OpenAI $7B buyback as execs leave

    di Tim Official: OpenAI

    OpenAI is falling apart. Nine of its most important leaders have left the company recently, and Sam Altman is about to ask the public to buy stock. Two of those leaders walked out within 72 hours of OpenAI handing its own staff $7 billion in cash. On Monday, August 10, OpenAI completed a deal letting current and former employees sell roughly $7 billion worth of their shares. The price valued the company at $852 billion. That $852 billion valuation was the exact same number as its March funding round. On Tuesday, August 11, Brad Lightcap announced he was leaving after 8 years. Brad Lightcap spent 4 years as chief financial officer. He ran the company as chief operating officer from 2022 until April. Brad Lightcap worked alongside Sam Altman at Y Combinator before OpenAI existed. On Thursday, August 13, chief revenue officer Denise Dresser announced she was leaving. Denise Dresser was hired in December from Salesforce, where she had been the CEO of Slack. In April, Denise Dresser took over most of Brad Lightcap's responsibilities. Denise Dresser lasted 8 months. Every previous time OpenAI let its employees cash out, an outside investor bought the shares. In October, Thrive Capital, SoftBank and others put up $6.6 billion at a valuation near $500 billion. There was a $1.5 billion version of the same deal in 2024. This time OpenAI bought the shares back itself using its OWN money. No outside investor put a single dollar behind that $852 billion price. The cash window opened Monday, and by Thursday both executives who ran the business side were gone. Retail investors will see the numbers for the first time in a document written after every one of these people had already made their decision. The people who priced OpenAI at $852 billion this month were the same people who took the money out of it. Here is the full list of the people who left since April: Bill Peebles, who ran the Sora video app Kevin Weil, vice president of OpenAI for Science Srinivas Narayanan, technology chief of B2B applications Kate Rouch, chief marketing officer Josh Achiam, chief futurist, after nearly nine years Johannes Heidecke, head of Safety Systems Chloe Bakalar, the only person at OpenAI whose entire job was ethics Brad Lightcap Denise Dresser Chloe Bakalar left in July. OpenAI never announced it, and NOBODY has replaced her. Fidji Simo stepped down the same month, and two thirds of the organization had been reporting to her. Greg Brockman absorbed most of her job. He also introduced Dresser's replacement this week, a Wiz executive named Dali Rajic. Dali Rajic was most recently president and COO of cybersecurity company Wiz. Wiz was recently acquired by Google. OpenAI says they now have more than two million businesses. The number of businesses doubled from a year ago. Denise Dresser joined OpenAI in December. Denise Dresser was previously CEO of Slack. Many thought Denise Dresser was going to be heir apparent to Mark Benioff when she was at Salesforce. Denise Dresser hired a ton of enterprise sales folks over from Salesforce. Enterprise within OpenAI is an area they are very much focused on and chasing. Brad Lightcap said he is leaving to do something new. Fidji Simo left under different circumstances involving a chronic disease. Fidji Simo was another massive CEO in Silicon Valley who left her CEO seat to join OpenAI. OpenAI filed its IPO paperwork confidentially on June 8. The full prospectus, the one with audited financials in it, still has not appeared. So the order of operations is worth sitting with. File the paperwork in June. Buy your insiders out in August at a price you set yourself. Watch the people who built the commercial side leave that same week. Then show the public the books. Sam Altman told staff in June that he expects to go public within the next year. Reporting since then has pointed at 2027 instead, and a tender offer of this size is usually what a company does when the listing is not close. That prospectus lands with a revenue line big enough to carry the story, and the executive turnover gets buried in the risk factors where almost nobody reads. The people who priced OpenAI at $852 billion this month were the same people who took the money out of it; and the next set of buyers will not get that arrangement. #OpenAI

    Trascrizione (en)

    Denise Dresser is going to be leaving OpenAI after less than a year. She joined back in December and was a massive hire at the time, CEO of Slack. And many thought she was going to be heir apparent to Mark Benioff when she was at Salesforce. She also has hired a ton of enterprise sales folks over from Salesforce. Enterprise within OpenAI has been the golden goose. It's an area they are very much focused on and chasing. The company now appointing Dali Rajek as its new CRO. He was most recently president and COO of cybersecurity company Wiz, which was, of course, recently acquired by Google. OpenAI says they now have more than two million businesses, double from a year ago. So clearly, Denise Dresser has helped scale this business. But I mentioned the shakeup. We had news of Brad Lightcap leaving. He was the COO early on of this business. He said he's leaving to do something new. We don't know exactly what yet. We also had Fiji Simo. She was another massive CEO in Silicon Valley who left her CEO seat to go and join OpenAI. She left under different circumstances. She did have a chronic disease or does have a chronic disease that she's battling with. But Denise Dresser was one of the adults in the room they brought in from Silicon Valley, from very much the software business to come and try to get enterprises to use AI.