OpenAI has secured a key leadership asset by hiring Brian McCarthy from SpaceX to serve as its Vice President of Worldwide Sales. McCarthy, who previously held senior revenue roles at SpaceX and Cursor, brings a track record of scaling enterprise sales at firms such as Rubrik and AppDynamics.
Building the Revenue Engine
This appointment marks the first significant move by Dali Rajic, OpenAI’s Chief Revenue Officer, who joined the company less than a month ago on August 24. McCarthy will not be replacing anyone; instead, he occupies a newly created role designed to accelerate enterprise growth and international expansion.
The hire reunites McCarthy with Rajic; the two worked closely at AppDynamics between 2017 and 2018. Reports also indicate that Rajic is aggressively recruiting from the sector, reportedly bringing in Mark Fleming and Jaime Patel from the data giant Snowflake to bolster the sales engineering and enterprise divisions.
Market Positioning and IPO Prospects
The aggressive expansion of the sales force comes as OpenAI eyes a potential IPO next year. Enterprise adoption has become the primary front in the rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic. While Anthropic’s Claude Code has seen significant uptake, OpenAI’s latest Astra model has recently overtaken Anthropic’s Fable in enterprise spending, according to data from Ramp.
“AI should help people solve hard problems, do more than they thought possible, and create new opportunities,” McCarthy noted in a LinkedIn post.
OpenAI’s strategy focuses on helping enterprises transform while maintaining a commitment to safety and human-centric control, a vision McCarthy says he shares with CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman.
