Emmett Shear becomes the new CEO of OpenAI. Which Web3 projects has he invested in?

Emmett Shear Appointed as OpenAI's CEO A Look at His Investments in Web3 Projects

Author: Azuma, Odaily Star Daily

On November 20, several sources revealed that the OpenAI board has decided to hire Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear as the new CEO. This also means that Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI who was recently dismissed by the board in a similar fashion to Steve Jobs, has confirmed that he will not be returning.

Let’s put aside Sam’s future for now and focus on Emmett, the latest addition to OpenAI.

Emmett is best known for being the co-founder of Twitch. In June 2011, Emmett and his university classmate Justin Kan co-founded the live streaming platform Twitch. In 2014, Amazon successfully acquired Twitch for $970 million, defeating Google. Emmett himself served as the CEO of the platform until March of this year.

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Emmett and Justin

It is worth mentioning that besides being the CEO of Twitch, Emmett also serves as a part-time partner at the renowned venture capital firm Y Combinator. Meanwhile, Sam served as the president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, so it can be inferred that the two of them have had some work connections in the past.

As a high-ranking executive at a top VC firm, Emmett is also enthusiastic about venture capital investments. Public information shows that he has personally invested in some Web3 projects in the past.

According to Venture Beat, Emmett and Justin participated in a round of investments in 2018 for a NFT trading marketplace called Rare Bits. Rare Bits is a zero-fee, peer-to-peer NFT trading marketplace that helps early blockchain users trade OG-level NFTs such as CryptoKitties. In that funding round, Rare Bits received a total of $6 million in funding from institutions and investors such as SLianGuairk Capital, First Round Capital, and Craft Ventures. Unfortunately, the platform seemed to have missed the NFT boom as Rare Bits’ social media activity was quite active in 2018, but the last post was made in February 2019.

In June of this year, Emmett and Justin once again co-invested in the blockchain gaming company Proof of Play’s $33 million seed round. This round was led by top VC a16z and Greenoaks, with participation from Emmett, Justin, Balaji Srinivasan, Mercury, Firebase, Zynga, and Alchemy.

Proof of Play aims to create blockchain games that are both fun and easy to get into. The company’s founder is Amitt Mahajan, whom a16z refers to as a “startup genius.” You may not have heard of Amitt’s name, but you surely know the game he created during his time at Zynga, called FarmVille…

Interestingly, the massive seed funding of Proof of Play once shocked the entire industry. Kain.eth, the founder of Synthetix, once exclaimed that it’s ridiculous to raise so much money in the seed round, and this thing is “doomed to fail”.

In addition to direct investments, Emmett is also very interested in participating in discussions about Crypto, and his most accurate attitude towards Crypto can be traced back to May this year.

At that time, Emmett responded to another familiar figure in the industry, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (representative of Crypto opponents, author of “The Black Swan”), saying, “Bitcoin cannot be used as a hedge tool. It is a technology used for remittances and storage of value, suitable for countries that deceive their citizens with lower exchange rates and corruption than the market. Of course, Bitcoin also has its flaws… but there are no other alternatives on the market.”

Emmett finally emphasized, “What I want to clarify is that this (remittances and practical utility) does not necessarily make Bitcoin a great investment, but it does mean that Bitcoin does have real uses, especially in underdeveloped countries.”

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