Fidji Simo steps down from OpenAI’s no. 2 role

Simo came to OpenAI from Instacart, where she’d been CEO since 2021 and led the company through its 2023 IPO, and before that spent over a decade at Meta, including running the Facebook app.

Simo’s decision to step back permanently leaves Altman searching for a successor right as OpenAI itself eyes a possible IPO and races to close the enterprise distance with Anthropic. She’d been widely seen as a likely candidate to take on even more responsibility once OpenAI went public, making this a real vacuum for him to address.

Simo was primarily focused on growing OpenAI’s consumer business. But ChatGPT’s growth cooled late last year, missing internal revenue targets, pushing the company to lean harder into coding tools instead, an area where it has been and continues, for now, to trail Anthropic.

TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for more information.

OpenAI’s executive ranks appear from the outside to be on the thin side for a company that was most recently assigned an $852 billion valuation. In addition to Altman, Lightcap, Friar, and co-founder Greg Brockman (who is also the company’s president and was overseeing product strategy while Simo was out), its bench includes Denise Dresser, who in December joined as the company’s chief revenue officer, overseeing its “global revenue strategy across enterprise and customer success,” per a release at the time.

It wouldn’t be shocking to see Dresser take on a more expansive role, given she previously spent two years as the CEO of Slack and, before that, spent 14 years with Slack’s parent company, Salesforce.

Simo’s departure come against another backdrop worth understanding, which is OpenAI’s shifting approach to employee equity. In April of last year, the same month that Simo joined, the company shortened its vesting cliff — the waiting period before new hires’ stock grants begin vesting — from the industry-standard 12 months to 6 months. Then in December, OpenAI eliminated the cliff altogether for new hires, letting equity start vesting from day one.

The move, described internally by Simo as a way to let employees “take risks” without fear of losing equity if let go early, came amid an escalating AI talent war and reflects just how aggressively OpenAI has been spending to retain staff. The company was projected to spend $6 billion on stock-based compensation in 2025 alone.

None of the aforementioned exits appear tied to compensation. Senior executives’ executive equity packages are typically negotiated individually and could have entirely different vesting terms.