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‘OpenAI announced this week the hiring of former Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar as its first chief financial officer.
Friar previously served as a CFO at the financial services company Square, currently sits on the board of Walmart and also worked at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Salesforce. Her hiring was announced alongside the appointment of Kevin Weil as chief product officer. Weil previously worked at Twitter and Meta.
“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
The appointments came after the high-profile departures of several OpenAI executives including OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who left in May six months after playing a role in Altman’s firing and rehiring as CEO.
During her time as CEO of Nextdoor Friar encouraged real estate agents to use the neighborhood-based social media platform to generate leads.
“You’re in a market area that is all about community,” Friar said at an Inman Connect event in 2019. “People don’t buy a house, they buy a home. People don’t want to see bricks and mortar, they want to understand who are my neighbors what are the local schools like, how friendly are people.”
The company, however, raised its prices on real estate advertisements under her tenure, drawing criticism from agents who told Inman in a 2019 article that they struggled to find leads through the platform.
At Inman Connect New York 2024, Friar encouraged agents to go further in their efforts to ingratiate themselves into the communities they serve.
“We’re perfect for all of you because we are the neighborhood,” Friar said. “What I love about real estate agents, Realtors, is you are the new community activists. You are the people who care most about your communities.”
