How to become a COO when the best jobs are never posted: Joe Meyer of ExecThread

If you are wondering how to become a COO, here is the uncomfortable structural fact: most of the roles you would want are never advertised. Joe Meyer built a company around that problem after noticing it in his own career.

Meyer is founder and CEO of ExecThread, a crowdsourced network that surfaces executive-level opportunities that do not reach job boards. He is the first CEO to appear on the show, which makes his perspective on operators worth having. He was an operating executive at companies acquired by AOL, Apple and eBay, and has held board and advisory roles at companies acquired by Autodesk, Etsy and Mediaocean.

Two failures, then two exits

Meyer counts ExecThread as his third or fourth time as CEO, depending on how you score it. The first two were attempts at founding companies that did not succeed, early enough in his career that what he took away was perspective on the gap between the myth of the role and the reality.

What he considers his first real CEO job was HopStop, which he took over from the founder and ran through to acquisition by Apple, with what he describes as some sizable potholes along the way. ExecThread is his first time as a founding CEO.

His self description is one plenty of readers will recognize. He considers himself an entrepreneurial operator rather than an entrepreneur. The day to day of the job, at HopStop and now, is a hands-on multifunctional operating role, which he says is closely analogous to being a COO.

The problem he was living

The idea came from frustration rather than market analysis.

As his career progressed, Meyer got approached by executive recruiters more often. He was pleased about the ones that reached him, and increasingly bothered by the ones that did not. There was no efficient way to learn about opportunities he was not personally approached for, and no way to do it at scale.

His arithmetic is the part that lands. Being approached by a recruiter might happen a handful of times a year if you are lucky. Your network might surface another handful. Optimistically, you learn about a dozen roles. The question that started the company was how many you never hear about.

Building it as a side project rather than a startup

Meyer was at Apple after the HopStop acquisition and not especially looking to start another company. Rather than leave and raise money against an idea, he ran it as a grassroots experiment.

The design of that experiment is instructive. He reached out to second and third degree connections, plus first degree connections he had not spoken to in years, deliberately in markets outside San Francisco and New York, on the reasoning that those were not early adopter markets. He asked whether they would share opportunities they were approached for if he shared his. He also asked, up front, whether they were comfortable with him passing those on to everyone else he was asking.

Everyone said yes. It started with a few dozen people, who invited others in their networks, until people Meyer did not know were sharing roles into the group.

The validation was personal and specific. Of the first hundred opportunities shared, at least two or three were roles he was qualified for and interested in, and would never have been approached about. That proved the theory.

Marketplace mechanics

Meyer is clear-eyed that this is a supply and demand business, with jobs as supply and interest as demand, and far more demand than supply, as in any marketplace.

His reference point is eBay, where he spent about four years as a general manager. There were vastly more buyers than sellers, but enough sellers to keep the buyers interested.

Now with over 125,000 members, still vetted and curated, the dynamic has reversed at the top of the funnel. Hiring companies and recruiters bring their inventory of senior roles to ExecThread as a sourcing strategy, because that is where the right people are.

His framing of what the company actually owns is worth noting. The core asset is the member network. Vet it, curate it, serve it, keep it engaged, and the members refer peers, and the network grows. Critical mass is what makes everything else possible.

Running a company of twelve

Meyer runs small companies deliberately, and his description of what that means for a CEO is refreshingly unsentimental.

HopStop never exceeded 15 employees, while competing against Google Maps. ExecThread has never gone above 15 to 20, usually sitting around a dozen. The structure is flat and the posture is all hands on deck.

His line about his own role: the CEO of a company this size cannot sit at an elevated altitude delegating, because a CEO who does not contribute operationally is just contributing to overhead.

He extends it into a distinction worth keeping. Because the company does not have all the standard management roles filled, the team is made up of operators. People who do the work rather than tell people what to do, which he treats as a meaningful difference rather than a slogan.

Hiring for appetite rather than pedigree

Meyer's hiring approach at his last two startups runs against the usual advice, and he is direct about the tradeoff.

He has kept the team leaner and less experienced rather than more. What he looks for is people earlier in their careers who want more opportunity, more responsibility, more autonomy and more visible cause and effect than they would get elsewhere. The distinction he draws is between people who want those things and are getting them for the first time, and people who arrive expecting them.

Mentorship in that environment is informal, and he does not pretend otherwise. His model is David Wright, the former New York Mets captain, whose answer to how he led was that he showed up early, worked hard, stayed late, and kept trying to improve, and that people learned from watching. Meyer's view is that a company of a dozen people does not have time for a formal mentorship program, so leading by example is what is available.

Transparency with a steady hand

On leading through uncertainty, Meyer lands somewhere sensible between full disclosure and a brave face.

Be open and transparent to a large degree, while accepting that some things are best left unsaid. When the company is hitting potholes or moving sideways or downwards, the team needs to hear it, because they already know something is happening. What they need from you is that you are aware of it, what you are doing about it, and what the plan is for getting back into smooth air.

And it has to be delivered steadily. His framing is that the downs outnumber the ups, particularly building from the ground up, and that the job requires the stomach for it and people around you who have it too.

What experience gives you, in his telling, is not immunity but expectation. The potholes keep coming and should not surprise you. What is surprising is which one is next, because some of them you have genuinely never seen.

His illustration is a recent conversation with an angel investor about a cap table problem. Asked whether he had been through this before, his answer was that nobody had put it that way, and no, not this particular challenge, but he had been through many others and would get through this one.

Failure as fuel

Asked how he stays positive, Meyer notes that his kind of company is lonelier than most. With a full management team you have peers to commiserate with. Running lean, you often do not.

He is honest that he does not have a tidy answer. He wakes up and fights another day, and if he stops feeling motivated he treats that as a signal to question why he is doing it at all. With his last two companies, he keeps finding more reasons to keep going than not, including through periods where meeting payroll and surviving were open questions.

Then he names his actual motivator, with a caveat attached. He has failed twice as a founder, it was not fun, and you work just as hard on the failures as on the successes. He does not want to fail again. He acknowledges some people would call that an unhealthy motivator, and his response is that you need something to weather the storms.

What big companies are actually like

Meyer's two operating successes were Quigo, acquired by AOL, and HopStop, acquired by Apple. He stayed a year at AOL and two and a half years at Apple after the deals.

The sequence is what he thinks made those integrations manageable. He had already failed as a founder, and had already spent around four years at eBay, before either exit. So he arrived at both acquirers knowing what a large company feels like.

His generalization is bracing. Most big companies operate very similarly, and if you are not a big company person, most of them will not suit you. What you do is make sure the company you helped build is successfully integrated, while having an exit plan, either agreed in advance or formed along the way, and adding value in the meantime.

The advice underneath: go in with your eyes open, and do not assume it will be different because it is a different large company. It will probably be very similar.

Acquisitions that are not jarring

Michael asks how you lead a team through the uncertainty of an acquisition. Meyer's answer complicates the premise.

The startups he has been part of were mature by the time they sold. HopStop was around eight years old, Quigo seven or eight, and ExecThread had just passed its sixth anniversary at the time of recording.

His observation is that unless you are heading for an IPO and believe you can be a durable standalone company, most people at a startup understand the end goal is an acquisition. The right acquisition, he stresses, not just any acquisition. By year seven, eight or nine, especially among people who have been there throughout, an exit is expected. So it arrives as evolutionary rather than jarring, and as a new challenge, with some vindication attached.

His word for the feeling is not celebration but satisfaction, the sense of finally exhaling. He explains why by describing what being private costs: constant pressure to innovate, competition encroaching, technology aging toward legacy, retention getting harder as years pass, and key roles that are always difficult to fill.

He is equally clear about the limit. You cannot run a company with the single aim of being acquired. When candidates ask about the end goal, he tells them honestly that liquidity is one of the primary goals, while insisting it does not guide strategic decisions or dictate how and why they do things.

The reveal button, and what it says about executive hiring

Meyer's advice to executives looking for their next role is the least fashionable and probably the most accurate: leverage your network, your connections, the introductions and influence that come from them, and do it proactively.

He goes further than a founder normally would, saying plainly that executives do not get roles by applying to a posting, or even by finding one on his own platform.

Which is why ExecThread is built the way it is. For roughly 95% of opportunities there is no apply button. There is a reveal. You reveal the hiring manager's name, title and contact details, the recruiting firm running the search, and the names and titles of the internal and external recruiters working on it.

And then the product tells you not to use any of it directly. The prompt immediately after the reveal recommends that unless you know the person, you should go to your own network, find shared connections, and get a warm introduction instead. Meyer says the people who follow that advice do meaningfully better than those who cold contact.

His summary of the division of labor is the sharpest career advice in the episode. Use a platform like his to find out where the openings are, so that you can spend your network on getting in the door rather than on discovery.

He also notes what happens when a new member asks where the apply button is, which is that the question itself signals a gap in understanding of how senior hiring works. At the time of recording there were over 3,000 retained executive searches on the platform across functions, levels, geographies and company stages.

The 5 things I took away from this conversation

1. Use your network for the introduction, not the search. This is the reframe that makes executive job hunting tractable. Most people burn their relationships asking who is hiring. The higher leverage use is knowing the role already and spending one connection getting a warm introduction to the decision maker.

2. If you have to ask where the apply button is, you have misread the market. Meyer says out loud what recruiters imply. At the executive level, applications are not the mechanism. Roles move through relationships, and the sooner you internalize that, the sooner the search stops feeling arbitrary.

3. Validate a network product on yourself first. Before raising anything, Meyer ran the concept manually with people he knew and asked whether the first hundred shared roles contained anything he would have wanted and never heard about. Two or three did. That is a cheaper and more honest test than a market sizing exercise.

4. A small company should hire operators, not managers. His distinction between people who do the work and people who tell others what to do is the right filter under about thirty people. So is hiring for people who want more responsibility than they have had, rather than people who expect what they already have.

5. Steadiness is a deliverable, not a personality trait. Acknowledge the problem, admit your own frustration, and then say you do not yet know how but you will get through it, because you have before. Meyer is explicit that if he did not say and believe that, the challenge would land on his team as much heavier than it is.

FAQ

How do you become a COO or land another executive role? Through relationships, according to Meyer. Executives are rarely hired from applications. The reliable path is proactively working your network for introductions and influence. Platforms can tell you which roles exist, including confidential ones, but the introduction to the hiring manager is what converts.

What is the hidden job market for executives? Senior roles that are never posted publicly, either because they are confidential or because they are filled through retained search and personal networks. Meyer's estimate of what an individual can see unaided is roughly a dozen roles a year, between recruiter approaches and word of mouth, against a far larger set that never surfaces.

Should you contact a hiring manager directly if you find their details? Meyer's own product advises against it. Unless you already know the person, the recommendation is to find shared connections and secure an introduction instead. In his experience, members who take that route see noticeably better outcomes than those who reach out cold.

What are the chief operating officer duties at a very small company? At a dozen people, largely everything, and Meyer describes his own CEO role in exactly those terms. There is no full management team, so the people you hire are operators who do the work rather than direct it, and any executive who is not contributing operationally is overhead.

How should a team think about being acquired? As a likely outcome rather than a surprise, if the company is not heading for an IPO. Meyer's companies were seven to eight years old at acquisition, so the possibility was long understood and the event felt evolutionary. His caution is that liquidity cannot be the goal that drives strategic decisions, only one of several outcomes held in mind.

Also mentioned

• ExecThread, and the reveal mechanic that replaces an apply button for most listings
• HopStop, acquired by Apple, and Quigo, acquired by AOL, Meyer's two operating exits
• eBay, where Meyer spent about four years as a general manager
• Google Maps, the competitor HopStop faced with fewer than 15 employees
• LinkedIn, the tool ExecThread points members toward for finding a shared connection
• David Wright of the New York Mets, Meyer's model for leading by example
• Retained executive search, the channel through which most of these confidential roles move

Listen to the full episode

Joe Meyer on Between Two COO's

Between Two COO's is hosted by Michael Koenig. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.