Sarah Friar OBE
Friar in 2018
Born	Sarah Jane Friar (1972-12-24)24 December 1972 (age 53) Sion Mills,County Tyrone,Northern Ireland
Education	St Anne's College, Oxford (MEng) Stanford University (MBA)
Occupation	Business executive
Known for	CFO ofOpenAI Former CEO ofNextdoor Former CFO ofSquare, Inc.
Children	2

Sarah Jane FriarOBE (born 24 December 1972^[1]) is an Irish-American business executive, who has been thechief financial officer (CFO) ofOpenAI since June 2024.^[2] She was the chief executive officer of American technology companyNextdoor from 2018 to 2024^[3] and the CFO ofBlock, Inc. (formerly Square, Inc.) from 2012 to 2018.^[4][5][6]

Born in 1972, Friar grew up in the town ofSion Mills inNorthern Ireland.^[7][1] She attendedStrabane Grammar School.^[8] Friar won a scholarship from the accounting firmArthur Andersen after entering a competition; she then worked there for a year before pursuing engineering studies atUniversity of Oxford.^[9] She studied metallurgy, economics, and management at Oxford, and then completed an MBA from theStanford Graduate School of Business where she was an Arjay Miller scholar.^[1][10] Friar interned atAshanti Goldfields in 1990s, during which she was assigned to work at a gold mine in Ghana.^[11]

Friar was an analyst forMcKinsey in South Africa,^[12] a managing director in equity research atGoldman Sachs, and a senior vice president of finance and strategy atSalesforce^[13] before becomingchief financial officer atSquare in 2012,^[14][15][16] and then joiningNextdoor, a hyperlocal social networking service for neighborhoods, as CEO in 2018. She led the companypublic through aspecial-purpose acquisition company in 2021.^[17] Nextdoor announced Friar would step down as CEO in mid-2024.^[18] In June 2024, she joinedOpenAI, the artificial intelligence research organization that developsChatGPT, as its first CFO.^[2]

Friar is on the boards ofWalmart andConsenSys,^[19][20] and previously sat on the boards ofSlack Technologies andNew Relic's boards.^[21] 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.^[22][23][5]

She received an honorary doctorate fromUlster University in 2018.^[24] In 2019, she was granted anOrder of the British Empire fromQueen Elizabeth II for her commitment to entrepreneurship and financial services.^[25][26]

Friar is married to David Riley, a formerhedge fund partner.^[13] The couple has a daughter and son.^[27] She lives inMarin County, California.^[1]

• Living people
• American business executives
• People from County Tyrone
• Alumni of the University of Oxford
• Stanford University alumni
• OpenAI people
• McKinsey & Company people
• Goldman Sachs people
• Salesforce people
• 1972 births
• Businesspeople from Northern Ireland
• Officers of the Order of the British Empire

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