So Andrew Bialecki, co-founder and CEO of Klaviyo, just made the announcement every technical founder dreams about: He’s bringing in Chano Fernandez (the ex co-CEO of Workday) as co-CEO so he can go back to product. Chano will run GTM, operations, and G&A. Andrew will focus on engineering, product, and long-term vision.
This is the dream, right? The founder gets to focus on where they can add the most value — product — while a seasoned operator handles all the stuff that made the job “very big and very hard and very complex,” as Marc Benioff once put it.
But does this actually work on practice?
First, Let’s Look at What Klaviyo Is Doing
Klaviyo is crushing it, but at a time where change is ripping through the industy. They just crossed $1.2B in revenue run rate, growing 32% year-over-year. They have 183,000+ customers. They powered $3.8B in attributed revenue from 22 billion messages on Black Friday/Cyber Monday alone. Market cap is around $9B.
No vendor is more beloved in the Shopify ecosystem.
And Bialecki sees something massive on the horizon: AI agents exploding in e-commerce. He wrote in his announcement that “LLMs and the current wave of AI were going to create a step change in how businesses defined customer experiences.” Instead of users configuring marketing campaigns, AI agents will draft, execute, and optimize them automatically.
That’s a product bet. A big one. And to make that bet, Bialecki wants to be in the product all day and maybe even in the code, not in finance meetings.
Enter Chano Fernandez. Chano was co-CEO of Workday from 2020 to 2022 alongside Aneel Bhusri, after serving as co-President before that. Across his nine years at Workday, he helped scale revenue from $469M to $6.2B. Before that: McKinsey, SAP, Infor. He’s been on Klaviyo’s board for two years. Bialecki says they’ve shared “lunches and dinners in Boston and London” and developed “deep respect for each other’s intensity and intellect.”
The Dream: Founder Gets To Go Back to Product
Every technical founder I know who’s scaled past $50M ARR has fantasized about this. The job of CEO just becomes … different. At $10M, you’re still in the code sometimes. At $100M, you’re managing managers. At $1B, you’re running a small country.
The pull to “get back to product” is real. It’s where the magic is. It’s where founders feel most alive. It’s where they add the most differentiated value. Nobody knows the customer, the problem, and the vision like the founder.
And the math seems simple: hire someone great to handle sales, marketing, ops, finance, legal, HR — all the “generic” stuff — and let the founder do what only the founder can do.
Except it often doesn’t work. It is risky.
“There Can Only Be One CEO”?
The thing I hear over and over from public company CEOs: there can only be one CEO.
Not because of ego. Because of reality.
When the board calls at 6am with a crisis, who picks up? When two executives are at war and someone has to make the call, who decides? When the Street wants to know the strategy, who owns it? When a $500M acquisition lands on the table and needs a yes or no in 48 hours, who signs?
The CEO job isn’t divisible the way a founder might hope. Product and GTM aren’t two separate companies that happen to share a cap table. They’re deeply intertwined. Pricing is product. Positioning is product. The sales team’s feedback shapes the roadmap. The roadmap shapes what sales can sell.
Every time there’s a gray area — and there are hundreds of gray areas per week at a $1B company — someone has to be the tiebreaker. And if both people think they’re the tiebreaker, you get paralysis. Or politics. Or both.
This is why many co-CEO arrangements end with one person leaving within 18-24 months. It at least doesn’t appear to be highly stable in many cases.
The Graveyard of Co-CEOs
Let’s be honest about the track record here.
- SAP: Tried co-CEOs multiple times. Failed multiple times. Christian Klein and Jennifer Morgan lasted six months. SAP itself said “the times we live in require companies to act quickly and decisively. This requires a clear leadership structure.”
- Salesforce: Marc Benioff tried it twice. Keith Block was co-CEO for 18 months before leaving “to pursue the next chapter.” Bret Taylor lasted about a year. Benioff is back as sole CEO. Again.
- Oracle: Had Safra Catz and Mark Hurd as dual CEOs under Larry Ellison for years. It worked… but Ellison never really left. And when Hurd passed away, Oracle didn’t replace him. Catz is now sole CEO.
One Cloud Wars analysis put it bluntly: “If pigs had wings, they’d be eagles. If companies were meant to be led by co-CEOs, we’d see that model everywhere instead of nowhere.”
Personally, I think it definitely can work with truly equal and close co-founders. For an outside hire? It can be tough.
One Huge Advantage: A Force Multiplier With Customers
But here’s something that gets overlooked: customers love to talk to the CEO.
It’s the ultimate trump card in enterprise sales. When a $2M deal is stuck, when a renewal is at risk, when a strategic account needs love — nothing unsticks it like CEO involvement. The problem is there’s only so much CEO to go around.
With two co-CEOs, you have a force multiplier. Chano can be in London closing a major European account while Andrew is in Boston meeting with a key partner. Both conversations carry the weight of “CEO.” Both customers feel like they got the top person.
At Workday, this was a real advantage. Bhusri could focus on product-centric customer conversations — roadmap, vision, technical deep-dives — while Chano handled the business conversations: contracts, expansions, executive relationships. Two CEOs meant twice the customer coverage at the highest level.
For a company like Klaviyo with 183,000+ customers and aggressive enterprise ambitions, this matters. A lot.
When It Actually Works
Workday — where Chano Fernandez comes from — is probably the best example of the co-CEO model actually working in enterprise software.
Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield ran Workday as co-CEOs for years. When Bhusri needed to focus more on product and strategy, Chano stepped up as co-CEO. The split was exactly what Klaviyo is proposing: Bhusri on product and innovation, Chano on customer relationships and GTM.
And it worked.
- Workday went from ~$700M to over $6B during Chano’s tenure.
- Netflix is another example. Reed Hastings brought in Ted Sarandos as co-CEO, then Greg Peters. Hastings moved to executive chairman. The company never missed a beat.
- Atlassian’s co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar were co-CEOs for 20 years.
So what separates the successes from the failures?
The 5 Things That Make Co-CEO Work
1. Clear, non-overlapping domains. Product vs. GTM is a clean split. Strategy vs. execution is not. If both co-CEOs think they own “strategy,” you’re dead. Klaviyo is doing this right: Andrew owns product, engineering, design, vision. Chano owns GTM, ops, G&A. Clear lines.
2. Deep personal trust built over time. Bialecki and Chano have known each other for two years. Chano’s been on the board. They’ve had “lunches and dinners.” That’s not enough. But it’s a start. The Workday founders knew each other for decades. The Atlassian founders started the company together. Trust takes time. Bialecki knows this: “We developed a deep respect for each other’s intensity and intellect.”
3. Ego checked at the door. This is the hardest one, no matter what anyone says. Two people who are both qualified to be CEO have to genuinely believe the company is better with both of them than with either alone. Chano explicitly talked about this from his Workday days: “Shared responsibility meant that ego had to be set aside.”
4. The founder stays in the room. The co-CEO model fails most often when the founder uses it as a stepping stone to leaving. If Bialecki is actually going to be deep in product and AI — not just stepping back — this works. If he’s really moving to executive chairman in disguise, it doesn’t.
5. Complementary skills, not overlapping. Bialecki is a technical founder who built the product. Chano is an enterprise sales and ops exec who scaled a $6B company. That’s complementary. Two product CEOs or two sales CEOs would be a disaster.
The COO Alternative
Many founders try to solve this with a COO instead of a co-CEO. The thinking is: same benefits, clearer hierarchy.
But as Reid Hoffman wrote about his experience at LinkedIn: “The kind of person who has the capacity to be a great leader usually wants to be CEO, not COO.” Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook is the exception, not the rule.
To get someone of Chano’s caliber — former co-CEO of a $60B market cap company — you probably have to give them the co-CEO title. A COO role wouldn’t have gotten him.
Why This Moment Matters for Klaviyo
Bialecki isn’t doing this because he’s burned out or because the board pushed him. He’s doing it because of the radical change AI is bringing to marketing and commerce.
“We’ve hit a critical stretch where an agentic layer that can drive our B2C CRM is no longer a research project, it’s production grade,” he wrote. “We have the opportunity to make rapid progress, usher in this new era… and lead it.”
That’s a founder bet. And to make that bet, he needs to be building, not managing.
Klaviyo already launched Marketing Agent and Customer Agent — AI tools that can autonomously build marketing plans and handle customer service. They’re not messing around.
A High Conviction Move
This is one of the highest-conviction co-CEO moves I’ve seen.
Here’s why:
Chano already did this exact job at Workday, with the exact same split. He’s not learning on the job. Bialecki isn’t stepping back — he’s leaning into a massive product bet during a generational AI shift. The company is crushing it at $1.2B+ revenue with 32% growth. This isn’t a turnaround or a crisis. And they have two years of relationship building before making the move.
But I’ve also seen enough of these fail to know the risks:
Decision-making can slow down when two people have to align. External stakeholders (investors, press, partners) may not know who’s really in charge. Personal conflicts, even small ones, can metastasize. And if the AI bet doesn’t pay off, “I was focused on product” becomes “why weren’t you managing the business?”
The co-CEO model works maybe 20% of the time. But when it works, it really works. Workday is proof.
Klaviyo has the right ingredients. Let’s see if they can cook.
The Dream. Just Make Sure It Works in Reality
Every technical founder at $100M+ has dreamed of hiring someone to handle “all the other stuff” so they can get back to building. Most of the time, it doesn’t work. And most public company CEOs will tell you flatly: there can only be one.
But it is worth thinking about more in the Age of Ai.
Klaviyo is doing this the right way:
They found someone who’s done the exact job before. They have clear domain separation. They have a relationship foundation. The founder is staying fully engaged, just on a different part of the business. And they’re doing it from a position of strength, not desperation.
If you’re a founder thinking about this move, ask yourself: do you have all five ingredients? The clear domains? The deep trust? The ego checked? The commitment to stay in the room? The complementary skills?
If not, the COO or President title is probably safer. Or just accept that being CEO means doing the whole job.
But if you do have all five… maybe it’s time to make the call.
Related: Klaviyo’s co-CEO announcement
