Why We Do This: Reflections on QED’s 12th Annual CEO Summit

Three weeks ago, QED concluded its 12th annual CEO Summit. 53 of our CEOs traveled from 12 US states and five countries for an intense 36 hours of learning, sharing, and networking. It’s always a humbling experience for me – being surrounded by people half my age with twice my IQ – and more so this year than ever before. It felt like an exclusive club of the best, the brightest, most innovative and disruptive leaders in financial services – all sharing ideas, best practices, and tips and tricks for overcoming common challenges and achieving breakthrough growth, all in an open, collaborative milieu.

"It felt like an exclusive club of the best, the brightest, most innovative and disruptive leaders in financial services"

Why do we do this?

As investors, we see companies achieving breakthrough growth and struggling to solve company-defining issues on a weekly basis, and we faced these same challenges ourselves as operators while building Capital One and a host of other businesses. But our CEOs and our team put down our pencils for two days each year to focus on our most pressing issues, to nurture our networks, and to invest in our surefooted growth. It can get lonely at the top for CEOs. Having a set of 50+ peers sharing experiences and solutions to their most significant problems keeps them coming back each year, despite the constant demands on their time.

Thirteen percent of our CEO attendees lead companies valued at over $300M and 21% of CEO attendees lead companies valued at more than $100M. This creates unique opportunities for mentorship, learning across sectors, business models, and stages. Creating an environment in which CEOs can make those connections and derive value from one another is indispensable. You can’t put a price on this cross-pollination.

At QED, we help guide companies through what we like to call .9^6. Say companies face at least six challenges that could cause them to fail. Even if the best leaders have a 90% chance of overcoming these challenges they are contingent on one another. The odds of overcoming them all can become daunting. By eliminating even a few of them, our companies’ chances of success increase dramatically. Being former operators, we have made many of these mistakes ourselves and are uniquely qualified to support founders throughout this learning process. The CEO Summit is a forum in which we can share, and companies can learn from, our mistakes and from their peers’ mistakes.

This year, we invited seven outside experts in our networks to engage with our CEOs. Below is a sampling of our content and participants.

Managing your Board – How can you tee up and structure Board meetings to make them fun, engaging, and valuable, instead of perfunctory and sterile? Begin every board deck with 3-4 bullets about what’s going well, what’s not going well, what decisions the board needs to make, and what feedback you need. Keep this up to date and share it with your management team regularly. This is more actionable and allows you to maximize value during each session. Keep the agenda light, with room for discussion and make these meetings positive and upbeat. Other things discussed with Leadership Coach Anne Mitchell and Remitly CEO Matt Oppenheimer include – Have you articulated your vision for the Board? Do you take advantage of the unique skills, connections, and experiences of your Directors? How often do you, as a CEO, get feedback from them? Should you have a separate CEO and Chair? When and whom should you add as an independent? Stellar engagement by the group.

Hiring and HR – My dear friend Dennis Liberson joined us to talk about hiring and HR. Dennis was a critical player in scaling Capital One and he held the group’s undivided attention. One of the biggest mistakes interviewers make, according to Dennis? Talking too much about themselves. When interviewing, make sure you have a structure to help you learn about the candidate to avoid the all too familiar self-talk trap. Not only is Dennis a wealth of knowledge on HR and culture, but he is supremely funny.

Scaling Sales – A panel comprised of Mandy Cole, Founder of RISE Accelerator, Nima Pourshasb, CEO of minu, Dan Titcomb, CEO of Lendeavor, and Yinon Ravid, CEO of Albert, talked sales processes, growth targets, and hiring. The session turned into a conversation, illuminating our CEOs’ successes, failures, and best advice from their experiences scaling sales.

What’s the end game? – Frank Rotman led a conversation with Steve McLaughlin, Founder of FT Partners, and Guy Moszkowski, Founder of Autonomous Research US, for a conversation about exits. The takeaways? There are many types of exits with no one-size-fits-all answer. There are also some things you can start to do early to prepare for an inevitable exit including managing unit economics, having an effective management team, and ensuring accurate accounting.

Managing Unit Economics – If you know anything about QED, you know we are keenly focused on unit economics. Kai Stinchcombe, CEO of True Link Financial, Stuart Sopp, CEO of Current, and Portman Wills, co-CEO of Wagestream, led a group conversation about managing unit economics. One of the key takeaways? Think about unit economics in the short-term and how they’ll look at scale in the long-term. Knowing and understanding this will give you degrees of freedom.

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If you told me 12 years ago, when Frank Rotman, Caribou Honig, and I founded the firm that we would have a portfolio of more than 100 investments across 4 continents, a half score of unicorns and over a billion under management I’d have not thought it possible. If you then said we’d have organized 12 CEO summits, each better than the last, I would’ve written you off as having lost your marbles!

"If you told me 12 years ago, when Frank Rotman, Caribou Honig, and I founded the firm that we would have a portfolio of more than 100 investments across 4 continents, a half score of unicorns and over a billion under management I’d have not thought it possible"

When I left Capital One in 2004, I couldn’t have imagined we would be where we are today. The financial services space was nascent and pregnant with opportunity. There was information asymmetry, power imbalance, and a host of macro factors that put wind in the sails of early-stage Fintech disruptors. Twelve years later, financial services have come so far – thanks in large part to our CEOs (“Fintech” wasn’t even a word back then!). It is our great privilege to stand with them at the vanguard of this innovation wave. Our CEO Summit captures the energy, talent, verve, and disruption taking place across financial services today.

Every year we strive to make the content valuable and relevant to all of our CEOs. The entire QED team feels incredibly validated that 100% of our CEOs said they would return to next year’s summit and gave the event a Net Promoter Score of 89. The team works tirelessly to make this event a success and it would not be what it is today without them. I am already looking forward to next year and can tell already it will be the best event yet.