The Biotech+ Hub at Pegasus Park in Dallas launched its “Pegasus Park Speaker Series” last week—and brought in a marquee industry heavyweight as its inaugural guest.
Last Monday’s launch featured a fireside chat with Sarah Friar, the chief financial officer at OpenAI, the powerhouse AI research organization behind ChatGPT. Formerly the CEO of Nextdoor from 2018 to 2024, Friar had previously been CFO at Block (formerly Square), and had held earlier executive roles at Goldman Sachs. She began her career at McKinsey in London and South Africa. (The current CEO of Nextdoor, by the way, is Dallas-based Nirav Tolia, a co-founder of the company who returned to helm it earlier this year.)
Interviewing Friar at last week’s event and representing the Pegagus Park ownership group was Nicole Small, CEO of Lyda Hill Philanthropies and LH Capital. The fireside chat was presented before 200 guests, which included “tenants and friends of Pegasus Park,” the organization said.
At the event, Friar shared the story of her gamechanging career, from her Northern Ireland roots to leadership lessons she’s learned as a top player in a rapidly evolving tech universe.
Pegasus Park’s 18-story office tower is at left, with the recently opened Bridge Labs literally bridged to it on the right. [Photo: Mauricio Rojas]
Hard work, community, and entrepreneurship
At the fireside chat, Friar said that her career has reflected the influence of the hometown she grew up in, and its enduring community ethos of the “power of hard work, power of community, and spirit of entrepreneurship.” Those principles have guided her career across a range of industries, and now she’s putting them to work to help shape the future of what AI could mean for the world, and for all of us.
According to the speaker series’ organizers, her advice for navigating the future of work focused on “pursuing the intersection of four key elements: what you’re good at, what you’re passionate about, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs.”
Friar is apparently good at a lot of things. She’s currently on the board of directors of Walmart and Consensys, and on the advisory boards of HOPE Global, the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, and the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University. She previously served as a director on the boards of Nextdoor, Slack, and New Relic.
Inspiring local female students
Last week’s event featured a meet-and-greet connecting Friar with 50 young women who no doubt hope to equal or surpass her resume one day. The students—from The Hockaday School, Uplift Williams and Young Women’s STEAM Academy at Balch Springs—were among the attendees at the event. Friar emphasized “the vital role of network” in speaking with the students, urging them to “harness the power of connection as they pursue careers in STEM and beyond,” Pegasus Park said.
Co-founded Ladies Who Launch
Citing her own experience with harnessing connections, Friar also discussed her role as co-founder of Ladies Who Launch, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering women and non-binary entrepreneurs to grow and sustain their businesses.
That served as an ideal segue, because following the fireside chat, Ladies Who Launch hosted its first Texas-based event at Pegasus Park—inspiring another group of 150 entrepreneurs “to dream bigger and create lasting impact.”
Featured speakers at the Ladies Who Launch event included: Susie Sarich, founder & CEO of SusieCakes; Rosie Rios, former Treasurer of the United States and chair of America 250; Allison Harmon, head of growth at Open AI; Bianca McGee, Founder & CEO at Plan, Profit, Grow; and others.
Additional Pegasus Park Speaker Series events are coming in the future, but as yet, no speaker information has been announced.
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