Alex Katz began Two Chairs with a headquarters that was also a room where the company did its work. In his later account of those beginnings, the staff outside its specialist team numbered three. There was one location in downtown San Francisco. An organization with national ambitions had to fit inside a rather smaller floor plan.
That is a useful place to meet him. The financing announcements came later, with their neat numbers and carefully arranged names. The early room supplies a different scale: a few colleagues, a business to organize, and all the practical questions that an ambition leaves unanswered. A headquarters sounds more impressive when nobody asks how many rooms it contains.
Katz founded Two Chairs in 2017. By June 2022, he was announcing its first expansion beyond California, into Washington. Five years separated the founding from that first state line. For a reader accustomed to startup stories told in funding rounds, the interval deserves attention. He had been building an organization before he had much geography to put on a map.
The résumé before the room
His earlier career had supplied a close view of established organizations. Katz earned a B.A. and an M.S. at Stanford University, worked at McKinsey & Company, and later led the Consumer Goods group at Palantir Technologies. Consulting, enterprise technology, consumer businesses: the sequence put him near the systems that large companies use to make decisions.
A title can make a career transition look deceptively tidy. The change from advising an organization to founding one alters the relationship to every recommendation. The founder has to recruit the people, decide what can wait and live with the results. An appealing proposal eventually becomes somebody’s Tuesday afternoon.
At Palantir, Katz helped major consumer companies tackle complicated problems with data and technology. At Two Chairs, he would have to decide where technology belonged in a business he was assembling himself. The question went beyond selecting software. It concerned the relationship between a tool and the person expected to use it.
Read across those moves and a pattern suggests itself: an interest in how organizations function, followed by the decision to take responsibility for one. The Stanford degrees and previous employers explain part of his preparation. The company he founded reveals the choices he made with it.
A friend from freshman year
One of those choices involved people who had known him well before the startup. In 2019, Katz announced a $21 million Series B led by Amplo, with Goldcrest and Maveron participating. The announcement contained an unusually personal detail: Amplo’s Sheel Tyle had been his friend since their freshman year in college.
It is a small piece of biography that changes the texture of a financial event. A founder and an investor were entering another stage of a relationship that already had a history. Their acquaintance stretched back beyond the founding date, the first office and the earliest versions of the company.
Friendship alone cannot explain an investment decision. What the detail does establish is continuity. Katz’s professional network included someone who had known him before there was a business to assess. The company’s timeline and the friendship’s timeline met in the same announcement.
That round also gave Katz an opportunity to state what he wanted to build next. He identified three priorities: technology, additional locations and the team. They are broad headings, but their combination matters. He was committing capital to a business whose operation would require software, physical places and people to work together.
Announced round sizes. The 2024 financing included equity and debt. These figures describe company financing.
The employer in the business plan
Katz has repeatedly explained a decision that can disappear beneath the larger financing numbers: employing the people who deliver the company’s core service. He chose a W-2 model early. In a 2025 conversation about employment structures, he linked that model to salary, financial security, benefits and a collaborative working environment.
Those are concrete commitments. An employer takes on responsibilities that have to be organized and funded. Training requires time. Collaboration requires colleagues who can find each other. Professional development needs more substance than an encouraging sentence in a recruitment advertisement. The model places part of the burden for making work possible on the organization itself.
That choice also helps explain why his account of growth keeps returning to the people inside the company. The work is performed by employees whose experience matters to the operation. Recruiting them is one task. Giving them reasons to stay, learn and work together is another, renewed each week.
The argument is easy enough to print. Running a company around it is the continuing obligation. Katz’s position makes a useful test for any founder’s language about culture: look at the employment arrangement, the tools provided and the time reserved for learning. Those decisions give the word something solid to stand on.
A website has backstage work, too
The same attention to the organization appears in the less visible parts of its design. Two Chairs worked with Lightmatter on a marketing website that needed to welcome visitors and remain manageable for staff. The project included workflows, reusable components, third-party integrations and a content management system.
That last requirement rarely receives the glamour treatment. Yet a website that looks composed to its visitor can create a considerable tangle for the person maintaining it. The case study describes reviewing administrative use cases alongside the public experience. Someone considered the work that would happen after the design presentation was over.
For Katz, the public-facing brand was also an operating concern. In a 2020 conversation, he described wanting a clean, modern aesthetic across the website, Instagram and physical locations. He wanted the experience to feel warm and welcoming. The visual decisions belonged to the broader experience he was trying to organize.
A company meets people in many places: a booking screen, a room, an exchange with a staff member. Looking at those details together makes his approach easier to understand. The polished surface has practical dependencies. A page needs updating. An appointment needs arranging. Behind the impression sits a list of jobs.
Five years to the first state line
Washington supplied a milestone Katz could describe precisely. On June 7, 2022, he announced that Two Chairs had expanded beyond California for the first time. In the same reflection, he returned to the small founding team and the original San Francisco location. The new territory made the distance from those beginnings visible.
The announcement discussed flexibility, opportunities for development and reducing administrative work. Those concerns accompanied the map. Katz was presenting expansion as something that depended on the way the company’s employees worked, as well as where its services were available.
The distinction is useful when reading a founder’s growth story. A new state supplies a clear date and a recognizable destination. The organization underneath it is harder to photograph. It includes routines, decisions and working relationships that have to function beyond the place where the company began.
By September 2024, in a conversation on Disruptive CEO Nation, Katz was discussing strong foundations, investors whose expectations aligned with the company and the value of support networks for founders. His emphasis suggests a view of leadership that leaves room for other people’s judgment. The chief executive still has decisions to make; he also needs people with whom to think.
There is a practical reason for that support. As a company grows, a founder cannot bring firsthand knowledge to every question. Advice from another founder may help frame a choice; an experienced colleague may see an operational consequence sooner. Katz’s discussion of support networks places those relationships inside the leadership story. It also makes the college friendship with Tyle more than an isolated anecdote: his account of building a business repeatedly includes other people.
“Scaling with quality is hard.”
Alex Katz, April 2024
The number, and what follows it
In April 2024, the number was $72 million. Two Chairs announced a Series C financing that included equity and debt, led by Amplo. Katz used the occasion to discuss future markets and continued investment in the company’s tools and workforce. The money widened the possibilities. The operational questions remained.
His sentence about the difficulty of scaling is worth leaving short. It describes a tension rather than resolving one. More locations, more colleagues and more activity multiply the places where a company’s intentions have to survive contact with daily work. Capital can pay for additional capacity. Leadership must decide how that capacity is organized.
In January 2025, Two Chairs announced two further additions: Matt Manders to its board and Michelle Crank as senior vice president of commercial. For a founder, adding experienced leaders is another change in the work. The organization gains more people with responsibility for its direction and relationships.
Katz’s story has several convenient markers: Stanford, McKinsey, Palantir, a founding date, two financing announcements. The more revealing thread runs between them. He chose an employment structure, invested in tools, worked on the experience people encountered and expanded beyond the original state. Each choice made the company more particular.
The progression changes what a reader should ask of the résumé. Earlier employers tell us where Katz worked. These later decisions tell us what he has chosen to make his own company responsible for. That is a more demanding measure of a founder than the amount raised in a round. It follows him into questions of staffing, organization and execution, where an intention must become something colleagues can use.
Return to that first headquarters and the larger story becomes easier to see. A business that once fitted into one working room accumulated colleagues, investors, locations and responsibilities. Katz’s task grew along with it. The founder who began by building a company now has to keep deciding how all those people will build it together.