chief

Let’s check in on community-focused startups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 29, 2022Posted in chief, clubhouse, EC Media, On Deck, Social, StartupsNo Comments

Over the past few years, community has been a buzzword for tech startups looking to sell a product or service based on their definition of a useful network. The pandemic stress-tested these business models, with some companies seeing that consumers weren’t willing to pay fees in exchange for advice they could find on Twitter, while others realized that focusing on a target user was more important than finding the biggest total addressable market possible. It’s part of the reason I had so much fun interviewing founders from Clubhouse and Chief last week at ZebethMedia Disrupt. I spoke to the founders of these companies to understand how they’ve evolved to deal with a bewildering new normal, and while a social audio app and a private membership community for women in leadership are quite different in strategy, they shared the same vibe: Less is more. Clubhouse’s product-market fit Paul Davison, Clubhouse co-founder and CEO, was fast to address what others described as Clubhouse’s fall from grace. He said that the app’s early hype saw it grow 10x in users month over month, a boom that broke a lot of the underlying infrastructure of the app. For months, he said, people had a bad experience on the app because of tech issues and the inability to find a room that matched their interests.

Yes, Chief • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in carolyn childers, chief, equity, lindsay kaplan, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha is bringing one of her favorite Disrupt panels to your ears. She sat down with Chief co-founders Lindsay Kaplan and Carolyn Childers to talk about the future of their private membership club for women in leadership positions. (Shout out Bryce for this amazing live illustration he did while we were all on stage!). The conversation touches on outlasting competitors, pandemic-defined community, the duality unicorn valuations and the word girlboss. If you love the conversation, share it with a friend. And if you want more on Chief, read a recap post that my colleague Ron Miller wrote about all things membership community and waitlists. Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. ZebethMedia also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, a show that details how our stories come together and more!

Why members-only club Chief, with a waitlist of 60K, hates the term ‘girl boss’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in chief, Disrupt, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Chief co-founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan started the company because they had experienced first-hand being women executives without a ton of support. They created a community of female leaders that is now 20,000 strong, with 60,000 sitting on waitlists, but just don’t call these women ‘girl bosses.’ The two women appeared at ZebethMedia Disrupt today in San Francisco. Kaplan asked the audience how many men call themselves “boy bosses.” Nobody raised their hand. “We don’t use the phrase ‘boy boss.’ We only use the phrase ‘girl boss’ because we’ve put women in another category instead of just assuming that a woman can be a leader. And so I don’t like the phrase because of that. I don’t like thinking about women in leadership. It’s just leadership,” Kaplan told the Disrupt audience. She added, “How can we celebrate women, not tear them down, not infantilize what it is to be a woman leader by calling them a ‘girl boss’ and truly make sure that women can lead and do it in their own way.” The three-year-old startup has grown from a 200 person group in NYC to a 20,000 strong organization that has raised $140 million on a $1 billion valuation. Yet they have another 60,000 women who want to join. Kaplan stresses that giving its members a highly curated and valuable experience is more important than growing too fast and losing their value proposition. “The member experience is most important. So when you ask about growth, when we think about how we’ve only scratched the surface of 5 million women [executives] in the US, it is so critical for us to make sure that members are really loving their experience,” she said. It all comes back to the mission, which was born in personal experience, says Childers. “When I started to get in the room where decisions were happening, and I realized that there were differences in the way that conversations were running for different people within the organization, that was just a really eye-opening thing for me,” she said. She decided creating a network of like-minded women could be incredibly helpful. This week the company opened what they call ‘a clubhouse’ in San Francisco, a place for women to meet in person. They have three others in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. In addition, they expanded outside the U.S into the U.K. for the first time.