Welcoming Acrew’s Newest General Partner: Aliisa Rosenthal, World-Leading AI Sales Leader
Aliisa Rosenthal is an N of 1.
She was the first commercial hire at OpenAI, joining when it was still a research lab. She went on to build and lead OpenAI’s sales organization, developing an AI-native go-to-market playbook while the market itself was still being invented. Under her leadership, OpenAI went from a lab to the world’s fastest growing company, reaching roughly $10B in revenue.
You might expect someone with that resume would show up with a (well-earned) swagger. Plenty of people with far less impressive experience do. Aliisa is the opposite. She’s down-to-earth, thoughtful, and relentlessly sharp. She asks the right questions, sees around corners, and knows how to hone in on the decisions that actually change outcomes.
We could not be happier to welcome Aliisa to the Acrew partnership as a General Partner.
This is a meaningful moment for us. We founded Acrew to be team-first, and we hold a high bar for anyone who joins our crew. Aliisa is the first GP to join the crew since our founding in 2019. That wasn’t by accident. It reflects how deliberate we are about building a partnership where each person meaningfully expands what we can do for founders.
AI-Native Commercialization, and the Gap Founders Are Feeling
AI is upending traditional go-to-market playbooks. Usage-based economics, evolving models, the increasing need for trust, and new security challenges all change how products are sold and scaled.
Of course, there’s no shortage of commentary about how AI is reshaping go-to-market.
There are very few people who have actually scaled an AI-native product through those challenges, at global scale, inside an organization with no precedent to follow. Aliisa is one of them.
That’s why her arrival matters so much for our founders. Aliisa brings a stacked résumé and something rarer still: demonstrated judgment at the inflection points that matter. She knows where teams rush too early, where they hesitate too long, and which early commercial decisions quietly define what’s possible later.
Aliisa will work closely with Acrew founders on building AI-native growth teams, designing go-to-market strategy, and navigating pricing, sales architecture, and early commercial hires. She’s a supercharger in the truest sense of the word, helping founders avoid the missteps that can harden into long-term constraints.
Building a Crew: A single unified team means each partner has to bring complementarity and a team-first mentality
Acrew hires for complementarity, not homogeneity. We’ve intentionally built a medium sized, tightly aligned partnership because doing so allows us to be both powerful and agile. We think it takes performance and discipline to stay in this spot: enough different perspectives to be powerful but intimate enough to operate as one team, one crew. This only works when each person brings distinctive super powers. And there’s no question that Aliisa’s arrival fundamentally augments capabilities for our founders: she brings an AI-native commercial lens at hyperscale.
We’ve known Aliisa for years, and this decision has been a long time coming. We’ve been fortunate to collaborate with her over the last decade and to see firsthand how she operates. She shares our values: authenticity, humility, and a bias for the long game. She shows up as a coach and she rolls up her sleeves. She’s the kind of partner who stays close to founders while they’re building, not just at milestone moments.
Why This Crew
As you might imagine, Aliisa had her pick of places to join. In her own words, here’s why she picked Acrew:
“After helping scale OpenAI from a research-driven lab into an enterprise-grade business, I wanted to spend my next chapter supporting the founders building on top of this platform shift. I had a front-row seat to how enterprises are actually adapting to AI - what they need, where they struggle, and where early decisions really matter.
What ultimately pulled me to Acrew was how the team shows up: deeply collaborative, intellectually honest, and genuinely excited to do the work alongside founders. The firm’s depth across core thematic areas like fintech, infrastructure, data, and security felt like a natural complement to my expertise.
Acrew’s low-ego, team-oriented partnership model matches the way I like to work. This is a moment where thoughtful capital and practical experience can shape how AI gets deployed, and Acrew felt like the right place for me to help founders navigate the messy middle and build companies with real, lasting impact.”
This is the part of the AI cycle where early decisions begin to compound. Sustainable commercialization and demonstrated business impact is no longer a future problem.
Aliisa has built that bridge before. Now she’s here to help Acrew founders build it again. We can’t wait to learn and build alongside her.
— Lauren, Theresia, Asad, Mark & Aliisa