Unleashing the Power of a COO: CEOs, Are You Truly Overbooked? With Keith Rabois, Founders Fund

Name: Unleashing the Power of a COO: CEOs, Are You Truly Overbooked? With Keith Rabois, Founders Fund
Uploaded: 2023-10-24T13:30:30+00:00
Duration: 53 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this segment, the speaker challenges the long‑standing belief that technology companies should never have a COO, a view popularized by veteran board…

24 Oct 2023 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker challenges the long‑standing belief that technology companies should never have a COO, a view popularized by veteran board member Pierre Lamon. He argues that the need for a senior operating leader—whether titled COO or not—can be identified by concrete signals such as a CEO’s calendar being more than half filled on a Sunday night, leaving no room for strategic thinking or discretionary interactions. The speaker also notes a growing trend of CEOs trying to serve simultaneously as the company’s VP of Product, which further stretches their capacity and creates a compelling case for adding dedicated operating expertise.

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I don't think you should necessarily. When I was growing up in Silicon Valley, I had one of the wisest and most experienced people on a board with me, Pierre Lamon, and Pierre said, "Absolutely, technology companies should never have COOs." That was the conventional wisdom, and there's a lot of good reasons behind that conventional wisdom. You're violating the conventional wisdom every time you hire a COO. I think some of the best reasons to do it is if you look at your calendar on a Sunday night and you're the CEO going into your week, and more than half your calendar is already booked, you probably need another senior leader. Now whether that person gets a title of COO is a different question, but you need to have enough flexibility. If half your time is in meetings or something like that. If you already have no time to think, no time for discretionary interaction with people, you are way overconsumed as CEO. The second thing is there's been a rise, and I think this correlates with the rise of COOs, many, many CEOs today wanna play two roles. They wanna be VP of Product and CEO.