Chief, the New York Club for Elite Women, Is Expanding

(Bloomberg) -- Chief, a private club for the powerful women of New York City, launched in January with 200 members and a party in Tribeca. Six months later, the network has a 5,000-person waiting list, nationwide demand and, now, money to grow.

Chief on Tuesday announced a $22 million series A investment round led by Ken Chenault at General Catalyst and Alexa Von Tobel at Inspired Capital. The chief executive officer of American Express Co. until 2018, Chenault will also join Chief’s board, as will von Tobel. Chief plans to use the money to expand in New York and open chapters in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Washington by the end of 2020.

Unlike women’s trade groups or other professional networks, Chief is only interested in women who are already successful -- defined as a job at the vice president level or higher. Often members get their employers to cover the cost of the annual dues, which are set at $5,400 or $7,800, depending on experience level. They get access to the Tribeca clubhouse, a Slack channel, and events with speakers like Whoopi Goldberg and Valerie Jarrett.

Chief’s central offering, though, is the “core group,” a curated set of 8-12 members who meet every four to six weeks with an executive coach. (Chief contracts the services of more than 35 of New York-based coaches and plans to do the same as it expands to other cities.)

“Throughout my career, I certainly have experienced the challenges of moving forward,” said Chenault, one of a small handful of black men to lead a big publicly held company. “Chief is very serious about placing more women in leadership positions and cultivating those leaders. We want to be a part of that.”

Co-founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan, two veterans of the New York startup scene, had similar experiences. The two had climbed the rungs at various startups. Childers was a senior vice president at Handy; Kaplan was a VP at mattress company Casper. As they rose, they found it got harder to find guidance from other women on how to keep going. “We were getting more senior in our careers, but there was no community for us,” Childers said.

Women’s Ranks

Despite all the talk about the importance of corporate diversity, women’s ranks dwindle at the most senior levels -- and the statistics haven’t improved in recent years. In 2015, research by McKinsey & Co. and Lean In found that women made up 27% of vice presidents at the hundreds of companies they surveyed. Last year, that number ticked up to just 29%. Only around 5% of big companies have female CEOs. Women of color hold just 6% of all VP-level jobs. Three non-white women run Fortune 500 companies.

“The numbers aren’t budging,” Kaplan said. “And it felt like there was this monumental need for this 40-year-old woman. No one was catering to her at all.”

The demand for Chief exceeded even the expectations of its founders.

“We’re at where we expected to be sometime in 2020,” Childers said. Its almost 800 members include women who work at Uber, Google, and Walmart. They want community, but don’t need co-working spaces, the other industry that’s seen a mini-boom in offerings catering to women. The best-known among them, The Wing, announced a $75 million investment round in December.

Julie Alvin, a senior vice president at Refinery 29, said other attempts at networking had fallen short of her expectations.

“I didn’t meet people who could give me guidance,” Alvin said. “Chief seems like a better opportunity to me for someone looking for mentorship, guidance, and connections. It seemed like something I was missing.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Rebecca Greenfield in New York at rgreenfield@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Janet Paskin at jpaskin@bloomberg.net, Kevin Miller

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