Greg Maged

Greg Maged runs a haircare company, and the first thing to know about him is that he had no business running a haircare company. He spent the better part of two decades inside spreadsheets and boardrooms - McKinsey, then Charles Schwab, then a fintech he built himself. Then he picked up a shampoo bottle and read it like a balance sheet.

SEEN Hair Care, the brand he cofounded in 2018, sells on one stubborn idea: that hair care is skin care. The shampoo you rinse out runs down your back. The conditioner you leave in touches your scalp, your forehead, your jaw. For most of the beauty aisle, that has been somebody else's problem. Maged and his cofounder, Harvard-trained dermatologist Dr. Iris Rubin, decided it was the whole problem.

The company exists because Rubin kept breaking out and could not figure out why, until she traced the cause to her own hair products. A dermatologist, undone by her shampoo. She had the hypothesis. Maged had the operating discipline to turn a hypothesis into a brand that now sits on every Ulta shelf in the country.

The long apprenticeship

Before any of this, Maged collected the kind of resume that consultants frame. A bachelor's from Stanford. An MBA in finance from Wharton. An early stint with Nippon Telegraph & Telephone in Tokyo. He joined McKinsey & Company in 1995 and made Associate Principal, working out of San Francisco and Houston on technology and communications.

In 2002 he moved to Charles Schwab and landed as close to the center as you can get - chief of staff to the founder and chairman, Chuck Schwab himself. He led product marketing across two-thirds of the firm's retail operations and oversaw advisory services that generated $300 million in revenue against more than $80 billion in assets. It is a long way from there to a bottle of sulfate-free shampoo, and the distance is exactly the point.

In 2012 he made his first jump out of the corporate machine, cofounding Bicycle Financial, an online registered investment advisor built around life-stage financial planning. He ran it as CEO. The fintech taught him the part that consulting never could: what it feels like to start something with your own name on it.

The second act, done slowly

Plenty of people talk about a mid-career reinvention. Few execute one into a different industry entirely. When Maged and Rubin started SEEN, they refused to behave like a typical early-stage company in a hurry. The brand took more than four years and countless formulation rounds to reach market. Chemists submitted 30 or more versions of a single product before one earned a yes. Rubin tested early formulas on her own skin. Speed was never the metric. Not breaking anyone out was.

That patience produced SEEN's proprietary Epidermal Rebalancing Technology and the National Eczema Association Seal of Acceptance - products engineered to deliver good hair without the fragrance, pore-clogging agents and irritants that send sensitive scalps into revolt. It is, in industry shorthand, the "skinification of hair." SEEN got there early.

Selling the unglamorous truth

Here is the quiet genius of the operation. The Ulta Beauty partnership did not begin with a pitch deck. The retailer found SEEN on Instagram, recognized what the brand was doing, and brought it in through the Sparked incubator in 2022. From there it spread to 700-plus stores, and in April 2025 to all 1,400-plus Ulta locations nationwide.

Underneath the retail story is an operator who thinks like an investor, because for most of his life he was one. Maged steered SEEN to 100% compounded annual growth every year since launch, a brand that consistently beats Ulta's own sales projections. When it came time to raise, the September 2024 Series A pulled in nine million dollars and a roster most beauty startups can only envy: Danaher cofounder Mitch Rales, Somerville SPV led by Feroz Dewan, the permanent-capital firm Sator Grove Holdings, and George Mrkonic, a board director at Ulta itself.

The other ledger

Maged never fully left finance behind - he just pointed it somewhere useful. He sits on the board of the National Endowment for Financial Education, the financial-literacy nonprofit, where he joined in 2016 and became Vice Chair in 2020. The shampoo CEO who also wants you to understand compound interest. It is a fitting double life for someone who built a beauty brand on the principle that the boring details are the ones that matter.

He lives outside Washington, D.C., the company headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. The arc is unlikely on paper - Tokyo to McKinsey to Schwab to fintech to a dermatologist's shampoo - but it reads as one continuous habit of mind. Find the thing everyone overlooks. Do the unglamorous work nobody else will. Then let the results argue for themselves.