Chief

Chief is a membership network for senior women executives, founded in January 2019 in New York by Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan. It combines a vetted community with structured peer and coaching work: members take either six guided peer-advisory sessions in a Core group or four one-to-one executive coaching sessions each year, plus quarterly courses from Wharton Executive Education, summits, events and unlimited access to four physical Clubhouses in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington D.C. Eligibility is based on tenure rather than title alone, with a stated floor of fifteen years of leadership experience and separate criteria for corporate executives, founders and independent operators. Chief raised US$140 million in 2022 in a round led by Alphabet's CapitalG, reaching a US$1.1 billion valuation, and had drawn criticism in 2023 from members who questioned whether the experience matched its growth. It has since replaced its waitlist with an application model and, in 2024, restructured its membership tiers. Alison Moore became chief executive in January 2025.

How it works

Applicants are reviewed against Chief's published criteria and, if qualified, have a 30-minute call. Members choose between a Core peer-advisory group, which meets six times a year and is matched by journey and professional goals, or four executive coaching sessions. Membership also includes Clubhouse access, Wharton Executive Education courses, summits and year-round events.

Typical member

Chief describes four member journeys: C-suite (CXO title at organisations with 1,000 or more employees, or a public-company board seat), senior leaders and executives (CEO, CXO, VP or SVP and founders at mid-market to enterprise firms), and builders and navigators (solopreneurs, consultants and fractional leaders with prior CXO or VP-plus experience, or a business with US$2 million or more in revenue or venture funding). Chief states more than 60 per cent of members are sponsored by their employers.

Chief is a venture-funded company rather than a member association, and that shows in how it has changed shape: a waitlist reported at 60,000 in 2023, a membership restructure in 2024, a new chief executive in 2025, and Clubhouse access moved into the base tier in 2025. Members quoted by Fortune in 2023 questioned whether rapid growth had diluted the network, which is the standing criticism to weigh. Its distinctive feature is that more than 60 per cent of memberships are employer-sponsored, which changes the incentives compared with organisations members pay for themselves. Pricing is not published on Chief's own pages: reported figures cluster around US$5,900 a year, with Core tiers higher, but the tier structure has changed more than once, so any single number ages quickly.

Editorial analysis by Peer Group Guide editors. It is separated from the record above and follows the editorial policy.