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OpenAI names first worldwide sales VP, adds two Snowflake hires including one who negotiated against it
Brian McCarthy becomes OpenAI's first vice president of worldwide sales, arriving from a SpaceX that OpenAI stopped supplying three weeks ago. He is the new revenue chief's first hire, and two Snowflake sales leaders are moving over too.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- OpenAI has created a vice president of worldwide sales for Brian McCarthy, a new role, reporting to chief revenue officer Dali Rajic, who started on 24 August.
- Two senior Snowflake salespeople are also leaving for OpenAI, and Snowflake told some employees on Thursday, according to Kevin McLaughlin of The Information.
- OpenAI's sales leadership has changed four times since August, with revenue chief Denise Dresser and sales leader Kaylin Voss out and Rajic and McCarthy in.
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Why it matters
- decision A company mid-cycle with OpenAI has to decide whether to re-confirm scope and commitments with whoever now owns the account, because the leadership above it changed four times in five weeks.
- capability Because the worldwide sales job is a week old, enterprise buyers get a single named escalation point above their account team for the first time.
- exposure Any vendor whose executives have negotiated a model deal with OpenAI now has to treat its own negotiating bench as a recruiting target for the party across the table.
- precedent Cutting a customer off from models and recruiting that customer's revenue leader within the same month sets the expectation that supply decisions and hiring run on separate tracks at OpenAI.
Mark Fleming spent seven years at Snowflake, where he was senior vice president of sales for the Americas Enterprise unit [21]. He also helped negotiate Snowflake's own commercial relationship with OpenAI, The Information reported [22]. He has now agreed to go and sell for OpenAI [24]. Jaime Patel, who built Snowflake's North America Enterprise sales engineering team, is going with him [23].
Counting McCarthy, that is three named sales hires landing at OpenAI inside one week of reporting [3]. OpenAI's announcement described the job in plain commercial terms: McCarthy will lead the worldwide sales organisation as the company helps more businesses put AI to work [7]. Patel's function is pre-sales technical work, the staffing a large evaluation needs before anyone signs, and McCarthy brings more than 20 years in enterprise software, at Rubrik, ThoughtSpot, AppDynamics and Qlik [23][5].
The rebuild around him has been going on all summer. Denise Dresser left as revenue chief in August, and TNW reported at the time that OpenAI was doing more than replacing her [14]. Rajic came in from Wiz, the security firm Google bought [15]. Days after he arrived, Kaylin Voss resigned and went to Salesforce, the second such departure in a week [16].
McCarthy joined Cursor in February [8]. SpaceX closed its $60bn purchase of the company on 14 August and he moved across, carrying the title of president of global revenue and worldwide field operations at both [9][10]. Two weeks after the deal closed, OpenAI stopped supplying its models to Cursor, a decision TNW reported on 29 August [11]. So he ran revenue for roughly six months at an account OpenAI then stopped serving [2]. OpenAI has not said whether the appointment changes anything about that supply decision, and SpaceX has not commented on his departure [12][13].
"I'm joining OpenAI to lead the sales team and I'm excited to join forces with my friend Dali Rajic," McCarthy wrote on LinkedIn on Thursday [1]. McCarthy reported to Rajic at AppDynamics between 2017 and 2018, when Rajic was chief revenue officer and McCarthy vice president of sales, Fortune reported [18]. Cisco bought AppDynamics a day before its planned listing, and the flotation never happened [19].
For anyone with an OpenAI deal in flight, two checks are worth making on this timeline. The first is whether the person who scoped your pilot will still hold the account when the paper goes out, given that the role above them is a week old [3]. The second is whether the technical person assigned to your evaluation sits in sales engineering or carries a quota, because those two people answer for different things when a pilot stalls.
What to watch
- Whether OpenAI restores model access to Cursor now that its former revenue lead works for OpenAI.
- Whether Rajic's next hires fill regional or vertical field roles. That would be a conventional enterprise sales build.
- Whether more Snowflake enterprise sellers follow Fleming and Patel out the door.