“I’m joining OpenAI to lead the sales team and I’m excited to join forces with my friend Dali Rajic,” Brian McCarthy wrote on LinkedIn on Thursday.
OpenAI has made him its first vice president of worldwide sales. He arrives from SpaceX, which OpenAI cut off from its own models three weeks ago.
OpenAI announced the hire in a post on LinkedIn. The role is newly created and McCarthy replaces nobody, Emily Forlini reported for Fortune. He reports to Dali Rajic, the chief revenue officer who started on 24 August. McCarthy has more than 20 years in enterprise software, OpenAI said, including spells at Rubrik, ThoughtSpot, AppDynamics and Qlik.
Rajic set out the reasoning in the same announcement. McCarthy “combines a deep commitment to customers with a belief in what technology can do for people,” he wrote. In a post of his own, Rajic said the two share a vision for how AI can transform enterprises, and that he was looking forward to building together.
OpenAI described the job in plain commercial terms. McCarthy will lead the worldwide sales organisation as the company helps more businesses put AI to work, the announcement said. It also listed what he has done before: president and chief revenue officer at the security firm Rubrik, chief revenue officer at the analytics firm ThoughtSpot, and earlier roles at AppDynamics and Qlik.
OpenAI stopped supplying the company he is leaving
McCarthy joined Cursor in February, according to The Information. SpaceX closed its $60bn purchase of Cursor on 14 August, and he moved across with it. He was president of global revenue and worldwide field operations at both companies, Fortune reported.
Two weeks after that deal closed, OpenAI stopped supplying its models to Cursor. TNW reported the decision on 29 August. The coding tool had run on OpenAI models, and the acquisition put it inside a company building a rival lab.
So the executive now selling OpenAI to enterprises spent the past three weeks at a company OpenAI had just stopped serving. Neither OpenAI nor SpaceX has addressed that publicly. OpenAI’s announcement says only that McCarthy joined SpaceX through its acquisition of Cursor.
Nor has OpenAI said whether the appointment changes anything about the supply decision. That decision was about a rival, not about a person, and nothing in Thursday’s announcement revisits it. SpaceX has not commented on his departure.
The fourth change at the top of OpenAI sales since August
OpenAI has been rebuilding this team all summer. Denise Dresser left as revenue chief in August, and TNW reported at the time that the company was not simply replacing her. Rajic arrived from Wiz, the security firm Google bought, to take the job.
Days later a second sales leader went the other way. Kaylin Voss resigned and joined Salesforce, the second such departure in a week. McCarthy is the first senior appointment Rajic has made since taking over, Fortune reported.
Across those five weeks the shape is a rebuild rather than a replacement. OpenAI lost a revenue chief and a sales leader, then hired a chief revenue officer from outside the company. It has now given him a worldwide sales deputy, in a job that did not exist on the org chart before Thursday.
They ran a sales team together once before
The two men have history. McCarthy reported to Rajic at AppDynamics between 2017 and 2018, Fortune reported, when Rajic was chief revenue officer and McCarthy was vice president of sales.
Both were there as AppDynamics prepared to go public. Cisco bought the company a day before the planned listing, and the flotation never happened. Rajic has now recruited the same deputy into a company whose own listing is the subject of constant speculation.
Two Snowflake executives are going with him
Kevin McLaughlin reported for The Information that two senior salespeople are leaving Snowflake for OpenAI. Snowflake told some employees on Thursday, according to that report. Fortune had the same two names from a person familiar with the matter.
Mark Fleming was senior vice president of sales for Snowflake’s Americas Enterprise unit and spent seven years at the database company. He helped negotiate Snowflake’s own commercial relationship with OpenAI, The Information reported, and worked on deals with Thomson Reuters and HubSpot. Jaime Patel was vice president of sales engineering for North America Enterprise, and built that team. Fleming negotiated with OpenAI on Snowflake’s behalf before agreeing to go and sell for it.
Neither Fleming nor Patel has commented publicly. OpenAI has not confirmed either hire, and its LinkedIn announcement names only McCarthy.
What the team is being built to sell
Selling to companies is now the larger half of OpenAI. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar told shareholders in August that enterprise revenue had overtaken ChatGPT. A worldwide sales organisation is the machine that has to keep that true.
Enterprise budgets are also where OpenAI and Anthropic compete hardest. Anthropic’s Claude Code has been widely adopted inside engineering teams. OpenAI has taken back some ground recently, and its Astra model passed Anthropic’s Fable in enterprise spending this week, on figures from the corporate card company Ramp cited by Fortune.
The timing sits against a listing that keeps moving. OpenAI is weighing a private round that would value it at $1.5tn. Altman ruled out a flotation this year and gave safety as the reason. Fortune expects one next year, which would make the enterprise business the thing that listing rests on.
McCarthy gave his own reasons in the same post. What drew him was a shared vision for how to serve enterprises better, he wrote. He shares the belief held by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Rajic that AI should help people solve hard problems and create new opportunities.
He then went further than a sales appointment usually does. For him the job means “helping customers use it safely, keeping people in control, and making sure as many people as possible benefit”. AI is serious technology that needs to serve humanity rather than replace it, he wrote, calling that belief deeply personal. He starts with a team that has lost three leaders since August.
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