In mid-August, OpenAI announced a new chief revenue officer, its fifth C-suite shakeup in the past year and perhaps its most consequential as the company moves toward what could be an historic IPO, likely in 2027.

OpenAI said Dali Rajic, the president and COO of Google-owned cybersecurity company Wiz, would replace Denise Dresser as CRO. Dresser held the role for less than a year, prompting questions about what happened and why OpenAI chose Rajic.

Rajic, 53, has built a reputation as one of the most disciplined and successful enterprise sales leaders in technology. One source with ties to OpenAI rival Anthropic told Fortune that OpenAI’s ability to recruit him was a “coup.” OpenAI now has more revenue from enterprises than consumers, a milestone CNBC reported the company reached earlier than planned, and that makes the CRO role central to how the company scales ahead of any public-market push. The company is also moving aggressively to gain market share from Anthropic, which is reportedly planning to go public as soon as September and could therefore reach the public markets before OpenAI.

“If OpenAI is behind on enterprise, he is definitely the guy,” said Jyoti Bansal, who hired Rajic in 2012 to lead sales for AppDynamics, the application performance management platform Bansal co-founded and ran. Rajic later rose to chief revenue officer and played a key role in pitching AppDynamics to investors ahead of a possible IPO. The company nearly went public in March 2017 before Cisco bought it the day before the planned debut for $3.7 billion.

After the Cisco deal, Rajic stayed for two years. In 2019, he joined Zscaler as president of go-to-market and CRO. In 2024, he moved to Wiz, another enterprise cybersecurity company. Google acquired Wiz in 2026 for $32 billion, its largest acquisition to date.

Rajic’s cybersecurity background is especially relevant to OpenAI. The company is seeking to expand revenue in that area by pitching businesses on using its models to prevent hacks and breaches, which places him in a role that spans both sales execution and a fast-growing product category. OpenAI calls its flagship cybersecurity program Daybreak, and the program expanded into multiple access tiers on August 10.

Intense, well-dressed, and a fan of Starbucks hard-boiled eggs

People who have worked with Rajic describe him as disciplined, blunt, and intellectual, according to four people cited by Fortune, two of whom requested anonymity to speak freely about the increasingly influential Silicon Valley executive. Rajic declined to comment for this story, but confirmed the accuracy of the details included.

Rajic was born in Yugoslavia, in an area that is now Croatia, and moved to Germany when he was one year old. He said on a 2022 episode of the Grit podcast that he always dreamed of coming to the United States and moved there at age 16 for his final years of high school. He later attended California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and earned an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

“He is one of the most intense people you will ever meet,” one former friend and colleague told Fortune. “We would call him the Croatian Sensation. I remember we would get breakfast, and his version of breakfast was on our way to a meeting would grab two hard-boiled eggs at Starbucks, stuff them in his mouth, and be like, ‘That’s breakfast. Let’s go.’”

At parties, he is said to prefer quiet conversations with one or two people rather than working the room. People who know him say he does not like to talk about himself. Although he is well-dressed and disciplined about his health, he is not quick to step in front of a crowd or accept public speaking invitations. Unlike many prominent executives, Rajic does not have an X account.

OpenAI’s salesforce buffeted by change, leadership turnover

Dresser also brought considerable intensity to the role, according to one former employee who worked under her. The employee said she pushed for organizational change, including efforts to establish reliable, granular reporting. Dresser worked around the clock and sometimes called colleagues late at night on weekends for long conversations. One source said she was “always on the road,” meeting prospective clients “almost like the most senior salesperson” in the roughly 1,200-person commercial organization she oversaw. OpenAI said Rajic will also spend significant time traveling, since travel is a key part of the job.

Current and former employees say the organization Rajic is joining has faced constant change over the past few years, and that keeping up has been exhausting.

Dresser’s departure has already triggered more turnover. Kaylin Voss, OpenAI’s VP of Americas, is leaving to return to Salesforce, according to The Information, where she previously worked with Dresser. Voss joined OpenAI five months ago. In an interview with Fortune last month, Voss described her team’s strategy of segmenting businesses into groups such as telecommunications, retail, consumer goods, and manufacturing. Cybersecurity was a major focus, along with driving adoption and clarifying return on investment.

OpenAI has acknowledged the high number of leadership changes and says the pace is similar to other fast-growing companies. In Rajic’s case, an OpenAI spokesperson said he was selected to lead the next phase of growth for the revenue organization and that the company has confidence in its strong bench of senior leaders.

Dresser did not respond to requests for comment. CNBC reported that OpenAI investor Josh Kushner introduced Rajic to OpenAI. A source familiar with the decision said OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman then decided to hire him. Brockman took over the revenue organization in early July after CEO of Applications Fidji Simo left to focus on her health.

A fresh sales philosophy, but how long will Rajic last?

Rajic views sales primarily as a science rather than an art, according to former colleagues. He is a disciple of the MEDDPICC philosophy for enterprise sales, created in 1996 at Boston-based PTC by Dick Dunkel, Jack Napoli, and John McMahon. A source described Rajic as the “protege of John McMahon, the godfather of enterprise sales.” Rajic worked with McMahon at BMC Software in the early 2010s.

MEDDPICC is a sales framework and training program. The acronym stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Identify Pain, Champion, and Competition. Together, those elements are meant to help companies evaluate deal viability and forecast revenue.

“I’m sure you’ve heard of the PayPal mafia,” said Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures who has known Rajic for years. “In the world of go-to-market, the equivalent is the PTC Mafia.” Shah said several top tech executives come from that sales tradition, including Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB, Cedric Pesh, MongoDB’s CRO, Dan Fougere, CRO of Datadog, and Rajic.

Another part of the philosophy is the use of “leading indicators” to predict which salespeople will succeed within months of starting a role. Those indicators can include the number of first meetings set up and the number of customer demos completed, among other metrics.

For those who are not meeting expectations, “you don’t hesitate, you move them out of the business,” one of Rajic’s former colleagues told Fortune. The goal is to build a “very disciplined, highly predictable, scalable go-to-market machine,” the person said.

That kind of predictable revenue is exactly what investors will want ahead of OpenAI’s IPO, the source said.

Rajic starts this week and plans to spend substantial time traveling to clients and in San Francisco, possibly living there part time, his friends say. He currently lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children. According to friends, he is excited and eager to begin.

Still, questions remain about how long he will stay. “It’ll be interesting to see if Dali is there in 12 or 18 months, or if he will burn out like so many other people do at OpenAI,” one source told Fortune. “That’s the open question.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com