Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Shopify’s Secret Weapon? A COO Who Owns What the CEO Won’t

21 May 2025 · 1 min

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Cameron Herold explains how CEOs and COOs divide responsibilities, contrasting outward-facing COOs (marketing, sales, PR, culture) with inward-facing COOs (engineering, finance). He uses Shopify (Tobias Lütke as CEO; Harley Finkelstein as COO) and 1-800-GOT-JUNK as illustrative cases to show style differences.

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So the CEO tends to be the operational counterpart to the CEO, right? The visionary and the integrator. Or there's the CEO and the coo. The CEO tends to do all the stuff that the entrepreneur or the CEO sucks at. They tend to oversee all the stuff that the entrepreneur doesn't like to do. Harley Finkelstein, who is the CEO of Shopify and Tobias Luque is the CEO of Shopify. Tobias oversees finance and engineering. Harley, the COO, oversees marketing and sales and business development and PR and culture. Harley's a very outward facing COO at a company called 1-800-got- Junk. Eric is a very inward facing COO. He oversees it, he oversees engineering, he oversees finance. He's not a very outward facing. Rarely does he ever even speak to the media kind of a coo. But it's because the style of the CEO that they're matching is different. That's what's very uniquely different about the CIO role.