Sarah Friar is Chief Financial Officer and Operations Lead at financial technology and mobile payments company Square, Inc.

A native of Sion Mills, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, Friar attended Strabane Grammar School. Friar went on to attend the University of Oxford, where she rowed women’s crew and graduated with an MEng in Metallurgy, Economics and Management in 1996. Friar later earned an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2000.

Since two years between her graduation from Oxford and her matriculation at Stanford, Friar worked as a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company in London, England and Johannesburg, South Africa. Following business school, Friar spent 11 years at Goldman Sachs, initially as an Associate in its Technology Investment Banking Group. In 2002 Friar transitioned to Goldman’s Investment Research division to cover software stocks, where she ultimately worked her way up to Managing Director, Business Unit Leader for Technology and Lead Software Analyst. Friar left Goldman in 2011 to serve as Senior Vice President, Finance & Strategy at Salesforce.com. Friar joined Square, Inc. in 2012, where as CFO she spearheaded its 2015 initial public offering.

Friar has been a Director at software analytics company New Relic since 2014 and messaging startup Slack since 2017. ^[4]