Emmett Shear became the new CEO of OpenAI, what Web3 projects did he invest in?

By Azuma, Odaily

On November 20, multiple sources revealed that OpenAI’s board of directors had decided to hire Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear to take over as CEO. This also means that OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who was abruptly fired by the board of directors in a similar form to Steve Jobs, has confirmed that he will not return.

Sam’s future holdings, let’s focus on Emmett, the latest addition to OpenAI.

Emmett was previously better known as the co-founder of Twitch. Emmett co-founded Twitch in June 2011 with his college classmate Justin Kan, and in 2014 Amazon beat out Google for $970 million to buy Twitch, and Emmett himself served as CEO of the platform until March of this year.

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Emmett and Justin

It is worth mentioning that Emmett is a part-time partner of Y Combinator, a well-known venture capital firm, in addition to being the CEO of Twitch, while Sam was the president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019.

As a senior executive of a leading VC, Emmett is also keen on venture capital, and public information shows that he has personally invested in some Web3 concept projects in the past.

According to Venture Beats, Emmett and Justin participated in an NFT marketplace called RareBits in 2018. Rare Bits is a zero-fee, peer-to-peer NFT marketplace that helps early on-chain users trade OG-level NFTs like CryptoKitties. In the round in which Emmett participated, Rare Bits raised a total of $6 million in funding from Spark Capital, First Round Capital, Craft Ventures, and others, but alas, the platform seems to have failed to catch the wave of NFT take-off — Rare Bits’ social media was quite active in 2018, but the last post was in February 2019.

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In June this year, Emmett and Justin once again co-invested in a $33 million seed round of blockchain game company Proof of Play, which was co-led by leading VC a16z and Greenoaks, and in addition to Emmett and Justin, Balaji Srinivasan, Mercury, Firebase, Zynga, and Alchemy also participated.

Proof of Play aims to create on-chain games that are both fun and accessible, and the company’s founder, Amitt Mahajan, is called an “entrepreneurial genius” by a16z. You may not have heard of Amitt’s name, but you must know that one of the games he made during his time at Zynga, Farmville, is called “Happy Farm” in Chinese…

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Interestingly, Proof of Play’s huge seed round shocked the industry. Kain.eth, the founder of Synthetix, once called it nonsense to take so much money in the seed round, and this thing is “not destined to be good”.

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In addition to outright investments, Emmett is also keen to participate in some of the discussions about Crypto, and his most definite attitude towards Crypto can be traced back to May of this year.

At the time, Emmett replied to another long-time acquaintance, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (a representative of the Crypto opposition and author of Black Swan), that “Bitcoin cannot be used as a hedge, it is a technology for remittances and stores of value, which is suitable for countries that deceive their citizens with lower exchange rates than the market and corruption.” Of course, Bitcoin has its drawbacks… But there are no other alternatives on the market. 」

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“I want to make it clear that this doesn’t necessarily make Bitcoin a great investment, but it does mean that Bitcoin does have a real use, especially in non-developed countries,” Emmett concluded. 」