ran as CEO from August 2011 until he stepped down in March 2023 in favour of Dan Clancy. Amazon bought Twitch on 25 August 2014 for a reported $970 million. He became a part-time partner at Y Combinator in June 2011. On 19 November 2023 OpenAI's board named him interim CEO after removing Sam Altman. An agreement to reinstate Altman was reached on 21 November, ending the job after two days. In March 2025 he co-founded Softmax, where he is CEO and where its team page also lists David Bloomin as a founder and Adam Goldstein on the board. The lab studies what it calls organic alignment - in its own words, "the process by which individuals learn to form flourishing wholes at ever greater scales" - and runs multi-agent games in which people and their coding agents compete and cooperate.

Specialization

AI alignment, multi-agent reinforcement learning, consumer video platforms, startup investing

Country

United States