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Sarah Friar
Irish-American business executive From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Sarah Jane Friar OBE (born 24 December 1972[1]) is an Irish-American business executive who is the chief financial officer of OpenAI since June 2024.[2] She was the chief executive officer of American technology company Nextdoor from 2018 through 2024,[3] and was chief financial officer of Block, Inc. (formerly Square, Inc.) between 2012 and 2018.[4][5][6]
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Early life
Born in 1972, Friar grew up in the town of Sion Mills in Northern Ireland.[7][1] She attended Strabane Grammar School.[8] Friar won a scholarship from the accounting firm Arthur Andersen after entering a competition; she then worked there for a year before pursuing engineering studies at University of Oxford.[9] She studied metallurgy, economics, and management at Oxford, and then completed an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where she was an Arjay Miller scholar.[1][10] Friar interned at Ashanti Goldfields in 1990s, during which she was assigned to work at a gold mine in Ghana.[11]
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Career
She was an analyst for McKinsey in South Africa,[12] a managing director in equity research at Goldman Sachs, and a senior vice president of finance and strategy at Salesforce[13] before becoming chief financial officer (CFO) at Square in 2012,[14][15][16] and then joining Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social networking service for neighborhoods, as the CEO in 2018. She led the company public through a special-purpose acquisition company in 2021.[17] Nextdoor announced Friar would step down as CEO in mid-2024.[18] In June 2024, she joined OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research organization that develops ChatGPT, as its first CFO.[2]
She is on the board of Walmart and ConsenSys,[19][20] and previously on Slack Technologies and New Relic's boards.[21] She also co-chairs Stanford's Digital Economy Lab and runs Ladies Who Launch, a non-profit focused on female entrepreneurs that she co-founded.[22][23][5]
She received a honorary Doctor of Science degree from Ulster University in 2018.[24] In 2019, she was granted an Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II for her commitment to entrepreneurship and financial services.[25][26]
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Personal life
Friar is married to David Riley, a former hedge fund partner.[13] The couple has a daughter and son.[27] She lives in Marin County, California.[1]
References
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