Chief's Billion-Dollar Rise

A story about how Chief, a professional network for senior executive women, experienced unexpected rapid growth from launch.

"I can remember back when we were launching and we were like 'we're gonna have just 100 great members as we launch and we're really excited.' Even from the very beginning and the launch we had thousands of people sign up for a waitlist for Chief. Now we're close to 15,000 members, but we have a waitlist of close to 60,000, which is incredible.

We started to sell at the end of 2018, didn't officially launch services until February 2019, and we were just in New York City. We continued adding members in New York City until around mid-2019 when we raised our Series A to expand into new cities. At the time, expansion was more capital intensive because we were in person and had to make investments into clubhouses. We were in the midst of those buildouts when the pandemic happened, and that's when we made the full pivot over to virtual. As we did that, engagement actually went up across every one of our services. It was a time where something like Chief was needed more than ever, and it allowed us to expand in a much different way."