Sarah Friar

Sarah Friar grew up in Sion Mills, Northern Ireland, studied engineering at Oxford, and built a blue-chip finance career: Goldman Sachs analyst, Salesforce executive, CFO of Square through its 2015 IPO, then CEO of Nextdoor from 2018 to 2024, taking the neighborhood network public. In June 2024 she became CFO of OpenAI — arguably the most consequential finance job in technology.

Financing the frontier

At OpenAI, Friar has engineered funding on a scale no startup CFO had ever attempted: record-setting venture rounds, restructuring negotiations with Microsoft, and the multi-hundred-billion-dollar web of compute commitments behind projects like Stargate. Her job is the practical case for AI optimism — persuading the world’s largest investors that the technology’s returns justify unprecedented capital.

That role put her at the center of a November 2025 firestorm. At the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event she described an ecosystem of banks, private equity and a federal “backstop” or “guarantee” that could lower the cost of financing AI chips. Critics heard a taxpayer bailout-in-waiting for a company committed to spending over a trillion dollars, and within a day she posted a clarification on LinkedIn. Sam Altman followed up, writing that OpenAI does not have or want government guarantees for its data centers and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions.

The episode made Friar a case study in how closely markets parse every word from OpenAI’s finance chief — and underlined how much of the AI boom now rests on the deals she structures.