OpenAI hires new CRO as executive shake-up continues

OpenAI has replaced chief revenue officer Denise Dresser after just nine months on the job, tapping Wiz president and chief operating officer Dali Rajic to take on frontier lab’s top sales job.

The move comes as part of a broader shake-up in the organization in the last month, which has seen the departures of COO Brad Lightcap and the company’s No. 2 executive, CEO of AGI deployment Fidji Simo.

OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman has taken a larger role in management following Simo’s departure, and announced Rajic’s arrival today in a blog post. Wiz, Rajic’s previous employer, was acquired by Google for $32 billion this year in the tech giant’s largest-ever acquisition.

“Denise has led our revenue organization through a formative period for the business and has worked tirelessly to get the team to where it is today,” Brockman wrote. “The way we’re deploying this technology is changing rapidly, and Dali will turn what we’ve learned into repeatable execution as we build out the full system to make AI broadly useful for people and businesses.”

OpenAI says its products reach more than one billion weekly active users, and two million businesses. Despite the incredible growth and its powerful models, however, executives have suggested both privately and publicly that the company hasn’t hit all of its revenue goals.

The company says it has filed confidentially with the SEC ahead of a potential IPO, but it’s not clear when that will take place. Private firms often try to round out their executive ranks ahead of a public markets debut. OpenAI purchased $7 billion worth of shares from employees this week in a tender offer that allowed them to cash in on some of their equity compensation, which may suggest a delay in the public offering.

Bloomberg News’ coverage of the change-up referenced an OpenAI blog post that said the company needed to have a “relentless focus” on “measurable business impact,” but those comments appear to have been removed from the published version.

However, this year CEO Sam Altman has spoken about focusing the company on enterprise deployment and cut back on technology projects and experiments seen as distracting from that goal.

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Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C.

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