Credit: Jernej Furman from Slovenia
OpenAI chief revenue officer Denise Dresser is leaving after eight months, replaced by Dali Rajic, formerly president and chief operating officer of Wiz. The company has also hired recruiters to rebuild its go-to-market team, two days after longtime executive Brad Lightcap said he was leaving.
OpenAI’s chief revenue officer is leaving after eight months in the job. Denise Dresser is departing “to pursue other opportunities,” the company said on Thursday, and will stay through a transition period working with the business team. Dali Rajic, formerly president and chief operating officer of Wiz, takes the role.
OpenAI was warm about what she built. It credits Dresser with assembling the team, strengthening relationships with major customers and establishing “the commercial foundation that has brought our business to this point.” She joined in December after more than a decade at Salesforce, where she had been named chief executive of Slack in 2023.
The timing is the problem. Brad Lightcap, who spent eight years at OpenAI and four of them as chief operating officer, left on Tuesday to start something new. Dresser makes the tenth senior departure since April.
That list already runs through chief product officer Kevin Weil, applications chief Fidji Simo, chief marketing officer Kate Rouch, Sora architect Bill Peebles, safety head Johannes Heidecke and AI ethics head Chloé Bakalar. Losing the person who owns the revenue number is a different order of problem.
The replacement suggests what OpenAI thinks it needs. Rajic ran Wiz as president and chief operating officer through the period Google agreed to buy it for $32bn, a deal that closed in March. Before that he was president and chief operating officer of Zscaler, and chief customer and revenue officer at AppDynamics.
OpenAI wants him to build what it calls a revenue operating system. President Greg Brockman said the company is “moving into a compute-powered economy, with AI becoming embedded in every workflow,” and that Rajic will “turn what we’ve learned into repeatable execution.”
The quieter line in the announcement says more. OpenAI has also formed a partnership with Chad Peets and RPT Partners, a firm that recruits sales leadership, to build what it describes as a world-class go-to-market team. Companies that are happy with their sales organisation do not hire people to rebuild it.
The business he inherits is large. OpenAI says its products reach more than a billion weekly users and more than two million businesses, twice as many companies as a year ago.
It is also about to be examined in public. OpenAI has filed confidentially for a listing and closed a $7bn employee tender offer valuing it at $852bn, though it has been reported to be weighing a delay to 2027 to hold out for $1tn.
OpenAI said it is “deeply grateful” for Dresser’s leadership. It has not said why she is going, and neither has she.
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