Shared control at the top of a scaling software business is far more common than most sponsors assume, and it is a governance question long before it is a personality one. In one recent depth run of our European CEO mapping, six of the seven PE, VC and growth-backed portfolio CEOs we profiled held a Co-CEO title: AB Tasty, Evaneos, Marshmallow, Kardinal, LPA and Instaffo. That is a striking density of shared control in a single slice of the market, and our Talent Map coverage of European portfolio CEOs and COOs now stands at 72 mapped leaders. The pattern is not an anomaly. It is a feature of how European software scales.
Most sponsors treat the chief executive seat as a single point of accountability. When two people share it, that assumption breaks, and the questions it raises do not resolve on their own. They land at three distinct moments in the life of the investment.
At entry: who actually holds the pen
The first question is the least glamorous and the most expensive to get wrong. In a business with two chief executives, who holds decision rights, and does the deal documentation reflect that or quietly assume a single accountable leader who does not exist?
A Co-CEO structure is usually a founder paired with an operator, or two founders who built the company together and never separated their roles. It made sense at the scale-up stage, when the work genuinely divided in two: one holds product and vision, the other holds commercial and operations. By the time an institutional investor writes a cheque, that division has hardened into how the company actually runs. The reserved matters, the board mechanics, the tie-break on a disputed call: all of it needs to be mapped before signing, not discovered after.
The academic work on Co-CEO firms is useful here. Research on the incidence and effectiveness of Co-CEOs finds that shared leadership functions as an alternative governance mechanism, with mutual monitoring between the two executives substituting for some board oversight and their complementary skills substituting for some board advising. The same research finds that firms most likely to run Co-CEO structures have less independent boards and greater merger activity. For a sponsor, that is a double-edged read. The structure can be genuinely efficient, and it can also concentrate control in a way a standard governance package does not anticipate.
At scale: does shared control survive the plan
The second question arrives once the value-creation plan starts to bite. A plan that demands fast, single-owner decisions is a stress test for any shared-control model, and the real issue is whether it holds under load.
Sometimes it does. Mutual monitoring between two capable leaders can be a genuine asset in a scaling business, catching errors a single CEO might miss and spreading a workload that is honestly too large for one person during a period of rapid growth. But the same governance research is clear that the model unravels without exceptional trust and communication, and that a strong external governance mechanism reduces the risk of the two executives colluding rather than genuinely monitoring each other. That is precisely the fragility a sponsor underwrites at entry. A board that assumed a single CEO and finds a divided one, under pressure, in the middle of a value-creation plan, is a board that has to rebuild its own decision-making at the worst time to do it.
The sponsor’s leadership work here is not to admire the structure or to break it. It is to manage it actively. Clear boundaries between the two roles, real board oversight of the interface, and a pre-agreed way of resolving a deadlock are the elements that make a shared-control arrangement durable. Where they are absent, the plan is one hard decision away from stalling.
At exit: the structure that has to unwind
The third question is timing, and it is the one sponsors most often leave too late. Co-CEO structures almost always resolve into a single accountable chief executive before or through an exit process, because that is what most trade buyers, sponsors and public markets want to see. A business going to market with two people sharing the top job invites every buyer to ask which one stays, and to price the uncertainty into the offer.
The sponsor who plans that resolution early protects the value. There is time to decide which leader takes the single seat, to give the other a role that keeps them engaged through the process, and to present a clean line of accountability to the market. The sponsor who leaves it until a process is live inherits the opposite: a founder standoff at the moment of maximum sensitivity, with the deal timetable as leverage for whichever executive feels short-changed. The structure that made the company fundable at the scale-up stage becomes the thing that complicates the exit, unless someone has already done the work to unwind it.
The read for sponsors
Shared control is not a problem to be screened out. It is a common and often effective way that European software companies are led, and filtering for it would mean passing on some of the best businesses in the market. The point is narrower and more useful than that. A Co-CEO structure changes the leadership brief at every stage of the hold, and the sponsor who reads it as a personality quirk rather than a governance fact is the one most likely to be caught out by it.
We map this because our clients ask a version of the same question at entry, at scale and at exit: who actually leads this business, and will that hold. In a market where six of seven CEOs in a single mapping run shared the title, that is not a niche question. It is the question.
HMN Capital. Executive search and interim management for PE, venture and growth-backed businesses.
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