The Silicon Valley CEO tasked with getting OpenAI to turn a profit

Mint

20-05-2025

Fidji Simo, OpenAI's newest senior hire, and CEO Sam Altman bonded over a mutual fixation: They hate standing meetings and love to kill them in the name of efficiency.
Simo will need that waste-no-time ethos in her new role helping OpenAI prepare to go public in the coming years. In her newly created role of CEO of applications, she is charged with helping the ChatGPT maker become a profitable global business, while remaking an internal culture that has been mired in executive infighting and high-profile departures.
Altman needs Simo—an established operations and turnaround guru at Instacart, where she is currently CEO—more than ever. During a recent all-hands meeting, he suggested that when the company goes public, he would like Simo, not him, to be the one leading the earnings calls.
In her newly created role, Simo, who joins this summer, will oversee all of the company's major business functions, including its product, finance and sales teams, reporting to Altman. She represents a new generation of OpenAI leadership.
The startup and runaway leader in generative artificial intelligence has increased its head count more than fivefold since the 2022 launch of ChatGPT. Traffic to the chatbot has grown more than threefold to 5.1 billion monthly visits in the past year, according to Similarweb.
It is also bleeding cash. OpenAI told investors last fall that it won't generate a profit until 2029, and it expects to lose $44 billion before doing so, a person familiar with the matter said. Longer term, Altman wants OpenAI to build AI-powered robots and personal devices, and operate a global network of data centers to build and run its AI models.
Altman, who has roughly two dozen reports, has been looking for months to delegate more responsibility during a period of rapid growth. He ultimately plans to bring in similarly seasoned leadership to helm the company's infrastructure division, according to people familiar with his thinking.
OpenAI lost two of its key executives last year—chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and technology chief Mira Murati—both of whom left to start competitors after complaining to the board about what they described as Altman's chaotic management style. Murati took more than 20 OpenAI employees with her.
Simo has earned a reputation as an adept and detail-oriented manager capable of running large teams, people familiar with her work said. That is a contrast to Altman, who has been known to let problems fester and spends more time dreaming up ideas than figuring out how to execute them, according to people who have worked with him.
Simo told OpenAI staff that she had wiped all group meetings from employee calendars at the grocery delivery company. That amounted to canceling roughly 100,000 hours of gatherings in the second half of last year. Altman celebrates a similar practice at OpenAI: The company systematically scraps all standing meetings once a year.
Simo grew up in a small port city in the south of France, where her family had worked in the fishing industry for generations. She went to business school in Paris before moving to California to pursue a full-time job at eBay.
At Facebook in the 'move fast and break things" era, she helped build its mobile advertising business before also overseeing its video and entertainment products. She was promoted in 2019 to head of the Facebook app, managing a team of over 6,000 people and reporting to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Simo has often described how, while at Facebook, she took foreign-accent-reduction courses to mask her thick French accent and was advised to wear hoodies and jeans to better fit in with the company's culture. She rejected the advice and became known for her bold designer style.
The same year that she began leading the Facebook app, Simo constantly felt faint and dizzy and was diagnosed with a neuroimmune condition called postural tachycardia syndrome.
She began bringing a reclining chair into management team meetings to make sure her blood pressure didn't drop, and eventually she founded a health institute to treat complex medical conditions.
Simo's product leadership caught the eye of Instacart co-founder Apoorva Mehta, who recruited her to his startup's board of directors. Simo joined the board in January 2021 and succeeded Mehta as chief executive that summer.
A post-Covid return to in-person shopping had slowed Instacart's core delivery business and several top executives had exited.
Simo revived talks Mehta had initiated to sell Instacart to DoorDash, code-named Project Donut, people familiar with the matter said. She discussed creating a food-inspiration app similar to Pinterest, where users could share recipes and other content.
After the talks fell apart because of regulatory concerns, she readied Instacart for an initial public offering and diversified its business. Instacart hit five consecutive quarters of profitability before its 2023 market debut.
Altman had previously been introduced to Simo by his friend Diane von Furstenberg, the Belgian-born fashion designer and wife of media mogul Barry Diller. After Altman's brief ouster from OpenAI in late 2023, which led to the departure of almost all of its former directors, Simo's name was floated as a potential new board member.
Bret Taylor, the board chairman, had served with her on Shopify's board and approached her to become an OpenAI director. Simo began working closely with Altman after joining the board last March, and quickly became an adviser to him, including when the startup was negotiating a $40 billion fundraising deal with SoftBank, people familiar with the matter said.
Altman has told associates that each of the three areas of the company—Simo's applications business, infrastructure and research—will one day become multitrillion-dollar businesses.
For now, he will focus more of his attention on the latter two, leaving Simo to figure out how to get the tech world's most closely watched company to one day turn a profit.
Write to Berber Jin at [e-mail] and Keach Hagey at [e-mail]