Twitch 
Justin.tv 
Y Combinator 
Twitch CEO Emmett Shear expressed the importance of community on the platform and revealed new tools that will help build stronger communities during his keynote address at TwitchCon Friday morning.Shear also highlighted how Twitch, the dominating game streaming service, has grown. More than a million people, he said, are tuning in to Twitch at any given moment and every day about half a million streamers go live on the service.Streamers who develop enough of a following can make money (and...
Twitch
Emmett
Shear
Cofounder / CEO
When COVID-19 struck and lockdowns were issued, Shear’s livestream gaming service Twitch – cofounded with Justin Kan in 2011 and sold to Amazon for $970 million in 2014 – predictably attracted record numbers of viewers and creators, putting it on pace to surpass the 600 billion minutes watched in 2019. He gave back with Stream Aid, a livestreamed 12-hour benefit concert which raised over $2.77 million for the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for WHO, and a $1 million pledge to the SF New Deal, a non-profit focused on keeping small businesses and their employees afloat. He also expanded Twitch’s sports offerings, partnering with the National Women’s Soccer League. In the wake of increased competition from YouTube and Facebook Gaming, Twitch is forming exclusive partnerships with streamers like Ninja, who returned to Twitch in September after leaving for now-defunct Mixer in 2019. Late 2020 has also seen Twitch lead aggressive updates to its terms of use, cracking down on hate speech and countless copyright violations spanning years of streams.
