Fidji Simo is onboarding as OpenAI's CEO of Applications and is expected to oversee most of the company's roughly 3,000 employees. Her mandate is to turn a chaotic, unprofitable startup into a disciplined, publicly traded tech giant. She lived through Facebook's hyper-growth era, helped take Instacart public, and understands the advertising industry, experience seen as valuable for introducing ads in ChatGPT. Sam Altman is stepping back from day-to-day operations to pursue massive compute financing, a brain-computer-interface startup, and consumer hardware. Altman described creating a "new kind of financial instrument" to bankroll OpenAI's data center buildout.
Fidji Simo is wrapping up her first week at OpenAI, where she is expected to oversee most of the company's roughly 3,000 employees. To investors and partners, OpenAI leaders have been describing the former Instacart CEO as the kind of steady hand the company needs. Her mandate is clear: turn a chaotic, unprofitable startup into a disciplined, publicly traded tech giant.
Simo's arrival also underscores a bigger shift inside OpenAI. It's becoming increasingly clear that CEO Sam Altman doesn't want the responsibilities of running the next Big Tech company. He appears more focused on raising trillions of dollars for massive compute projects and incubating a brain-computer-interface startup than managing day-to-day operations. At the dinner I attended with him last week, he lit up while describing a "new kind of financial instrument" to bankroll OpenAI's data center
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