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

The CEO vs. COO Myth: Why Most Founders Get It Wrong | Matt Verlaque

17 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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Cameron Herold argues that CEO and COO roles aren't fixed. At Shopify, Tobias Lütke focuses on engineering while Harley Finkelstein handles sales and marketing. At SaaS Academy, it's flipped. The split depends on what each leader does best, not a standard playbook.

Chapters

I think what most people sadly do is they say, well, this has to be the CEO's role and this has to be the COO's role. And the reality is, no, it doesn't. What makes the COO role quite complicated at times is we need to be great at all the stuff that the CEO sucks at or doesn't want to work on. And that's different company to company. Shopify's case, you know, Tobias Lütke is a very engineering and product CEO. Very inward-facing, doesn't really talk to the public very much. And then they have Harley Finkelstein, who's a very outward-facing biz dev, sales, marketing, you know, CEO. You guys at the SaaS Academy, like, and it's the opposite, right? You got a very outward-facing CEO and you got a very inward-facing operational COO. So no, it's just very different company to company.