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SF Sarah Friar On Masters of Scale

“I tell finance people all the time: if you don't realize you're in sales, you are losing because you need to go sell. You need to sell an annual plan. You need to go sell a change to a number. You need to sell a budget.”

Masters of Scale · Startups & Venture · October 2026

“I tell finance people all the time: if you don't realize you're in sales, you are losing because you need to go sell. You need to sell an annual plan. You need to go sell a change to a number. You need to sell a budget.” — Sarah Friar, Masters of Scale

OpenAI's CFO, speaking with Reid Hoffman, said people with finance job titles use ChatGPT for finance only about a quarter of the time, with another quarter going to engineering and another to marketing. She said she has coded more in the last two months than when she was an engineer.

Transcript

Masters of Scale Around 19:50 into the episode
Speaker 3

No, no. No, I bought it off the shelf. Get it five times.

Speaker 4

…takes, you know, and it's like, no, no, that's a question of mindset, how you approach it, how you engage it. So, how, how do you think about how the world at large, not just the builders of these amazing AI, should think about their agency and how should they kind of embody their agency with AI?

Speaker 3

…free to now build sites, to build like whether it's for fun stuff, to professional stuff, in a way that, you know, I've done more coding in the last two months than from one way back on when I actually was an engineer. And now the coding language for me is English. I just talk to my computer. I don't even tippy tap anymore. So 25% is engineering. 25% is marketing, which gladdens my heart because I tell finance people all the time: if you don't realize you're in sales, you are losing because you need to go sell. You need to sell an annual plan. You need to go sell a change to a number. You need to sell a budget. You really need to sell a budget. Particularly at OpenAI, keeping people to a budget is sales motion in and of itself. So people's jobs are really changing. Again, sorry, because Dublin is very fresh in my mind. I did an invent on Monday night. You know, I have a nonprofit on the side that I do with an amazing co-founder called Ladies Who Launch. So it was about 250 to 300 women in the room. And…

Speaker 4

100%. So we only have a couple of minutes left. And by the way, thank you for the gymnastics I know you did on your calendar in order to get here and be with us.

Speaker 3

For you, it's always worth it.

Speaker 4

No. But I actually think it's worth sharing where are you going to next and why?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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