Chief Executive Officer
Owns the direction, the money in the bank and the hiring bar. In a startup, also owns whatever nobody else owns yet.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
Almost never a hire — this is the founder. The fractional and interim versions exist for a different situation: a technical or domain founder who wants an operator to run the company while they build, a board replacing a founder, or a post-acquisition business needing a steady hand for two or three days a week. Look for someone who has carried a P&L and closed a funding round, not someone who has only advised.
Education
No requirement and no correlation. An MBA helps with the vocabulary of a board meeting and nothing else; investors read the last company, not the degree.
Experience
For a fractional or interim seat: 10+ years with at least one full cycle — raise, scale, exit or wind-down. The wind-down counts. Someone who has only ever been in a company going up will not recognise the shape of one going down.
Vertical / domain experience
Domain experience matters most where the buyer is institutional and slow — health, defence, banking, government. In those markets the CEO's address book is a real asset. In a self-serve or SMB market it is close to worthless; the market is reached by product and distribution, not by relationships.
What it pays, roughly
$95,763 median, Canada — for Legislative and senior managers, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $84,000 to $199,992 over 249,465 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters |
|---|---|---|
| ICD.D — Institute of Corporate Directors designation | Institute of Corporate Directors (Canada) | Only relevant once you have a real board with outside directors. Signals governance literacy, not operating ability. |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
Does the work. Writes the deck, the first contracts and the first 20 outbound emails; probably also the product. The job is to find out whether anyone wants this before the money runs out.
Stops doing and starts deciding. Hires the first three people, sets the one metric the company is run on, and spends about a third of the time on the next raise.
Full time on capital, hiring the leadership layer, and the two or three decisions a year that cannot be delegated. If the CEO is still closing deals personally at Series A, the GTM hire was made too late.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Chief Marketing Officer
- Head of Worldwide Partnerships (Marketing & go-to-market)
- Product Manager (Product & design)
CEO + CMO is the most common honest merge in a startup: the person telling the story to investors tells it to the market too. CEO + product also works when the founder is the domain expert. Both merges have the same expiry date — the first time the company misses a quarter because the CEO was writing copy.
Keep separate from
CEO + CFO in one person removes the only internal check on the numbers the board is shown. Keep the books with someone else even if that someone is a part-time bookkeeper — it is a governance line, not a workload line.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Can state the company's one constraint in a sentence, and it is the same sentence two weeks later
- Talks about a failure in specifics, including their own part in it
- Has fired someone and can describe how they did it
Red flags
- Every past outcome was someone else's fault
- Wants the title without the dilution or the risk
- Cannot read a cap table
What this role runs on
The software categories this seat lives in, each linked to the screen of who sells it — the incumbent, the challengers and what the lock-in is.