Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is resigning

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is resigning, effective immediately, he announced in a blog post on Thursday.

Shear has been at Twitch since before it was Twitch. He was a co-founder of Justin.tv, the platform where Justin Kan streamed his life 24/7. That became Twitch in 2011 to focus on popular gaming livestreams, and just three years later, the platform was acquired by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars.

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

Shear will be replaced by Dan Clancy, who has been at Twitch for more than three years and was serving as the company’s president. Clancy was originally hired in 2019 as the company’s executive VP of creator and community experience, according to Variety. Shear will continue at the company in an advisory role.

In recent months, Twitch has rolled out new moderation and safety features to try and improve the health of the platform and grappled with complaints from creators about changes to its revenue split. (Clancy’s name was actually the one attached to a September letter to creators about those revenue split adjustments.) And over the past few years, Twitch also faced increased competition from YouTube’s livestreaming platform, especially as the company poached some of Twitch’s most popular streamers.

Despite all that, Shear is confident in the platform’s future. "I’ve never had more confidence in Twitch’s leadership, in all our people, and in our product, than I do today," he wrote. "For many years I truly felt Twitch might die without my guidance and input, but I no longer feel that is true."

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