Chief

The most powerful room in the building has, for once, women in most of the chairs.

It's a Tuesday inside a Chief clubhouse. A woman who runs a 4,000-person division is describing a board fight she can't take to her own team. Across the table, a chief marketing officer she met eight weeks ago nods, because she lost the same fight last spring. No one is selling anything. No one is performing. This is the product.

Chief is a private network for senior women in business — vice presidents, C-suite officers, and the leaders one rung below. Members are sorted into small, vetted peer groups led by an executive coach, then handed workshops, curated events, and physical clubhouses in five American cities. The pitch is plain: every powerful man seems to arrive with a network already attached. Senior women were told to manage without one.

By late 2022 the company had crossed 20,000 members drawn from more than 8,500 employers, a roster that reads like a stock index: HBO, American Express, Nike, Google, Goldman Sachs, NASA, Chobani, Pfizer, Apple. The waitlist, at one point, reportedly stretched to 60,000. That is a great deal of demand for a thing the corporate world insisted didn't need to exist.

The corporate ladder has a peculiar feature near the top: it stops admitting women.

Plenty of companies are happy to talk about pipelines. Far fewer can explain why the pipeline keeps leaking right before the C-suite. Women climb to senior management in respectable numbers and then, somewhere around the executive floor, the climb gets steeper and the company they keep gets thinner.

The usual remedies were a panel discussion and a tote bag. Chief's founders looked at the same gap and saw something less inspirational and more useful: the women already at the top had nowhere to be honest. Mentorship programs aimed downward. Conferences aimed at the stage. The peer group a male executive assembled over decades of golf and back-channel favors simply had no equivalent for the woman who'd just become CFO.

It is a tidy irony that the problem was invisible precisely because the women who had it were successful. You don't get pity for being lonely in the corner office. You get a bigger office.

Two operators decided that peers beat keynote speakers - and put a business on it.

Carolyn Childers, who had built and run operations at Handy, and Lindsay Kaplan, who had shaped brand and communications at the mattress company Casper, launched Chief in early 2019. Their wager was unglamorous: senior women didn't need more inspiration, they needed each other, in small rooms, regularly, with a skilled facilitator keeping the conversation useful.

They charged accordingly. Membership ran in the neighborhood of $5,800 to $7,900 a year, and roughly 70% of early members had it covered by their employers as a leadership-development line item. The company wasn't shy that this was an exclusive club. Exclusivity was the feature; the whole value was who else was in the room.

Investors agreed with the bet, repeatedly. A 2019 Series A drew General Catalyst's Ken Chenault and Inspired Capital's Alexa von Tobel onto the board. In March 2022, a $100 million Series B led by Alphabet's growth fund CapitalG carried total funding to $140 million and valued Chief at $1.1 billion. A women's networking club had become a unicorn during a pandemic that was simultaneously pushing record numbers of women out of work.

Strip away the clubhouses and the brand, and Chief sells one thing: a vetted room.

The core unit is the Core group — a small, screened circle of executives matched by seniority and led by a trained coach, meeting on a schedule. Around that sit workshops, group coaching, talks, salons, and the members-only digital platform that keeps the network alive between cities and sessions.

The numbers grew faster than almost anyone, including Chief, was ready for.

Membership went from a few hundred to 20,000 in about three years. The members came from more than 8,500 companies. The capital came from Alphabet. And the growth came with the bruises that growth always brings — a 2023 round of layoffs, public grumbling from some members that the experience hadn't kept pace with the price, and a 2025 leadership handoff to new CEO Alison Moore.

Skeptics had a point worth keeping: a billion-dollar valuation pinned to a membership club is a promise as much as a fact, and the 2023 cuts showed the model wasn't immune to gravity. But the underlying demand was real. People do not line up 60,000-deep for a tote bag.

Get more women into the rooms where decisions are made - and keep them there.

That is the line, and Chief means the second half as much as the first. Getting promoted into a senior seat is one problem. Surviving it, with the isolation and the second-guessing and the absence of anyone who has done the exact job, is another. Chief's contribution is the support system that, for men, has been quietly assumed for a century.

Back in that clubhouse, the woman with the board fight has stopped explaining and started planning.

The CMO across the table has been there. So has the operator two seats down. By the time the meeting ends, the problem hasn't vanished — problems at this altitude rarely do — but it is now a shared problem, with people who have skin in solving it. That is the small, unglamorous thing Chief manufactured at scale.

Whether it stays a unicorn or settles into something steadier, the bet underneath it has already been validated by the line out the door. Senior women wanted a network of their own. Two founders built it, charged for it, and watched 20,000 leaders decide it was worth the price. The old boys' club spent a century pretending the room was full. Chief just changed who's sitting in it.