VC Partnerships Manager

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.

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 our San Francisco office. We use a hybrid work model (3 days/week in the office) and offer relocation assistance for new employees.

• 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.

• 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.

• Public speaking skills, and able to communicate 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.