Two co-CEOs discuss how splitting the role lets them divide responsibilities, phase in executives strategically, and stay connected to customers while scaling. They cover regulatory constraints, cultural impacts, and the practical trade-offs of sharing the top job.
historically we get that there's like one CEO and that's how most kind of companies work, especially stateside. I think in Europe you've seen a little bit more of the co-CEO thing historically play out. But at the end of the day, we are operating, like I said, in a space where a lot of the decisions like can't just be not checking things with the regulators or even with our internal compliance teams, et cetera. And so if you think like We turn it around like, what is actually the benefit of having one CEO? The benefit tends to be that, okay, if you want to have a more dictator-style kind of leadership culture within your company, then you can move really fast, et cetera. That's never anything that we really strive to actually do because you just can't really have that. I can't go in and completely just overrule my chief compliance officer. That's not how this industry kind of works. And so a lot of it is really just dialogue. And then when you looked at what the benefit of being co-CEOs and that structure actually means, it means a lot of different things. So for instance, we are— where a lot of companies sort of that scale very quickly end up struggling is when they have to hire the first kind of C-levels. I think we've brought on a COO and a CFO recently, but, you know, we have not brought on a chief growth officer or CMO because that's sort of what my co-CEO focuses on. We have not brought on a chief product officer because that's what I kind of focus on. And so I think you're able to scale the company in a little bit of a different way versus sort of you get to that point where you waste, you know, you have your product market fit, you raise that round, and then boom, you gotta add 5 C-levels in the span of 6 months. That's really tough culturally. Everybody's coming with their own kind of leadership styles that, like, that's a really different problem to navigate. I think we've been able to at least cut that problem in half and basically phase it out a little bit more, right? There might be a day where I end up hiring a chief product officer to sort of replace myself for the role that I play within product, but I'm able to put that off a little bit more, which then allows me to focus my energy on ensuring that our CFO and our CRO are probably not just onboarded, but probably integrated into the company as well. And so I think there are actually some distinct advantages also being able to share the CEO responsibility. It's a massive one, right? Let's be honest. And so I think it often puts CEOs at the place where they're like, oh, all I have time for is fly around, maybe not in the last 15 months, but historically CEOs, they fly around for conferences and speaking gigs and they do basically just fundraising and press and whatnot. And if that's all you do, you quickly become a little bit distant from the company and then actually you put yourself, it might adversely affect yourself as far as your ability to sort of have temperature on your customers and your company and your core people in the business, et cetera. And so again, I think we're sort of sharing the CEO workload helps us stay more connected to what's actually going on in the company, which I think at this point in the company's life is incredibly beneficial overall.
Yeah, well, since you say that, and I think what ends up happening, you just happen to make it formal, but I know with my company that I started in '95, me and my co-founder, although he had the CEO and chairman of the board title, I had the president chief operating officer title. We literally were co-CEOs. We met regularly, distribute everything you talked about. We operated that way. And I think a lot of early-stage companies operate the same way, although they may not have the title nomenclature like, like you've talked about.
And I think it also helps, like, when we come out, me and Leif, my co-CEO, when we come out, we make a decision implicitly. Everyone in the company knows that we've talked about this. This is very thought through. This is not a rushed thing. And this is something that we we both agree on. And, and again, that is a dynamic that, that you can't necessarily have as a, as a sort of, um, you know, sole CEO, if you will.
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