Meet Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s latest top hire — who rose from a small French fishing village to the heart of Silicon Valley

For 39-year-old Fidji Simo, joining OpenAI as its new CEO of applications is but another chapter in her storied career in tech.

On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it had hired Instacart’s chair and CEO to join its C-suite. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, wrote in a blog post that Simo is “uniquely qualified” for the role and will report to him directly.

Altman said Simo “has already contributed a great deal to our company” since she joined OpenAI’s board in March 2024. She is expected to join OpenAI’s leadership team later this year after she begins her “transition from her role at Instacart over the next few months.”

The hiring of Simo, who spent much of her career at Meta, has signaled to some in the industry that OpenAI is serious about building a social network. The Verge reported last month that OpenAI was in the early stages of building an X-like product.

“It looks like they want to go after Facebook, after every consumer mobile app that is successful because they can and because she has the background to do it,” Julien Codorniou, a partner at 20VC who worked alongside Simo at Facebook, told Business Insider. “It’s a very big signal to the competition, to the market, and to the users.”

Simo did not respond to a request for comment from BI. OpenAI referred BI to Altman’s blog post on Simo’s hiring.

‘The crew comes before you, always’

Simo’s story began in Sète, the French fishing port town where she grew up.

“My family, all the men in my family, whether it’s my dad, my grandpa, great grandpa, and all my uncles were fishermen and one of them, my uncle became a fish monger, after you know, stopping fishing,” Simo told Bloomberg in an interview that aired in November.

“And so we have been very deep into the fishing industry for many generations,” Simo added.

Simo started her corporate career at eBay as a strategy manager in 2007, after graduating from HEC Paris, one of France’s top business schools.

The French-American joined Meta, then known as Facebook, in 2011.

Simo’s rise at Facebook was meteoric. Even her job application was remarkable. She applied for a marketing communications role — an area in which she had no previous experience.

In a 2021 interview on “The Twenty Minute VC” podcast, she recalled how she spent an entire Thanksgiving weekend inventing a new product called “Facebook Stores,” and recorded a webinar and produced marketing materials to promote it. The presentation helped her get the role, but Simo said the hiring manager later laughed that she would never have been considered just on her previous experience alone. (Facebook later launched a very similar initiative, called Shops.)

Simo later switched from marketing to product — another role where she had no prior experience — and worked on some of the most influential product launches at Facebook. She was put in charge of monetizing mobile shortly after its 2012 IPO, at a time when there were concerns about whether the company could ever make a successful mobile business. She led the launches of video products like Facebook Live and Facebook Watch and eventually rose to lead the Facebook app.

“I think a lot of my career took off around moments where I made bets other people didn’t think were obvious bets,” Simo said on the “Twenty Minute VC” podcast interview.

Simo became popular among coworkers and business partners alike. Dominique Delport, who sat on Facebook’s client council for eight years when he was managing director at the French advertising giant Havas Group, told BI that “openness” is a big part of Simo’s leadership philosophy.

“Big Tech sometimes has an image of arrogance — and Facebook has been through some phases — and I think she was among the ones who helped change the perception among the advertising community,” Delport said.

Simo joined Instacart’s board in January 2021 and became its CEO in August 2021.

Simo said in her interview with Bloomberg that her childhood growing up in a fishing village influenced her career choices.

“I think it was incredibly special because there is a craft and a respect that fishermen have. It’s interesting, in Silicon Valley, the people who are most respected are like tech people, whereas here, the people who are most respected are the people who feed the town,” Simo said.

“So in a way, becoming CEO of Instacart is kind of bridging these two things for me, where I love tech but I always had a passion for feeding people, and so it’s a really special thing to be able to bridge the two,” Simo added.

In a profile published by Sequoia in February 2024, Simo said her leadership style was shaped by her father and grandfather, who were both boat captains.

“The crew comes before you, always,” Simo said of their leadership ethos.

Leaving Instacart

Simo’s exit comes in the same week Instacart reported its best quarterly order growth in more than two years. It also forecast positive growth for the second quarter, bucking the trend of a bleak retail sector.

Rachel Wolff, an analyst at EMARKETER, a BI sister company, said the upbeat earnings showed “how successfully the company has positioned its service as a necessity for many households.”

In a letter to Instacart employees on Wednesday evening, Simo said it was an “incredibly hard decision” for her to leave the company.

Simo said her decision was partly driven by her passion for AI and its “potential to cure diseases,” which made OpenAI a difficult opportunity to pass up. Simo is currently the president of the Metrodora Institute, a for-profit healthcare clinic that focuses on treating complex neuroimmune diseases.

While she will remain CEO of Instacart while the company searches for a successor, Simo is preparing her next chapter. Simo has previously said her favorite book is “The Night Circus,” a fantasy novel about two magicians preparing to take each other on in a deadly duel. Now working for Sam Altman, Simo is set to go into battle with her former mentor, Mark Zuckerberg, as OpenAI bids to dominate the world of apps.

“For that job, she’s absolutely perfect,” said Codorniou. “She has something very special — she’s one in a billion.”

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