Emmett Shear

Co-founder and CEO, Softmax · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutiveinvestor@eshear ↗LinkedIn ↗softmax.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗

Emmett Shear is the co-founder and former CEO of Twitch, which he led through its acquisition by Amazon. He also briefly served as interim CEO of OpenAI and currently leads AI startup Softmax.

17statements → 3claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.59/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 9said about them ↓

3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 2 assertions · 9 insights · 4 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Emmett argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up

Shear predicts Twitch will expand into non-gaming live streaming over five years

“For Twitch, I think the next five years is all about growing the base of the kinds of content that you can live stream. And interact around and making that really easy.”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 32:19 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

How they sound: speaking style how? →

266 words/min while actually speaking · 2.4 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Emmett Shear: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 24 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 6,187 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Emmett Shear is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 1/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10

setup questions received 85%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 10:57“How do you think about the balance between that unwavering persistence to push the boulder up the hill versus actually realizing maybe the boulder's not meant to go up the hill, an…” ▶ 16:56“Can I ask, does it create instability within the team and the group switching between these structures, which are so very different every two years or so?” ▶ 26:32“Which of those individual skills do you think you're like, a fantastic at? And then which are you like, hmm, Emmett, I really need to spend some time improving this one?”

when Emmett pushed back ▶ 23:20“That is increasingly true as the company gets larger. So in the beginning, that's, I think that's absolutely not true.” ▶ 12:56“Maybe if you kept going, right? Maybe if you kept going at that yoga, You would actually find, oh wow, I actually do love it. The problem is you just didn't do enough.”

What they said17 What others said9 Episodes1

Everything Emmett Shear said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Shear: Org structure has only two moves: centralizing and decentralizing

“There is a fundamental tension or trade-off between centralizing and decentralizing, and those are really the only two moves.”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 14:22 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Insight

Shear: Growing companies inevitably require reorgs every 18 to 36 months

“You just sort of inevitably wind up on a 18, 24 month, 36 month beat, having a reorg at some level. And that's not something to fear, but something that you should embrace.”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 16:46 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Insight

Shear: Communities cannot be built directly, they must be grown like gardens

“The particular object level advice would be that you don't build communities, you grow them. Your communities are more like a garden than they are a building. And like a garden, it's important that you, there's things you can do to make the garden more likely …”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 29:11 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Insight

Shear: Early startup CEOs must lead product or sales, not allocate resources

“So in the beginning, that's, I think that's absolutely not true. Like, I think that you're a six person startup. The best CEO is either an amazing salesperson or an amazing product leader. Or a brilliant engineer, and they, whatever it is that the company real…”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 23:24 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Disclosure

Twitch pitched around 40 VCs before raising post-pivot round with Bessemer

“The first VC round after the pivot was with Bessemer and we struggled to raise that round. We had to pitch a lot of VCs, but Bessemer is amazing, but like we probably pitched four EVCs in that round. It was a struggle. Nobody wanted to invest in Twitch at firs…”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 30:46 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Prediction Held up

Shear predicts Twitch will expand into non-gaming live streaming over five years

“For Twitch, I think the next five years is all about growing the base of the kinds of content that you can live stream. And interact around and making that really easy.”

Insight

Shear: College is optimal for launching startups due to risk tolerance

“We were never going to have higher risk tolerance, and we were never going to have more access to other smart people than we did right men. And so if we're going to start a startup, maybe that was the best time to do it.”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 2:53 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

What-if

Shear: Waiting for a great idea prevents founders from starting

“I don't think if I'd waited to have an actually good idea or to know what I was doing that I would have ever actually gotten started.”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 4:17 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Disclosure

Shear: Justin.tv co-founders kept the company afloat using personal Kiko proceeds

“When we started Justin TV, we took some of the money that we earned from Kiko Not very much, but like a little bit. We wound up actually lending it to the company to keep the company afloat when we didn't have any cash in the bank”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 8:18 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Insight

Shear: Product-market fit doesn't reduce startup work, it shifts the sprint

“Product market fit is just as much work. It's a different kind of work, but you're sprinting after it as hard as you can, barely keeping up with this boulder rolling downhill, rather than agonizingly trying to push it up the hill.”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 10:14 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Insight

Shear: Founders must separate core thesis persistence from tactical pivots

“I do generally believe you want to know the bedrock first principle things about the world that you have faith in. So a good example of this might be like Amazon believing that commerce is going to go online in the nineties. Amazon clearly had a belief shoppin…”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 11:48 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Insight

Shear: Communication formats dictate which ideas succeed in organizations

“The way you connect, the way you communicate, the format you're using determines at some level the kinds of ideas that, not that you can express almost any idea in almost any medium, but the kinds of ideas that flow well, that other people will want to absorb,…”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 19:11 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Assertion Supported

Shear: Apple requires high-fidelity demos to secure internal project funding

“The way you pitch for resources for a new Apple product. A lot of the time is a full fidelity demo. And you actually make a full touch and feel high fidelity demo of the experience that the customer is going to have. And then the vice president of the area who…”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 20:43 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Insight

Shear: Early-stage CEOs must be control freaks when teams are small

“I think that good CEOs are often kind of control freaks early on because there's no one else to do it and somebody needs to make sure everything is going well.”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 25:35 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Assertion Supported

Shear: Tucows bought web calendar Kiko on eBay for roughly $258,000

“It winds up getting bought by two cows for, I'm gonna get the number wrong, but I think it's, like, 258,000.”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 7:29 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Disclosure

Shear: Kiko Calendar and Justin.tv never found sustainable product-market fit

“And we never achieved product market fit with Kiko Calendar. We did a little bit, certain brief moments. We had something that kind of was akin to product market fit with Justin TV, but then it turned out the hill wasn't very high, and the boulder didn't roll …”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 10:28 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

Disclosure

Shear: Twitch CEO role shifted to resource allocation around 400 employees

“And I think for me at Twitch, that happened somewhere around 400 people. It stopped being something where my main job was to figure out what we should do and where we should go and how to meet the customer needs and started being more about deciding where to a…”

Emmett Shear Feb 21, 2020 ▶ 24:04 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

The other half of the tape: Emmett Shear's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 9 times in 6 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 5 Justin Kan 2 Steve Huffman 1 Mike Maples 1