Fireside Chat, Interview, Conference Presentation
Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan, Co-founders of Chief
- Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan co-founded Chief, a professional network dedicated to connecting female executives and accelerating women's advancement into senior leadership.
- Chief has attained "unicorn" status, with nearly 80% of Fortune 100 companies employing members and a waiting list of approximately 60,000 people.
- The platform's mission is to change the representation of senior leadership, aiming to avoid traditional transactional networking in favor of forging deep, meaningful cross-industry connections.
- Data cited indicates it would take over 100 years to reach parity in senior executive levels; some projections suggest this timeline has extended to nearly 200 years without intervention.
- Chief's model utilizes hyper-curated peer groups of 10–12 members at similar experience levels, ensuring cognitive diversity by mixing roles, industries, and functions with an executive coach present.
- Approximately 70% of Chief members are sponsored by their employers, while the remaining 30% are self-sponsored individuals seeking to reevaluate their career trajectories.
- A strategic pivot occurred from direct-to-consumer to a B2B model where companies proactively approach Chief to sponsor employees, shifting the narrative from employee requests to employer investment.
- Currently, Chief operates across the entire U.S., launched in every city in the U.K. earlier this year, and is preparing for further international expansion.
- Women are identified as the forefront drivers of progressive workplace policies, specifically integrating caregiving responsibilities and neurodiversity into new ways of working post-COVID.
- Senior women face compounded pressures regarding economic uncertainty, workplace politics, and outsized caregiving responsibilities, which Chief's peer groups aim to normalize and address.
- The brand strategy intentionally avoids traditional gendered aesthetics (pink or blue), utilizing "rich academic green" and the masculine-coded name "Chief" to position the network as aspirational and inclusive.
- Chief launched via a "whisper campaign" of cold emails rather than a public press release, focusing initial resources on member experience and organic community growth.
- Statistics highlighted include 8% female CEOs in the Fortune 500 and only 18 female founders among over 2,000 companies that went public in the last decade.
- The founders emphasize that current pipeline programs are sufficient, arguing that the critical intervention point is supporting women at the cusp of leadership rather than early-stage entry.
- Chief has evolved its focus to ensure women in leadership do not face "loneliness at the top," instead fostering a community where support and collaboration are central to the leadership definition.
- Future programming includes bringing in economists to address macroeconomic uncertainty and specialists to assist members in personal branding during job transitions or layoffs.