Greg Brockman

Who they are

Greg Brockman is President and Co-Founder of OpenAI — dropped out of MIT in 2010 to join Stripe as its first CTO, then co-founded OpenAI in 2015 from his living room with an 11-person team and $1B in committed funding.

Person

Brockman joined OpenAI in December 2015 when it was a newly founded nonprofit AI research lab, operating out of his living room with roughly 11 people and $1B in committed funding from private investors. Before that, he was Stripe's first CTO — recruited by Patrick Collison, a connection that traces back to their overlapping time in elite university circles. His education arc is itself a signal: undergraduate at the University of North Dakota, then Harvard (Mathematics and Computer Science, 2008–2009, dropped out), then MIT (Computer Science, 2010, dropped out) — each departure made in favor of a more compelling opportunity. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Trevor Blackwell, and others. His public voice is substantial — 428k+ Twitter followers, a blog at blog.gregbrockman.com covering the CTO role, his path to OpenAI, and AI development — and he has spoken at TED2023 ('The inside story of ChatGPT's astonishing potential'), SXSW 2023, the MIT AI Conference 2023, the Milken Institute Global Conference 2023, and as recently as 2026 at the PMWC Precision Medicine World Conference. The through-line is someone who leaves institutions the moment a bigger technical bet presents itself, and who then builds the institution others leave everything for. He is also an angel investor in over 20 startups.

Company

OpenAI filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 8, 2026 — the most consequential structural move since its conversion to a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation in October 2025, which kept the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation in a controlling position. That IPO filing follows a $122 billion funding round closed in early 2026 at an $852 billion post-money valuation, anchored by Amazon ($50B), SoftBank ($30B), and Nvidia ($30B), with co-leads including Andreessen Horowitz and D.E. Shaw Ventures — the largest private funding round in history. On the product side, GPT-5.4 launched in 2026 as the company's most capable model, Codex scaled to over 2 million weekly users growing 70%+ month-over-month, and the ChatGPT agent (launched July 2025) enabled autonomous multistep task completion. Revenue hit $13.1 billion in 2025, with CFO Sarah Friar indicating the annualized run rate had surpassed $20 billion by early 2026 — though the company projected $14 billion in losses for 2026 and does not expect break-even until around 2029–2030.

Market

The enterprise AI market — worth approximately $37 billion by end of 2025 — is effectively a three-player oligopoly: Anthropic (40% share), OpenAI (27%), and Google (21%). OpenAI's enterprise share dropped from 50% in 2023 to 25% by late 2025, and ChatGPT's global chatbot share fell from 75% in October 2025 to 61% by November 2025, as Anthropic and Google close ground. The competitive and regulatory environment is intensifying: U.S. and European antitrust scrutiny is rising, Chinese AI models are commoditizing inference pricing, and geopolitical dynamics around chip export controls and AI governance are reshaping how the major players access compute and markets.

Network

Brockman's closest professional orbit is the OpenAI founding cohort: Sam Altman (CEO, his co-presenter and the person he resigned alongside when Altman was briefly removed by the board), Ilya Sutskever (co-founder), and Trevor Blackwell (co-founder). His pre-OpenAI anchor is Patrick Collison — the Stripe founder who brought Brockman in as first CTO, a relationship that shaped his trajectory from academia to company-building.

Sam Altman· CEO, OpenAI
Ilya Sutskever· Co-founder, OpenAI
Trevor Blackwell· Co-founder, OpenAI
Patrick Collison· Co-founder and CEO, Stripe
Sarah Friar· CFO, OpenAI

How they likely show up

Long tenure at OpenAI (December 2015 to present, through nonprofit → PBC conversion → IPO filing) → thinks in decade-scale arcs; unlikely to be impressed by short-term metrics framing.
Left Harvard, then MIT, then Stripe — each for a larger technical bet → high tolerance for institutional sacrifice when the upside is compelling enough; responds to audacity over caution.
Founder role pattern alongside prior CTO track → operates at the intersection of deep technical credibility and organizational architecture; not purely a builder or purely an executive.
Active public speaker (TED, SXSW, Milken, MIT AI Conference, podcast appearances through 2025–2026) → comfortable being the public face of complex ideas; likely engages well with direct, substantive questions.
Blog at blog.gregbrockman.com covers the CTO role and path to OpenAI → processes experience by writing about it; values precision in how ideas are framed.
Angel investor in over 20 startups alongside co-founding and running OpenAI → high agency, runs parallel tracks; meetings that don't have a clear action orientation may not hold his attention.

Conversation tips

→ Reference something specific from blog.gregbrockman.com — his post on defining the CTO role at OpenAI is granular and personal; showing you read it signals you did real preparation.
→ The November 2023 board crisis (resigning in solidarity with Altman) is a defining moment — if it comes up, treat it as a test of character and institutional loyalty, not just a governance story.
→ Ask about the PBC conversion and what it changes operationally — he's lived through the nonprofit-to-PBC transition and the IPO filing; this is live, not historical.
→ Don't frame questions around ChatGPT consumer features — his public writing and speaking consistently operates at the level of AGI trajectory, compute scaling, and AI self-improvement.
→ He has spoken publicly about AI self-improvement and the path to AGI (Big Technology Podcast, 2025) — if you want to get him thinking out loud, ask about where the current scaling curve actually leads.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on the June 8, 2026 IPO filing — OpenAI just filed a confidential S-1, and Brockman has been there since day one in his living room; the arc from nonprofit research lab to trillion-dollar IPO candidate is a story only he can tell from the inside.
Reference his TED2023 talk, 'The inside story of ChatGPT's astonishing potential' — he gave one of the defining early public explanations of what the model actually does; ask what he'd say differently now that GPT-5.4 is out and Codex has 2 million weekly users.
Mention his 2025 Big Technology Podcast appearance on AI self-improvement and the superapp bet — he laid out a specific thesis about where compute scaling goes next; it's a concrete hook into how he actually thinks about the roadmap.

Discovery questions

When you co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit and ran it from your living room, what did you think 'success' looked like — and how has that definition shifted now that you're filing for an IPO at an $852 billion valuation?
Codex is at 2 million weekly users growing 70%+ month-over-month — at what point does a coding agent stop being a product and start being infrastructure, and how does that change how you build around it?
The enterprise market share numbers show Anthropic at 40% and OpenAI at 27% — from your vantage point, is that a distribution problem, a product problem, or a deliberate trade-off against the consumer and API businesses?

Avoid

Don't lead with questions about the 2023 board firing as a governance or management failure — he resigned in solidarity with Altman and the outcome was Altman's return; treating it as a wound rather than a resolved chapter will close the conversation down.

Make it yours