So are two CEOs better than one? I remember Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of Research in Motion, telling me once that he and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis would trade emails when an issue needed immediate attention. “You play these little games where you try to suggest it to the other guy first,” he said. “I’m really busy, can you handle it?”
Feigen pointed to three prerequisites for these arrangements to work.
Separate areas of expertise—Magouyrk is an infrastructure leader while Sicilia leads applications. “Those are the two critical elements for next-generation, cloud-supported AI, which means they can go deep and across,” says Feigen. The title almost doesn’t matter: In many Silicon Valley companies, a CTO founder is often the product lead and equal to the CEO.
One factor in Oracle’s favor is that Catz herself was co-CEO with Mark Hurd prior to his death in 2019. Feigen thinks it can work again. “This is the right model for a complex, fast-growing company,” he says. “Two CEOs are not job sharing. They are doubling capacity.”
