Emmett Shear

Emmett Shear co-founded Twitch in 2007 and spent 12 years as its CEO, growing it from a scrappy live-streaming experiment into the dominant gaming and creator platform that Amazon acquired for nearly $1 billion in 2014. After a surreal 72-hour stint as interim CEO of OpenAI during the Sam Altman board crisis in November 2023, he pivoted to founding Softmax, an a16z-backed AI alignment startup working on 'organic alignment' - a biology-inspired approach to making AI systems genuinely care about their communities rather than merely comply with rules.