Founders Fund hires former OpenAI policy exec Ryan Beiermeister

Ryan Beiermeister announced Monday that she has joined Founders Fund as a partner. Before this role, she spent about two years as VP of Product Policy at OpenAI as the company became a household name in the wake of ChatGPT becoming the fastest-growing app in history.

That tenure ended abruptly in February, when she was reportedly fired after objecting to a planned ChatGPT feature called “adult mode,” which was going to let adults use the chatbot for erotica. The Wall Street Journal reported that her firing involved an accusation by a male colleague of sexual discrimination, though Beiermeister called any allegation that she discriminated against anyone “absolutely false.” OpenAI reportedly scrapped plans for adult mode in March.

More recently, Beiermeister became known in Silicon Valley for her strategy on a Founders Fund YouTube show called “Mafia,” a game in which players try to identify secret “Mafia” killers before those players eliminate the rest. She played against OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, Figma’s Dylan Field, Flexport’s Ryan Petersen, Founders Fund’s Trae Stephens and several others. Some on Twitter speculated that the game had doubled as a kind of job interview, but a Founders Fund spokesperson told TechCrunch that wasn’t the case: “Though she is an excellent Mafia player, that wasn’t part of her interview process. She has been close with Trae Stephens since they worked together at Palantir and has been friendly with our team for years.”

Beiermeister has known Stephens for at least a decade. Before OpenAI, and Meta before that, she spent her formative years at Palantir, the data company founded by Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel; Stephens also worked at Palantir in its early days.

Beiermeister said she’s most interested in backing startups in categories Founders Fund is known to favor. “The companies that will define the next twenty years are being built in the categories where product engineering is hardest and the stakes are highest — AI infrastructure and agentic systems, defense, energy, climate, biotech, the regulated frontier,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post. “To the founders in these domains, especially if you don’t fit the standard mold: I want to talk to you and my inbox is open.”

Why it matters

The hire gives Founders Fund a partner with firsthand policy experience inside the AI lab shaping the industry’s fastest-growing product, at a firm already deeply networked into the AI, defense and infrastructure startups she says she wants to back.