Friar grew up in Sion Mills in Northern Ireland and attended Strabane Grammar School. She won a scholarship from the accounting firm Arthur Andersen through a competition and worked there for a year before studying metallurgy, economics and management at the University of Oxford. She later took an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business as an Arjay Miller scholar.
She worked as an analyst for McKinsey & Company in South Africa, as a managing director in equity research at Goldman Sachs, and as senior vice president of finance and strategy at Salesforce. In 2012 she became chief financial officer of Square, now Block, and took it public in 2015.
In 2018 she became chief executive of Nextdoor, the neighborhood social network, and took it public through a special-purpose acquisition company in 2021. She left in 2024 and joined OpenAI in June 2024 as its first CFO.
At OpenAI she oversees all finance operations. She also sits on the boards of Walmart and Consensys. In September 2026, as OpenAI sought $1.4 trillion, she declined to discuss the talks and called the company "very well capitalized", The Inference reported.
Sources · written 16 October 2026
