OCC opens new office for fintech

Chief finally has a clubhouse in San Francisco, but don’t call it a coworking space. The 8,600 square feet includes conference rooms, one-person zoom rooms and open-plan seating, but it also has a bar, lounge seating and – like the Chiefs’ other clubhouses in New York, LA and Chicago – a piano.

“To me, the piano represents ‘this is not a coworking space,'” Chief co-founder Lindsay Kaplan told me on a tour of the clubhouse ahead of the official opening Thursday. “This is a place where you can sit back and take meetings in a very relaxed way.”

Unlike Wing, the women-focused coworking space and club that shut down this summer after a six-year run, Kaplan and co-founder and CEO Carolyn Childers are still much more interested in building and supporting Chief’s network than growing its physical facilities.

Therefore, Chief’s main offering, curated, 10-member “Core” peer groups that meet monthly with an executive coach, will continue to take place virtually.

“What we optimize for the most is finding the right and perfect 10 people for you to be with,” Childers said. “Even in San Francisco, there might be someone from out of town.”

Before Chief expanded outside of New York, the groups still met in person, but applicants who said they wanted to join for the slot didn’t tend to get off the waiting list. The network is about the peer group, and the space is more like “the container that it can happen in IRL,” Kaplan said.

The network is more closely modeled after the Young Presidents’ Organization, the 72-year-old network of top managers under the age of 45 who help each other work through professional and personal challenges. YPO is about its network and does not have its own areas, Childers said.

Kaplan and Childers were also inspired by Carole Robin, a longtime facilitator of the popular “touchy feely” course at Stanford, to think through “how you create the right level of, frankly, vulnerability that you need to get to in order to really work through things,” Childers said. “The bottom line [group] really gets to a place where you can speak to what’s really going on for you, both personally and professionally, because those two things really come together.”

That said, the clubhouse is also a place where members can host guests, hold board meetings and — yes — take Zoom calls. Ten percent of the Chief’s 20,000 members live in the Bay Area, but when the Chief planned its next clubhouse, San Francisco was also the most requested city by non-Bay Area members. In other words, chief members in cities like Boston and DC wanted a clubhouse in San Francisco where they could visit while in town.

Despite that, Childers and Kaplan are trying to more closely mimic a Harvard alumni club, which has clubhouses with “great facilities,” Kaplan said, but most of the real benefits come from being part of a large, powerful network. But with a mission to change the face of executive management, the female-focused atmosphere can also feel somewhat more accessible — Kaplan recalled a similar sense of camaraderie with other women trying on clothes in the communal fitting room at the old New York department store Loehmanns.

“It kind of reminds me of this intimate space,” Kaplan said. “If you tried something on and you went in front of the mirror, all the women around you were like, ‘honey, that looks good.’