Account Director, Startups Expansion

Account Director, Startups Expansion

At OpenAI, our 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 helps customers learn to leverage and deploy our highly capable AI products across their business. The team includes Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, and Partnership professionals who collaborate to create valuable solutions that bring AI to as many users as possible.

About The Role

OpenAI is seeking a highly motivated and experienced Account Director, Startups Expansion to join our Startups Go To Market team. You will play a critical role in owning relationships with top startup customers and supporting them in building successfully on the OpenAI platform.

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 building effectively with OpenAI’s APIs, and provide access to OpenAI teams and expertise to support their growth.

This role blends technical understanding, vision, partnership, and strategy. You’ll be the primary relationship owner for a set of strategically important startup customers, and you’ll work across the OpenAI organization to help these startups accelerate their progress and successfully use our models. You’ll collaborate cross-functionally with product, research, engineering, support, and solutions architecture to help customers get the most out of our models.

This role is based in San Francisco or New York. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In This Role, You'll

• Manage a portfolio of startup accounts, developing and executing strategies for a comprehensive account plan.
• Partner with solutions architects to drive successful technical engagements with startups, accelerating their product development process.
• Own a consumption revenue target and manage consumption revenue forecasts.
• Analyze key account metrics to create reports and provide insights to internal and external stakeholders.
• Collaborate with solutions, marketing, communications, business operations, people operations, finance, product management, and engineering.
• 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 and contribute to corporate strategies.
• Support the recruitment and onboarding of other teammates.
• Support the development of company culture.

We're Seeking Someone With Experience Including

• 8+ years selling platform-as-a-service, cloud, or other API products.
• Experience working in or around the startup ecosystem, preferably as a founder, employee, or partner to startup customers.
• Supporting the growth and product development of fast-growing, high-performance companies.
• Working directly with C-level executives and startup founders.
• Communicating technical concepts to customers and internal stakeholders.
• Gathering, distilling, and processing complex market (industry, competitor, customer, prospect) intelligence.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

• Are customer-centric. You are motivated to deeply understand your customer’s priorities and help them achieve their vision for using our models to improve their products and services. You build strong relationships with executives and professionals across functions and serve as a trusted advisor.
• Have a passion or deep curiosity in artificial intelligence. You embrace the opportunity to help deploy our technology in a way that benefits humanity. You’re excited to educate our customers on AI and how to plan for the future.
• Are a builder. You are excited to impact how our company operates and scales. Your passion is building strong systems and processes from the ground up and executing them with precision.
• Are excited by new challenges. You don’t have the answers to every question up front, but the process of solving them invigorates you. Bespoke issues requiring multidimensional knowledge excite you. You’re willing to experiment with new solutions.
• Are a strategist. You deeply understand go to market best practices and raise the bar for our organization. You think and plan forward on the order of years and bring internal and external stakeholders along with your strategy.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Key skills/competency

• Account Management
• Startup Ecosystem Engagement
• Go-to-Market Strategy
• Revenue Forecasting
• Technical Sales
• C-Level Engagement
• API Products
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Market Intelligence