The man who helped OpenAI to go from millions to billions in revenue - Zack Kass [Open AI]

Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with the man who had the hardest sales job in Silicon Valley history: Zack Kass.Before ChatGPT was a household name, it was just a research lab. Zack was Head of Go-To-Market. He joined when OpenAI was around a hundred people doing two million in revenue. His job? Sell human-level intelligence to Fortune 500 executives who didn't even know what a token was.He built the playbook for Microsoft. For Coca-Cola. He turned a nonprofit lab into an eighty billion dollar superpower. Then he walked away.Zack, thanks a lot for being here!TIMELINE00:00:00 - 00:06:34 : Joining OpenAI as the first sales person00:06:34 - 00:09:47 : The early GPT-3 wrapper ecosystem00:09:47 - 00:11:03 : Strategy behind ChatGPT's development00:11:03 - 00:16:45 : The chat interface decision and market response00:16:45 - 00:21:04 : ChatGPT's explosive growth and company atmosphere00:21:04 - 00:26:45 : Lessons from viral growth and Microsoft partnership00:26:45 - 00:30:21 : Scaling challenges and the "bigger boat" moment00:30:21 - 00:33:44 : Personal burnout and health crisis00:33:44 - 00:37:29 : AI as humanity's last invention00:37:29 - 00:45:21 : Technology, inequality, and policy failures00:45:21 - 00:48:35 : Global AI competition and geopolitics00:48:35 - 00:50:18 : AI's potential to solve major problems00:50:18 - 00:54:33 : The next renaissance and education transformationREFERENCES- Sam Altman- Brad Lightcap- Lukas Biewald- Chris Van Pelt - John Maynard Keynes- Elon Musk- Jeff Bezos- Koch brothers- "The Next Renaissance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential" by Zach Cass- "Attention Is All You Need" - Figure Eight- Lilt- Weights & Biases - Scale AI - Jasper - Harvey - Bain & Company- Waymo- Prenuvo- DeepSeek- OpenAI- RLHF- CRISPR - Jevons paradox - Jaws