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San Francisco’s mayor-elect, Daniel Lurie, has tapped OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to help run his transition team, the campaign announced on Monday, as part of the administration’s effort to embrace the tech industry. Altman, alongside nine other San Francisco leaders, will provide guidance to Lurie’s team on ways the city can innovate, and help the new mayor develop relationship with key partners.
“I’m excited to help the city I love, and where OpenAI was started, as it begins its next chapter with Mayor-elect Lurie stepping into his new role,” said Altman in a statement to TechCrunch.
Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, has never held elected office and ran against incumbent mayor London Breed as an outsider to the rough-and-tumble nature of San Francisco politics. He personally invested nearly $9 million to fund his campaign.
When Lurie takes office on January 8th, he’ll be tasked with addressing San Francisco’s public safety crisis, an issue that has pushed many tech leaders away from the Bay Area. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who has invested millions in the city, has not been shy to criticize the the city’s failures around public safety. Elon Musk closed X’s office in downtown San Francisco in August, citing similar concerns around drug use and crime. However, Musk’s AI startup moved into OpenAI’s old office in the city’s Mission District shortly after.
Nevertheless, these issues have caused many Silicon Valley leaders to exit the area for younger tech hubs such as Miami or Austin – often with loud condemnations of city officials on their way out the door. A key job for San Francisco’s new mayor will be attracting young professionals to the city, and convincing current tech entrepreneurs to stay and build their companies here.
Apparently, the new mayor wants Sam Altman to help lead that effort. Lurie previously called OpenAI’s CEO “one of the most important figures on the planet,” in a recent interview with The Information, and said he wants Altman and other tech leaders to play a role in reinvigorating downtown San Francisco.
Another Silicon Valley native will join Altman on Lurie’s transition team: Ned Segal, Twitter’s former chief financial officer. Segal left Twitter, alongside former CEO Parag Agrawal, in 2022 following Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media company. Today, Segal sits on the board of several venture-backed companies, including Beyond Meat and RingCentral, as well as Lurie’s non-profit, Tipping Point.
Tapping a tech executive to advise your administration just might be the next big thing in politics. On the national stage, president-elect Donald Trump recently announced Elon Musk will advise the White House as part of a new group meant to drive efficiency in the federal government. In both cases, Musk and Altman seem like they’ll have an outsized role on the political stage, but won’t need to divest from their financial interests.
Beyond running the world’s leading AI company, with multiple offices throughout San Francisco, Altman also ran the city’s famous startup incubator, Y Combinator, from 2014 to 2019. Altman could help Lurie curry favor with startups and YC itself, especially since its current CEO, Garry Tan, has given San Francisco’s new mayor a less-than-warm embrace.
“If Lurie wins I will watch his admin like a hawk and he will be relentlessly held accountable by me and all my friends,” said Y Combinator’s Garry Tan in a tweet from October.
Tan criticized Lurie for using his personal wealth to outspend his competitors.
That said, a non-profit that Tan sits on the board of, Grow SF, endorsed Lurie in the mayoral race. Tan has also taken an increasingly large role in San Francisco’s politics in the last few years, and he’s seen as a leader to many of the young founders and engineers in the city.
Lurie may use Altman to win over Tan and other tech entrepreneurs who have grown skeptical of San Francisco’s leadership. Altman, on the other hand, may use the title to get a leg up in politics – a world OpenAI is slowly becoming more enveloped in as it matures.
Other transition team co-chairs include: former Fire Chief of the San Francisco Fire Department, Joanne Hayes-White; the Mission Asset Fund’s founding CEO, José A. Quiñonez; former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs; Chief of the Vulnerable Victims Unit and Community Partnerships at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, Nancy Tung; former San Francisco Police Department Commander, Paul Yep; former interim chief executive of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Sara Fenske Bahat; lawyer Ann O’Leary, a partner at Jenner & Block; and former San Francisco Controller Ben Rosenfield.
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