OpenAI picked up a Morgan Stanley MD, for private equity things
If you’re at Morgan Stanley and eagerly awaiting your chance to work on the OpenAI IPO, why not cut out a few words and just work at OpenAI? After all, they are hiring, and from your bank, no less. You don’t even need to be a technologist.
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Alisha Lehr joined OpenAI last week as a managing director (MD) in its private equity team. She joined the firm from Morgan Stanley, where she spent nine years, and was most recently an MD and chief operating officer of firmwide AI.
Lehr has been vocal about AI for some time. She told Bloomberg back in March, for example, that generative AI is very good at generating “first drafts” for investment bankers, although she also said that Morgan Stanley takes a “human-centric” approach to AI, and that its bankers were empowered to “use tools at their discretion”.
What exactly does a private equity head at OpenAI do? According to an expired job posting on LinkedIn from earlier this month for a “private equity lead”, which appears to be the job that Lehr took, the role is related to how OpenAI deploys its agents to private equity portfolio companies. She will seemingly be acting as a relationship manager for these clients.
Before she propagated AI at Morgan Stanley, Lehr was head of market innovation at the bank. She once worked for IBM and has an MBA from Columbia Business School. All of this is presumably desirable at OpenAI.
Lehr might have taken a bit of a pay cut to join OpenAI. The job posting noted that it pays between $335k and $350k in “compensation” – it does not mention bonuses. An MD in a bank earns around $400k as a rule of thumb, before any bonuses.
OpenAI and Alisha Lehr did not respond to requests for comment on this article.
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