In this webinar, Charlie O'Donnell of nextNYC and Raymond Nieuwenhuizen of Propeller Industries will discuss what professional CEOs actually do and what happens when founders hand over the keys.

At some point, nearly every founder asks the same question: when does it make sense to hand over the CEO role and what actually happens when you do?

This conversation brings together two perspectives that rarely get explored side by side. Ray stepped into the CEO role at Propeller, taking over an 18-year-old company in the middle of a deliberate platform transformation. Coming from his time as COO at Peloton Consulting, where he built and scaled a digital transformation practice, he’s navigating the founder-to-CEO transition from the inside, earning trust, inheriting culture, and defining what leadership looks like in a company he didn’t start.

Charlie O’Donnell brings the investor’s lens, having seen this transition play out across dozens of companies, both when it works and when it doesn’t.

Together, they’ll unpack the realities behind the decision founders wrestle with: what you gain, what you risk, and how the role of CEO fundamentally changes when the founder remains deeply involved.

The conversation will touch on:

• Building trust with a team you didn’t hire

• Balancing inherited culture with the need to evolve it

• What happens when a founder’s instincts meet an operator’s playbook.

This is not a theoretical discussion. It’s a grounded look at one of the most consequential and least understood inflection points in building a company.

​​This is event is hosted by nextNYC. To learn more about nextNYC and/or sign up for their newsletter, visit http://next.nyc