VC Partnerships Manager

About the role

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.

In this role, you'll:

• 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

We're seeking someone with experience including:

• 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
• Communicating 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
• Public speaking ability

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.