Sarah Friar

OpenAI's first CFO

Sarah Friar is chief financial officer of OpenAI. The company named her to the role in June 2024, announcing it alongside Kevin Weil as chief product officer. People Matters reported that she would lead the finance team and ensure continued investment in core research, and Sam Altman said she and Weil brought a depth of experience that would help OpenAI scale and plan its next growth phase. Wikipedia describes the role as OpenAI's first CFO, and 2026 press coverage continues to identify her in it.^[1][2][3]

From Northern Ireland to Oxford and Stanford

Friar was born on December 24, 1972 in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, and attended Strabane Grammar School. She won a scholarship from Arthur Andersen and worked there for a year, then studied at St Anne's College, Oxford, earning an engineering degree with study in metallurgy, economics and management. She later earned an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was an Arjay Miller scholar. A 1990s internship took her to a gold mine in Ghana.^[2]

McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and Salesforce

Her early career included time as an analyst at McKinsey in South Africa, a role as managing director in equity research at Goldman Sachs, and a position as senior vice president of finance and strategy at Salesforce. Wikipedia does not date these roles.^[2]

Square and Slack

Friar was chief financial officer of Square, now Block, from 2012 to 2018. In 2017 she became the first independent director on Slack Technologies' board, and she has also sat on the board of New Relic.^[2]

Nextdoor

From 2018 to 2024 she was chief executive of Nextdoor, the neighborhood social network. She led its public listing through a special-purpose acquisition company in 2021, and a leadership transition was announced in February 2024, four months before she moved to OpenAI.^[2]

Financing OpenAI's compute

OpenAI announced on March 31, 2026 that it had closed a record funding round with $122 billion in commitments at an $852 billion post-money valuation, co-led by SoftBank with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw, Amazon and Nvidia. The company reported $2 billion in monthly revenue and $13.1 billion for the previous year, and remained unprofitable and preparing for a potential IPO. Business Today, writing on April 6, 2026, said a significant part of the round was expected to come from partners such as Amazon and Nvidia.^[5][3]

Reporting on IPO readiness

Business Today, citing The Information, reported in April 2026 that Friar had warned colleagues OpenAI might not be ready to go public in 2026, and that she flagged the risk of more than $600 billion in cloud-capacity commitments over five years as revenue growth moderated. The report is secondhand. It also said her reporting line had shifted to Fidji Simo, while noting that Friar and Altman have both publicly said they are aligned on compute strategy.^[3]

Boards, nonprofit roles and honors

Wikipedia lists current board seats at Walmart and ConsenSys, co-chairmanship of Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, and co-founding Ladies Who Launch, a nonprofit for female entrepreneurs. She received an honorary doctorate from Ulster University in 2018 and was appointed an OBE in 2019. TIME named her to its 2026 list of the 100 most influential people; in the accompanying profile, GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan wrote that she earns trust inside and outside her companies so that people tell her what they really think rather than the glossy version.^[2][4]

Why she matters

Friar has been finance chief at Square and OpenAI and chief executive of Nextdoor, and she now sits at the point where AI ambitions meet the economics of compute. How she balances record fundraising, commitments in the hundreds of billions and a possible IPO will shape how investors price the rest of the AI sector.^[2][3][5]

On The Executive List

Sarah Friar is ranked No. 57 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Financial Officers discipline. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.