Who Is Fidji Simo? The woman to lead the most important products at Sam Altman's OpenAI
OpenAI
is leaning into consumer adoption and practical utility with increasing focus on real-world use cases and monetization. It recently also restructured its governance model and scrapped plans to shift into a traditional for-profit corporation.
Amid this, it has brought in a high-profile executive to lead the charge in bringing its tools like
ChatGPT
, DALL·E, and the GPT Store to the masses.
Fidji Simo
, the CEO of
Instacart
, has been appointed as the head of OpenAI's Applications division, where she will oversee all customer-facing products.
OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman said, 'Applications brings together a group of existing business and operational teams responsible for how our research reaches and benefits the world, and Fidji is uniquely qualified to lead this group.'
About Fidji Simo
Fidji Simo was raised in Sète, a small port town in the south of France, and she was the first in her family to finish high school. 'When she was 20 years old, she interned as a lobbyist for the fishing industry,' reported Marie Claire in 2019. Her early life, far removed from Silicon Valley, shaped a grounded perspective that she carried into the corporate world.
Simo earned a master's degree in management from HEC Paris, one of France's top business schools, before starting her professional career at eBay as a strategy manager.
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But it was at Facebook (now Meta) where she truly made her mark.
Her work at Facebook
Joining Facebook in 2011, Simo helped build the company's mobile advertising business from the ground up. She led the development of ad products for News Feed and eventually became the head of the Facebook app itself in 2019. She oversaw everything from Marketplace and Groups to Video and Stories.
Her ability to grow products while driving revenue didn't go unnoticed as 'She helped monetise the Facebook app and build the tech giant's advertising business during her stint at Meta,' TechCrunch reported.
Simo's work at Instacart led the company to success
Simo joined Instacart's board in early 2021 and quickly took over as CEO at a time when the company faced immense competition from Amazon, Walmart, and DoorDash. Under her leadership, Instacart shifted from a delivery-only mindset to a retail tech platform.
She led the development of a self-serve ad platform, which generated nearly $1 billion in revenue by 2024, according to Forbes. Products like Carrot Ads and Carrot Insights helped build Instacart into a major player in the retail media space.
Her tenure also saw the successful rollout of AI-powered smart carts in physical stores and the IPO of the company in 2023 at a valuation of $10 billion.
To ensure profitability, she implemented thoughtful strategies like freezing hiring and renegotiating cloud contracts, laying the groundwork for long-term sustainability.
She has a connection to AI and healthcare
Simo isn't just a tech leader, she's also an advocate for using AI in life-changing ways.
After being misdiagnosed several times before discovering she had postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), Simo founded the Metrodora Institute in 2023. The institute focuses on enrolling patients in research studies that combine genomics, immune profiling, and environmental data to drive more accurate diagnoses.
At a conference, she said,'The beauty of AI is in the past, these data sets were very siloed... now... we're going to be able to understand patterns we couldn't understand before.' (Fortune, 2024)
Why has she joined OpenAI now?
Simo's move into OpenAI comes just as the company is looking forward to real-world applications of its technology.
'Joining OpenAI at this critical moment is an incredible privilege and responsibility,' Simo said in a statement to TechCrunch. '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.
'
She will report directly to CEO Sam Altman, while top executives like COO Brad Lightcap, CFO Sarah Friar, and CPO Kevin Weil will report to her.
She's not leaving Instacart entirely, though she'll remain chair of the board.
What will be her role at OpenAI?
With a background in scaling ad platforms and monetizing digital products, she's expected to explore areas like conversational shopping, AI assistants, and targeted advertising tools. Just last month, ChatGPT began offering users the ability to search for and shop products directly within its platform, complete with images, reviews, and purchase links.
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