Square hires Blizzard Entertainment's Amrita Ahuja as CFO three months after long-time CFO Sarah Friar exited for the CEO job at Nextdoor
Founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey says Square has poached Amrita Ahuja from Blizzard Entertainment, a division of the gaming company Activision Blizzard …
Context & Ripple Effects
The hire closes a gap opened by Sarah Friar's October departure for the Nextdoor CEO job, and it continues a pattern at Square: the company previously pulled Jacqueline Reses out of Yahoo for a senior role, and its executive bench keeps getting raided upward — Friar herself surfaced again in 2024 as OpenAI's first CFO.
For Blizzard, losing Amrita Ahuja is another leadership drain on top of the turmoil covered elsewhere in this thread, where Johanna Faries was installed as president after Mike Ybarra exited following layoffs. The seat Dorsey is filling is one he has had to refill repeatedly — Alyssa Henry's 2023 step-down ended with Dorsey taking direct charge of the Square unit himself.
First-order effects
- Square gets an experienced public-company finance chief within a quarter of Friar's exit, removing uncertainty over who owns the numbers during a period when Dorsey is splitting attention across his companies.
- Blizzard loses its CFO to a fintech outside gaming, deepening the executive turnover that already saw its president replaced after layoffs.
Second-order effects
- Friar's trajectory — Square CFO to Nextdoor CEO to OpenAI CFO — turns Square's finance bench into a proven talent export, raising the price rivals must pay to hold onto their own CFOs.
- Gaming companies now compete with fintechs and AI labs for the same small pool of operators, pushing Activision Blizzard and peers to promote from inside, as Blizzard did with Faries.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the CFO seat functions less as a terminal role than as a launchpad — companies will increasingly treat finance chiefs as succession candidates rather than back-office hires, and boards will poach them accordingly.
- Executive mobility between gaming, payments, and AI firms points toward a shared senior-talent market where loyalty tenure shrinks and internal pipelines become a structural competitive asset.
The trend: Tech CFO roles are becoming springboards to CEO seats and marquee finance jobs, forcing companies to build deeper internal succession pipelines.