Twitch founding CEO Emmett Shear is stepping down after 16 years

Emmett Shear is no longer the boss of Twitch. After 16 long filled with controversy Years ago, the co-founder and only CEO of Amazon-owned streaming platform he’s ever known announced he was stepping down to spend more time with his family.

“Since my first child was just born, I’ve been thinking about my future with Twitch,” Shear wrote a blog post on Thursday. “Twitch often feels to me like a child that I raised myself. And while I always want to be there when Twitch needs me, it feels to me like at 16, Twitch is ready to move out of the house and venture out on my own.”

Shear, who founded Twitch in 2007 with Justin Kan as Justin.tv, will be replaced by current Twitch President Dan Clancy, who joined the company in 2019 after long stints at NASA and Google. Shear said he will continue to work with Twitch in an advisory capacity, but writes that he no longer fears the platform would die “without my guidance and input.”

Twitch was born when Justin.tv spun off its gaming-centric streams in 2011 and was bought by Amazon in 2014 for just under $1 billion. Since then, the platform has grown and changed tremendously, with its most popular streamers expanding into content beyond gaming, effectively running everything from them daily talk shows To Sketch comedy clubs.

But it’s also under constant scrutiny in terms of payment splits for creators, targeted harassment, and streamers who profit from things like gambling. Pull out outraged many makers last year when it announced the end of the special 70/30 splits for top performers. At the time, it claimed the sales changes were a result of higher fees from Amazon Web Services, its parent company’s cloud-computing moneymaker.

At the same time, Twitch some of them bleed its biggest stars to YouTube. More recently, the platform has attempted to address long-standing complaints about controversial features such as canal raids and improve moderation and user security on the platform.

“With the arrival of my son, the time has come for me to focus my energies on building this tiny little startup family and I am ready to put my energies into that,” Shear wrote today. “Twitch will always be part of my extended family, a community where I’ve grown in so many ways alongside Twitch itself.”