What Web3 projects has the new CEO of OpenAI invested in?
The last investment was made in the blockchain project of the producer of "Happy Farm."Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
On November 20, multiple sources disclosed that the OpenAI board has decided to hire Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear as the new CEO. This also means that Sam Altman, the OpenAI founder who was abruptly dismissed by the board in a manner reminiscent of Steve Jobs, has confirmed that he will not be returning.
Let's set aside Sam's future for now and focus on Emmett, who has recently taken the helm at OpenAI.
Emmett is better known as the co-founder of Twitch. In June 2011, Emmett and his college classmate Justin Kan co-founded the live streaming platform Twitch. In 2014, Amazon successfully acquired Twitch for $970 million, beating out Google, and Emmett served as the CEO of the platform until March of this year.
It is worth mentioning that, in addition to being the CEO of Twitch, Emmett is also a part-time partner at the well-known venture capital firm Y Combinator, where Sam served as president from 2014 to 2019. This suggests that the two may have had some professional overlap in the past.
As a senior executive at a leading VC, Emmett is also keen on venture capital, and public records show that he has personally invested in several Web3 concept projects.
According to Venture Beats, Emmett and Justin invested in an NFT marketplace called Rare Bits in 2018. Rare Bits is a zero-fee, peer-to-peer NFT marketplace that helps early on-chain users trade OG-level NFTs like CryptoKitties. In the round of financing that Emmett participated in, Rare Bits raised a total of $6 million from institutions and investors such as Spark Capital, First Round Capital, and Craft Ventures. Unfortunately, the platform seems to have missed the wave of NFT popularity—Rare Bits' social media was quite active in 2018, but the last post was in February 2019.
In June of this year, Emmett and Justin co-invested in a $33 million seed round for the blockchain gaming company Proof of Play. This round was co-led by top VC a16z and Greenoaks, with other participants including Balaji Srinivasan, Mercury, Firebase, Zynga, and Alchemy.
Proof of Play aims to create fun and easy-to-play on-chain games, and its founder is Amitt Mahajan, whom a16z refers to as a "startup genius." You may not have heard of Amitt's name, but you surely know about the game Farmville, which he developed while at Zynga…
Interestingly, the massive seed round financing for Proof of Play shocked the entire industry. Synthetix founder Kain.eth remarked that raising so much money in a seed round was simply "absurd," and that this situation "is bound to end badly"…
In addition to direct investments, Emmett is also very enthusiastic about participating in discussions about Crypto. His most precise attitude towards Crypto can be traced back to May of this year.
At that time, Emmett responded to another industry acquaintance, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (a representative of the Crypto opposition and author of "The Black Swan"), stating: "Bitcoin cannot be considered a hedge; it is a technology for remittances and store of value, suitable for countries that deceive their citizens with lower exchange rates and corruption than the market. Of course, Bitcoin has its drawbacks… but are there other alternatives on the market?"
Emmett finally emphasized: "I want to clarify that this (remittance, store of value, etc.) does not necessarily make Bitcoin a great investment, but it does mean that Bitcoin has real utility, especially in underdeveloped countries."
