OpenAI's Second CEO Tasked With A Lot of First CEO Stuff
Berber Jin and
Keach Hagey
A few interesting tidbits here, mostly up top. First:
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s newest senior hire, and CEO Sam Altman bonded over a mutual fixation: They hate standing meetings and love to kill them in the name of efficiency.
Simo will need that waste-no-time ethos in her new role helping OpenAI prepare to go public in the coming years. In her newly created role of CEO of applications, she is charged with helping the ChatGPT maker become a profitable global business, while remaking an internal culture that has been mired in executive infighting and high-profile departures.
Yeah, I mean is a "CEO of applications" normally tasked with helping a $300B company "become a profitable global business" while "remaking an internal culture"? To me, that sounds more like a "CEO" without the qualifier. But I'm old fashioned like that. Still, this could just be WSJ pontificating a bit. Moving along...
Altman needs Simo—an established operations and turnaround guru at Instacart where she is currently CEO—more than ever. During a recent all-hands meeting, he suggested that when the company goes public, he would like Simo, not him, to be the one leading the earnings calls.
Certainly there are some companies that have someone else other than the CEO do earnings calls. Most often, it's the CFO. OpenAI has one of those – one who also happens to have experience being the CEO of a public company previously, in Sarah Friar. She is not mentioned here. But she will report to Fidji Simo.
In her newly created role, Simo, who joins this summer, will oversee all of the company’s major business functions, including its product, finance and sales teams, reporting to Altman. She represents a new generation of OpenAI leadership.
Certainly there are many companies where another executive oversees some of the above. Usually not all of it, as it's often the case to let the CEO focus on one of those things. But yeah, we know OpenAI is not a normal company. Anyway, normally that other executive is the COO. OpenAI has one of those, Brad Lightcap. He is not mentioned here. But he will report to Fidji Simo.
Altman, who has roughly two dozen reports, has been looking for months to delegate more responsibility during a period of rapid growth. He ultimately plans to bring in similarly seasoned leadership to helm the company’s infrastructure division, according to people familiar with his thinking.
Two dozen reports is a lot. Why some of those don't report to the current COO, I don't know. If nothing else, bringing on Simo makes sense in the spirit of lightening the load on Altman. And if they end up getting someone senior for infrastructure and give them the "CEO" title of that org, it could better balance this Simo situation, I suppose.
To that end:
Altman has told associates that each of the three areas of the company—Simo’s applications business, infrastructure and research—will one day become multitrillion-dollar businesses.
For now, he will focus more of his attention on the latter two, leaving Simo to figure out how to get the tech world’s most closely watched company to one day turn a profit.
There's a world in which Simo is the CEO of Applications, this would-be new executive is CEO of Infrastructure, and Altman is CEO of Research. But there's another world where someone else is also brought in as CEO of Research. At that point, perhaps Altman is "just" CEO of OpenAI?
Of course, there's also a world where Simo has that title. You don't really have to squint to see it above...
One more thing:
The startup and runaway leader in generative artificial intelligence has increased its head count more than fivefold since the 2022 launch of ChatGPT. Traffic to the chatbot has grown more than threefold to 5.1 billion monthly visits in the past year, according to Similarweb.
That 5B+ monthly visits would put ChatGPT only behind Google, YouTube, and Facebook – and not that far behind Facebook either.1 That is... wild.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 Of note, Wikipedia cites Instagram as being ahead of ChatGPT as well in terms of web traffic. Regardless, at the current rate of growth, it's going to pass both Meta-owned properties soon. And yes, it already passed Wikipedia.