See the moment Sam Altman introduced Emmett Shear at Stanford 9 years before the ex-Twitch chief became OpenAI's CEO
- Emmett Shear is set to become OpenAI's interim CEO, the third in as many days.
- He previously crossed paths with Sam Altman at Y Combinator's inaugural class in 2005.
Emmett Shear announced at 1 a.m. PT Monday that he would become OpenAI's interim CEO.
After a dramatic weekend, the Twitch cofounder and former CEO is stepping into the role once held by Sam Altman, who was fired by OpenAI's board on Friday, before negotiations started to bring him back in.
The talks broke down and Altman will instead move to Microsoft along with former OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
Shear becomes the third person in as many days to take the reins at OpenAI, after the previous interim CEO, Mira Murati, publicly supported Altman amid the chaos.
This isn't the first time Altman and Shear have crossed paths.
In 2005, both were in the inaugural class for Y Combinator, the startup accelerator of which Altman was president from 2014 to 2019.
And back in 2014, Altman introduced Shear during a talk about startups at Stanford University.
In a 46-minute YouTube video posted by Y Combinator, Shear delivered a lecture on how to run user interviews to understand a startup's customers.
The first 20 seconds show Altman introducing Shear, noting how Amazon acquired Twitch.
In the video, he said the lecture "should be really useful" and thanked Shear for coming before the class got underway.