End Of An Era: Twitch CEO Emmett Shear Steps Down After 16 Years

Emmett Shear, the long-serving CEO of ^Twitch, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN)'s popular live streaming platform, has announced his resignation from the company, effective immediately.

The announcement was made by Twitch on Thursday through a blog post.

Shear, who co-founded Twitch in 2007 as Justin.tv, has served as CEO for the past 16 years, overseeing the platform's growth from a small online community to a global powerhouse with millions of monthly users.

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"With my first child just born, I’ve been reflecting on my future with Twitch. Twitch often feels to me like a child I’ve been raising as well," Shear wrote. "And while I will always want to be there if Twitch needs me, at 16 years old it feels to me like Twitch is ready to move out of the house and venture alone. So it is with great poignancy that I share my decision to resign from Twitch as CEO."

In October 2006 we started working on live video for the internet. That became Twitch. More than 16 years later, I'm now a father and ready to move to my next phase of life. I wrote a blog post, but the short version is: thank you so much to everyone who built this with me.

— Emmett Shear (@eshear) March 16, 2023

Twitch President Dan Clancy will be taking over as CEO. Clancy joined the company in 2019, after working at NASA and Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL). Meanwhile, Shear assured he will continue working at the company in an advisory role, though he said he no longer fears the platform would die without his "guidance and input."

"Thank you, everyone, for your support, your critical thoughts, your trust, and your help. We built something great," the former CEO concluded.

In recent years, Twitch has faced intense scrutiny over a variety of issues, including creator payment structures, targeted harassment, and streamers profiting from controversial activities such as gambling. Furthermore, numerous prominent streamers have been departing from the platform and migrating to Alphabet's YouTube.

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Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin via Unsplash