Why VCs should want their CEOs in CEO CF
If you back a CEO, you are backing their capacity to make difficult decisions through changing circumstances. Helping that person keep learning deserves attention alongside the next hiring plan or funding milestone.
CEO CF gives leaders a place to examine consequential questions with experienced peers outside their own business. For investors, the case is practical: a CEO who has space to test assumptions, regain perspective and return with a considered next step.
It is also a case for protecting energy. A leader who feels understood and can see a way forward may return more ready to tackle the work that matters.
Support the person whose judgement you depend on
Gompers and colleagues’ survey of 885 institutional venture capitalists found that respondents placed particular importance on the management team in investment selection. That finding concerns investor priorities. It does not establish a return from any particular leadership programme.
It does raise a useful question. If the team matters so much at the investment decision, how will its leaders continue to develop afterwards?
Our community offers ongoing peer exchange around real business decisions. The relationship sits alongside an effective board, specialist advisers and any coaching or portfolio support the CEO already values.
Give an unfinished question somewhere to develop
An early concern does not always arrive as a clear board proposal. A CEO may recognise a problem without yet understanding its cause. They need somewhere to test an incomplete explanation and hear what it leaves out.
In a CEO Challenge, preparation helps frame the issue. Peers then ask questions before giving observations and recommendations. The CEO has time to understand the feedback and decide what follows.
Consider an illustrative example: a CEO wants to hire a country manager. The questions reveal that the business has not yet established how customers in that market will buy. The immediate action may be to test the route to market before committing to the hire.
The appointment could still be right. The benefit is a more considered decision and a clearer account of the evidence needed to make it.
Add experience beyond the portfolio
A fund’s own founder network can be valuable. CEO CF adds a European, cross-industry group of non-competing leaders whose experience extends beyond one portfolio.
Someone in another market may see an assumption that local peers take for granted. Someone in a different sector may recognise a familiar management problem beneath unfamiliar business language.
The CEO must still evaluate what applies. Experience from another business is useful when its conditions are understood, rather than treated as a ready-made answer.
The exchange is reciprocal. A portfolio CEO contributes their own experience and attention to other members. Helping another leader think can also sharpen their understanding of their own business.
Protect balcony time
Day-to-day demands encourage a CEO to keep responding. Balcony time creates distance to ask why the same problems keep appearing and whether the organisation has outgrown the way it is being led.
The balcony metaphor, associated with Ronald Heifetz and described in Harvard Business Publishing’s leadership brief, is a useful way to describe this shift in perspective.
In the country-manager example, it means moving from the immediate task of approving a job description to the broader question of how the business intends to enter the market.
Two days together allow that thinking to develop across structured work and informal conversation. Investors can help by treating that time as part of the CEO’s leadership work and protecting it from routine demands.
Value the energy to act
Clarity is useful partly because it changes what a leader feels able to do next. A problem that has been circulating in the CEO’s head can become a question with a first action and people to return to.
Encouragement, relevant experience and the chance to contribute can all be energising. A demanding meeting may leave someone tired yet more purposeful about the work ahead.
That is an intended benefit to explore with the CEO, rather than a measured wellbeing or investment-return claim. Ask what they now see more clearly, what they feel ready to tackle and how they will make space to act.
Follow-through makes the conversation useful to the company
The Challenge ends with the presenter choosing discoveries and commitments. The captured record and continuing peer relationship give those decisions somewhere to be revisited.
Harkin and colleagues’ review of progress-monitoring experiments found that encouraging people to monitor progress improved goal attainment on average. The studies covered varied settings and did not evaluate CEO CF. They support the practical importance of reviewing what actually happened.
An investor can ask about the CEO’s chosen actions without requesting other members’ private contributions. Sponsoring development should preserve the confidentiality that makes candid peer discussion possible.
Begin with fit
The right questions are whether the CEO wants this kind of challenge, can commit the time and is willing to contribute as well as receive support.
Speak with our team about a suitable portfolio CEO. An approved guest meeting can offer a practical way to assess the experience; availability and the applicable guest fee are discussed with the team.
Give the CEO room to judge its usefulness for themselves. The result to look for is visible in their own leadership: a clearer diagnosis, renewed purpose and a thoughtful next step.
