Former Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar Appointed OpenAI's First CFO After Executive Shakeup

Nextdoor Holdings Inc.’s KIND former CEO Sarah Friar has been named OpenAI‘s first chief financial officer following a leadership churn that took place earlier this year.

The artificial intelligence company has also appointed Kevin Weil, former president of product and business at Planet Labs, as chief product officer.

Friar was previously CFO at Square and worked at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Salesforce. She is also a board member of Walmart and Consensys, OpenAI said.

"Sarah and Kevin bring a depth of experience that will enable OpenAI to scale our operations, set a strategy for the next phase of growth and ensure that our teams have the resources they need to continue to thrive," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement on Monday.

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The new appointments follow the departure of OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever in May, who was replaced by Jakub Pachocki, Reuters reported.

Pachocki has previously served as OpenAI’s director of research and led the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five.

Sutskever played a key role in Altman’s dramatic firing and rehiring in November last year while on OpenAI’s board of directors.

Sutskever was removed from the board and his position at the company became unclear after Altman returned.

Andrej Karpathy, an artificial intelligence researcher and one of the founding members of OpenAI, left the company in February, Reuters reported.

In March, OpenAI said it was appointing new directors including Altman, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, a former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, a former president of Sony Entertainment and Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart.

Also Read: OpenAI Rethinks AI Safety Strategy After Key Team Members Depart

Photos: Sara Friar, Photo by Stephen McCarthy/MoneyConf via Sportsfile via Flickr Creative Commons; OpenAI, Shutterstock