OpenAI has hired Brian McCarthy away from SpaceX to fill a newly created role as its vice president of worldwide sales, Fortune reported. He’s the first major hire for Dali Rajic, the chief revenue officer who started at OpenAI on Aug. 24.
McCarthy joined SpaceX in August through its acquisition of Cursor, the AI coding company, and at both companies he was president of global revenue and worldwide field operations. Before that he led enterprise sales teams at Rubrik, ThoughtSpot, AppDynamics and Qlik.
The two men have worked together before. At AppDynamics in 2017 and 2018, McCarthy was vice president of sales and reported to Rajic, then chief revenue officer, as the company prepared to go public. Cisco bought AppDynamics a day before its planned listing.
“Brian combines a deep commitment to customers with a belief in what technology can do for people,” Rajic said in an OpenAI LinkedIn post. OpenAI said McCarthy will work with Rajic to build out the sales team and accelerate enterprise growth, including overseas.
Building a bigger enterprise sales bench
Rajic has also recruited two sales executives from Snowflake, according to a source cited by Fortune: Mark Fleming, Snowflake’s SVP of enterprise sales, and Jaime Patel, its VP of enterprise sales engineering for North America.
The hiring comes as corporate customers have become a key battleground between OpenAI and Anthropic, and an important revenue stream for OpenAI ahead of an IPO expected sometime next year. Fortune said OpenAI has clawed back ground despite the wide adoption of Anthropic’s Claude Code, citing Ramp data showing OpenAI’s latest Astra model passing Anthropic’s Fable model in enterprise spend.
In his own LinkedIn post, McCarthy said that with technology this powerful, his job means “helping customers use it safely, keeping people in control, and making sure as many people as possible benefit.”
WebProNews is an iEntry Publication