OpenAI Names Coinbase Marketing Chief Kate Rouch as First CMO

OpenAI has named its first chief marketing officer (CMO): current Coinbase CMO Kate Rouch.

“It’s official: Kate Rouch joins us as our first chief marketing officer,” OpenAI said in a Tuesday (Dec. 3) post on X. “Her experience across consumer and enterprise marketing will shape how we connect people to the transformative power of AI.”

Rouch will remain with Coinbase through Friday (Dec. 6) before joining OpenAI on Monday (Dec. 9), she said in a Tuesday post on X.

“The Coinbase journey proves that smart marketing can transform brand into an asymmetrical business advantage for frontier tech companies — in good times, and bad times,” Rouch said in the post.

“This journey is my inspiration as I move into my next role as OpenAI’s first CMO, which I’ll be starting Monday,” Rouch added.

Rouch is Coinbase’s first CMO and has served in that role since August 2021, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Before that, Rouch was with Meta for 11 years, where she was one of the company’s first marketers and most recently led brand and product marketing for Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook, according to the profile.

The news of Rouch joining OpenAI comes days after the company’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot turned 2 years old.

Since that debut, the market capitalization for the six largest tech companies has increased — in aggregate — by more than $8 trillion, Bloomberg News reported Friday (Nov. 29).

It was reported Saturday (Nov. 30) that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has added 250 million weekly active users since its launch two years ago and that the company aims to reach 1 billion users over the next year.

The company anticipates a new wave of growth driven by new products, new data centers and its partnership with Apple.

“[In 2025] we will be coming into our own, as a research lab serving millions … hoping it can be billions of consumers around the world,” OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told the Financial Times (FT).

On Nov. 5, OpenAI hired Caitlin Kalinowski, the one-time head of Meta’s augmented reality glasses project, to oversee the AI startup’s robotics effort.

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