Emmett Shear

In his senior year at Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry, Shear co-founded the online calendar program Kiko with classmate Justin KanJustin KanJustin Kan is an American internet entrepreneur and investor who rose to prominence in 2007 with Justin.tv, which broadcast his life around the clock from a head-mounted camera. He went on to co-found the game streaming platform Twitch, which Amazon acquired for about $970 million in 2014; he also founded the legal technology company Atrium and co-founded the gaming payments platform Stash.Open the full entry; it received start-up capital from Y Combinator as part of its first batch in summer 2005. Kiko struggled after GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry introduced a competing product, and the two sold it on eBayeBayeBay Inc. is an online marketplace company headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar; it started out with person-to-person online auctions and listed on Nasdaq in 1998. As of the end of 2025, it had 135 million active buyers, and its platform’s gross merchandise volume in 2025 was nearly $80 billion.Open the full entry for $258,000. Shear recalled: “While everyone else was applying for jobs, I was sort of not doing anything,” adding, “That forced me to start a company.”⁠[1][2]

In 2006 Shear co-founded the live-video site Justin.tv with Justin Kan, Kyle Vogt and Michael SeibelMichael SeibelMichael Seibel is an American entrepreneur and investor and a co-founder of Justin.tv (which became Twitch) and Socialcam. He led the Y Combinator startup accelerator from 2016 to 2024 and became a Partner Emeritus in March 2025. He has been a director of Reddit since June 2020 and a director of Dropbox since the same year.Open the full entry; it began by broadcasting Kan’s daily life through a wearable camera, and Shear was one of the pioneers of this “lifecasting” experiment. The four founders shared a two-bedroom apartment and worked in shifts so that someone was always awake to manage the site. In 2009 the founders were named to Inc. magazine’s “30 Under 30” list, with Shear listed at age 26.⁠[1]

On June 13, 2011, Y Combinator announced that Shear, along with Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry, Garry TanGarry TanGarry Tan is a Canadian-born ethnically Chinese technology entrepreneur, product design and engineering practitioner, and venture capitalist who currently serves as president, CEO, and general partner of Y Combinator. He worked on early product and engineering at Palantir, co-founded Posterous, Posthaven, and Initialized Capital, led early investments in companies including Coinbase, and has long been involved in San Francisco local public affairs.Open the full entry and Justin Kan, would join as a part-time partner, advising new startups for about a fifth of his time.⁠[2]

Twitch began as a gaming video category on Justin.tv and became a separate service in 2011 after it drew more viewers than all other categories combined. In February 2014 the company was renamed Twitch Interactive, and in August 2014 it shut down Justin.tv to focus on Twitch.⁠[3]

On August 25, 2014, AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry announced that it would acquire Twitch for approximately $970 million in cash; in July 2014 more than 55 million unique visitors had watched more than 15 billion minutes of content on Twitch. Shear, then Twitch’s chief executive, said: “Being part of Amazon will let us do even more for our community.”⁠[4]

In November 2023, during a leadership upheaval at OpenAI, Shear briefly served as the company’s interim chief executive. On November 19 MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry chairman and CEO Satya NadellaSatya NadellaSatya Nadella is a business executive who serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft; his leadership career spans cloud computing, developer platforms, corporate acquisitions, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry said: “We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them.”⁠[5][6]

On November 17, 2025, a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry released the episode “Emmett Shear on Building AI That Actually Cares: Beyond Control and Steering” of The a16z Show, hosted by Andreessen Horowitz general partner Erik TorenbergErik TorenbergErik Torenberg is a tech entrepreneur, investor, and podcast host who is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he invests and is responsible for marketing and the ecosystem network. He was the first employee of Product Hunt and founded or co-founded On Deck, Village Global, and Turpentine, long combining founder communities, expert content, and early-stage investing.Open the full entry with Séb Krier, AGI policy development lead at Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry.⁠[5][7]

Shear argued that the “control and steering” paradigm for AI alignment is fundamentally flawed and proposed “organic alignment,” teaching AI systems to genuinely care about humans. He discussed the risks of treating AGI as a tool rather than a potential being, current chatbots acting as “narcissistic mirrors,” why a sustainable approach requires AI that can say no to harmful requests, and his technical work on multi-agent simulations at Softmax.⁠[5][7]

X: Public account: https://x.com/eshear (opens in a new window).⁠[7]