Meditation Giant Headspace Taps Intuit Alum CeCe Morken To Be Its First Female CEO

On Monday, October 12, 2020, Los Angeles-based meditation app, Headspace, announced that current Headspace president and COO, CeCe Morken, will become the company’s CEO, effective January 1, 2021. Current CEO and cofounder Rich Pierson alongside cofounder Andy Puddicombe will transition to new roles as co-executive chairmen of the board.

“The founders have looked at what we've done in six months and said ‘we're super comfortable with where you're taking things, and so we want to we want to offer this role to you,’” Morken told Forbes in an exclusive phone interview, noting that the CEO role was not part of the initial conversations she had with Headspace when she joined in the company in April 2020.

“When we founded Headspace in 2010, we never imagined it would become the meditation and mindfulness leader it is today,” Pierson said in a statement Monday. He went on to note that for him and Puddicombe, this period of growth marked the right time to step away from Headspace’s day-to-day operations and “begin the next chapter on our own personal journeys—devoting more time to our philanthropic endeavors.”

“Because I'm already in the president and COO role, I've already done my listening tour with the organization to understand what are the things that they think are working. And what are the things that we need to do differently?” Morken said. “But we do have a really big opportunity to scale this business.”

“What I've been really interested in is how CEOs now view their employees’ mental health as being an important part of their responsibility,” Morken said. “The number of CEOs that now talk about the importance of mental health, so we get past the stigma around mental health, has really changed.”

You can read the full Forbes article here.