{"id":5149,"date":"2026-08-12T04:30:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T04:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5149"},"modified":"2026-08-12T04:30:35","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T04:30:35","slug":"when-openai-employees-have-a-problem-they-email-this-special-address-to-see-if-sam-altman-will-solve-it-immediately","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5149","title":{"rendered":"When OpenAI employees have a problem, they email this special address to see if Sam Altman will solve it immediately"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>It\u2019s called \u201cfriction.\u201d And it has the power to supersede just about anything a team is doing, often carrying the force of CEO Sam Altman or President Greg Brockman with it.  <\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5146\">France hits unsolicited telemarketers with $87,000 fine per call, following similar provisions in other European nations<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The process starts when someone emails friction@openai.com to report an internal bottleneck. The issues range from a technical system that isn\u2019t working, a process that\u2019s not having the intended result, or office-related frustrations, such as there not being enough IT vending machines.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>OpenAI\u2019s leadership team triages the emails sent to friction@, moving forward with ones they deem worthy. To help alleviate full parking lots, for example, the company started a pilot to prioritize spots for those with long commutes. Another time, employees asked for a better process to grant API credits reliably and at scale. If the matter is considered important enough, Altman or Brockman will get involved to ensure it\u2019s resolved.<\/p>\n<p>A former OpenAI employee who spoke to <em>Fortune<\/em> praised the friction system as an effective way for leadership to get ground-level feedback. The process helps teams keep moving forward, tackling issues before they can fester, the person said.  That\u2019s especially important as OpenAI\u2019s headcount grows to more than 8,000 employees expected by the end of this year, with offices across the U.S. and the globe. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a good thing\u2014literally anybody can complain about big company bullsh*t directly to Sam and they can act on it,\u201d the former employee said. \u201cIf you want to ruthlessly cut through bureaucracy, you have to be ruthless about it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Although the friction email has existed within OpenAI for some time, the process didn\u2019t really catch on until the fall of 2025 when Fidji Simo joined the company as CEO of Applications. She began her tenure with a three-month \u201clistening tour\u201d to understand problems at the company and how she could solve them. Concerns about moving quickly as the company grew were a consistent theme in those conversations.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201cCompanies rarely become bureaucratic all of a sudden\u201d Simo tells <em>Fortune<\/em>. \u201cIt happens one unnecessary meeting, one extra approval, one small frustration at a time. Each makes it only 1 or 2% harder to do your job, which is why they\u2019re easy to ignore, but those frictions compound.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Simo put more process around the friction@ address. She tasked Irina Kofman, OpenAI\u2019s VP of strategic initiatives and operations, with monitoring the inbox and making sure select issues got resolved. Simo also started a monthly, company-wide Slack update tracking the progress to signal to employees that the leadership team cared about their concerns. Simo left OpenAI in early July to focus on her health, and her healthcare startup, but the friction@ process and company-wide Slack updates about it remain.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5144\">Trump demands Iran pay for decades of U.S. deaths in rebuke of Tehran\u2019s request for reparations<\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>While the effort to root out inefficiencies has clear benefits, and the friction system has become an integral part of the OpenAI culture, not everyone is a fan.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>One former team leader at OpenAI, who said they had been on the receiving end of \u201cdozens\u201d of friction emails over the several years they worked at the company, said the process was often disruptive to the point that it created inefficiency.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201cThe individual who reports the issue probably thinks its the single most important thing, but to teams like mine that are constantly underwater, under-resourced, and over-leveraged, it\u2019s the single most disruptive thing you could do,\u201d the former employee said. <\/p>\n<p>At a company with an intense work culture, where working long hours\u2014often past dinnertime into the night\u2014is common, the friction emails can create unwelcome fire drills. \u201cIf Sam and Greg think something is worthy, if it\u2019s defensible, then essentially a \u2018friction\u2019 gets started, and the party who is responsible for the block is then more or less just told to shut up and do it,\u201d the person said. \u201cIt\u2019s no joke, a drop everything kind of deal.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>With competition so fierce in the race to build and release the latest AI models however, the expediency of shaving off every possible drag on speed trumps all. And in tech, fire drills and company-wide \u201clockdowns\u201d are a part of the job many have come to accept. In December, for example, OpenAI instituted an internal \u201ccode red\u201d pushing employees to double down on strategic product initiatives in order blunt the advances of rivals like Google and Anthropic.<\/p>\n<p>OpenAI\u2019s friction emails also call to mind a famous practice at another tech giant: the dreaded question mark emails from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p> When an Amazon customer emailed Bezos at jeff@amazon.com, if Bezos deemed the issue worthy of the responsible team to look into, he would email them a single question mark. This was internally known as a \u201cJeff B escalation.\u201d The team on the receiving end would need to prioritize deep diving and correcting the issue immediately. OpenAI\u2019s friction@ email address are in the same tradition, though aimed at internal issues rather than those experienced by its external customers.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5142\">\u2018Hear it here first\u2019: Trump\u2019s media company doubles down on the president and Truth Social<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From office parking issues to technical roadblocks, the friction@openai.com inbox is a way for senior leadership to get direct visibility into on-the-ground issues and eliminate &#8216;big company bulls**t&#8217;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5148,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-openai"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - 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