Who runs this, and why
ceo.cafe is a small, independent archive of first-person CEO stories. It is not a club, a network, a course or a funnel.
What it is
A CEO is watched constantly, scheduled by other people three-quarters of the time, and advised by almost nobody. Half report loneliness in the role. Two-thirds get no outside counsel at all, and nearly every one of them says they would want it. The products built to fix that cost thousands, gate on revenue or age, and want a full day a month.
So this is the cheap, open, unglamorous version: CEOs telling the truth about one hard decision, with the numbers attached, under their own names, where anyone can read it for free, including the CEO who is about to make the same call at two in the morning and is searching for exactly this.
Why a cafe
Ray Oldenburg called the cafe the archetypal third place: not home, not work, where conversation is the main activity, regulars set the tone and status is levelled at the door. Every competitor sells the opposite: a club, a forum, a council, a fee. We are not being cute. We are being specific about which of those two things this is.
How stories are made
Eight fixed questions and a numbers block. The CEO writes the answers, or we record thirty minutes and transcribe it. One editing pass pushes for specifics. The teller reads the final draft and can pull anything. Nothing is ever paid for, in either direction. The full standards are in editorial standards.
The numbers we quote
Where this site cites research about CEOs, here are the sources, so you can check them rather than trust us:
- CEO loneliness, and 61% saying it hinders performance: RHR International CEO Snapshot Survey, reported in Harvard Business Review, February 2012.
- Two-thirds of CEOs receiving no outside leadership advice, and nearly all wanting it: Stanford Graduate School of Business, Rock Center for Corporate Governance and The Miles Group, 2013 (n > 200).
- 86% of 2025 CEO appointments being first-time CEOs: Russell Reynolds Associates, Global CEO Turnover Index, full year 2025.
- 62.5-hour weeks, 72% of work time in meetings: Porter & Nohria, “How CEOs Manage Time”, HBR, 2018 (n = 27).
- Senior leaders reporting more daily loneliness than individual contributors: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 (n = 263,810).
If we ever put a number on a page without a source beside it, that is a bug. Tell us.
Who to write to
[email protected]. A person reads it.
What this is not
Not affiliated with any coffee product, with “CEO Cafe Club”, or with any of the membership organisations named on this site. We are not a broker, a recruiter or a fund, and nobody has paid to appear here.