OpenAI announced a new hire on Thursday, a woman from the south of France who has leapt the C-suites of Silicon Valley and was once a Sheryl Sandberg mentee.
Fidji Simo, a 39-year-old tour de force, will report directly to Sam Altman as CEO of applications, and according to Altman, will help OpenAI in scaling “traditional” company functions.
Here is everything we know about the rising tech star and her new role.
The daughter of a fishing family
Simo grew up in Sète, a port city in southern France. She comes from a family of fishermen and has often talked about the importance of food in interviews.
She said she is the first person in her family to go to university, which was thanks to a scholarship.
She studied at HEC in Paris from 2004-2008, and through the programme, was able to do an internship at eBay in the United States.
She said it was there she “fell in love with technology”. She said she then convinced eBay to give her a job in the US.
The Facebook years
After staying a couple of years at eBay, she then went on to join Facebook in the marketing department, which she said “propelled her career”.
She often tells the story that she got her big break at Facebook during a Thanksgiving weekend. Rather than take holiday, she decided to work on concepts for Facebook by imagining a shopping experience. She then pitched this to a hiring manager, asking for a job.
After eight years at Facebook, in which former chief operating officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg was one of her mentors, in 2019, she climbed the ranks to an executive position as head of the Facebook app.
One year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and following Sandberg’s departure from Facebook, Simo also left and took a position that went back to her roots.
Instacart
Simo became the CEO of the online grocery delivery company Instacart in 2021.
She helped turn the company’s fortunes around, and she forged partnerships with Uber for restaurant delivery through Instacart via Uber Eats, giving both companies a competitive edge over rival DoorDash.
On Friday, Simo, in an open letter to Instacart employees, said that it was “an incredibly hard decision” to leave “because I love this company”, adding that the staff was “top notch”.
But she said: “At the same time, you all know my passion for AI generally and in particular for the potential it has to cure diseases – the ability to lead such an important part of our collective future was a hard opportunity to pass up”.
Simo has often spoken about health in the workplace and opened up about her own case of endometriosis.
Joining OpenAI
Simo was already on the board of OpenAI. She will transition out of Instacart over the next few months and take up her new position full-time later this year.
Her new role in Applications will bring together “a group of existing business and operational teams responsible for how our research reaches and benefits the world,” Altman said in a blog post.
“Fidji is uniquely qualified to lead this group,” he added.
Altman said he would continue in his role, overseeing verticals like research, compute, and applications.
In the same blog post, Simo said: “Joining OpenAI at this critical moment is an incredible privilege and responsibility”.
“This organisation has the potential of accelerating human potential at a pace never seen before, and I am deeply committed to shaping these applications toward the public good”.
