Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. This conversation is all about the rise of the CCO or chief customer

officer. The episode is a conversation with A16Z's Matt Levy, partner on the executive talent team,

discussing the role with CCO's all, Alison Pickens of GameSite, Krista Anderson Copperman from

Acta and Hatem Shafik from Databricks.

I hear the question a lot in working with folks like you. I want to be a chief customer

officer one day. How do I do that? What does that mean? It's a role that I think gets

bandied around a lot in our portfolio, starting to become more and more prevalent just in the industry

as a whole. So we're going to talk about, hey, why are companies creating these roles?

What's the strategic value?

The different definitions and compositions of these roles.

And then finally, the career path, the chief customer officer.

Alison, how many of your customers do you see creating a chief customer officer role?

It's definitely an emerging role.

I think there have been a couple reasons why it's grown up. One has been, I think

people are realizing that customer success needs to report directly to the CEO. I think in doing that,

folks are realizing customer success isn't just about customer success management. It's actually about

other functions that need to work in tandem to drive value for clients. And so the CO role becomes about ensuring really strong cross-functional coordination across

the whole life cycle for all of these functions that are involved.

You operate kind of like a symphony orchestra, whereas everyone's looking at the same sheet

music.

You might be playing different instruments, but you're all playing the same general tune.

I think that's the role of a chief

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