Sam Altman needed someone to manage the finances. It was 2018, and OpenAI was still a nonprofit research outfit with 40 employees, no consumer product and no clear revenue model. But someone had to oversee the money.
Altman asked Brad Lightcap, who he’d worked with at startup accelerator Y Combinator, to help him with the search. Lightcap interviewed more than 20 people. Nobody wanted the job. So Lightcap decided to do it himself, stepping into a temporary role as the first business hire inside what was still unmistakably a lab.
“We had no idea we were going to make a chatbot that a lot of people were going to talk to,” Altman said at a dinner with reporters earlier this month in San Francisco that Lightcap also attended. “That was just not in the conception.”
Seven years after joining the nascent startup, Lightcap is operating chief of a $500 billion startup with 3,000 employees. His task is to turn OpenAI from a consumer phenomenon, known for creating ChatGPT and sparking the generative AI boom, into a force in the enterprise.
The company took a major step in that direction this week, announcing new offices in Brazil, Australia, and India in response to business demand.
