VC Partnerships Manager

About the team

OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) which benefits all of humanity. This long-term undertaking brings the world’s best scientists, engineers, and business professionals into one lab together to accomplish this.

In pursuit of this mission, our Go To Market (GTM) team is responsible for helping customers learn how to leverage and deploy our highly capable AI products across their business. The team is made of Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, and Partnership professionals that work together to create valuable solutions that will help bring AI to as many users as possible.

About the role

OpenAI is seeking a highly motivated and experienced VC Partnerships Manager to join our Startups Go To Market team. You will play a critical role in managing relationships with top venture capital funds and startup accelerators, with the goal of providing exceptional support to the portfolio companies of these funds.

We believe that many of the most disruptive and category-defining AI applications will be created by startups. The Startup Go To Market team’s mission is to help startups harness the power of AI models to drive these advances. You will support startups across stages with resources that help them get started with OpenAI APIs and build quickly, and provide access to OpenAI teams, community, and expertise to support their growth.

This role is a mixture of technical understanding, vision, partnership, and strategy. You’ll be responsible for forming and managing partnerships with top venture investors, accelerators, and other partners in the startup ecosystem, as well as working across the OpenAI organization to help startups accelerate their progress and be successful using our models. You’ll work cross-functionality with product, research, engineering, marketing, support, and solutions architecture to help customers get the most out of our models.

This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you'll:

• Manage and develop a set of partner-level relationships with top venture capital funds, startup accelerator programs, and other external partners in the startup ecosystem.

• Develop strategies to drive adoption of OpenAI’s models among thousands of startups and ensure companies have the resources they need to build quickly and effectively using OpenAI’s models.

• Identify opportunities for 1:many engagements and events for founders, and execute in collaboration with VC firm and internal teams.

• Provide technical guidance to startups in 1:1 engagements, in partnership with internal technical teams.

• Represent OpenAI at startup ecosystem events and speaking engagements.

• Analyze key metrics within startup portfolios and create reports and provide insights to internal and external stakeholders.

• Contribute to the development of programs and strategic initiatives focused on startup customers.

• Serve as an advocate for improving the startup experience building with OpenAI, synthesizing product feedback from insights captured from our work with startups.

• Closely monitor the industry landscape and startup landscape to contribute to product roadmap and other corporate strategies.

• Collaborate with solutions, marketing, communications, business operations, people operations, finance, product management, and engineering.

• Support the recruitment and onboarding of other teammates.

• Support the development of company culture.

We're seeking someone with experience including:

• Passion for the startup ecosystem and supporting the growth of fast-growing companies.

• Experience as a founder of a venture-backed startup (preferably a technical founder), a venture capital investor, or early employee at a fast-growing startup.

• Technical understanding of AI technologies and AI product landscape.

• 10+ years experience managing high-value external relationships (e.g., customers, partners, investors, Board of Directors) and working directly with founders and C-level executives.

• Communicating technical concepts to customers and internal stakeholders.

• Leading high-visibility customer engagements (e.g., conferences, 1:many events, product launches, etc.).

• Gathering, distilling, and processing complex market (industry, competitor, customer, prospect) intelligence.

• Public speaking ability.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are customer-centric. You are motivated to deeply understand your customer’s priorities and help them achieve their vision for using our models to improve their products and services. You build strong relationships with executives and professionals across functions and serve as a trusted advisor.

• Have a passion or deep curiosity in artificial intelligence. You embrace the opportunity to help deploy our technology in a way that benefits humanity. You’re excited to educate our customers on AI and how to plan for the future.

• Are a builder. You are excited to impact how our company operates and scales. Your passion is building strong systems and processes from the ground up and executing them with precision.

• Are excited by new challenges. You don’t have the answers to every question up front, but the process of solving them invigorates you. Bespoke issues requiring multidimensional knowledge excite you. You’re willing to experiment with new solutions.

• Are a strategist. You deeply understand go to market best practices and raise the bar for our organization. You think and plan forward on the order of years and bring internal and external stakeholders along with your strategy.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.