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A good leader delegates — but doesn’t abdicate.
Emmett Shear cofounded Twitch’s former parent company, Justin.tv, and eventually served as the streamer’s CEO when it spun off. He watched Twitch grow from a small enterprise to a streaming goliath, including its 2014 sale to Amazon. He eventually left Twitch in 2023.
Reflecting on his time at the helm of the company during a recent appearance on the “Social Radars” podcast, Shear said one mistake he made was over-delegating at Twitch.
When he first started delegating work, Shear said it had positive benefits.
“It was actually really critical for the company that I had someone else who was a CTO,” Shear said. “I didn’t really understand our architecture direction, but I worked with him enough.”
It took time: “We went through a number of CTOs and they didn’t work. They were bad,” he said.
Eventually, Shear said, that delegation turned into thinking that he “wasn’t supposed to override” his employees.
“I’d hired experts, I was supposed to let them do their jobs,” Shear said. “When I didn’t like how something felt, or where I was taking the company, that I should crush down that concern and not act on it.”
That was a “mistake,” he said.
In an email to Business Insider, Shear wrote that over-delegation leads to “slower decision-making on the margin, less risk-taking for the company as a whole, and lower efficiency.”
“I run a much, much smaller company now, so it’s a very different situation that you can’t really compare,” wrote Shear, who runs AI startup Softmax. “But when I was at Twitch, I tuned which things I chose to delegate over time and got better at it.”
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The magic recipe, he wrote, was “better judgment from reflecting on past experience.”
On the podcast, Shear said that the Twitch leaders he delegated to were “well-meaning,” but that they “didn’t really understand what we were doing.”
“No one but the CEO ever really understands what’s going on, because it’s not their job,” he said. “That’s my job.”
Shear said he failed in his “responsibility to the company as the holder of the context.”
Shear’s philosophy aligns with Silicon Valley’s “founder mode” ethos. YC cofounder and former president Paul Graham coined the term after hearing a talk from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky.
In his 2024 essay, Graham criticized the idea that leaders should “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.”
“In practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground,” Graham wrote.
When Graham stepped down as YC president in 2014, Sam Altman rose to take the reins. Shear also has a career connection to Altman; during Altman’s brief ousting from OpenAI in 2023, Shear took over as interim CEO.
On the podcast, Shear said that a CEO’s job is not only to delegate but also to discern: “Is this the kind of decision that we have to get right, or is this the kind of decision where it’s actually OK if we screw it up and it can be a learning experience for somebody?”
“That’s how I learned all this stuff, is I made a lot of mistakes and I got to learn from them,” he said.
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