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Sarah Friar
Irish-American business executive (born 1972)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sarah Jane Friar OBE (born 24 December 1972[1]) is an Irish-American business executive, who has been the chief financial officer (CFO) of OpenAI since June 2024.[2] She was the chief executive officer of American technology company Nextdoor from 2018 to 2024[3] and the CFO of Block, Inc. (formerly Square, Inc.) from 2012 to 2018.[4][5][6]
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 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]
Career
Friar worked as an analyst for McKinsey & Company 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 at Square in 2012.[14][15][16] She then joined Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social networking service for neighborhoods, as CEO in 2018. Friar 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]
Friar is on the boards of Walmart[15] and ConsenSys,[19] and previously sat on the boards of Slack Technologies and New Relic's boards.[20] 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.[21][22][5]
She received an honorary doctorate from Ulster University in 2018.[23] In 2019, she was granted an Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II for her commitment to entrepreneurship and financial services.[24][25]
Personal life
Friar is married to David Riley, a former hedge fund partner.[13] The couple has a daughter and son.[26] She lives in Marin County, California.[1] She was also named on Time's list of the most influential people in the world in 2026.[27]