By Berber Jin and Corrie Driebusch
After a dizzying summer of deals, Sam Altman came to work one day last fall, ready to show just how confident he was in OpenAI's future. In a livestream broadcast to the public from the startup's unmarked San Francisco offices in October, he showed a black-and-white slide with a number he said represented OpenAI's financial obligations for new computing capacity: $1.4 trillion.
The giant number spread like wildfire across the investment world -- and not in a good way. OpenAI was set to generate $13 billion in revenue that year. So everyone was asking the same question: how on earth was the company going to pay for it?
For Sarah Friar, OpenAI's chief financial officer, it was time to clear up the confusion. A veteran CFO who had spent more than a decade at Goldman Sachs, she had been brought into the startup to give it the financial maturity needed to go public.
In the ensuing months, she privately walked back his comments. The company actually planned to spend a much smaller amount, she told investors: $600 billion through 2030. More recently, she has questioned the wisdom of spending even more money on data centers, at times putting her at odds with her freewheeling boss.
Like any corporate CFO, Friar must translate her CEO's grandest ambitions into something the company can actually afford -- and know the right time to say no. She follows a line of women in Silicon Valley asked to tame the wilder impulses of companies -- or their younger male founders. Google brought in Ruth Porat after going public to control costs and add discipline to what had become freewheeling spending on moonshots. Mark Zuckerberg got Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook, and Elon Musk has Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX.
There was Friar herself at Square in 2012, where she became Jack Dorsey's second-in-command, helping steer the payments startup through a turbulent public offering more than a decade ago. When she announced her departure in 2018, Square's stock sank by over 10% -- a sign of just how important investors came to see her role at the company.
It falls to Friar to pull off what is envisioned as one of the biggest IPOs ever -- at the exact moment when OpenAI's growth has slowed relative to rivals.
Executives from OpenAI have spoken with stock exchange officials about potential IPO plans, according to people familiar with the matter, but haven't yet kicked off a formal process.
IPOs are always unpredictable, but even more so when the company is in a race to develop world-changing technology, where the winner changes week to week and investor sentiment shifts just as fast.
OpenAI recently missed multiple internal revenue and user targets after facing ferocious competition from its two biggest rivals, Google and Anthropic. The losing streak has rattled executives and employees, some of whom have peppered all-hands meetings with anxious questions about the company's future.
In recent months, Friar has grown more cautious about OpenAI's data-center spending, telling company leaders she was worried the company wouldn't be able to pay for computing deals if revenue didn't grow fast enough, The Wall Street Journal has reported. She has also told them it might need more time to prepare for an IPO. Altman, on the other hand, has pushed to do it as fast as possible.
The differing approaches show just how tricky Friar's job is becoming as she helps steer OpenAI through the most crucial stretch of its eleven-year-history. If she moves too slowly, OpenAI could fall behind and hit the market behind Anthropic, missing out on pools of investor money. Move too quickly, and she could stretch the business too far.
In other words, she doesn't have much room for error.
The company said this past week that its business was "firing on all cylinders," and that Friar remained optimistic about buying more computing power. She said on LinkedIn that OpenAI's latest model was a giant leap for coding, currently the hottest application for AI.
Northern Ireland to Goldman
Friar cuts an imposing figure when she walks into any room. She is known for her strategic acumen and comfort in the corporate norms of Wall Street, including a fondness for scheduled meetings and slide decks that ensure nothing is left to chance. Altman, by contrast, likes to come up with ideas on the fly, and is known to duck out of a room almost as soon as he enters it.
Friar, 53, grew up in a mill town in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, as the three decades of conflict over the region's future are known. Her mother was a nurse and midwife, and her father worked as a personnel manager at the mill. She left for Oxford where she earned an engineering degree in metallurgy, economics and management and rowed crew.
She did an internship at a gold mine in Ghana but has said she felt she didn't feel welcome given the lack of women who were there. She went to work for McKinsey, which sent her to South Africa just after apartheid ended. She calls the period a major influence in her life.
She got her M.B.A. at Stanford, where she met her future husband. Goldman Sachs then offered her a job and helped with a visa to stay in the U.S.
Friar worked at the bank for more than a decade as an investment banker and research analyst, putting her in the running for partner. And then one morning, she got the phone call that it wasn't her turn. Friar had to hold back tears in the office, she said in a 2023 Stanford Business School interview. Her husband, David Riley, told her to see it as an opportunity to try something new.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff pulled her out of Goldman in 2011 to work in finance at the rising software giant. Then, just a year later, Jack Dorsey hired her as the chief financial officer of Square, a fledgling payments startup with only a few hundred employees.
One of her biggest tests came in 2015, when she had to take Square public in what was a gloomy year for IPOs. Friar struggled to drum up investor interest, who were turned off by the company's losses. Bankers told her that they would have to cut Square's share price. "It was awful, " Friar said in the Stanford interview.
On the night of pricing, they considered scrapping the IPO. But there was a sense of obligation; people had flown into New York to ring the bell. Instead, Friar and her bankers agreed to sell less than 10% of the company and price the stock at $9 a share, valuing the company at roughly $3 billion, or half its previous valuation.
Three years later, the stock had shot up.
Ready for a CEO role of her own, Friar found one in the social-networking app Nextdoor.
Nextdoor was a fraction the size of Square, both in terms of employees and valuation. The pandemic injected life into the company: people needed their neighbors for finding anything from toilet paper to friendship.
In 2021, investors poured money into newly public companies, creating the frothiest IPO market in decades. That year, the company merged with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, to list shares under the ticker KIND. Friar, who often talked about cultivating kindness in community, picked the ticker symbol.
Unlike at Square, Nextdoor's stock didn't take off. It tumbled.
The ticker may have been KIND, but the site often wasn't. Comments could be racist or just sniping between neighbors. In February 2024, Nextdoor's stock traded around $2 a share, down more than 70% from when it went public. The company announced Friar's departure.
A few months later, Friar accepted the CFO job at OpenAI.
Trying for order at OpenAI
OpenAI was squaring off against its largest shareholder Microsoft. The tech giant held significant control over the business and was fighting for a large stake in it as part of its restructuring into a for-profit corporation.
Friar worked with Goldman Sachs, where she is still held in high regard, to advise OpenAI on the negotiations. The bank is expected to play a leading role in the company's IPO.
More importantly, she had been friends with Microsoft CFO Amy Hood ever since the two worked together in their 20s at the bank. That relationship became crucial when the two companies set out to rework their technology partnership last year, in a monthslong negotiation that took a series of twists and turns.
Some OpenAI employees involved in the talks had struggled to get on the same terms as Hood, who came to be known for her tough, unsparing style, according to people familiar with the matter. Friar was a key bridge, and would sometimes fly to Microsoft's headquarters to sit down with her fellow CFO and get the deal back on track.
OpenAI and Microsoft announced a revised agreement last fall, and another one this past week.
After Meta launched a talent raid on OpenAI last year, offering its researchers pay packages that topped $100 million, Friar worked with research chief Mark Chen to come up with a new framework for approaching compensation that allowed the startup to stay financially competitive without losing discipline.
Friar has been tight-lipped about the company's public listing plans, even to some of OpenAI's closest investors. But since last fall, she has been racing to get it ready, hiring a slew of new finance and accounting professionals and kick-starting informal conversations with banks.
Then came a slowdown in OpenAI's business.
A new version of Google's Gemini app stole market share from ChatGPT, and the company missed its target of reaching 1 billion weekly active users for the chatbot by the end of last year. (It still hasn't announced this milestone.) The bleeding continued after Anthropic's coding tool Claude Code took off among software developers, and OpenAI missed some internal revenue targets.
A company spokesman said the company has internal goals that are different from what it shared with investors. He said the company hit its revenue plans in the first quarter, but declined to specify.
Friar has taken a closer look at OpenAI's spending commitments, and has privately suggested waiting until 2027 for an IPO, cautioning that the company isn't yet ready to meet the rigorous reporting standards required of public companies, The Journal has reported.
She is up against a ticking clock.
Banks have told both Anthropic and OpenAI that whoever makes it to market first will get to define the new industry. If Anthropic succeeds in pulling off a mega-IPO, it could suck the wind out of OpenAI. There are large pools of cash eager to back new AI companies, and the first mover will get first dibs.
Write to Berber Jin at berber.jin@wsj.com and Corrie Driebusch at corrie.driebusch@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 01, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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