VC Partnerships Lead, APAC

About the team OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. This long-term undertaking brings together the world’s best scientists, engineers, and business professionals into one organization. In pursuit of this mission, our Go To Market (GTM) team is responsible for helping customers learn how to leverage and deploy our highly capable AI products across their business. The team is made of Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, and Partnership professionals that work together to create valuable solutions that will help bring AI to as many users as possible. About the role OpenAI is seeking a VC Partnerships Lead to join our Startups team in Asia-Pacific. In this role, you will build and manage senior relationships with leading venture capital funds, accelerators, and startup ecosystem partners, with the goal of helping high-potential startups adopt and scale with OpenAI’s products. Many of the most important AI-native companies will be built by startups. You will work with investors, founders, and internal OpenAI teams to identify promising companies, support their technical and commercial success, and create repeatable programs that expand OpenAI’s reach across the regional startup ecosystem. Success in this role requires a distinctive combination of ecosystem credibility, commercial judgment, technical fluency, and operational rigor. You should be comfortable working with founders and investors, designing scalable partner programs, and traveling frequently across the Asia-Pacific region. In this role, you will: - Manage and develop a set of partner-level relationships with top venture capital funds, startup accelerator programs, and other partners in the startup ecosystem - Be responsible for adoption and revenue growth for OpenAI’s APIs and applications (e.g. Codex), especially across early-stage companies - Work closely with Account Directors to identify and serve high-potential startups - Collaborate cross-functionally to design and execute 1:1, 1:few, and 1:many technical engagements with startup teams - Represent OpenAI at startup ecosystem events and speaking engagements - Develop insights into trends in startup ecosystems based on quantitative metrics and qualitative observations - Lead programmatic engagement of “long tail” early-stage companies - Serve as an advocate for improving the startup experience building with OpenAI, synthesizing product feedback from insights captured from our work with startups We're seeking someone with: - Passion for the startup ecosystem and supporting the growth of fast-growing companies - Experience owning revenue and other business outcomes - Background as a founder of a venture-backed startup, 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.) - High degree of comfort for gathering, distilling, and processing complex market (industry, competitor, customer, prospect) intelligence - Strong public speaking ability - Experience navigating different cultures and ecosystems, spanning everything between Japan, New Zealand, and Kazakhstan - [Strongly preferred] Professional proficiency in at least one relevant regional business language, such as Mandarin, Japanese, or Korean You might thrive in this role if you: - Are customer- and partner-centric. You are motivated to deeply understand customer and partner priorities and help them achieve their vision. 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. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.