When Two CEOs Are Better Than One

When Warby Parker co-CEOs Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa first pitched their eyewear startup to venture capitalists, investors weren’t just sceptical about their plan to shake up the sleepy optical industry with $95 prescription glasses you could buy online.

Their biggest hangup?

“They wanted one neck to choke if something goes wrong,” Gilboa said.

Fifteen years later, the college friends are still at the helm of the brand, which reported $771 million in sales last year. But their co-CEO structure remains an outlier. Fewer than 100 companies in the S&P 1200 and Russell 1000 between 1996 and 2020 were led by co-CEOs, according to Harvard Business Review.

Conventional wisdom says companies are best run under a single CEO — someone who can make swift, decisive calls without ambiguity. Co-CEO arrangements, by contrast, are often seen as a setup for conflict, delays and blurred accountability.

But fashion and beauty have long experimented with alternative leadership models. Zappos famously introduced its “holacracy” model in 2013, effectively making every employee their own CEO. Meanwhile, family-run luxury houses like Prada — led for years by husband-and-wife duo Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli — have long operated with shared leadership. More recently, brands like Warby Parker and Pattern Beauty have embraced the co-CEO model formally.

At On, the Swiss running brand, a decade-long journey from launch to IPO in 2021 was overseen by founders David Allemann, Caspar Coppetti and Olivier Bernhard — and since 2013, by co-CEOs Marc Maurer and Martin Hoffmann. In April, the company announced Maurer would step down in July, making Hoffmann, who also served as finance chief, On’s first solo CEO.

The fashion business often demands both creative vision and operational rigor — or a “left brain/right brain” pairing — especially in founder-led companies where splitting up responsibilities can preserve creative spark while scaling the business. Meanwhile, during periods of dramatic market upheaval — from the digital revolution to the pandemic — fashion firms under pressure may see partnership at the top as a strategic advantage.

A frequently cited 2022 analysis by HBR makes a compelling case: Among 87 public companies led by co-CEOs, the group generated an average annual shareholder return of 9.5 percent, outpacing the 6.9 percent average of their respective indexes. Overall, nearly 60 percent outperformed their solo-led peers.

Those insights may tempt more companies to consider the model — but “having a co-CEO isn’t just an interesting experiment to do,” said Paula Reid, an executive coach and president of the executive search firm Reid & Co.

Both leaders must have the communication skills, trust and shared vision needed to collaborate and lead as one.

“If you have either the combination of talent and/or of organisational need that warrants [two CEOs] — then that is the time and those are the only circumstances under which you should consider it,” Reid said.

The When and Why

Shared leadership can help leaders divide and conquer — and avoid the isolation and decision fatigue that often comes with being a solo founder or executive.

That was the case for Sarah Lee and Christine Chang, co-founders of the skincare brand Glow Recipe. The pair first met while working at L’Oréal Korea, then coincidentally relocated to New York around the same time in 2008. By the time they launched Glow Recipe in 2014, their shared background meant they had already developed trust and complementary working styles — eliminating the early friction that can derail co-leadership arrangements, Lee said.

But what has really kept them from ever splitting the top job, is the invaluable emotional and strategic support that comes from navigating big business decisions with a partner, she said.

“Oftentimes we hear from solo founders how lonely they feel — even if they have a large team,” Lee said. “But Christine and I feel like it’s the two of us against the world. Having somebody that’s like-minded, that you don’t mind spending a lot of time with … is probably one of the most powerful tools you can have.”

In many companies, co-CEOs are a temporary solution designed to get through periods of change. Tailored Brands, which owns Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank, appointed board members Bob Hull and Peter Sachse as interim co-CEOs in 2021 after its CEO stepped down. Netflix named Ted Sarandos as co-CEO alongside founder Reed Hastings in 2020. When Hastings stepped down in 2023, Greg Peters, another longtime executive with the company, joined Sarandos at the top, suggesting that in certain complex businesses, dual leadership may not just be a stopgap, but a long-term solution.

How to Be a Co-CEO

The hard skills required of co-CEOs — like technological know-how or category-specific expertise — will vary by company. But the soft skills are more universal: The best co-CEOs are highly collaborative communicators with strong conflict-resolution abilities, low ego and a willingness to share credit and visibility.

At Warby Parker, Blumenthal said he and Gilboa spent a lot of time researching and studying how “great business partnerships develop and grow.” Among their key learnings was that they needed to double down on communication — they sit next to each other at the office and are “constantly sharing information back and forth throughout the day,” he said.

 “If you want to do it well, you have to invest in it, and the investment generally comes in terms of time and mind share,” Blumenthal said. “Do you have time set aside to have discussions on the working relationship?”

Being collaborative, meanwhile, doesn’t mean being a pushover. Being able to disagree productively — and behind closed doors — is key.

Glow Recipe’s Lee and Chang said they had tough conversations early on, clarifying who handles what and which decisions require joint input. They work through disagreements privately to maintain a united front with their team, Chang said.

“One of the things that we heard time and time again from multiple team members is that they love seeing how the two co-founders have a very clearly shared vision and that we never come across as either disengaged or not in agreement,” Lee said.

It’s often assumed co-CEOs should always have complementary skills — say, one handles product while the other leads operations — but Blumenthal said overlapping skills (like both execs being strong in marketing or supply chain) are just as important if not key to making the two-leadership tie-up effective.

“It allows us to sub in for each other,” he said. “And it makes strategic decision-making easier, because there’s another really smart, thoughtful person taking a holistic view.”

Or, put another way: “We bring our skills and backgrounds together in a way that one plus one equals three or four,” Gilboa said.

One reason seemingly perfect creative-operational pairings in fashion fail is that the leaders are so different, it becomes difficult to meet in the middle, Reid said. Another risk of not having overlapping skills is that employees may try to game the system, said Michael Jenkins, a partner at global consultancy Kearney.

“[Manipulation can happen] especially if one of the CEOs has an incredible bent towards one skill set and the other towards the opposite,” Jenkins said. “You’ll take your question to where you think you’re most likely to get a ‘yes’ versus a ‘no.’”

Glow Recipe’s co-founders divide a few accounts but stay closely aligned on big-picture decisions like “strategy, innovation or future planning and community,” Chang said.

Both Warby Parker and Glow Recipe’s CEOs have identical compensation packages and aim to split things like media appearances, flashy conference keynotes and other public-facing opportunities as evenly as possible — or based on convenience rather than assumptions about the other’s capabilities.

“Sarah [who lives in Miami] just had a Miami influencer dinner, and on the same day, I was doing a series of desk sites with press in New York,” Chang said.

The most important ingredient for a successful co-CEO partnership, experts say, is setting ego aside.

“This structure does not work well when there are egos involved, and just by nature, you have to [be able to] share the spotlight,” Gilboa said. “That means at any point, one individual may not be the sole centre of attention or perceived the sole leader, and for some people that can be challenging.”