Every batch, we invite founders to advise YC companies as Visiting Group Partners. These advisors bring valuable insights and recent operational experience to YC’s early-stage companies. Throughout the batch, they take on a variety of responsibilities, including application reading, interviews, group and individual office hours, Demo Day prep, and more.

Today, we’re excited to welcome Emmett Shear and Wayne Crosby as our newest Visiting Group Partners — and welcome back to Visiting Group Partners David Lieb, Pete Koomen, Rich Aberman, and Umur Cubukcu.

Emmett Shear

Emmett was co-founder and CEO of Twitch, where millions of people come together live every day to chat, interact, and make their own entertainment together. For 16 years, he worked on live video for the internet starting with Justin.tv (W07), which later became Twitch Inc.

In 2014, Twitch Inc. became a fully owned subsidiary of Amazon and the platform has grown to more than 8 million streamers a month. Emmett resigned as CEO in February 2023 and now works with Twitch in an advisory role.

He graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a degree in computer science. Emmett lives with hisfamily in San Francisco and is happiest when he’s learning something new.

Wayne Crosby

Wayne is passionate about helping people and teams reach their full potential. He was a co-founder of Zenter (W07), a collaborative presentation product that was acquired by Google and turned into Google Slides. Wayne spent ten years at Google scaling and leading teams including GSuite, Machine Intelligence, and both successful and ill-fated parts of Google+. GSuite became Google’s fourth product to have more than 1B users and generate more than $1B in revenue.  

Wayne’s professional experience and his desire to help others led him to become an angel investor, and he’s invested in dozens of Y Combinator companies over the years. In 2017, Wayne co-founded his second company, Humu, a product that uses behavioral science and machine learning to help teams at large enterprises achieve greater happiness and better performance. Humu raised over $100M to deliver on its mission to make work better for everyone, everywhere.

Always the consummate builder, Wayne is also the founder of OrgOrg, a company that is building a suite of small business tools to help organizations run more efficiently. Above all, Wayne knows that none of his success would have been possible without the support of his family, and he loves spending time with them, their dog, and their hairless cat in the Bay Area.