It is no surprise that there is a general shift from blockchain to artificial intelligence at the moment.
Every week another report appears of a company or person leaving the cryptocurrency industry entirely or adding artificial intelligence to their portfolios. Bitcoin miners are moving away from mining to increasingly focus on AI infrastructure and venture capital firms are funding AI companies rather than crypto companies.
But it’s unusual for leading members of the same team to leave one company and jump to another down the road. That’s exactly what appears to have happened to the senior marketing team at cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN), which, over the course of about a year, landed on San Francisco-based OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Coinbase maintains a 150,000-square-foot office in the city.
It is worth noting that Coinbase employs a large number of marketing staff and six, although in fairly senior positions, make up only a small part of the entire team.
The migration of marketing talent began with Sarah Russell, who joined OpenAI as VP of Operations and Integrated Marketing in November 2024. She had spent a year and three months as Senior Director of Integrated Marketing at Coinbase, a role she left in January 2023. It’s worth noting that earlier in her career, she worked at Facebook (now Meta) headquarters in Menlo Park.
A month later, Kate Rouch became chief marketing officer at OpenAI. Immediately before that, he spent three and a half years in the same role at Coinbase. Prior to that, she spent more than 11 years as global director of brand and product marketing at Meta.
Rouch was followed by Elke Karstens, who joined OpenAI as head of international marketing in March 2025, although she did not move directly. Karstens spent three months at a London-based payment technology startup called Finom. Karstens also spent more than 10 years at Meta in various marketing roles.
The following September saw two more transitions: Kaitlin Gianetti became head of integrated marketing management at OpenAI a month after leaving Coinbase, and Amy (Good) Robbins joined as brand insights lead directly after leaving Coinbase. Gianetti had spent just over four years as director of integrated marketing at Coinbase. Before that, she also worked as a brand marketing executive at Meta. Robbins spent three and a half years as senior director of insights at Coinbase.
Most recently, Nina Mogavero joined OpenAI in December 2025 to work on marketing strategy and operations, a month after leaving Coinbase, where she spent three years in marketing and strategy.
A person familiar with the situation said the exodus was no coincidence. The person described Rouch as the “nexus” when it comes to attracting former Coinbase colleagues to move to OpenAI.
“To be fair, she hired a lot of them or brought them in from Facebook,” they said. Kate Rouch did not respond to a request for comment.
A Coinbase spokesperson dismissed the departures. “Coinbase’s marketing team is over 150 people, and while some people left to join OpenAI last year, and we wish them the best, characterizing this as anything other than normal people movements would be incorrect,” the spokesperson said via email.
OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.
Marketing is not the only department that finds AI more attractive than cryptocurrencies. Earlier this month, Tom Duff Gordon, former vice president of international policy at Coinbase, left the company to become head of EMEA policy at OpenAI.
Other Coinbase alumni who turned to OpenAI include
- Yi X, who joined the AI firm as a product manager in April 2025
- The head of design for decentralized trading platform Base, Alexandra Fitzroy, left Coinbase in October 2025 after just over five years.
- Abe Sprague left Coinbase in September 2024 to become a member of OpenAI’s data science team.
OpenAI isn’t the only machine learning shop that has scooped up Coinbase’s marketing talent. Earlier this month, Sarah Wolf, marketing lead behind Coinbase’s Base Layer-2 network, left after nearly five years at the exchange to lead startup marketing at AI lab Anthropic.
