Aliisa Rosenthal has found a new career as a VC. She knows what startups can do to protect themselves from the model makers eating their markets.

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Aliisa Rosenthal, OpenAI's first sales leader, has joined Acrew Capital as a general partner after building the company's enterprise sales team from two to hundreds of people. Drawing from her experience, she identifies key competitive advantages for AI startups: specialization in enterprise applications, ownership of the context layer (moving beyond basic RAG to persistent context graphs), and building on cheaper, lighter-weight models rather than expensive state-of-the-art ones. She plans to focus on investing in the application layer, particularly enterprise productivity tools, leveraging her network among OpenAI alumni and enterprise buyers.

OpenAI’s former sales leader joins VC firm Acrew: OpenAI taught her where startups can build a ‘moat’