It’s no surprise that blockchain is now moving towards artificial intelligence.
Every week there is a report about a company or individual leaving the cryptocurrency industry entirely or adding artificial intelligence to their portfolio. Bitcoin miners are shifting away from mining and increasingly focusing on AI infrastructure, and venture capital firms are funding AI companies instead of cryptocurrency companies.
But it’s unusual when leading members of the same team leave one company and move to another. That’s exactly what happened to the senior marketing team at cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN), which has been onboarding San Francisco-based OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, for about a year. Coinbase has a 150,000-square-foot office in the city.
It’s worth noting that Coinbase employs a large number of marketers, six of whom (albeit in fairly senior positions) make up a small portion of the overall team.
The marketing talent migration begins with Sarah Russell, who joined OpenAI in November 2024 as vice president of integrated marketing and operations. She served as senior director of integrated marketing at Coinbase for one year and three months, leaving in January 2023. Notably, early in her career, she worked at Facebook’s (now Meta) Menlo Park headquarters.
A month later, Kate Rouch became OpenAI’s chief marketing officer. Prior to that, she held the same role at Coinbase for three and a half years. Prior to that, she served as global head of brand and product marketing at Meta for more than 11 years.
Following Roush is Elke Karstens, who joined OpenAI in March 2025 as head of international marketing, but did not jump ship directly. Karstens spent three months working at a payments technology startup in London called Finom. Karstens also worked at Meta for more than 10 years in various marketing roles.
Two more transitions occurred the following September: Kaitlin Gianetti became OpenAI’s head of integrated marketing management a month after leaving Coinbase, and Amy (Good) Robbins joined directly after leaving Coinbase as head of brand insights. Gianetti served as Director of Integrated Marketing at Coinbase for more than four years. Prior to that, she served as head of brand marketing at Meta. Robbins served as senior manager of insights at Coinbase for three and a half years.
Most recently, Nina Mogavero joined OpenAI in December 2025 to work in marketing strategy and operations, a month after leaving Coinbase, where she worked for three years in marketing and strategy.
A person familiar with the matter said the exodus was no coincidence. The person described Roush as the “link” that attracted former Coinbase colleagues to OpenAI.
“To be fair, she hired a lot of people or brought them from Facebook,” they said. Kate Roush did not respond to a request for comment.
A Coinbase spokesperson dismissed the departures. “Coinbase has a marketing team of over 150 people, and while some left last year to join OpenAI, and we wish them all the best, it would be incorrect to characterize this as an unusual move,” the spokesperson said via email.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Marketing departments aren’t the only ones finding artificial intelligence more attractive than cryptocurrencies. Earlier this month, Coinbase’s former vice president of international policy, Tom Duff Gordon, left to become OpenAI’s head of policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Other Coinbase alumni heading to OpenAI include
- Yi X, joined the artificial intelligence company as a product manager in April 2025
- Alexandra Fitzroy, head of design at decentralized trading platform Base, is leaving Coinbase in October 2025 after more than five years on the job
- Abe Sprague left Coinbase in September 2024 to become a member of the OpenAI data science team.
OpenAI isn’t the only machine learning shop to win Coinbase marketing talent. Earlier this month, Sarah Wolf, the head of marketing behind the Coinbase Base Layer-2 network, left after nearly five years at the exchange to head up startup marketing at AI lab Anthropic.