The new CEO of OpenAI has finalized, what Web3 projects has Emmett Shear invested in?

Original | Odaily

Author | Azuma

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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 Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, who was abruptly fired by the board of directors in a similar form to Steve Jobs, has confirmed that he will not return.

• Odaily Note: For more information about Sam Altman’s incident, please pay attention to this report over the weekend, “Sam Altman leaves OpenAI, can Worldcoin become the focus of his career?”.

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 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’s other role in addition to the CEO of Twitch is a part-time partner of the well-known venture capital firm Y Combinator, while Sam served as the president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, so it is speculated that the two should have had some work overlap in the past.

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 Rare Bits 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 funding 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 NFTs taking off — Rare Bits’ social media was quite active in 2018, but the last post was in February 2019.

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

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 the seed round with so much money is nonsense, and this matter 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, and it 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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“What I want to clarify is that this [the practical utility of remittances] 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. ”